UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — John Mauro, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State, has been named a 2020 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Election to NAI fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors.
NAI fellows are academic inventors who have demonstrated “a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.”
Mauro will be inducted at the 10th annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors scheduled for June 7-9, 2021, in Tampa, Florida. He will be joining a cohort of 175 elite innovators from around the world selected for this honor.
“I am very honored to be elected a fellow by the National Academy of Inventors,” Mauro said. “I would like to thank all of my teachers, students and colleagues from whom I have learned so much.”
Mauro is a pioneer in the use of physics-based modeling for the design of new glassy materials and is the inventor of new models for supercooled liquid and glass viscosity, glass structure and topology, relaxation behavior, and thermal and mechanical properties.
Mauro is the co-inventor of three iterations of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, a thin, durable, touch sensitive, cover glass that has been used in billions of cellphones, tablets and touch-screen devices worldwide. Mauro developed Gorilla Glass compositions and dozens of other patented products and processes during his 18-year career at Corning before joining Penn State’s faculty in 2017.
At Penn State, Mauro and his team invented a new family of zinc germanosilicate optical glasses, new potassium aluminosilicate glasses to serve as claddings for tunable semiconductor core fiber lasers, new glass-ceramic compositions with improved mechanical properties, and an optimized silica glass with record-low optical scattering. Several patent applications have been filed related to these new inventions.
Mauro, who serves as the chair of Penn State’s Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Materials Science and Engineering and associate head for graduate education in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ (EMS) Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is also a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and the Society of Glass Technology. He received the EMS Paul F. Robertson Award for Research Breakthrough of the Year for his pioneering work in decoding the “glass genome” – the code to design new functional glasses
Mauro is the author of more than 280 peer-reviewed publications and has given more than 200 presentations at international conferences and seminars. His publications have been cited more than 11,000 times, with an h-index of 48. Mauro hold 55 granted U.S. patents, with additional pending.
Mauro is the author of the recently published textbook, “Materials Kinetics: Transport and Rate Phenomena.” The cover of the new textbook was designed by Jane Cook, director of the EMS Museum & Art Gallery and research professor in materials science and engineering. Mauro also is the co-author of the third edition of “Fundamentals of Inorganic Glasses,” the definitive textbook in glass science and engineering.