News
Mar 05, 2026
IST names Cai, Huang and Lee to lead college’s first academic departments
Huck co-hire Sharon Huang has been named head of the Department of Informatics and Intelligent Systems, one of the inaugural departments recently established in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology.
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Mar 05, 2026
Inaugural Penn State-Ghana Seed Grant Program awardees announced
The inaugural Penn State-Ghana Research Partnerships Seed Grant Program has awarded nine projects that aim to fuel global impact, including crop disease surveillance, removing heavy metals from mining wastewater and understanding multimodal traffic streams.
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Mar 04, 2026
2026-27 Huck Seed Grant Program opens call for proposals
The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences is calling for 2026-27 Seed Grant Program funding proposals, due by May 1. Huck seed grants foster innovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative life sciences research with the potential to drive scientific breakthroughs and generate new research directions leading to impactful externally funded research.
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Feb 27, 2026
Protein regulator of sugars and fats may work with an unexpected parter — itself
Penn State scientists characterize structure and function of protein implicated in liver disease working with another copy of itself, rather than its usual partner, to turn genes on and off
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Feb 25, 2026
The 'Spirit of Chocolate' celebrates chocolate as both science and story
On Valentine’s Day, the Palmer Museum of Art became a tasting room and a classroom all at once. “The Art of Chocolate: A Guided Tasting Experience,” presented by the Arboretum at Penn State, invited guests to explore chocolate as both science and story, pairing research with sensory discovery and chocolate with cheese. The event was a collaboration among arboretum staff and College of Agricultural Sciences professors Siela Maximova and Mark Guiltinan, co‑leaders of Penn State’s Cacao and Chocolate Research Network.
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Feb 25, 2026
Q&A: How can microbiome science solve problems in agriculture?
Decades of research has shown promise for using microbiome science to solve several problems facing agriculture, but these findings have not yet been translated to practical recommendations for growers, according to a team of scientists in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.
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Feb 24, 2026
Huck associate director elected fellow in American Academy of Microbiology
Andrew Patterson, John T. and Paige S. Smith Professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences, has been elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology. Fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology.
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Feb 24, 2026
Borrowing from biology to power next-gen data storage
DNA, the genetic blueprints in every living organism, is nature’s most efficient storage mechanism, capable of storing about 215 million gigabytes of data per gram. That storage capacity, if applied to electronics, could enable significantly more efficient data centers, speedier data processing and the ability to process far more complicated data. The trick to making this technological leap is getting DNA, a biological material, to work with electronics. A team led by Penn State researchers has figured out how to bridge the wide compatibility gap.
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Feb 20, 2026
Stretchy plastics conduct electricity via tiny, whisker-like fibers
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, professor of chemical engineering at Penn State.
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Feb 18, 2026
Plant-based material offers sustainable method of recovering rare earth element
A team led by researchers at Penn State used a plant-based material to separate and recover dysprosium, a heavy rare earth element used in industrial manufacturing, from other rare earth elements. According to the researchers, the approach is environmentally friendly, as well as more sustainable and efficient than other commercial approaches.
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