As part of our regular “We Are!” feature, we recognize 21 Penn Staters who have gone above and beyond what’s asked of them in their work at the University.
Zhenlong Li, associate professor of geography at Penn State, has received the 2026 Early/Mid-Career Research Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) for research that has advanced the field of geographic information science.
Penn State’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Institute of Energy and the Environment recently hosted the AI Data Center Integration to Power Grids Workshop at the Engineering Collaborative Research and Education (ECoRE) Building on the University Park campus.
Penn State graduate student Anthony Altobelli, a Pennsylvania Army National Guard staff sergeant, is the recipient of the 2026 LT. Michael P. Murphy Award. The annual award recognizes a Penn State student who has made exceptional contributions to the global geospatial intelligence community.
For Sierra Hill, a recent trip to Indiana helped bring the next phase of a climate science career into focus. Hill, a master’s degree student in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Penn State, spent two weeks at FluxCourse, an intensive training program focused on measurement, synthesis and modeling of land-atmosphere carbon, water and energy fluxes.
Thirty-six Penn State graduate students have received scholarships of up to $10,000 from the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Endowment, established by Jeff and Ann Marie Fox’s $20 million naming gift to Penn State’s J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School. The 36 students are studying in 32 master’s or doctoral degree programs.
Engineers at Penn State are blending art and science to create cute, paint-on tattoos that could help spot heart attacks early, power robotic prosthetics and read brain waves — all within a colorful, customizable system that can be easily washed away or reapplied.
Thirty-one students earned Discovery Grants to help fund their summer research and projects, gaining the opportunity for valuable experience in the field, in the lab and abroad.
By combining approaches from two rapidly growing fields of quantum physics, researchers at Penn State and Saint Louis University have demonstrated a novel specialized material can naturally enable a new way to study unusual physical phenomena known as non-Hermitian dynamics.
After years of near misses, Penn State’s meteorology team has reclaimed the top spot in WxChallenge, the national collegiate forecasting competition that rewards precision, consistency and a deep understanding of the weather.
