News
Mar 10, 2026
Q&A: What factors influence likelihood and severity of Ebola outbreaks?
Since its first documentation in 1976 there have been over three dozen outbreaks of Ebola virus disease in Central and West Africa, the largest of which resulted in the death of over 11,000 people between 2013 and 2016. A severe and often fatal disease, Ebola causes fever, weakness and bleeding, and spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is infected. Researchers at Penn State recently published two papers that looked at factors that contribute to how these outbreaks begin and how severe they become.
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Mar 10, 2026
Q&A: Gassing up bioengineered materials for wound healing
Biomaterials are specifically engineered to support tissue, nerve and muscle regeneration across the body, yet physicians and researchers have limited control over the size and connectivity of the internal pores that transfer oxygen and vital nutrients to where they are most needed. To solve this problem and better support tissue regeneration, a team at Penn State has designed a new class of tunable biomaterials.
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Mar 05, 2026
Sending a 'We Are!' to these Penn Staters — March 5
As part of our regular “We Are!” feature, we recognize 18 Penn Staters who have gone above and beyond what’s asked of them in their work at the University. This week, on behalf of the entire Penn State community, we’d like to say thank you to...
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Mar 05, 2026
IST names Cai, Huang and Lee to lead college’s first academic departments
Huck co-hire Sharon Huang has been named head of the Department of Informatics and Intelligent Systems, one of the inaugural departments recently established in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology.
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Mar 05, 2026
Inaugural Penn State-Ghana Seed Grant Program awardees announced
The inaugural Penn State-Ghana Research Partnerships Seed Grant Program has awarded nine projects that aim to fuel global impact, including crop disease surveillance, removing heavy metals from mining wastewater and understanding multimodal traffic streams.
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Mar 04, 2026
2026-27 Huck Seed Grant Program opens call for proposals
The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences is calling for 2026-27 Seed Grant Program funding proposals, due by May 1. Huck seed grants foster innovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative life sciences research with the potential to drive scientific breakthroughs and generate new research directions leading to impactful externally funded research.
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Feb 27, 2026
Protein regulator of sugars and fats may work with an unexpected parter — itself
Penn State scientists characterize structure and function of protein implicated in liver disease working with another copy of itself, rather than its usual partner, to turn genes on and off
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Feb 25, 2026
The 'Spirit of Chocolate' celebrates chocolate as both science and story
On Valentine’s Day, the Palmer Museum of Art became a tasting room and a classroom all at once. “The Art of Chocolate: A Guided Tasting Experience,” presented by the Arboretum at Penn State, invited guests to explore chocolate as both science and story, pairing research with sensory discovery and chocolate with cheese. The event was a collaboration among arboretum staff and College of Agricultural Sciences professors Siela Maximova and Mark Guiltinan, co‑leaders of Penn State’s Cacao and Chocolate Research Network.
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Feb 25, 2026
Q&A: How can microbiome science solve problems in agriculture?
Decades of research has shown promise for using microbiome science to solve several problems facing agriculture, but these findings have not yet been translated to practical recommendations for growers, according to a team of scientists in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.
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Feb 24, 2026
Huck associate director elected fellow in American Academy of Microbiology
Andrew Patterson, John T. and Paige S. Smith Professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences, has been elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology. Fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology.
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