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6/9/2025
Christine Masters, assistant dean for academic support and global programs and teaching professor of engineering science and mechanics, will retire effective June 30 after nearly 30 years as a faculty member in the College of Engineering.
6/9/2025
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has named Evan Bozek, a doctoral candidate in engineering science and mechanics in the Penn State College of Engineering, one of 79 recipients of the 2025 DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Award. Selected graduate students have the opportunity to continue their thesis research at a DOE facility for three to 12 months.
5/30/2025
Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Penn State Evan Pugh University Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, has been named co-recipient of the 2025 van de Hulst Light-Scattering Award alongside Andreas Macke of the University of Leipzig, honoring their significant contributions to the science of light scattering. The award recognizes excellence in fields such as optical theory, atmospheric science, and astronomy.
5/28/2025
Researchers from Penn State, Rice University and the University of Sussex chemically merged silica glass and graphene to produce “glaphene,” a single, atom-thick compound that the team said could potentially advance electronics, photonics and quantum systems.
5/10/2025
Penn State researchers have developed a lightweight, 3D-printed hydrogel electrode that adheres like a strand of hair to the scalp, enabling comfortable, long-term brain monitoring without gels or rigid components. The device delivers stable, high-quality EEG signals for over 24 hours, offering a significant advancement for both clinical and wearable neurotechnology.
5/9/2025
Carbyne, a one-dimensional chain of carbon atoms, is incredibly strong for being so thin, making it an intriguing possibility for use in next-generation electronics, but its extreme instability causing it to bend and snap on itself made it nearly impossible to produce at all, let alone produce enough of it for advanced studies. Now, an international team of researchers, including from Penn State, may have a solution.
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.
5/2/2025
The future of electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring may soon look like a strand of hair. In place of the traditional metal electrodes, a web of wires and sticky adhesives, a team of researchers from Penn State created a hairlike device for long-term, non-invasive monitoring of the brain’s electrical activity. The lightweight and flexible electrode attaches directly to the scalp and delivers stable, high-quality recordings of the brain’s signals.
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.
4/21/2025
Saying one thing while feeling another is part of being human, but bottling up emotions can have serious psychological consequences like anxiety or panic attacks. To help health care providers tell the difference, a team led by scientists at Penn State has created a stretchable, rechargeable sticker that can detect real emotions — by measuring things like skin temperature and heart rate — even when users put on a brave face.
4/21/2025
The American Rock Mechanics Association (ARMA) recently awarded the 2025 Rock Mechanics Research Award to a team of Penn State researchers, including three from the College of Engineering. The recipients will be recognized at the annual ARMA Symposium, which will take place on June 8-11 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
4/15/2025
The Materials Research Institute (MRI) at Penn State has announced the recipients of the 2025 Interdisciplinary Seed Grants and Transdisciplinary Teaming Initiative awards, designed to support collaborative, high-risk research with the potential for significant societal and technological impact.
4/11/2025
Over 100 students from Blue Ridge, Scranton and Wallenpaupack Area high schools recently visited Penn State Scranton for Discover Engineering Day, a collaborative event by the Penn State Engineering Ambassadors Program and Penn State Scranton and University students, faculty and staff
4/11/2025
Christopher Kube, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics in the Penn State College of Engineering, was selected to lead a multidisciplinary team on a two-year, $1 million grant from the Structures Uniquely Resolved to Guarantee Performance (SURGE) program of the federally funded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a method to detect, measure and localize porosity defects inside 3D-printed metal parts while they are being made. Instead of waiting until after printing to check for flaws, Kube’s team will develop acoustic sensors built into the printing platform and ultrasonic microphones to detect and measure pores during the print.
4/9/2025
Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, the James L. Henderson, Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, and his team had their research featured in a recent article by Interesting Engineering. Combining what Cheng calls “soft robotics and flexible electronics,” the team developed small, magnetic robots constructed out of materials that mimic living organisms.
4/7/2025
A tiny, soft, flexible robot that can crawl through earthquake rubble to find trapped victims or travel inside the human body to deliver medicine may seem like science fiction, but an international team led by researchers at Penn State are pioneering such adaptable robots by integrating flexible electronics with magnetically controlled motion.
3/27/2025
The Penn State College of Engineering has added 25 faculty members since February 2024. The four tenure-line faculty and 21 professional track faculty represent 10 units and departments.
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.
3/3/2025
Penn State engineering science and mechanics research was featured in an article recently published to Yahoo Finance. Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Evan Pugh University Professor and Charles G. Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, discusses the development of a porous plastic sheet that can be used as a wall and roof liner to passively reduce indoor room temperature.
2/26/2025
In November of 2024, two professors from the Penn State College of Engineering — Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics, and Slava V. Rotkin, Frontier Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, and professor of physics and of biomedical engineering — visited four leading research universities in Kazakhstan to deepen and expand strategic collaborations.
2/5/2025
A major challenge in self-powered wearable sensors for health care monitoring is distinguishing different signals when they occur at the same time. Researchers from Penn State and China’s Hebei University of Technology addressed this issue by uncovering a new property of a sensor material, enabling the team to develop a new type of flexible sensor that can accurately measure both temperature and physical strain simultaneously but separately to more precisely pinpoint various signals.
2/5/2025
An international team of researchers co-led by Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Penn State Evan Pugh University Professor and Charles G. Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, developed porous plastic sheets that can lower room temperatures through radiative cooling.
1/23/2025
Tao Zhou, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics and of biomedical engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, earned a five-year, $660,000 U.S. National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award to develop injectable and stretchable hydrogel electrodes to treat spinal cord injuries.
1/23/2025
Led by Parisa Shokouhi, Penn State professor of engineering science and of acoustics, a team of researchers developed a machine learning model for labquake prediction that can also automatically retrieve specific parameters — known as rate and state friction parameters — from the ultrasonic monitoring of stick-slip experiments. The rate and state friction parameters define the mechanics of the labquakes; they determine the strength of the fault, signaling how close it is to failure.
1/21/2025
The production of fuel cells requires the use of a rapid laser welding process; however, welding at too high a speed results in humping, marked by surface irregularities on the weld seam. A team led by researchers at Penn State has combined observation and analytical modeling to identify the conditions that produce humping at high laser welding speeds and to adjust the process parameters to increase weld speed without causing surface irregularities.
1/13/2025
The Penn State College of Engineering has received a $19 million gift from the estate of E. Michael Ackley, placing Ackley among the top five individual donors in college history. The funds will support a variety of critical priorities including student scholarships to aid access and affordability, the college’s campus facilities modernization and faculty research.
12/13/2024
Art developed for a Penn State Materials Science and Engineering research project was chosen as the inside back cover for an upcoming issue of Advanced Functional Materials, a popular science journal.
12/13/2024
A team led by Penn State researchers used principles of pulse monitoring in traditional Chinese medicine to design a pressure-sensing platform to identify the optimal pulse signal, which they
combined with a machine learning model to also predict blood pressure.
12/4/2024
Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, James L. Henderson, Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, was featured on the Web of Science Group’s 2024 Highly Cited Researchers List. Cheng is joined by another college of engineering faculty member, Long-Qing Chen, Donald W. Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.
12/3/2024
Three-dimensional (3D) printing isn’t just a way to produce material products quickly. It also offers researchers a way to develop replicas of human tissue that could be used to improve human health, such as building organs for transplantation, studying disease progression and screening new drugs.
12/3/2024
Six Penn State materials researchers, including three affiliated with the College of Engineering, have received the 2024 Rustum and Della Roy Innovation in Materials Research Award, recognizing a wide range of research with societal impact.
11/20/2024
Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle career development professor, associate professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, discusses his experience and rationale behind choosing to publish his research, “Multimodal sensors with Decoupled Sensing Mechanisms,” through Advanced Science’s open access library in a video interview.
11/18/2024
The Penn State Learning Factory will host its end-of-semester showcase at the Bryce Jordan Center on Dec. 10 and its virtual showcase Wednesday, Dec. 11 through Friday, Dec. 20. Both versions of the event are free and open to the public.
11/15/2024
The Penn State College of Engineering invites alumni and friends to support engineering student success through a GivingTuesday gift on Dec. 3 as Penn State celebrates its tenth GivingTuesday.
11/15/2024
China recently limited the export of gallium nitride, a type of wide bandgap semiconductor used to manufacture a variety of consumer power electronics, such as cell phones and computers, as well as medical devices, cars, wind turbines, solar farms, LED lightbulbs and more. Patrick Lenahan, distinguished professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, will investigate the possibility of replacing gallium nitride-based devices with boron nitride.
11/12/2024
As the managing director for Penn State's Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization (CNEU), Zachary Gray spends a lot of his summer in the classroom. He works to teach veterans and students how to work at microscopic scales as part of a 12-week course — the same one that shifted his career path almost two decades ago.
11/8/2024
A team of researchers led by Nanyin Zhang, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Brain Imaging and professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State, recently published their findings about how blood flow changes to different brain regions relate to what is happening with the brain's neurons.
11/1/2024
Eight Penn State College of Engineering graduate students have received the Diefenderfer Graduate Fellowship in Entrepreneurship for the 2024-2025 academic year. The Diefenderfer Graduate Fellowship encourages and provides financial support to innovative and entrepreneurial graduate engineering students.
11/1/2024
— Faculty, staff and students from across Penn State and especially in the College of Engineering and Materials Research Institute (MRI) are mourning the loss of Russ Messier, graduate alumnus and professor emeritus of engineering science and mechanics, who died on Oct. 11 at age 80 in Nashua, New Hampshire.
10/29/2024
Saptarshi Das, the Ackley Professor of Engineering Science and professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, was featured in a Q&A from Penn Stater Magazine.
10/11/2024
Several medications are available to treat high blood pressure, but more than 10 million Americans do not respond to the treatments. Tao Zhou, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics and of biomedical engineering at Penn State, received a five-year, $1.83 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to develop a soft and stretchable tissue-like electronic device for the treatment of resistant high blood pressure.
10/10/2024
Andrew Pannone, research co-author and doctoral student in engineering science and mechanics and Saptarshi Das, Ackley Professor of Engineering and professor of engineering science and mechanics are quoted on Interesting Engineering in reference to their research surrounding an AI powered electronic tongue that can discern between different types of liquid with a high level of accuracy.
10/9/2024
A recently developed electronic tongue is capable of identifying differences in similar liquids, such as milk with varying water content; diverse products, including soda types and coffee blends; signs of spoilage in fruit juices; and instances of food safety concerns. The team, led by researchers at Penn State, also found that results were even more accurate when artificial intelligence (AI) used its own assessment parameters to interpret the data generated by the electronic tongue.
10/7/2024
Saptarshi Das, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics and of electrical engineering at Penn State, was featured in a Q&A article by Tech Briefs. The article discussed the research of Das and his team that focused on Heliconius butterflies and how they process two sensory inputs — pheromones and vision — at once to find a mate.
10/4/2024
Twelve Penn State faculty members, including two from the College of Engineering, received Fulbright Scholar Awards for the 2024-25 academic year, according to the?Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.?An additional four faculty members, including two from the College of Engineering, have been named Fulbright Specialist Award recipients.??
9/25/2024
Using high-speed X-ray imaging, a team of researchers led by Christopher Kube, associate professor of engineering science and of acoustics, captured footage of a cross-section of liquid metal as it cooled. Their results confirmed longstanding hypotheses in the field that through local pressure changes, ultrasonic vibrations encourage air bubbles to increase in number, enlarge, migrate to the surface of a melt pool and pop — increasing the quality of the finished product.
9/17/2024
A novel neurotechnology treatment known as deep brain stimulation can benefit patients with neurological disorders, but it involves surgical procedures with potential risks. Assessing the risk-benefit tradeoffs and the ethics in making decisions about whether to begin such treatments and when can be tricky for both patients and clinicians.
9/12/2024
Penn State and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have announced the awardees for the 2024-25 cycle of their collaboration program. These awardees comprise four joint projects that connect Penn State and IISc researchers.
9/12/2024
Penn State is a global leader in nanomanufacturing workforce development and materials science research, positioning it to support the CHIPS and Science Act’s goals of boosting U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. The Penn State Center for Nanotechnology, Education and Utilization program trains military veterans for careers in a growing microelectronics and semiconductor industry essential for national security.
9/3/2024
Seventeen graduate students from Penn State have been awarded research fellowships and six undergraduate students from the commonwealth have been awarded scholarships for 2024 from the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium (PSGC).
8/8/2024
Two Penn State College of Engineering faculty members — Jacqueline O'Connor, professor of mechanical engineering, and Parisa Shokouhi, professor of engineering science and mechanics — were selected as part of the 2024-25 cohort of Drexel University’s Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science program.
8/5/2024
A discovery that uncovered the surprising way atoms arrange themselves and find their preferred neighbors in multi-principal element alloys could enable engineers to “tune” these unique and useful materials for enhanced performance in specific applications ranging from advanced power plants to aerospace technologies, according to the researchers who made the finding.
7/1/2024
A Penn State research team was one of eight chosen to receive funding from NASA as part of the agency’s University SmallSat Technology Partnerships (USTP) initiative within NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology (SST) program.
