Penn State and Kurt J. Lesker Company (KJLC) are launching a strategic partnership to develop new ways to create and shape the extremely thin layers of specialized materials that form critical parts of semiconductor, advanced packaging, quantum, photonic and other next-generation technologies.

Kat Hogan is a senior majoring in energy engineering, and she found her home as an undergraduate researcher in Penn State’s Center for Critical Minerals. She’s interested in sustainability — particularly in the energy sector — and said critical minerals sourcing is essential to a sustainable future for the energy industry.

This summer was a time for travel, research, internships and expanding classroom lessons for many students in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.

Jingzhou Wang, a graduate student in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education at Penn State, will give the talk “Flood Risk and Housing Markets without Flood Insurance: Evidence from 1930s Pittsburgh,” at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 9, in 157 Hosler Building on Penn State's University Park campus.

Rebecca Bussard, postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State, will give the talk “Mitigating Atmospheric Noise in InSAR Time-series Over Volcanic Targets Using a Convolutional Neural Network,” at 2 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 4, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building on the University Park campus and via Zoom.

A tedious process of trial and error is normally required to discover ceramic materials that generate electricity under mechanical stress. Known as piezoelectric ceramics, the valuable next-generation materials can be used to replace batteries in powering small electronic devices, like sensors. To streamline the research process, a team led by materials science researchers at Penn State introduced a new framework that combines an existing artificial intelligence (AI) model with human expertise to uncover these materials.

Pennsylvania ranks second in U.S. natural gas production, accounting for about one-fifth of U.S. output in 2024, and has one of the most extensive histories of energy extraction in the country. A team of researchers from Penn State is trying to better understand the environmental impacts of these sites — specifically, if fracking is increasing radium content in local drinking water.

Seismic waves produced by thunderstorms, called thunderquakes, can be used as a novel source for seismic imaging, according to a new study led by researchers at Penn State.

Glass may look uniform, but some of the strongest and most useful glass materials contain carefully controlled crystals. Their size, number and arrangement can determine whether a material is strong enough for a smartphone screen, transparent enough for an optical device or durable enough for a dental crown.

Wearable health monitors can track heart rate, muscle activity, brain signals and other physiological measurements, but many devices are designed to capture only one type of signal at a time. Recording multiple signals simultaneously is more difficult because sensors must maintain reliable contact with the body even through hair, sweat and everyday movement.