News

The 2025 David Ford McFarland Award Lecture for Achievement in Metallurgy will be held at 3:05 p.m. on Thursday, April 10, in 101 Agricultural Sciences and Industries Building on Penn State's University Park campus. Rose Hernandez, science program director at the International Space Station National Laboratory, will deliver the lecture, “From Earth to Space: Advancing Materials Technologies and Embracing Life's Mission.”

The Penn State Department of Geography will continue its spring 2025 Coffee Hour lecture series with a talk by Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh University Professor in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State. Alley’s talk, "Sea-Level Rise from Ice Sheets: How Bad Could It Be?" will examine the uncertainties surrounding sea-level rise and the scientific challenges of predicting future ice-sheet behavior.

Three Penn State graduate students, including Patrick Sarpong, doctoral candidate in energy and mineral engineering, received awards in the 2025 Three Minute Thesis competition.

Zhiqiang Mao, professor of physics, of materials science and engineering, and of chemistry, has been named a dellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Four Penn State faculty members in areas ranging from agriculture to the biological sciences, geology and physics have been elected to the latest cohort of fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

The fall 2024 cohort of the Penn State Emerging Academic Leaders (PSEAL) program have successfully completed their semester-long professional development experience.

David Newburn, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, will give the talk, “Interacting Incentives for Agricultural Conversation Subsidies and Trading Programs: Implications for Water Quality and Carbon Sequestration Benefits in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed,” at noon on Wednesday, April 2, in 157 Hosler Building on the University Park campus.

The Penn State Department of Geography’s GeoGraphics Lab will host its first Community Mapping Day on Saturday, April 5, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Walker Building at University Park. The event, free and open to the public, will kick off with an optional breakfast at 8 a.m. and bring together students, faculty and community members for a day of hands-on mapping, creative geospatial storytelling and collaborative problem-solving centered on sustainability and local climate action.

Rainfall and long-term water availability in a region before a woman becomes pregnant and during pregnancy predicted future growth outcomes of children in Uganda, according to new research led by a team from the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and the Penn State College of Medicine. Women living in an area that did not receive adequate rainfall or experienced drought were more likely to give birth to children who don’t grow at the expected rate for their age between birth and age five. Children who are under-nourished and behind in their growth are more susceptible to infections and may experience cognitive, physical and metabolic developmental impairments.

Three Penn State deans are co-hosting an event focusing on role of the University as Pennsylvania’s land-grant institution, the similar role of U.S. land-grant universities and the impacts of scholarly research they produce.