Penn State has named the inaugural Innovation to Impact Awards recipients, recognizing faculty, researchers, entrepreneurs and partners whose work exemplifies the University’s commitment to translating research into real-world impact.

For undergraduate student Amaya Heffelfinger, sustainability is more than a topic in the classroom. She said it is tied to the places where she grew up, the environmental questions she cares about and the kind of work she hopes to do in the future.

Gabriel Agostini, doctoral student in information science at Cornell Tech, will give a talk, “Inferring Fine-Grained Migration Patterns across the United States,” at noon on Wednesday, April 1, in 157 Hosler Building on the Penn State University Park campus.

 Xiaoyong Zheng, professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University, will give a talk, “The Unintended Consequences of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Taxes on Sales and Prices of Beer Beverages,” at noon on Wednesday, March 25.

The inaugural Penn State-Ghana Research Partnerships Seed Grant Program has awarded nine projects including three researchers from EMS.

Accurate air quality forecasts are critical for helping people limit exposure and for guiding regulatory action. However, a new study led by Fan Wu, a doctoral student in meteo, suggests some of the computer models that agencies rely on may not be getting it right.

 Madeline Yozwiak, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, will give the talk, “Grid Hardening and the Effectiveness of Climate Adaptation in the U.S. Electricity Sector,” at noon on Wednesday, March 18.

 researchers in the Department of Geography studied how the Northern California landscape responded to extreme wildfire, and study how prior fires influenced chances of forest recovery. 

 Researchers have figured out how to get DNA, a biological material, to work with electronics, by pairing synthetic DNA with a semiconducting material called crystalline perovskite.

A stretchy, conductive type of plastic could help power the next generation of implantable biomedical devices, like longer-lasting pacemakers or glucose monitors, according to Enrique Gomez.