This spring break 14 students and three faculty members on a seven-day sustainability tour of New Zealand. The trip is part of a three-credit Sustainable Energy in New Zealand course offered by Derek Elsworth, G. Albert Shoemaker Chair in Mineral Engineering.
FeiFei Shi, assistant professor in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, received a $400,000 research and development award from the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) in the U.S Department of Energy (DOE) to develop foundational research on the corrosive damage caused by molten salt in nuclear salt reactors (MSRs).
Twelve students in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences capitalized on their time off to gain an exclusive educational experience abroad. The students traveled to Iceland, a small country known for its outsized renewable energy resources, to see classroom concepts in real life, while crossing off a bucket-list global experience.
The spring 2023 Celebrating Women in Energy and Water Research seminar series continues on Thursday, April 13, with two seminars by Jaquelin Cochran, director of the Grid Planning and Analysis Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The free seminars are open to Penn State faculty, staff and students.
Elisa Alonso, a physical scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), will give the 2023 G. Albert Shoemaker Lecture in Mineral Engineering at Penn State. Her talk, “Rare Earth Elements are not the only critical mineral commodities,” will be held at 3 p.m. on Friday, April 14, in the Hub-Robeson Center’s Freeman Auditorium and online via Zoom. A reception will follow the lecture at 4 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Elham Rahimi, a graduate student in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, received the SME Ph.D. Fellowship grant from the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME).
The spring 2023 Celebrating Women in Energy and Water Research seminar series continues on Thursday, March 16, with two seminars by Erin Baker, distinguished professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The free seminars are open to Penn State faculty, staff and students.
The Colorado River basin, which supplies water to 40 million people in the Western United States, is threatened by historic drought, a changing climate and water demands from growing cities. One potential response involves encouraging individuals to conserve water, and a new study may help identify those most likely to change their behaviors to contribute, according to scientists.
Critical minerals, including rare earth elements, are used to power devices like smartphones and computers and are essential to our nation’s economy and national security. Penn State’s Center for Critical Minerals has developed a new purification process that extracts mixed rare earth oxides from acid mine drainage and associated sludges.
Tapping into abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania, products of the state’s long history of energy extraction — could provide a future source of affordable geothermal energy, according to Penn State scientists.