alumni News

A two-day virtual symposium featuring speakers from academia and industry will be held from 1 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday, April 14-15, and will discuss the past and future of polymer sciences. The symposium is free and open to the public via Zoom.

The Penn State Alumni Association will recognize 16 outstanding Penn Staters during a virtual ceremony on Tuesday, April 13. Registration is open and free to all Penn Staters, and you can sign up online.

When Peter Heaney, Penn State professor of mineral sciences in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and the Materials Research Institute, was preparing for a graduate seminar in crystallography last spring, he searched for a photo of an unsung hero of materials science and engineering, Walter Friedrich. What he found instead was a buried interview from 1963 with Friedrich that Heaney helped to translate, shining some light on the German scientist’s vital yet forgotten role in a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.

For as long as he can remember, John Hellmann was interested in science. He excelled in chemistry, physics and other fields but he was most drawn to fields that could be applied to solving real-world problems.

In September 2019, a US National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported workshop, “The Enrollment Floodgates Are Open—Best Practices in Materials Science and Engineering Undergraduate Education for Rising Enrollments,” was held at The Pennsylvania State University. In attendance were representatives in leadership positions from universities, a variety of companies, national laboratories, and government organizations. This group (Figure 1) met over three days to discuss the steady and significant rise in undergraduate students graduating with degrees in materials science and engineering (MSE) over the last decade as a result of rising enrollments in many existing MSE programs and the creation of new undergraduate programs. The workshop attendees discussed the impact of these changes on the educational mission and opportunities for employment and the establishment of best practices for the future.

The 2020 David Ford McFarland Award for Achievement in Metallurgy lecture will be held at 3 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, via Zoom. William Woodford, co-founder and chief technology officer of Form Energy, will deliver the lecture “The Critical Role of Materials in Global Decarbonization” and receive the 2020 McFarland Award.

Penn State and the University of Freiburg will showcase their close collaboration in the field of living materials during the upcoming Materials Day on Nov. 10-11. Materials Day is an annual event organized by the Materials Research Institute to highlight materials-related interdisciplinary science and engineering research at Penn State. 

The 2020 Richard E. Tressler Lecture in Materials will be held at 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, via Zoom. Melissa Hockstad, president and CEO of the American Cleaning Institute (ACI), will deliver the lecture “Materials for Success: Bringing Together the Elements for a Successful Career” and receive the 2020 R.E. Tressler Award.

Zi-Kui Liu, professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Phases Research Laboratory, has been named the inaugural Dorothy Pate Enright Professor.

Katelyn Kirchner, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at Penn State, recently earned the Alfred R. Cooper Scholars Award from the American Ceramic Society.