News
Archive:
12/19/2024
Due to its massive scale of production, concrete’s environmental impact is significant: It
accounts for 8% of the globe’s total annual carbon dioxide emissions. In the Penn State
College of Engineering, researchers are working to make a dent in that number
through innovations in manufacturing and carbon capture and storage.
11/27/2024
The Sustainable Communities Collaborative (SCC) at Penn State Sustainability (SustainPSU) has coordinated a record number of partnership projects with the Borough of State College this semester.
11/22/2024
Since 2001, the Penn State Center for Dirt and Gravel Road Studies, housed in the Larson Transportation Institute in the College of Engineering, has worked to reduce the environmental impact of dirt and gravel roads and undersized bridges and culverts. Most recently, the research center worked with the U.S. Forest Service to develop a standard to replace stream crossings in Pennsylvania. The first few stream crossings designed with this new standard were recently completed.
11/18/2024
Phosphorus, a nutrient in soil essential for sustaining most forms of life, is increasingly disappearing from land as it is washed into waterways throughout the United States, according to a new study led by researchers at Penn State.
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
Pennsylvania Secretary of Transportation Michael Carroll will speak at the Penn State student chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE) Student Leadership Summit (SLS) later this year. The Penn State ITE student chapter encourages all interested students to attend the first SLS held in the ITE’s Mid-Colonial District (MCDITE) on Nov. 15-16, 2024 at the University Park campus.
11/12/2024
A group of Penn State civil engineers recently held a drone flying demonstration for students at the Park Forest and Mount Nittany middle schools in State College, Pennsylvania.
11/1/2024
The latest episode of "Growing Impact" explores how a research team is using computer modeling and animations to visualize future flood and levee failure scenarios.
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.
10/30/2024
Faculty and staff in Penn State’s Law, Policy, and Engineering initiative were recently tapped by the governor’s office to lead a two-day training program in September in Harrisburg on science and technology policy. The faculty and staff are part of Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Science and Technology Policy Program (COPA-STEP), which is run by LPE and aims to improve public and environmental health, economic and social equity, and public scientific discourse in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
10/29/2024
Microplastics have been steadily increasing in freshwater environments for decades and are directly tied to rising global plastic production since the 1950s, according to a new study by an interdisciplinary team of Penn State researchers.
10/23/2024
Gene Myers, owner and chief sustainability officer of Thrive Home Builders in Denver will deliver the 2024 Hankin Distinguished Lecture, hosted by the residential construction program and the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, housed in Penn State’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His talk, “A Homebuilder’s Journey to Carbon Neutral Construction,” will be held at 4 p.m. on Nov. 6 in Robb Hall at the Hintz Family Alumni Center at University Park.
10/21/2024
Margery E. Hoffman, widow of 1982 Penn State civil engineering doctoral alumnus Paul C. Hoffman, has committed a $1.05M estate gift to establish an endowment to benefit graduate students in civil engineering in her husband's memory.
10/17/2024
The Penn State Climate Consortium has awarded funding to four research projects through its Climate Solutions Accelerator Program. Through this program, the consortium aims to put promising climate solutions into action via interdisciplinary partnerships.
10/10/2024
The J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School at Penn State recognized 110 graduate students, including 20 College of Engineering students, as recipients of the 2024-2025 University Graduate Fellowships. These students were honored at a reception held in the Bryce Jordan Center on Oct. 3.
9/30/2024
Penn State civil engineering student teams and one individual placed first or second in five categories at the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Region 2 Mid-Atlantic West Symposium in April at George Mason University. Two of those teams were invited to compete at the National ASCE competitions in June at Brigham Young University, where one team went on to place third.
9/27/2024
Li Li, the Barry and Shirley Isett Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, was selected for two honors from the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest Earth and space science association, for her scientific contributions to the field of hydrology.
9/12/2024
The newly constructed Engineering Collaborative Engineering Research and Education Building (ECoRE), the latest expansion for the College of Engineering onto West Campus at Penn State University Park, is a showcase for collaboration, both in how it was built and how it will be used by faculty, staff and students at the University.
9/12/2024
Nine Penn State researchers, including three from the College of Engineering, have been named fellows of the Institute of Energy and the Environment (IEE) for 2024.
9/1/2024
Lauren McPhillips, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and of agricultural and biological engineering, was featured in an article from Grid Magazine.
8/28/2024
Farshad Rajabipour, interim department head and John A. and Harriette K. Shaw Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will be co-editor in chief for the Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering (JMCE), effective Oct. 1.
8/26/2024
Nitrate, a common chemical compound that occurs naturally and is found in plants, water and soil, can break down into molecules harmful to human, animal and ecological health and accumulate as a pollutant. contamination in streams, lakes and estuaries is a critical problem in many agricultural watersheds, but water-quality data is limited, making monitoring stream health and making management decisions difficult, according to researchers at Penn State. To enhance available data, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded a four-year, $650,000 grant to a research team at Penn State.
8/21/2024
In a video produced by WPSU, Bill Burgos, professor of civil and environmental engineering, discussed the toxic effects of abandoned coal mine drainage on the Moshannon Creek.
8/20/2024
Penn State has announced the selection of 23 faculty members for the Penn State Emerging Academic Leaders (PSEAL) program for fall 2024. This initiative highlights individuals who have demonstrated exceptional potential for academic leadership and innovation within their fields.
8/12/2024
Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing has launched Geomorphica, a Diamond Open Access journal that promotes discourse and disseminates research in geomorphology, the study of landforms.
8/2/2024
At the Larson Transportation Institute Test Track, ride along with President Bendapudi and the faculty and students who are helping develop tech for self-driving cars.
7/18/2024
Xianbiao "XB" Hu, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State with a Larson Transportation Institute (LTI) affiliation, shared his transportation engineering expertise with President Neeli Bendapudi and others at a visit to LTI’s test track on June 29. Penn State News spoke with Hu about his research and some of his recent and ongoing projects that address emerging transportation issues affecting drivers in Pennsylvania.
7/18/2024
As the number of major utility-scale ground solar panel installations grows, concerns about their impacts on natural hydrologic processes also have grown. However, a new study by Penn State researchers suggests that excess runoff or increased erosion can be easily mitigated — if these “solar farms” are properly built.
7/11/2024
The Institute of Energy and the Environment has announced an update to its research themes. The change is to better align three of the research themes with the energy and environmental research being done at Penn State, and with efforts to recognize the importance of community and justice.
6/27/2024
Six College of Engineering baccalaureate graduates have been selected for the U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF-GRFP). Four engineering graduates were also named honorable mentions for the NSF-GRFP.
6/7/2024
A pair of researchers from Penn State’s Department of Civil and Environment Engineering analyzed the composition of mussels downstream of a wastewater treatment facility in Western Pennsylvania that had accepted and treated fracking wastewater, and found that the tissue and shells of mussels contained radium.
6/6/2024
Six interdisciplinary research teams with investigators from the College of Engineering have been awarded funding through the?Institute of Energy and the Environment’s Seed Grant Program for 2024.
5/7/2024
Li Li, the Barry and Shirley Isett Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, is the inaugural recipient of the Institute of Energy and the Environment’s Person of the Year Award. The award celebrates an exceptional researcher whose accomplishments in energy or environmental research have yielded notable successes over the past year.
5/3/2024
In 2020, the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation committed $15.5 million to create the A. James Clark Scholars Program in the College of Engineering to support high-achieving engineering students with significant financial need. This spring, the first cohort of A. James Clark Scholars will graduate from the Penn State College of Engineering.
5/2/2024
The latest episode of Growing Impact discusses how thawing Arctic permafrost is affecting rivers and communities in the region. With temperatures rising globally due to climate change, landscapes in the Arctic are evolving. A Penn State research team is investigating how thawing permafrost will change Arctic rivers and the consequences for erosion, sediment transport, and ultimately, communities.
4/25/2024
The Penn State College of Engineering has named its student marshals for the spring 2024 commencement ceremony.
4/18/2024
Penn State’s Climate Consortium awarded funding to hold workshops to three researchers from the Penn State College of Engineering, including Zoubeida Ounaies, professor of mechanical engineering, director of the Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Material Systems and associate director of the Materials Research Institute; Christine Kirchhoff, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and of law, policy and engineering; and James Mutunga, assistant research professor in the School of Engineering Design and Innovation.
4/12/2024
Xiaofeng Liu, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, was named a fellow of the Environmental & Water Resources Institute.
4/4/2024
Eight College of Engineering graduate students were among the forty Penn State graduate students named recipients of Penn State’s most prestigious annual graduate student recognition awards.
2/26/2024
Alaska needs an estimated 27,500 new housing units over the next 10 years to alleviate overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, according to the Alaska Housing Foundation Corporation. A Penn State interdisciplinary team that includes researchers from the College of Engineering is looking to alleviate some of that stress with a $376,000 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant.
2/19/2024
The Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, housed in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State, will host two concurrent conferences on March 27-28 at The Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center, with two full days of educational panels, talks, exhibits and events.
2/7/2024
Lauren McPhillips, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and of agricultural and biological engineering, was quoted in an article published by The New Republic. The article discussed the importance of addressing aging drain and sewer systems as climate change accelerates.
2/2/2024
The latest episode of "Growing Impact" explores the connection between the expansion of solar energy and land use. To meet net-zero emissions by 2050, it is estimated that the U.S. would need to devote 0.5% of its land to achieve that goal through solar energy. That is nearly 16,000 square miles or about a third of the state of Pennsylvania.
1/24/2024
Vikash Gayah, interim director of the Penn State Larson Transportation Institute and professor of civil engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, was featured in the NPR podcast Planet Money.
1/18/2024
A mechanical engineering alumnus honored his late brothers and their Coal Region roots through an $800,000 gift to establish a scholarship in the College of Engineering. The Robert, John, and Edward Mitchell Family Endowed Scholarship Fund in the College of Engineering will help engineering students who hail from Pennsylvania’s Coal Region – or Schuylkill, Carbon, Columbia and Northumberland Counties – in their pursuit to become engineers.
