Electric grid is going through a rapid transformation with significant demand growth, large scale integration of renewable energy sources, and infrastructure upgrades to support electrification and data center loads and to enhance reliability and grid flexibility. Energy storage is at the center of this transformation providing system operators with a flexible resource to support renewable integration and enhanced grid reliability.
Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar
A collection of upcoming energy and environment events from around Penn State and beyond.
The Joint Geophysics and Geochemistry Forum hosts Leonardo van der Laat presenting "Crater-Lake Control on Phreatic Eruptions at Poás Volcano Revealed by Seismo-Acoustic and Multidisciplinary Monitoring."
The 2026 SeED (Science Equity and Diversity) Conference will highlight the power of inclusive communication to strengthen belonging, elevate diverse voices, and expand pathways in STEM. Through sessions on difficult conversations, professional empowerment, identity and belonging, and the Her STEM Story gallery, participants will explore how dialogue fosters discovery and how advocacy drives impact.
A fundamental aim of biology is to understand the dynamic interactions between organisms and their environment that generate and maintain biodiversity over ecological and evolutionary timescales. The responses of organisms to environmental change are structured across heterogeneous environments and within the genome itself. This is because adaptation to local environments in the past influences contemporary plastic responses and future environmental adaptation, and because the genome itself is a heterogeneous landscape of selection, drift, recombination, and mutation.
The 2026 SeED (Science Equity and Diversity) Conference will highlight the power of inclusive communication to strengthen belonging, elevate diverse voices, and expand pathways in STEM. Through sessions on difficult conversations, professional empowerment, identity and belonging, and the Her STEM Story gallery, participants will explore how dialogue fosters discovery and how advocacy drives impact.
9:00am – 3:00pm
Full details
Please join us for an In-Service day focused on networking between water researchers and those in extension and outreach, who bring research to stakeholders. Interactive sessions will provide opportunities to share ideas on how to work together to elevate and integrate programming.Agenda*Location: TBD
Materials made from fungal mycelium, or the root-like structure of fungi, have become popular across industries for their affordability. However, mycelium material properties are not yet controllable. In this talk, I will discuss broad applications of fungal mycelium materials and our research efforts to understand why different fungal species exhibit different material properties. Outcomes of our work will advance rational design of mycelium materials to support economic growth in biomanufacturing.
When people hear “ceramics,” most probably think of coffee mugs, plates, or something fragile. But what if ceramics could help produce clean fuels and power the energy systems of the future?In this talk, I’ll introduce a new generation of functional ceramics, Protonic Ceramic Cells. By operating at a lower temperature, these materials enable efficient energy conversion and storage, opening the door to solutions that are more practical, scalable, and well‑suited for real‑world deployment.
The 2026 SeED (Science Equity and Diversity) Conference will highlight the power of inclusive communication to strengthen belonging, elevate diverse voices, and expand pathways in STEM. Through sessions on difficult conversations, professional empowerment, identity and belonging, and the Her STEM Story gallery, participants will explore how dialogue fosters discovery and how advocacy drives impact.
Fine-grained migration data illuminate demographic, environmental, and health phenomena. However, United States migration data have serious drawbacks: public data lack spatial granularity, and higher-resolution proprietary data suffer from multiple biases. Through harmonization of high-resolution yet biased proprietary data with coarse yet reliable Census data, we create and release MIGRATE: annual migration matrices capturing flows between 47.4 billion US Census Block Group pairs—approximately four thousand times the spatial resolution of current public data.
Data assimilation (DA) is the science of fusing information from numerical model forecasts with information from observations. It is the backbone of Earth system prediction. DA faces significant challenges associated with the high-resolution, multiscale, coupled Earth system modeling, and a large amount of diverse and complex observations sampling a variety of scales. The next-generation DA is required to effectively analyze the state and quantify its uncertainty across multiple scales and various Earth system components.
Prepare PA will host four regional network meetings across Pennsylvania in March and April, bringing together current and prospective members of the PA Climate Network to help shape the direction and goals of the statewide initiative.
The 2026 SeED (Science Equity and Diversity) Conference will highlight the power of inclusive communication to strengthen belonging, elevate diverse voices, and expand pathways in STEM. Through sessions on difficult conversations, professional empowerment, identity and belonging, and the Her STEM Story gallery, participants will explore how dialogue fosters discovery and how advocacy drives impact.
The 2026 SeED (Science Equity and Diversity) Conference will highlight the power of inclusive communication to strengthen belonging, elevate diverse voices, and expand pathways in STEM. Through sessions on difficult conversations, professional empowerment, identity and belonging, and the Her STEM Story gallery, participants will explore how dialogue fosters discovery and how advocacy drives impact.
The Geochemistry Forum hosts Tushar Mittal presenting "Beyond the Grain: The Statistical Mechanics of Multi-Mineralic Rock Textures."
The Environmental health sciences program area in the College of Health and Human Development will host Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, Department chair of Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health-Columbia University who will be giving a keynote lecture at 11 AM. Her talk will be followed by a catered lunch and networking from 12:30-1:30PM, and then a panel discussion from 1:45 PM-2:45 PM on funding in the field of Environmental Health with a focus on the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) moderated by Dr. Asher Rosinger, and panelists: Dr.
Hosted by the Penn State Center for Biorenewables, Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food and Environmental Science, Institute for Energy and the Environment, Huck Institute for Life Sciences and Penn State Extension.
Hosted by the Penn State Center for Biorenewables, Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food and Environmental Science, Institute for Energy and the Environment, Huck Institute for Life Sciences and Penn State Extension.
Penn State’s glass research ecosystem enables partners to address surface‑driven performance challenges, from rapid, targeted analyses to long‑term fundamental research collaborations.
Surfaces and interfaces play a crucial role in chemical and physical phenomena, such as heterogeneous catalysis and reactions. At the surface or interface of water, the hydrogen-bonded network is abruptly interrupted, giving rise to fascinating interfacial properties. These specific properties are the driving forces for many biochemical, environmental and geochemical processes.