Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive

The PaSDC Data User Conference seeks to educate its audience on the demographic and socioeconomic research and policies affecting Pennsylvania. Each year, researchers, policymakers, planners, and data professionals from across Pennsylvania gather for the commonwealth's most comprehensive forum on demographic and socioeconomic data. Sessions span a wide range of topics including population trends, workforce analysis, rural Pennsylvania issues, community development, data visualization, and innovations in data technology. Sessions at the conference are non-commercial and vendor neutral.

Sponsored by PPG Industries, the 12th Annual Elevator Pitch Competition is an opportunity to pitch your research in TWO minutes or less, using no more than four supporting slides. Graduate students will briefly convey their research to a curious and technically diverse audience in hopes of taking home CASH PRIZES and developing new COLLABORATIONS.Competition DateJune 3, 20269:30 a.m. - 12:00 noonTop 5 pitches will present live at 11:30 am.

The Life Sciences Symposium (LSS) is an annual meeting organized by the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the Huck Graduate Student Advisory Committee (HGSAC) at Penn State. This year's theme is From Protocols to Pipelines: Connecting Bioinformatics with Experimental Biology. Since 2015, this free, all-day event has brought together hundreds of Penn State researchers from diverse scientific fields, promoting unique research collaborations, funding, and networking opportunities. The LSS features keynote speakers, student research presentations and posters, awards, and more.

This all-day workshop will bring together leading experts from industry, government, and academia to examine the emerging implications of large-load integration and discuss pathways to maintain a stable and resilient grid.

2026 Women Advancing River Research Seminar SeriesCarbon Transport and Processing Across Land-Ocean ContinuumSuzanne Tank, University of Alberta, CanadaNuria Catalan, Centre d’Estudis Avancats de Blanes, SpainAll seminars will be presented online live at 11:00 a.m. ET on the third Thursday of each month. Seminar recordings will be posted later. Please register in advance for all talks. 

The availability and affordability of housing are critical issues in many communities across Pennsylvania. This webinar presents descriptive and economic analyses from a Rural Housing Affordability: 2013-2023 study to examine the variation in severity of these issues across the nation, with a particular focus on rural areas, which have been underrepresented in previous studies on housing livability.

Register to join the industryXchange 2026: Engineering Innovation with AI. This collaborative event, led by the Penn State College of Engineering, will bring together Penn State faculty and graduate students and industry leaders to network, discuss industry needs, and explore artificial intelligence research opportunities.Scheduled concurrent breakouts include:

Join us for the 2026 Climate Solutions Symposium, May 18–20, to explore how climate change is shaping communities and ecosystems in Pennsylvania and beyond. Through expert keynotes, interactive sessions, field experiences, and cross-sector networking, the symposium brings together researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and students to advance evidence-based approaches to resilience and adaptation.

Register to join the industryXchange 2026: Engineering Innovation with AI. This collaborative event, led by the Penn State College of Engineering, will bring together Penn State faculty and graduate students and industry leaders to network, discuss industry needs, and explore artificial intelligence research opportunities.Scheduled concurrent breakouts include:

In the UK, the hospitality sector generates 8% of the country’s total food waste. This has significant social, economic, and environmental costs. While restaurants already adopt a number of practices to reduce kitchen waste, plate waste remains a complex issue driven by service design and diner behaviour. This research draws on the Behaviour Change Wheel framework to develop an online experiment testing three interventions to reduce plate waste: direct server interactions with diners, indirect informational nudges, and a combination of both.

Penn State's AI and the Economy Initiative brings together policymakers, practitioners and researchers from across the United States to exchange knowledge about the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the economy and society. 

Join us for the 2026 Climate Solutions Symposium, May 18–20, to explore how climate change is shaping communities and ecosystems in Pennsylvania and beyond. Through expert keynotes, interactive sessions, field experiences, and cross-sector networking, the symposium brings together researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and students to advance evidence-based approaches to resilience and adaptation.

Penn State's AI and the Economy Initiative brings together policymakers, practitioners and researchers from across the United States to exchange knowledge about the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the economy and society. 

Join us for the 2026 Climate Solutions Symposium, May 18–20, to explore how climate change is shaping communities and ecosystems in Pennsylvania and beyond. Through expert keynotes, interactive sessions, field experiences, and cross-sector networking, the symposium brings together researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and students to advance evidence-based approaches to resilience and adaptation.

The One Health Microbiome Center (OHMC) in the Penn State Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences will host the One Health Microbiome Symposium on May 13 and 14, 2026. The symposium will bring together researchers from an ensemble of traditionally siloed disciplines to unify microbiome science, reflecting the center's mission. By welcoming industry partners and convening experts from the "One Health" pillars of human, agricultural and environmental health, the symposium highlights a central principle: Human health is inseparably linked to the health of our environment.

The One Health Microbiome Center (OHMC) in the Penn State Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences will host the One Health Microbiome Symposium on May 13 and 14, 2026. The symposium will bring together researchers from an ensemble of traditionally siloed disciplines to unify microbiome science, reflecting the center's mission. By welcoming industry partners and convening experts from the "One Health" pillars of human, agricultural and environmental health, the symposium highlights a central principle: Human health is inseparably linked to the health of our environment.

Modern technologies, from electric vehicles to wind turbines, depend on rare earth elements and other critical minerals that are extremely difficult to separate due to their nearly identical chemical properties. In this talk, I will show how we can reprogram cellulose, nature’s most abundant biopolymer, at the nanoscale to selectively capture specific rare earth elements and precious metals from complex mixtures by precisely engineering its chemistry and structure.

Evolving regulations and consumer expectations are driving the food packaging industry to adopt new can coating chemistries, but evaluating how these coatings interact with food ingredients remains slow, empirical, and limited in mechanistic insight.

Parasitic plants obtain water and nutrients from other plants through specialized feeding structures known as haustoria. Having evolved on at least a dozen independent occasions, parasitic plants represent about 1% of flowering plant species diversity. Parasitic plants range from facultative, where plants retain an ability to live on their own without a host, to complete host dependence and loss of photosynthetic ability with associated morphological reduction to the point of being nearly unrecognizable as a plant.

The Geochemistry Forum hosts Manato Akishiba, Tohoku University, presenting on Oscillatory zoning in quartz and calcite veins: Implications for the seismic cycle and fluid migration in fault zones.