Roberto Fernández, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State, will give the talk “Living with Water” at 2 p.m. on Sept. 25, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building on the University Park campus. The talk will also be available via Zoom.

Shotaro Nakamura, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education at Penn State, will give the talk “Monetary and non-monetary barriers to accessing environmental public benefit programs: experimental evidence from California,” at noon on Friday, Sept. 25, in 157 Hosler Building on Penn State’s University Park campus.

The theme of the 2026 Nelson W. Taylor Lecture in Materials is “Extending materials science into the impossible.” The lecture will be held from 8:15 to 11:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 25, in the HUB-Robeson Center’s Heritage Hall at Penn State University Park.

Tiny wrinkles could reveal new behaviors in graphene, an exceptionally strong, conductive and thin material used in batteries, computer chips and other electronics. According to a new study published in Advanced Materials, small bends in graphene’s two-dimensional (2D), or one-atom-thick, structure can change the material’s electrical properties.

If there’s one thing a career in meteorology and atmospheric science taught Penn State alumna Cheryl Nelson, it’s that things can change in the blink of an eye. She graduated in 2002 and since then has been navigating through storms and sunny days in a career that’s shifted more than a Central Pennsylvania season.

Seven Penn State students were nominated for the 2027 Rhodes, Marshall and Churchill scholarships, among the most prestigious and competitive awards available to U.S. students.

Roberta Mendonça De Carvalho, teaching associate professor in the urban studies program at the University of Pittsburgh, will deliver a talk titled “500 Cities in 50 Years: Fragmentation and Urban Expansion in the Amazon” at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 18, in 112 Walker Building at Penn State University Park. The talk will also be accessible via Zoom.

It’s not so much where people live, but where they frequently spend their time that can provide useful information for predicting community health measures. A team led by geographers in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences found that adding place visitation data — geographical data points collected from millions of anonymous cell phone users with GPS-enabled devices — to a population health model increased the model’s predictive performance by an average of 7.5%.

Clive Randall, Evan Pugh University Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State, has been named an inaugural recipient of the Inamori-KYOCERA Award, an international honor recognizing individuals whose scholarship, invention, technological innovation and international collaboration have substantially advanced the ceramics industry.

Storing energy as heat is a proven pathway to address the challenge solar power faces when it’s dark or cloudy outside by enabling the capture, storage and on-demand release of thermal energy. The process, called high-temperature thermal energy storage (TES), however, can be prohibitively expensive. Researchers at Penn State have found that steel slags — a rock-like waste byproduct of the steelmaking process — may potentially serve as a low-cost, heat storage candidate for TES applications.