Millennium Café

Glass has been a cornerstone of architecture for centuries, from the windows of cozy homes to the façades of towering skyscrapers. Yet, the way we manufacture it has remained largely the same: an energy-intensive process that pumps out tons of CO₂ every year due to high melting temperatures and ingredients that release additional CO₂ upon decomposition. Enter LionGlass™: a revolutionary glass family developed by our Glass Research Lab at Penn State. LionGlass™ not only melts at ~400°C lower than standard glass, but also eliminates the use of CO₂-releasing ingredients, thereby offering the potential to reduce emissions by more than half. Moreover, it demonstrates >10x times the crack resistance of the glass we use today. We are on a mission to transform LionGlass™ into the next generation of energy-efficient windows, aiming to demonstrate how even a simple sheet of glass can reshape the industry and play a pivotal role in building a sustainable future. This work is sponsored by a seed grant from the Cocoziello Institute of Real Estate Innovation.

Mehmet Ozay
Chemical Engineering

Understanding the properties and structure of solid materials remains critical for advancing technologies across many fields. Through ultrasound, we can probe bulk volumes while maintaining microscale sensitivity to structural heterogeneities. I will introduce the basic principles of ultrasonic testing and share how we've applied this versatile approach to understand various systems.

Olivia Cook
Argüelles Research Group

Despite its inception during the World War II era, the field of ultrasound biomedicine has enjoyed an explosion of new diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities, driven by advances in materials science, electronics miniaturization, and image processing. This talk will highlight ongoing collaborative research developing ultrasound nano-contrast agents that enable non-invasive and real-time imaging of physiologic phenomena at the single cell level. Current efforts seek to link these materials-enabled advances with innovations in acoustic hardware and image processing approaches to create an Acoustic Medicine consortium that will accelerate ultrasonic life science research across the university.

Scott Medina
Biomedical Engineering

The search for new phases of matter is one of the most thrilling challenges in materials science. Why? Because discovering and designing new materials unlocks groundbreaking technologies—from faster electronics to cleaner energy solutions. But what if, instead of following the conventional rules of stability, we embraced disorder? High-entropy oxides take an unconventional route, challenging the limits of traditional material design. Instead of relying on enthalpy-driven approaches, they harness entropy—deliberately mixing a wide variety of elements in a single crystal structure. This randomness creates materials that defy expectations: chemically disordered yet structurally ordered, and often with surprising new properties. By trapping these chaotic atomic arrangements at room temperature, we force atoms into environments they wouldn’t naturally choose—unlocking possibilities for novel functionalities and next-generation technologies.

Saeed Almishal
Materials Science & Engineering

~ 375 million years ago, early tetrapods began transitioning from life in the water to life on land. To understand how they achieved this major transition, we study the fossil record and the diversity of living fishes. Here I’ll discuss two behaviors that are adaptations to life on land—walking and blinking—and how we are studying the origins of these behaviors to learn about joint mechanics and neural system evolution. These investigations help us to understand how functional innovations originate at evolutionary timescales and reveal new comparative systems for bio-inspired design.

Tom Stewart
Biology

Agricultural sensors are becoming essential tools for monitoring soil moisture, nutrient levels, and crop health. As the global market for these technologies expands, there is a growing interest in developing ways for plants to communicate their needs directly. Beyond measuring environmental conditions, future sensor systems could detect early signs of drought stress, nutrient deficiencies, pest infestations, and disease outbreaks before symptoms become visible. However, significant challenges remain in developing sensors and interpreting plant signals. Primarily, due to their very nature, sensors are either temporarily or spatially removed from the environment in which the plants exist, due to the time required to read the results or the micro-environment the sensor creates in its static position, compared to the changing plants. Our team is seeking collaboration on sensor technology and the use of AI for signal processing and interpretation.

Shiran Ben-Zeev
Postdoctoral Fellow  |  Guojie Wang Laboratory