News
Apr 07, 2026
Medina, Paris receive 2026 Excellence in Advising Award
Scott Medina, the William and Wendy Korb Early Career Professor and Dorothy and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Nano Bioengineering; and Heather Paris, associate director of the advising center and career services at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, have been selected to receive the 2026 Penn State Excellence in Advising Award.
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Apr 07, 2026
Kaye honored with Graduate Program Chair Leadership Award
Jason Kaye, distinguished professor of soil biogeochemistry in the College of Agricultural Sciences and chair of the Ecology Intercollege Graduate Degree Program, is the 2026 recipient of the Graduate School Alumni Society Graduate Program Chair Leadership Award.
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Apr 07, 2026
Undergrad research featured in American Chemical Society journal
Undergraduate students at Penn State Brandywine developed an environmentally friendly and easy method to synthesize compounds from plant-derived molecules for potential use in therapeutics. Their work, conducted under the supervision of Penn State Brandywine Assistant Professor of Chemistry Anna Sigmon, was published in a special issue of the journal American Chemical Society (ACS) Omega titled “Undergraduate Research as the Stimulus for Scientific Progress in the USA.”
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Apr 06, 2026
WATCH: Cell ‘snowball’ may be answer to large-scale tissue engineering
Cell cultures — single layers of cells grown in a small dish — have enabled researchers to study biological growth, develop or test drugs and even discover what causes some diseases. Cell spheroids, 3D versions of cell cultures built using a process known as cell aggregation, are the next step in advancing this work, capable of more closely modeling real tissue.
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Apr 01, 2026
Molecular entomologist Jason Rasgon named AAAS Fellow
Jason L. Rasgon, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Endowed Chair in Disease Epidemiology and Biotechnology at Penn State, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Mar 30, 2026
Q&A: Robots can’t feel; these sensors could change that
A research team, including Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, James L. Henderson Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State, is using pressure sensors — tiny devices, roughly the size of a paperclip, that can measure the force applied over an area — to design a highly sensitive electronic “skin” to use alongside robots and prosthetic limbs.
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Mar 26, 2026
Community Q&A: Brain health and neuroscience research
On March 20, Nikki Crowley, associate professor of biology and of biomedical engineering, Huck Chair in Neural Engineering, and director of the Penn State Neuroscience Institute at University Park and Santhosh Girirajan, T. Ming Chu Professor of Genomics and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology visited The Village at Penn State, a local senior living community.
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Mar 26, 2026
Seth Bordenstein named a Fellow of the AAAS
Seth Bordenstein, professor of biology and entomology, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair of Microbiome Sciences, and director of the Penn State One Health Microbiome Center, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
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Mar 26, 2026
Francesca Chiaromonte named a Fellow of the AAAS
Francesca Chiaromonte, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Statistics for the Life Sciences at Penn State, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Mar 24, 2026
Low-cost sensor system could warn farmers of salt stress in plants
Soil salinity is a critical concern in agriculture when excessive soluble salts restrict a plant’s water uptake, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, hindering crop growth and reducing yields on roughly 30% of U.S. irrigated land. Caused by irrigation, poor drainage or saltwater intrusion, soil salinity impacts soil structure, reduces fertility and causes economic losses. To help growers identify and mitigate salt stress, in a proof-of-concept study, a team led by Penn State researchers built a low-cost sensor system that detects signals released by plants in trouble.
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