The Weitzman School of Design is home to an incredible range of research labs and initiatives that address the future of life on earth.
- The Housing Initiative at Penn works to achieve a more effective, equitable housing policy at the local, state, and national levels.
- The Center for Environmental Building Design (CEBD) is a cross-disciplinary faculty research unit and consultancy that designs truly resilient buildings and cities.
- The Future Cities Initiative accelerates research on sustainable urbanism and fosters international dialogue on the connections between emerging technologies and the evolving global urban environment.
- The Advanced Research & Innovation Lab creates greater synergies in robotics by combining the expertise of faculty with state-of-the art fabrication, measurement, and modeling technologies.
- The Polyhedral Structures Lab (PSL) bridges the gap between design and engineering by advancing structural geometry and synthesizing function, form, technology, material efficiency, and energy conservation.
- The Autonomous Manufacturing Lab reduces the economic and environmental costs of construction by exploring better integration of design and production in robotic processes for building manufacturing.
- DumoLab Research (DLR) supports health by bringing biomaterial systems from biomedical engineering, life sciences, and vernacular design and architecture into everyday products and structures.
- Thermal Architecture Lab research uses novel technologies and design strategies to reduce the energy demand of buildings, while designing shelter and cooling interventions in a warming world.
- The Center for Safe Mobility pioneers fundamental shifts in the ways that roadway safety is understood and evaluated, by developing new methods to measure safety with proactive, user-based metrics.
- EMLab, an applied research unit of the McHarg Center, specializes in the analysis, simulation, and visualization of environmental systems.
