An opportunity grant for non-tenure-line faculty offered through the Center for Faculty Development and Advancement can be used for professional development, advancing approaches for educating students or for acquiring skills that help improve a program at Penn State. Sekhar Bhattacharyya, associate teaching professor of mining engineering, used it to do all three.

Penn State’s highly ranked mining engineering program is slated to be among the recipients of a proposed $100 million investment from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded Penn State’s Two-Dimensional Crystal Consortium (2DCC) $4.6 million over four years to support its transition toward long-term sustainability while the national user facility continues providing researchers across the country with access to specialized materials, equipment and expertise.

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.

Twenty-one years ago, long before federal agencies began requiring researchers to openly share data, Penn State faculty were voluntarily making their data publicly available.

A new planning tool under development at Penn State could help keep the lights on as the U.S. electric grid faces growing pressures from extreme weather, renewable energy and data centers, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. On the latest episode of “Growing Impact,” researchers discuss how the tool identifies unlikely but plausible combinations of events that could threaten grid reliability and inform smarter investments in transmission lines and power plants.

Fourteen interdisciplinary research teams have received funding through the Institute of Energy and the Environment’s (IEE) 2026 Seed Grant Program. The program supports basic and applied research that lays the groundwork to pursue external funding and is guided by IEE’s five strategic research themes. This year, the program awarded seed funding to more than 40 researchers across 10 colleges and campuses and 21 departments and units.