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Erwin Müller served on the faculty of Penn State’s Department of Physics from 1952-1976. The German-born and -educated physicist is known as the “first man to see the atom.” A brilliant experimentalist, Müller’s invention of the field emission microscope (1936), the field ion microscope (1951), and the atom probe (1967) were seminal contributions to the fields of materials science and nanotechnology.

Dorothy Quiggle received a master's degree in chemical engineering in 1927 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and came to Pennsylvania State College as a research assistant in 1929. She became an instructor of chemical engineering in 1935, the next year becoming the first female faculty member in science or engineering at Penn State and the first woman Ph.D. in chemical engineering in the U.S.

Philip Skell was one of the founders of modern carbene research. He is best known for the “Skell Rule,” which is used to predict how some chemical compounds will form and has been used to assign spin states to carbenes, which are highly reactive molecules containing a divalent atom.

Woldermar Weyl could creditably be referred to as the “father” of glass science. Weyl was head of the department of glass technology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany from 1932 to 1936. In 1936, he came to Penn State as a visiting professor and returned with his family to join the faculty in 1938. His early papers on the structure and constitution of glasses are classics in the field of glass and ceramics.

Rustum Roy was a major innovator of new materials synthesis techniques. Starting in 1948, he devised the solution sol-gel process for making pure nanoscale reactive powders for many important ceramic compositions. Roy's seminal work in developing the sol-gel process and in identifying the phases of barium titanate, the most widely used material for capacitors, gained him worldwide recognition.

Newnham’s basic discoveries in ferroelectric materials helped propel the growth of electronic devices, such as cell phones, and his contributions to the field of acoustic imaging earned the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering in 2004, an honor that placed him among some of the greatest scientists of the modern era.

Evan Pugh Professor of Materials Science (1974), Philip Walker was a leading authority on the science of carbon, graphites, and coals. Walker came to Penn State for his doctorate in fuel science, which he received in 1952. Dr. Walker was one of the founders of the American Carbon Society and the editor of Chemistry Physics of Carbon, and associate editor of the international journal Carbon.

Della M. Roy, Emeritus Professor of Materials Science, was the first female materials scientist ever elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE,1987), the first woman from Penn State to be elected to the NAE, and the first woman elected to the World Academy of Ceramics.