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12/5/2025
The Penn State Learning Factory will host its biannual end-of-semester showcase for engineering students to present their cornerstone and capstone design projects. The in-person showcase will take place from 1:00-3:00 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11, at the Bryce Jordan Center, while a virtual showcase will take place on Friday, Dec. 12 through Friday, Dec. 19. Both versions of the event are free and open to the public.
12/3/2025
Two Penn State civil engineering graduate students, Xueyang Wang and Mahdi Mirabrishami, were selected by the ASCE Central Pennsylvania Section to receive two of the four $2,000 Student Awards for 2025.
11/12/2025
Penn State will celebrate its eleventh GivingTuesday on Dec. 2 — and the College of Engineering invites alumni and friends to be a part of the event by making a gift to support engineering student success.
10/27/2025
A team of researchers at Penn State have developed a hydrological model that can forecast flooding impacts and manage water resources on a global scale. The approach combines artificial intelligence (AI) with physics-based modeling to provide communities with reliable, detailed data for managing water, reducing flood risk, planning crops and protecting ecosystems.
10/21/2025
Chaopeng Shen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State, is recognized as a leading innovator in blending artificial intelligence (AI) with water and Earth systems research. For these transformative contributions, the Institute of Energy and the Environment (IEE) has named him Person of the Year for 2025.
10/17/2025
Five years ago, the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation established the A. James Clark Scholars Program, a comprehensive scholarship and curricular support program for exceptional Penn State engineering undergraduates who demonstrate financial need. Now, with an additional $11 million investment, the Clark Foundation renewed its support for the program, ensuring that 10 new undergraduate engineering majors at Penn State will receive full tuition, fees, room and board, and curricular enrichment support each year in perpetuity.
10/17/2025
Four Penn State researchers, including two from the College of Engineering, have been selected as 2025 fellows of the Institute of Energy and the Environment (IEE). The IEE Fellowship Program recognizes researchers whose work has significantly advanced energy and environmental research and provides support to further their efforts.
10/13/2025
Kenneth Mensah, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student at Penn State University, received the prestigious Canham Graduate Studies Scholarship at this year’s Water Environment Federation’s Technical Exhibition and Conference for his innovative research on sustainable water and wastewater treatment solutions. His work, advised by Onur Apul, focuses on advancing technologies to address emerging environmental challenges.
10/7/2025
Dennis Steigerwalt, president of the Housing Innovation Alliance, will deliver the 2025 Hankin Distinguished Lecture, which is free and open to the public. His talk, “The Future of Housing Is Now,” will be held at 4 p.m. on Nov. 19 in Robb Hall at the Hintz Family Alumni Center at University Park.
10/7/2025
The Institute of Energy and the Environment (IEE) has welcomed five new faculty members, including two from the College of Engineering, to its community. Their expertise spans artificial intelligence, water treatment, marine ecosystems, sustainable buildings and solar cell efficiency, strengthening IEE’s interdisciplinary approach to addressing complex challenges.
10/3/2025
Onur Apul, who joined Penn State as an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in August, spoke about his research into "forever chemicals."
10/1/2025
A team of Penn State researchers created a scalable framework to develop, analyze and evaluate using streetlights as a low-cost, equitable EV charging option.
9/22/2025
Between February and August 2025, the Penn State College of Engineering welcomed 12 new faculty members across various departments, including tenure-line, professional track, and administrative roles. This expansion supports the college’s strategic commitment to academic and research excellence.
9/22/2025
As the frequency and intensity of heatwaves increase across the U.S., a similar but more striking phenomenon is occurring in American rivers. Analysis of data from nearly 1,500 sites in the contiguous United States between 1980 and 2022 revealed that heatwaves in rivers are accelerating faster than and lasting nearly twice as long air heatwaves, according to a new study by researchers at Penn State.
9/12/2025
Freshwater tidal marshes, critical for wildlife and coastal protection, are now serving as microplastic catch basins, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. They recently found that these marshes trap large amounts of diverse plastics, with concentrations and ecological risks increasing downstream.
9/8/2025
Penn State faculty are addressing flooding from every angle, including developing tools to help families understand their risks, partnering with municipalities on levee management, modeling nature-based solutions, rethinking infrastructure and training the next generation of engineers. Their work will be highlighted on Sept. 9 and 10 at the Goddard Forum 2025 — Flood Risk in the Mid-Atlantic
8/27/2025
Pennsylvania’s aging levee systems are a risk to communities and their citizens. Penn State researchers have a new method to certify flood protection and save money.
8/11/2025
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded a two-year, $957,013 grant to Ming Xiao, professor of civil and environmental engineering, to investigate the effect on permafrost and how its melting could expose contaminants to the environment.
8/7/2025
Eric Donnell, senior associate dean of the Penn State College of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering, and his collaborators at Penn State used a large data set of Pennsylvania crash statistics and roadway features taken from all state-owned, rural roads to compare the safety performance of roadway segments with passing zones to stretches without marked passing zones. Their analysis revealed 11% fewer total crashes, and 12% fewer crashes leading to significant injury or fatalities on sections of rural highway marked as passing zones compared to sections of road marked as no passing.
8/6/2025
Aleksandra Radlinska, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State, alongside a team of researchers from Penn State and the University of Georgia, co-authored a recent study published in the July issue of Cement and Concrete Research. Their work explored the impacts of two iron sulfide minerals that naturally occur in the environment, pyrrhotite and pyrite, on the structural integrity of concrete.
8/4/2025
On the latest episode of “Growing Impact,” a team of Penn State researchers discusses how their seed grant project aims to identify environmental impacts from the oil extraction process.
7/22/2025
Vikash Gayah, professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, has been named director of the Thomas D. Larson Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, effective July 1. He has served as interim director of the institute since 2023 and his involvement with the institute extends to when he was first hired as assistant professor of CEE in 2012.
7/16/2025
Valerie Smykalov, a Penn State doctoral student, received a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support her research on carbon movement through freshwater systems using deep learning and process-based modeling. Her work aims to uncover overlooked aspects of the carbon cycle and better constrain global carbon budgets.
7/2/2025
The Penn State Engineering Alumni Society (PSEAS) held its annual awards ceremony on June 20 at the State Theatre, building on its 53-year tradition of honoring excellence among engineering faculty, staff and alumni through the PSEAS awards. The award recipients were recognized in the categories of teaching, research, advising and service.
7/2/2025
A research group, including several Penn State researchers, developed a computational model to streamline flood prediction in the continental United States. Their model, which they call a differentiable routing model, incorporates physical readings — like temperature and river height — into a system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate and predict water movement.
6/23/2025
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Department Executive Officers (DEO) program has gained five additional fellows from the Penn State ranks. One of the fellows is the College of Engineering’s Farshad Rajabipour, head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, John A. and Harriette K. Shaw Professor and director of CIAMTIS University Transportation Center.
6/23/2025
Farshad Rajabipour, the John and Harriette Shaw Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been named head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), effective July 1. The promotion follows his service as interim department head since July 2023 and as a Penn State CEE faculty member since 2009.
5/6/2025
The Penn State College of Engineering has named its student marshals for the spring 2025 commencement ceremony, which will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, May 9, in the Bryce Jordan Center at University Park.
4/25/2025
Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI) announced the winners of its first-ever “Cheat-a-thon.” The virtual competition, held March 3 through April 6, invited faculty and students at universities across the United States to test the capabilities and limitations of using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to answer college-level questions.
4/24/2025
The Penn State College of Engineering will recognize 21 alumni with the 2025 Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award and Early Career Award in a ceremony on April 24 in the new Engineering Collaborative Research and Education (ECoRE) Building.
4/23/2025
The Penn State Learning Factory will host its biannual end-of-semester showcase for engineering students to present their cornerstone and capstone design projects from 1-3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29, at the Bryce Jordan Center. The?virtual showcase?will take place Wednesday, April 30, through Friday, May 9.
4/17/2025
An interdisciplinary team from Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh developed a coastal management model that takes a chess-like approach to protecting shorelines against rising sea levels amid climate change uncertainty.
4/11/2025
In a partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, Penn State civil engineering researchers examined infrastructure development across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, statistically modeling how each county’s transportation infrastructure impacted the economic health of the region and beyond.
4/10/2025
A rainy day in 1990 helped spark Pennsylvania’s dirt and gravel road maintenance program, aimed at protecting water quality by reducing sediment runoff from unpaved roads. What began as a concern among trout fishermen has grown into a nationally recognized environmental effort, balancing rural transportation needs with ecological preservation.
4/10/2025
A rainy day in 1990 helped spark Pennsylvania’s dirt and gravel road maintenance program, aimed at protecting water quality by reducing sediment runoff from unpaved roads. What began as a concern among trout fishermen has grown into a nationally recognized environmental effort, balancing rural transportation needs with ecological preservation.
4/7/2025
Four undergraduate members of Penn State’s land surveying club, Tristan Dobbs, Jonathan Smith, Luke Jones and Zachary Smith, placed fourth at the National Society of Professional Land Surveyors (NSPS) Student Competition on March 17-20 in Silver Spring, Maryland.
4/4/2025
Two Penn State civil engineering students were awarded scholarships from the Deep Foundations Institute (DFI) Educational Trust. Xueyang Wang, a second-year graduate student in civil engineering, was awarded $2,500, and Matthew Griffiths, a recent Penn State alumnus of the civil engineering program who was a student at the time of application, was awarded $5,000.
4/4/2025
Penn State recognized 42 graduate students, including eight from the College of Engineering, with annual University awards that celebrate students' impact in research, scholarship, teaching, outreach, mentoring and more.
4/4/2025
Thirty-one graduate students, including four from the College of Engineering, received awards at the 2025 Graduate Exhibition, hosted by the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School on Friday, March 28, on the University Park campus.
4/4/2025
More than 400 students from 20 universities attended the symposium on March 27-29, which this year was hosted by Penn State’s student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The event offered a variety of civil engineering competitions, presentations and professional development opportunities to student engineers.
4/3/2025
Kaleigh Yost, the L. Robert and Mary L. Kimball Early Career Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, recently received the Younger Member Award from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI). She also was recently elected to serve on a board representing geotechnical faculty.
3/26/2025
The Penn State Emeritus Academy has announced the induction of seven esteemed emeritus faculty members as Academy Professors for Spring 2025, including Martin Pietrucha, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, College of Engineering, University Park campus.
3/26/2025
Ali Memari, professor of civil and environmental engineering and of architectural engineering, the Bernard and Henrietta Hankin Chair in Residential Building Construction and director of the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, discusses potential solutions to the U.S. housing crisis in an article published by AP News.
3/26/2025
The fall 2024 cohort of the Penn State Emerging Academic Leaders (PSEAL) program have successfully completed their semester-long professional development experience.
3/24/2025
The Penn State College of Engineering’s Office of Corporate and Industry Engagement
invites engineering faculty to I-CONNECT: Intellectual Property and Innovation. The event will take place virtually and on campus at 504 Engineering Collaborative Research and Education
Building (ECoRE) from 12:30 – 2 p.m. ET on April 2.
3/6/2025
A team of Penn State civil engineering students won the Constructors Association of
Western Pennsylvania’s (CAWP) ninth-annual student estimating competition for the third year in a row on Feb. 20-22.
3/3/2025
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning (ASHRAE) recently awarded Wangda Zuo, professor of architectural engineering, affiliate professor of mechanical engineering and associate director for research of Penn State’s Global Building Network, the title of fellow.
2/25/2025
Nathaniel Warner, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, was quoted in a story on hazardous waste pollution found in the Sewickley Creek in Western Pennsylvania. Warner commented on his study that found radioactivity in freshwater mussels in the Allegheny River miles downstream of a wastewater treatment facility that had accepted fracking wastewater.
2/25/2025
NASA’s Microgravity Investigation of Cement Solidification project, led by Penn State civil engineering researchers, was featured in NASA’s 2024 Annual Highlight of Results. Results from this research will improve researchers' understanding of concrete hardening, and could support innovations for civil engineering, construction and manufacturing of industrial materials on exploration missions.
2/21/2025
Nathan Brown, assistant professor of architectural engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, earned a five-year, $587,000 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for a project titled, “Active Designer-Computer Collaborative Conceptual Design Using Data-driven Models.”
2/14/2025
The Pennsylvania Housing Research Center (PHRC), housed in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State, will host a residential construction conference on March 26-27 at the Central Hotel and Conference Center in Harrisburg.
2/7/2025
The construction engineering and management (CEM) program in the Penn State Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering aims to provide students with the educational and leadership skills they need to help maintain and continue growth in the construction industry. Two Penn State engineering alumni rebuilt the program to fulfill the need for skilled industry leaders.
1/27/2025
The Institute of Energy and the Environment recognized six Penn State faculty members for their research excellence - four of whom are affiliated with the College of Engineering. The College of Engineering faculty who received awards were Margaret Busse, Brian Fronk, Lauren McPhillips and Nathaniel Warner.
