Turgay Ertekin has been named the new head of the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering (EME) at Penn State, effective July 1.

Ertekin is a professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering and holds the George E. Trimble Chair in Earth and Mineral Sciences. He also serves as a co-director of the newly formed Penn State Institute for Natural Gas Research.

Laura Bradley, an alumnus of Penn State and the EMS Energy Institute recently received The National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Award. Bradley is working on her PhD at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on vapor phase polymer deposition on liquid substrates.

Bradley spent time as an undergraduate working at the EMS Energy Institute. During that time, her paper, The Effect of Fuel Composition on Pyrolysis Kinetics, received a Best Student Paper Award at the 2009 Clearwater Coal Conference.

Zuleima Karpyn, associate professor and Quentin E. and Louise L. Wood Faculty Fellow in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering will serve as the interim director of the EMS Energy Institute for one year while Director Chunshan Song is on sabbatical leave. Dean Easterling, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, announced that Dr. Karpyn’s appointment will officially begin July 1, 2013.

Last year Professor Angela Lueking was awarded a highly competitive Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship to partner with researchers at the University of Crete to study basics of hydrogen adsorption and diffusion on surfaces. The Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship is open to top non-European researchers to work on projects in Europe. The fellowship helps to develop research cooperation between Europe and other parts of the world.

Gareth Mitchell is a geologist. As an associate researcher at Penn State, the 61-year-old can still be found out in the field, collecting samples and doing research on coal. 

“I'm a hands-on kind of fellow," he says. "I don’t mind getting dirty and doing the hard work.” 

He also likes working with his feet. On ice, particularly.