News

Forty-one graduate students received awards for their research and creative scholarship in the 33rd annual Graduate Exhibition, held March 23 and 25 on Penn State's University Park campus. A complete list of winners is available below.

Heather A. Conley, senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia and the Arctic and director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., will deliver a lecture titled “The Kremlin Playbook: Understanding Russia’s New Generation Warfare” at 4 p.m. March 29 in Room 116 of the Lewis Katz Building on Penn State's University Park campus.

Development of a theoretical basis for ultrahigh piezoelectricity in ferroelectric materials led to a new material with twice the piezo response of any existing commercial ferroelectric ceramics, according to an international team of researchers from Penn State, China and Australia.

Open-source code developed by a Penn State graduate could improve weather forecasting and a range of other research endeavors that rely on pairing atmospheric models with satellite imagery.

Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Purnendu Chatterjee Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will discuss “Electric Field Control of Magnetism” during the 2018 Nelson W. Taylor Lecture Series in Materials Science and Engineering, held on Thursday, April 5.

Researchers from Penn State, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Texas at Austin are partnering on a new $2.5-million project to illuminate what happens to carbon dioxide during underground sequestration. 

It had been five days since Hurricane Maria made landfall with Puerto Rico, and Kelly Nunez Ocasio still hadn’t heard from her father. Ocasio grew up on the island and weathered powerful storms before. Now a graduate student at Penn State studying how hurricanes form, all she could do was wait.

Author, social justice advocate, and former NBA player Etan Thomas will give a free public lecture from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 15, in 233A HUB-Robeson Center at University Park. Thomas will discuss his latest book, “We Matter: Athletes and Activism,” which includes dozens of interviews — with people like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Mark Cuban, and Soledad O’Brien — on the subject of race in America.

Lightning and volcanos both produce glass, and humans have been making glass from silicon dioxide since prehistory. Industrialization brought us boron-based glasses, polymer glasses and metallic glasses, but now an international team of researchers has developed a new family of glass based on metals and organic compounds that stacks up to the original silica in glass-forming ability.

This March and April, an international team of researchers will install monitoring equipment inside an active fault zone off the coast of New Zealand, in the Ring of Fire, in the first-ever scientific drilling mission specifically designed to study slow earthquakes.