Eberly College of Science Superlatives 2005

• Penn State is ranked as having the 5th highest impact in space science among the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities.

• Donald Schneider, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, is ranked as the 2nd most-often-cited space researcher by the latest ISI Essential Science Indicators report, based on publications during the last ten years. (from first-quarter report of 2007)

• In the National Science Foundation report on the research expenditures of all U.S. public and private universities, Penn State ranks:

9th in Chemistry
10th in Physics
11th in Astronomy, and
13th in Mathematical Sciences.

• Peer rankings repeatedly place Penn State's disease-dynamics research group among the top 5 in the world.

• Peer rankings place Penn State's plant-biology and molecular-evolution research groups among the top 10 in the world.

• The National Science Foundation ranks Penn State 12th overall in R&D expenditures among all universities, public and private.

• Penn State chemistry is consistently ranked as one of the top ten departments in the nation, and currently is ranked #2 in the Big Ten in external research funding. By traditional rankings of faculty excellence, Penn State is ranked 8th nationwide in analytical chemistry and 18th in all combined areas of chemistry.

• Penn State ranks sixth nationwide in the number of baccalaureate recipients in the physical sciences who earned doctoral degrees from 1999 to 2003--and is tied for sixth in the biological sciences, according to a recent report sponsored by the National Science Foundation and other government science organizations.

• The Department of Chemistry and the Department of Physics contribute strongly to Penn State’s strong ranking in materials science and engineering, currently 7th nationwide.

• Penn State is ranked 12th among all U. S. colleges and universities for its graduate program in condensed-matter and low-temperature physics.

• The Department of Statistics recently was ranked as one of the top 15 institutions worldwide in publication output in statistics from 1986 to 2000 by the Canadian Journal of Statistics.

• The Department of Statistics is ranked 19th in the nation the by the National Research Council.

• The Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics is ranked 21st in the nation the by the National Research Council and also is cited as being the most improved department in its scientific discipline nationwide.

• Penn State's Webb Miller is an author of the most widely used set of computer programs in the biological sciences, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST). The article describing BLAST has been cited more than 18,000 times since the program was written in 1990. The programs are a tool for matching sequences of genetic information. They perform fast database searching combined with rigorous statistics for judging the significance of matches.

Some Measures of Faculty Excellence and Leadership

• During the past decade, the rate at which research papers by Eberly College of Science faculty were cited in scientific journals by other researchers increased 150 percent. The total number of citations reported for the 1999-2003 period is 51,090. Also during the past decade, the number of Penn State research papers in fields including biology, biochemistry, mathematics, microbiology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, and space science grew by over 50 percent to an average of more than 1,400 papers per year from 1999 to 2003.

• Nina Fedoroff, professor of biology and the Verne M. Willaman Chair in Life Sciences serves the United States as a member of the National Science Board. The board is composed of 24 part-time members who are selected on the basis of their eminence in science, engineering, education, or research management to direct the activities of the National Science Foundation. Fedoroff was nominated for the influential position by President Clinton and subsequently was the United States Senate.

• Penn State is tied for 14th among public universities and 29th among all universities in the United States in the number of faculty who are members of the National Academy of Sciences. Penn State has 15 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 12 of them in the Eberly College of Science.

• 9 Eberly College of Science faculty are Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 5 Eberly College of Science faculty are Fellows of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom.

• 13 of Penn State’s 24 active Evan Pugh professors, the highest honor given by the university, are in the Eberly College of Science.

Some Faculty Awards and Honors

In recognition of their research achievements and their leadership in their scientific disciplines, members of the Eberly College of Science faculty have been honored with numerous prestigious awards, including:

• Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award of Iota Sigma Pi
• Alfred Bader Award of the American Chemical Society
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship
• Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award
• Arthur C. Cope Senior Scholar Award
• A. W. Adamson Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Surface Chemistry
• Beckman Young Investigator Award
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellowship
• American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship
• American Philosophical Society Membership
• Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award
• Career Award of the National Science Foundation
• Career Development Award of the National Institutes of Health
• Chemical Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Chemists
• Dreyfus Foundation Fellowship
• Established Investigator Award of the American Heart Association
• Guggenheim Fellowship
• Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award of the National Science Foundation
• Fritz London Prize in Low-Temperature Physics
• Fulbright Fellowship
• Humboldt Award
• Institute of Medicine Membership
• International Prize for Biology
• Leukemia Scholar Award
• Lifetime National Associate Award of the U. S. National Academies
• Mac Arthur Fellowship
• Merit Award of the National Institutes Health
• Merk Award of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• Nakanishi Prize of the Chemical Society of Japan
• National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing
• National Academy of Sciences Membership
• Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society
• Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize of the American Physical Society
• Packard Foundation Fellowship
• Pew Scholar Award
• Pfizer Enzyme Award
• Presidential Young Investigator Award
• Repligen Award
• Research Innovation Award of the National Science Foundation
• Research Scholar Award of the American Cancer Society
• Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society
• Royal Society of the United Kingdom Fellowship
• Searle Scholar Award
• Silver Medal of the American Acoustical Society
• Young Investigator Award of the Office of Naval Research
• Many honorary doctoral degrees awarded by universities worldwide

Some Undergraduate Awards and Honors

This year, Penn State students received the maximum number of Goldwater Scholarships allowed for any single institution. All four recipients of the 2005 Goldwater awards are undergraduate students in the Eberly College of Science.

Some of the many other prestigious awards received by Eberly College of Science undergraduate students include the:

• Fulbright Fellowship,
• Gates Fellowship,
• Winston Churchill Scholarship,
• National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships
• Joint Research Fellowship from the U. S. National Institutes of Health and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and
• Annenberg Marshall Scholarship.

Some Research Achievements

• The first planets ever found outside our solar system were discovered by Aleksander Wolszczan, Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who currently is involved in the Space Interferometer Mission.

• Penn State is the control center for NASA’s new space observatory, the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer. Penn State also lead the teams that designed and built two of the telescopes on the Swift observatory, which collect all of Swift’s data in X-ray, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths.

• The first experimental evidence for the existence of a new "supersolid" phase of matter was discovered by Moses H. W. Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics. Chan’s innovative experiments revealed that a supersolid form of helium-4, predicted decades ago by Einstein’s theories but never before observed experimentally, can flow without friction, much like a superfluid.

• The concept for the world’s second-largest telescope, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, was originated at Penn State, which played a leadership role in its design, construction, and commissioning, and which has a 25-percent share in its operation. Larry Ramsey, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, served as the founding Project Scientist for the telescope from its inception through 2004.

• A new field of “superatom chemistry” based on a new periodic table of “cluster elements” was founded by research lead by A. Welford Castleman Jr., the Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics and the Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science. His research team discovered that clusters of aluminum atoms have chemical properties similar to single atoms of metallic and nonmetallic elements when they react with iodine.

• The first National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center was established at Penn State as the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics. Its research team members also play a major role in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), whose data are transferred to a dedicated LIGO computing center at Penn State for subsequent analysis.

• One of the founders of the field of molecular evolution is Penn State's Masatoshi Nei, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Director of the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics.

• Penn State researchers in the lab of Jean E. Brenchley, professor of microbiology and biotechnology, discovered millions of micro-microbes--less than 1 micron in size and smaller than most commonly known bacteria--surviving in a 120,000-year-old ice sample taken from 3,000 meters below the surface of the Greenland glacier. Scientists now are studying the microbes to understanding how microbial life can be preserved, for perhaps millions of years, while enduring subzero temperatures, desiccation, high pressures, and low oxygen and nutrient concentrations. The discovery may help to define the limits for life on Earth as well as elsewhere in the universe, such as on cold planets like Mars.

• A team led by Teh-hui Kao, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, is the first to to identify with definitive experiments that a single gene determines whether a plant is able to fertilize itself. The discovery, which could help to double the yield and reduce by one-third to two-thirds the labor costs involved in hybrid seed production, could provide the key to producing hybrids in many crops where this technique previously has been either inefficient or impossible.