After getting a little lost in the winding hallways of Skirkanich Hall on Penn’s University City campus last Thursday, this reporter eventually found her way up the second floor where the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory and Bio-MakerSpace. Once in the lab, music playing in the background was tuned out by the buzz of students working throughout the space.
The nearly 20-year-old lab is a space where anyone in the Penn community — that is, all PennCard ID holders — can work on collaborative projects, whether they are enrolled in the school’s bioengineering department and taking a class in the lab or not. Think of it more like a makerspace, with offerings that include hand tools,…