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Academic Superlatives |
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Penn State is ranked as having the 5th highest impact (citations/paper) in space science among the top 100 federally funded U. S. universities. In the National Science Foundation report on the research expenditures of all U.S. public and private universities, Penn State ranks: 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 No.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 titled "Doctoral Recipients from United States Universities Summary Report 2003: Survey of Earned Doctorates" 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 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. The Department of Statistics is ranked 19th in the nation by the National Research Council. 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
Nine Eberly College of Science faculty are Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Five Eberly College of Science faculty are Fellows of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. 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. 13 of Penn State's 24 active Evan Pugh professors, the highest honor given by the university, are in the Eberly College of Science. 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. Penn State ranks 5th as a “high-impact space university” according to University Science Indicators based on average citations per paper among the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities that published at least 300 papers in Thomson Scientific-indexed journals of space science between 1999 and 2003. SOME FACULTY AWARDS AND HONORS
SOME UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS AND HONORS
Among the many other prestigious awards received by Eberly College of Science undergraduate students are the: SOME RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS
Penn State is the control center for NASA's new space observatory, the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer. Penn State also leads 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. 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. 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. |
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