On any given day, one in 31 hospital patients is diagnosed with an infection that developed as a result of care during their hospital stay, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Medical devices such as catheters, stents, heart valves and pacemakers, whose surfaces can become covered with harmful bacterial films, account for about a quarter of such infections.

By Jamie Oberdick

A method of highly accurate and sensitive virus identification using Raman spectroscopy, a portable virus capture device and machine learning could enable real-time virus detection and identification to help battle future pandemics, according to a team of researchers led by Penn State.  

Mauricio Terrones, Verne M. Wilaman Professor of Physics and professor of chemistry and of materials science and engineering, has been named an Evan Pugh University Professor, the highest honor that Penn State bestows on a faculty member.

The ability of piezoelectric materials to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and vice versa makes them useful for various applications from robotics to communication to sensors.