UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Five Penn State faculty members have received 2023 Faculty Scholar Medals for Outstanding Achievement.
They are Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology in the Eberly College of Science; Steve Broadnax, professor of theatre and co-head of the master of fine arts in directing program in the College of Arts and Architecture; Sy-Miin Chow, professor of human development and family studies in the College of Health and Human Development; Jon-Paul Maria, professor of materials science and engineering in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences; and Miguel Alejandro Mostafá, professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics in the Eberly College of Science.
Established in 1980, the award recognizes scholarly or creative excellence represented by a single contribution or a series of contributions around a coherent theme. A committee of peers reviews nominations and selects candidates.
Maciej Boni
Boni has made major contributions to the prediction and management of infectious disease, nominators said. His research focuses on COVID-19, influenza and malaria.
“Boni has made major contributions to prediction and mitigation for a wide range of critical diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19,” a nominator said. “He is a world-class scientist who has contributed greatly to shaping public health policy globally and who has shown a strong commitment to public engagement.”
Boni’s research has helped to better understand the origins of COVID-19. One highly cited study found that SARS-CoV-2, the source for the COVID-19 pandemic, had been circulating in bats undetected for decades before emerging as a global threat in 2019. Nominators called his findings “of intense scientific and public interest.” He earned the Faculty Scholar Medal in Life and Health Sciences.
“Understanding the origins of this virus is helping to shape management plans for preventing virus spillover events in the future and to dispel conspiracy theories in the popular press about a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a nominator said. “Like most scientists with his skill set, Boni shifted much of his research and service focus to COVID-19, publishing a range of studies. He also frequently communicated with the public through the media, advised school districts on decision-making to limit disease transmission, and assisted Rhode Island and Massachusetts in a plan for effectively managing the use of their hospital beds during the pandemic.”
Boni uses mathematical modeling to understand disease dynamics. An area he’s had an impact is researching the evolution of drug resistance to the malaria parasite, a research realm with tremendous global health implications. Nominators said his research used sophisticated modeling techniques to assess optimal strategies for malaria therapies. Boni’s work showed how resistance to the powerful anti-malaria drug artemisinin can be countered by using different drugs and strategies. His work directly influenced the World Health Organization’s (WHO) approach to the disease.
Boni also looks at influenza, specifically how small-scale poultry farmers respond to avian flu outbreaks, which can devastate farmers and increase food prices. Avian flu also has the potential to jump to the human population, which could lead to a pandemic, and his research has shown that current avian flu responses elevate the risk of a pandemic.
“This research is an example of how his data-led approaches are being used to inform and effectively guide disease management policies,” a nominator said.
Boni’s work, which has attracted the attention of WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, shows that the history of diseases can tell us much about the future of diseases, nominators said. They also praised Boni’s spirit of collaboration, particularly his former colleagues in Vietnam, who work with him tracking influenza.
“Boni is a star in the field of infectious disease epidemiology and his research is a very important contributor to the visibility of Penn State,” a nominator said.
Steve Broadnax
As a director of theater, Broadnax is at the top of his field and is in high demand, nominators said. He’s making an impact in both well-established works as well as new works that bring fresh, yet challenging, perspectives to audiences regarding social and cultural issues. Nominators said they’re fortunate to have a terrific educator with renown for productions both on the Broadway and nonprofit theater circuits. Broadnax earned the Faculty Scholar Medal for Arts and Humanities.
“His professional output of productions directed and written in recent years, most at the highest levels of American theater, places him in a very small circle of exceptional directors and theater-makers in our nation today,” a nominator said. “It’s an enormous testament to Penn State that a member of our faculty is among a small handful of contemporary theater artists creating work and receiving recognition throughout the nation.”
Broadnax has directed several highly acclaimed productions, including his Broadway debut of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” written by Keenan Scott II. The play made history as the first Broadway show written, directed, performed and produced entirely by Black men. It earned accolades such as the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Production.
Broadnax also directed the world premiere of “Sally and Tom,” written by Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, which premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and “The Hot Wing King,” written by Katori Hall, which received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2021. He also directed “The First Deep Breath,” written by Lee Edward Colston II, which premiered at the Victory Garden Theatre in Chicago, with a recent production at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.
“Since 2018, Broadnax has accomplished several achievements most other directors don’t achieve in their lifetime,” a nominator said. “These accomplishments have increased the visibility of Penn State while opening new opportunities for Broadnax, his students, his colleagues, and our alumni to expand and advance contemporary American theater.”
Those who worked with Broadnax as a director praised his storytelling and attention to detail. They called his work “visually riveting and compelling.”
“Like every great director, when Broadnax is in the rehearsal room, he is in the moment,” a nominator said. “He is a brilliant communicator of text, helping the actors understand and deliver the story of the play, and he devises gorgeous staging solutions. He skillfully mines the joy of my work and brings it into the production. Working with Broadnax, we make great art; we put on a fabulous show; and we have fun doing it.”
Sy-Miin Chow
As a quantitative psychologist, Chow has developed highly impactful analytical techniques that overcome some of the challenges of studying human behavior, which can be more complex to model than biological or physical systems, nominators said.
Chow has expertise in dynamic modeling and creates novel approaches for how we assess and understand the dynamics of emotions, child development and family processes, and promotion of well-being and risk prevention. She’s director of Penn State’s Quantitative Development Systems Methodology hub, a unit that stimulates, coordinates, supports and disseminates research and teaching using quantitative methods in social science. Chow earned the Faculty Scholar Medal in Social and Behavioral Sciences.
“Chow’s work focuses on the development of novel, highly sophisticated quantitative methods for modeling human behavior complexity over a continuous time scale while also accounting for differences among individuals,” a nominator said. “She applies these methods in her own work on emotion and lifespan development but also dedicates herself to extending the application of these modeling tools to other areas of human behavior through collaboration and mentoring. She’s also created widely used software that extends the impact of her innovative work.”
Chow also uses novel approaches for gleaning data, an effective method for curating more complete information. She uses mobile health via digital and online platforms. This helps solve issues related to participants’ engagement that is often affected by complex interactions among individuals, families, communities and environments.
Nominators said several key accomplishments stood out: Chow was elected president of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology, an invitation-only, peer-nominated group that’s home to the top quantitative psychologists. She’s a superb mentor to her students and postdoctoral scholars and has a track record of producing students who go on to lead at elite academic and research posts.
Research funding sources such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have found value in Chow’s research. In the past five years, she’s been involved in 10 research grants totaling more than $4 million. Her work has been continuously funded for more than 15 years, having served as principal investigator on six grants from federal and private foundations, and as a key personnel or training grant mentor on 21 other external grants.
“Chow’s research builds off her established research that results in increasingly important contributions that advance her field,” a nominator said. “What’s better, the research is creative in the sense that she doesn’t just rehash or update previous ideas, but instead advances the field through research that branches out into new territory. She introduces research from other fields to create novel ideas and applications.”
Jon-Paul Maria
Nominators said Maria is an internationally recognized leader in advanced inorganic functional materials. They cited his impact in two important breakthroughs: entropy stabilized ceramics and a new class of ferroelectrics, built on shattering a 75-year-old belief on the limits of ferroelectrics. Maria earned the Faculty Scholar Medal for Engineering.
“Bridging these two very distinct and important application spaces is Maria’s unique crystal chemical intuition and his mastery of materials synthesis techniques that enable him to establish a whole new family of materials and functionalities,” a nominator said. “Maria routinely discovers pathways to solve outstanding challenges in science and engineering that lead the scientific community at large in new, unexplored directions.”
Nominators said Maria builds on the fundamentals of materials science to address key technological problems. One example is Maria’s discovery of two ferroelectric materials that can operate at lower temperatures with far less energy compared to traditional materials used in computing memory and other components by engineering ferroelectric functionality into crystals. Nominators said this discovery overturned long-standing precedent on the limits of ferroelectrics.
“The key ingredient of Maria’s phenomenally successful approach to the materials breakthroughs is to fearlessly imagine and propose an innovative hypothesis that pushes the boundaries of what is known as possible toward the unknown and ‘the impossible,’” a nominator said. “His group then works on critically preliminary experiments to test the idea and often generates intriguing results that pique broader interest.”
The ferroelectrics work is now the foundation for the Three Dimensional-Ferroelectric Microelectronics (3DFeM) Center funded by the DOE-Energy Frontier Research Center program, with Maria leading one of the two areas. The work also caught the attention of industry leaders such as Samsung and IBM, who are working with Maria at 3DFeM to bring his new materials to commercial viability.
“Such rapid adoption of new materials by industry, even at the early exploration stage, is incredibly rare and warrants recognition,” a nominator said. “This work could change how we do computation within the next few years.”
Maria also is rewriting how we think of the synthesis of crystalline phases. His work in high entropy oxides is transformative, nominators said. It challenges century-old rules about phase stability, crystalline structure and composition. Nominators said this discovery will no doubt lead to exciting new materials — and new discoveries — as researchers navigate this ‘new world’ of entropy stabilized crystal chemistry. They called Maria’s work “disruptive” to all we know about crystalline structures.
That work led to a $10 million interdisciplinary research group that Maria leads within the NSF-MRSEC Center for Nanoscale Science at Penn State.
“His ingenuity to identify new frontiers in our field, to build and nurture them by making disruptive discoveries, and then translating them quickly into impactful experimental demonstrations is truly inspiring, “ a nominator said.
Miguel Alejandro Mostafá
Nominators said Mostafá has significantly advanced the frontiers of fundamental knowledge regarding particle physics and astrophysics. That’s opened unprecedented windows into the physics of our universe.
Mostafá is an experimental particle astrophysicist who researches the origins of the most energetic particles in the Universe. Mostafá uses cosmic messengers in the form of ultrahigh energy cosmic and gamma rays to probe the physics behind cosmic accelerators. He earned the Faculty Scholar Medal in Physical Sciences.
Mostafá conducts this work through international collaborations at the High Altitude Water Cerenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC) in Mexico and the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina.
“Rising to prominence as a scientist in large physics collaborations such as HAWC or Auger is not an easy endeavor,” a nominator said. “It requires both keen scientific talent and managerial acumen for complex project management.”
At HAWC, Mostafá’s team oversaw the construction of important components of the observatory. His team also produced various analytical tools that led to the discovery of new gamma-ray sources and the most powerful accelerators in our galaxy.
At Auger, Mostafá steered the hardware design and construction and also had a hand in software, analysis and interpretation. Nominators said his background in physics and astrophysics meant he could be the bridge to cross historical boundaries between particle physics and high-energy astrophysics.
At Penn State, Mostafá helped create the Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON) by serving as principal investigator for the first NSF-funded grant — which was subsequently renewed — on multi-messenger astrophysics. Mostafá oversees several areas of AMON, including oversight of technology solutions, organizing workshops and international partnerships.
“AMON placed Penn State on the international map in this field by pioneering searches that combine signals from various cosmic sources,” a nominator said. “In the past few years, AMON has made major discoveries by combining observations from various observatories. That led to the landmark observation of a ‘flaring blazar’ in coincidence with high energy neutrinos. That discovery was a direct result of Mostafá’s leadership.”
Mostafá is now working on the Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection, which nominators say will lead to new discoveries related to multi-messenger astrophysics.
“Mostafá has all the characteristics that embody a true ‘faculty scholar,’” a nominator said. “He is a scientific leader, an inspiring teacher and mentor, and a citizen-scientist contributing energetically to the academic enterprise and to the scientific awareness in broader society.”