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June is National Pride Month in the United States, and in support on Saturday, June 8, the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) will participate in the State College Pride Parade and Festival, hosted by Centre LGBT+.

A Penn State research team was recently awarded a $4.99 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop and assess advanced separation technologies for the extraction and recovery of rare earth elements and other critical materials from coal, coal wastes and coal by-products.

A project led by Mort Webster, professor of energy engineering at Penn State, has been selected to receive up to $815,959 from the Grid Deployment Office of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The team will evaluate prospective market design changes to efficiently integrate batteries and other unconventional resources into wholesale electricity markets, with the aim of improving electrical grid reliability.

Penn State students are making an impact on climate change at the local level by helping officials across Pennsylvania track the carbon footprint in their communities and recommending ways to reduce it. 

Penn State ranked in 49 out of 55 subjects, with Mineral and mining engineering ranked 13, in the 2024 World University Rankings by Subject, released April 10 by London-based QS, one of the major three international organizations that annually rank academic institutions.

Using machine learning, researchers at Penn State have tied low-magnitude microearthquakes to the permeability of subsurface rocks beneath the Earth, a discovery that could have implications for improving geothermal energy transfer.

A team of five graduate students from the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences won first place in the 2024 Chevron National Engineering Competition. The annual competition challenges teams to present novel ideas about contemporary subjects in the petroleum and energy industry, with this year’s topic focused on use cases for implementing artificial intelligence (AI).

Edward  C. Dowling Jr., president, chief executive officer, and board of directors member at Compass Minerals, will give the 2024 G. Albert Shoemaker Lecture in Mineral Engineering at Penn State. His talk, “Challenges and Opportunities of the Critical Minerals Revolution,” will be held at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, April 19, in the Hub-Robeson Center’s Freeman Auditorium and online via Zoom. A reception will follow the lecture at 5:30 p.m. in Alumni Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

Moderated by Chiara Lo Prete, associate professor of energy economics at Penn State, the workshop, “The Geopolitics of Cross-border Electricity Grids” will focus on the rise of cross-border electricity interconnections — and the high stake challenges they introduce — will be held from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m on Monday, April 15, in 603 Barron Innovation Hub. The workshop will also be available online via Zoom.

Wes Norton, a computer networking expert for a NASA contractor, is making the jump to civil servant to help to solve climate change with the skills he's acquired through the energy and sustainability policy program offered in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering.