Administrator
Ten interdisciplinary research teams have received funding through the Institute of Energy and the Environment’s (IEE) 2025 Seed Grant Program. The program supports basic and applied research that lays the groundwork to pursue external funding and is guided by IEE’s five research themes. This year, the program awarded seed funding to 34 Penn State researchers across seven colleges and 17 departments and units.
When John Mauro talks about Penn State, you’d think he was born answering the call, “We are!” His deep enthusiasm and unwavering dedication to the University and its community make it easy to forget that he only arrived in Happy Valley in 2017 when he joined the MatSE faculty.
As July 1, 2025, Mauro will begin his tenure as the head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State, Mauro brings his visionary leadership and deep commitment to innovation to the role.
Mauro is an internationally recognized materials and glass science expert and co-inventor of LionGlass. Prior to joining Penn State, Mauro worked for eighteen years as an industrial research scientist at Corning Incorporated, where he was co-inventor of three iterations of Corning Gorilla Glass, a thin, durable, touch sensitive cover glass that has been used in billions of cellphones, tablets, and touch-screen devices worldwide.
“I feel truly honored and excited at this opportunity to lead the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State,” Mauro said. “I am very grateful to my colleagues for the trust they’ve placed in me and to Susan Sinnott for her outstanding leadership over the past ten years.”
“Given his amazing research accomplishments and current work on LionGlass, it is particularly gratifying that Professor Mauro is willing and eager to serve the students, faculty and staff in this important leadership role,” said Kump.
Mauro has served as the chair of Penn State’s Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in MatSE and associate head for graduate education in MatSE since 2019.
"John hit the ground running when he joined the department by writing two textbooks, revitalizing our classes on glass and kinetics, supervising the work of a small army of students and postdocs, publishing many papers in peer-reviewed journals, filing patents—including for the now famous LionGlass material—and excelling in service to the department and the profession,” said Sinnott. “Everything that he does is of exceptional quality and I expect the same in this new role.”
Mauro is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, the Society of Glass Technology, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and an elected academician in the World Academy of Ceramics.
Mauro is the author of more than 390 peer-reviewed publications and is the editor-in-chief of Journal of the American Ceramic Society. He is co-author of Fundamentals of Inorganic Glasses, the definitive textbook on glass science and technology, and author of the textbook published in 2021, Materials Kinetics: Transport and Rate Phenomena.
Mauro was awarded the University’s Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 2021 and the EMS Paul F. Robertson Award for Research Breakthrough of the Year in 2020 for his pioneering work in decoding the “glass genome”—the code to design new functional glasses. He also was awarded the Wilson Award for Excellence in Teaching from EMS in 2022.
Mauro earned a bachelor of science degree in glass engineering science and a bachelor of arts in computer science, both in 2001, and a doctorate in glass science in 2006, all from Alfred University.
As global temperatures rise, the demand for air conditioning is surging, driving up energy bills and straining power grids. In the United States, air conditioning accounts for nearly one-fifth of all residential electricity use, and cooling systems in commercial buildings consume about one-third of their total energy. To meet this energy need, a team of researchers at Penn State is developing new materials that cool their surroundings when bent or stressed.
Irena Potochny first picked up a needle to sew buttons on felt in preschool, and she hasn’t put down crafts since. Now a student entering her senior year at Penn State, Potochny spends her free time creating upcycled clothing and tackling myriad projects, like 3-D printing her own spinning wheel one weekend this spring semester.
As biomedical challenges grow more complex, Penn State’s Dipanjan Pan is pioneering a multifaceted approach to nanomedicine that spans basic research, clinical translation and entrepreneurial deployment.
