Student Spotlight: Yerahm Hong BE’26

The University of Pennsylvania Bioengineering undergraduate experience prepares students to be innovators. The undergraduate trajectory of senior Yerahm Hong (BE ’26) exemplifies what a Penn Bioengineering education is designed to achieve. While her recent receipt of the prestigious Rose Undergraduate Research Award highlights her individual brilliance, her academic journey showcases how the Penn Bioengineering experience blends deep technical specialization with a broad, career-ready foundation.

A primary characteristic of the Penn Bioengineering undergraduate experience is early and frequent access to top-tier research infrastructure. Penn intentionally positions undergraduates to contribute to active clinical teams at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) from their earliest years. Hong’s path took an unexpected turn during her freshman year when an elective course, Introduction to Brain and Behavior, sparked an interest in brain science. Penn’s collaborative ecosystem allowed her to transition directly into the lab of Dr. Ethan Goldberg, Associate Professor of Neurology, by the summer of her freshman year.

By guiding undergraduates to these environments early, Penn Bioengineering outcomes may include real-world operational mastery. Over her sophomore and junior years, Hong helped study complex disease models, laying a baseline of rigorous technical skill that prepared her for high-stakes translational medicine. Bioengineering breakthroughs are made when engineers are prepared to translate a laboratory discovery directly into a patient-facing treatment. Penn’s bioengineering curriculum deliberately fosters this translational agility.

By the summer of her junior year, Hong was equipped to pivot from baseline observational science to testing actual therapeutic interventions for rare genetic disorders like KCNC1-related developmental and epileptic encephalopathy (DEE). In this role, she took on responsibilities typically reserved for senior lab staff: managing live therapeutic cohorts, executing precise genetic delivery, and designing behavioral studies to track real-world quality of life improvements. This level of autonomy prepares Penn Bioengineering graduates for the realities of the biotechnology and medical sectors. Students leave the program having already managed life-cycle testing on emerging therapeutics, giving them a distinct competitive edge in the global market.

The ultimate metric of an engineering education is how a student responds when a protocol fails. The rigorous wet-lab training embedded in Penn’s bioengineering major ensures that students develop the emotional grit and technical precision required to handle challenging experimental environments. For Hong, this milestone came during a notoriously finicky lab test called a Western Blot: a multi-step chemical process used to isolate and visually verify proteins. Because a single misplaced microliter or a minor timing error can ruin weeks of work, successfully executing this procedure requires an elite level of attention to detail.

“It taught me that research requires an enjoyment of the troubleshooting process,” Hong reflects. “The attention to detail required to execute experiments effectively is a skill I hope to continue building throughout my career.” This ability to view failure not as a roadblock, but as an engineering puzzle to solve, is perhaps the most vital long-term outcome of the Penn undergraduate experience.

Penn Bioengineering deliberately surrounds its undergraduates with a dense, multi-tier mentorship network. Throughout her undergraduate years, Hong operated within a collaborative ecosystem, working daily alongside Sophie Liebergall, an M.D.-Ph.D. Candidate at Penn, and Dr. Kelly Markwalter, a Postdoctoral Fellow at CHOP.

At Penn, Hong discovered that “working with people who are genuinely passionate about what they do is contagious.” This deep immersion in a professional medical network has seamlessly propelled Hong into her next phase: pursuing a highly competitive M.D.-Ph.D. pathway. Having been fully “bitten by the science bug,” she represents the gold standard of Penn Bioengineering student outcomes: a graduate who has not only mastered the technical foundations of engineering but is uniquely equipped to spend her career transforming cutting-edge technologies into clinical realities.