Encompassing colleges and campuses across the entire university system, the scope of Penn State’s world-class research enterprise holds the potential to boost economies, cure diseases, and alter countless aspects of everyday life for the better.
The extent of inquiry and impact made through the Penn State research enterprise is staggering.
Consider the milestone regarding fiscal year 2024–25: $1.44 billion in research expenditures, the largest in the university’s history and an 8% increase over the previous year. Such a significant investment in Penn State’s faculty and student researchers represents a mind-boggling number of experiments conducted, patents filed, and technology advanced in a single year.
“For the first time, Penn State’s research surpassed the $1 billion mark, not including the Applied Research Laboratory,” Senior Vice President for Research Andrew Read said in a press release about the milestone. “Every research-intensive college at Penn State saw an increase in research expenditures this year, which speaks to the strength and breadth of our enterprise.”
The story of Penn State research is as big and broad as that record-setting figure. Ranked in the top 16 public research universities globally, the research enterprise impacts every continent and generates $15.8 billion annually in Pennsylvania alone.
From inventing a microscope that gave humans the ability to see an atom, to creating a brand-new type of glass with a much smaller carbon footprint, Penn State has long been a pioneer in innovations that change the world. Across more than 100 research centers and institutes, faculty and students are driving discoveries that create economic opportunities, inspire startups, and save lives.
Sure, Penn State research is about making headline-worthy innovations: The beginnings of the birth control pill and the HPV vaccine were developed here. The rechargeable pacemaker was created here. The first Earth-sized planet found to be orbiting a star in the habitable zone was discovered by astronomers here.
But Penn State research also is about creating strategic partnerships with industry to improve ideas developed on campus. It’s inviting promising researchers to become part of the Penn State family. It’s supporting students and faculty as they advance science, technology, and knowledge importantly yet incrementally. And it’s helping researchers file patents, issue licenses, and create startups that bring their discoveries to the public.
Penn State research is not one story, but many. Here are five of them.
There’s a certain audacity in attempting to significantly improve a material that’s been virtually unchanged for hundreds of years. But with LionGlass, Penn State researchers—led by Materials Science and Engineering department head John Mauro and assistant research professor Nicholas Clark—have invented a family of glass that is 10 times more damage-resistant than standard soda-lime glass and has half the carbon footprint.
“The top priority was to replace soda-lime silicate, because this accounts for something like 86 million tons of carbon dioxide released each year,” says Mauro, recently named interim dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, who came to Penn State from Corning Inc. in 2017 with the goal of helping to cultivate the next generation of glass scientists. Nine years later, his team has more several patent applications pending, and corporate partnerships with three companies to further its work with LionGlass.
The carbon dioxide released each year in the making of traditional glass comes from the energy required to melt soda-lime silicate at super-high temperatures, and from the carbon dioxide released into the environment when two of the ingredients—sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate—are melted and converted to oxides.
“The goal with our LionGlass project was to dramatically lower the carbon footprint of this everyday glass product by eliminating the use of carbonate batch materials—so that part is gone—and by lowering the melting temperatures significantly,” Mauro says.
Coming up with the right combination of ingredients and melting point was “like throwing darts at a dartboard blind and just seeing what hits or not,” he says. A crucial element of their success was the internal R&D funding that came from a variety of sources, including then-EMS dean Lee Kump, the university’s Cocoziello Institute of Real Estate Innovation, the materials science department’s discretionary funds, and a $25,000 grant from the LionGlass team winning the 2023 Tech Tournament at Invent Penn State.
Another internal source of support has been the Commercialization GAP Fund, administered by the Office of Technology Transfer to help researchers bridge the gap between innovation and commercialization.
“GAP funding is very important for getting a technology derisked downstream,” says Matthew Smith, assistant director of technology licensing in the Office of Tech Transfer. “In an ideal world, LionGlass would have been perfect as is, and we could get something commercialized. But there’s X, Y, and Z that has to be done to get an invention up to scale.”
GAP Fund support is furthering research regarding the color and recycling of LionGlass. “It’s very rare for an academic invention to be turnkey right out of the gate,” says Smith, the licensing officer for LionGlass. “Our faculty is not interested in or thinking about large-scale manufacturing.”
Smith, who’s been with the Office of Tech Transfer for 35 years, works with Mauro and Clark to file patent applications, development agreements with industry partners, and eventually, if all goes well, licensing agreements—which Mauro says LionGlass will be in a better position for given the support received thus far from Penn State.
“Because of internal investment, we were able to make significant progress and file multiple patent applications that have no strings attached to any external entity. It’s a really smart move on behalf of the university to do that,” he says. “Now we’ve got three companies who are actively supporting our research and students here, paying evaluation option fees to help defer the cost of patents, and working together with us on pilot-scale trials.”
The first company on board was Italian glassmaker Bormioli Luigi, which specializes in high-end bottles for the cosmetics industry. The company renewed its partnership with Penn State at the end of 2025 after a successful first year of development, which included two trips to Italy for Clark to demonstrate the latest composition of LionGlass being formed into bottles using the company’s equipment.
Also at the end of 2025, research partnership agreements were signed with two other companies: Vitro Architectural Glass, which aims to develop windows and windshields using LionGlass, and Verallia, the world’s third-largest producer of glass containers for food and beverages.
Getting such enthusiastic interest by established glass manufacturers in varied industries was a coup for the team, particularly in an industry Clark says can be averse to change.
“Glassmakers can be dubious. It takes a little bit of convincing ... because they just don’t have any experience outside of standard soda-lime glass,” he says. “For them, adjusting the glass composition by 1% or 2% is something that needs to be talked about in a committee and thought about carefully. I’m thankful for the companies that do work with us so closely. They’re being, in my opinion, quite brave.”
What’s considered brave today could be called prescient tomorrow, given the promise of this new material and its trajectory thus far. The name LionGlass was modeled after the story of Gatorade, the dominant player in the sports drink industry, which was invented at the University of Florida and named after its mascot.
“Our hope is that LionGlass, in a similar fashion, can lead to a continuous stream of funding that Penn State can use to help support scholarships and research, and that part of that money can be used to help design newer, better glasses,” Mauro says. “Just because we have a first successful product, that doesn’t mean innovation’s done. We want to take some of the income from the first commercialized glass and reinvest it into inventing the next one.”
May 2024 was a very busy time for Joshua Reynolds. That month, Reynolds successfully defended his dissertation, got married, and received $2.4 million in funding from the National Cancer Institute via a Small Business Transition Grant that would allow him to turn his doctoral research in disease evolution, drug resistance, and structural oncology into a business. That summer, in Penn State’s Summer Founders Program—which annually gives a $15,000 equity-free grant to startups with at least one student founder—Reynolds ’18 MS, ’24 PhD Eng launched his company, Atlas Biotech, from an office suite in State College’s Innovation Park.
Atlas Biotech furthers the lab work Reynolds did on building a quantitative scanning platform to better measure how certain mutations in cancer cells might impact drug efficacy. “We’re trying to improve personalized medicine,” he says. “Where we see the most immediate opportunity is in building better translational models for potential drug resistance.”
This work, he says, will generate better targeted cancer drugs that benefit more patients—and will also allow manufacturers to more confidently bring drugs to market. “Right now, the success rate of preclinical cancer drugs advanced into clinical trials is really low, around 5%,” Reynolds says. By modeling mutations that could impact the efficacy of a potential drug, Atlas Biotech’s early-stage due diligence will help identify drugs that are the most likely to be successful, he says, and enable companies to more quickly develop them.
Targeted therapies for different kinds of cancer offer tremendous potential. Much less harsh than chemotherapy and far better tolerated, targeted treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia, for example, which block the BCR-ABL1 protein that causes the disease, have yielded great results for many patients, Reynolds says. While they’re not a cure, the ability to determine the mutations that could cause a particular targeted therapy to not work can help medical professionals make better clinical decisions for their patients.
“Right now, existing models are not sufficient to capture the diversity of patient genetics,” Reynolds says. “It’s a very challenging problem—but we saw an opportunity to solve one aspect of it, and that’s where we’re starting.”
Atlas Biotech is now working with small, early-stage biopharma manufacturers and academic labs in the U.S. and collaborating with a lab at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. Going forward, the group is hoping to expand the scope of its research, Reynolds says, and is building new tools to examine different cancer types and the potential of other drug classes such as antibodies and cell therapies. —SI
Giselle Saulnier SholleR spent 14 years as a doctor and researcher building the Beat Childhood Cancer Research Consortium, a partnership of 50-plus hospitals and universities focused on pediatric cancer research, which she co-founded and chaired. When Penn State approached her in 2023 about leading the university’s childhood cancer research, she wasn’t looking for a change. But her team, based primarily in Charlotte, N.C., encouraged her to “go and see.”
“I went for a visit, then came back and told the team, ‘This is incredible. And I think we can do so much more there,’” she recalls. “Penn State really is poised to be a leader in pediatric oncology. With THON and Four Diamonds, and with the right infrastructure around us, we can have the ability to help so many more patients.”
They arrived in Hershey in September 2023, with Sholler named director of pediatric oncology research at Penn State College of Medicine and division chief of pediatric hematology and oncology at what is now Penn State Health Golisano Children’s Hospital. By December 2023, the team had secured FDA approval for the use of the drug difluoromethylornithine (DFMO), which they’d long been studying as a maintenance therapy for patients with high-risk neuroblastoma. In their clinical trials, DFMO—whose brand name is IWILFIN—improved the relapse rate by 50%.
Children from 28 countries have since come to Penn State for the breakthrough therapy. This aligns with the university’s mission to become the global leader in pediatric oncology. Since Sholler’s arrival, the consortium has opened a European research site in Barcelona, Spain, and a South American site in São Paolo, Brazil. Such expansion comes with a lot of red tape, which she says the university has been critical in handling. “The legal team understands the regulatory and legal implications of the work, laws in the different countries, and how to protect the research,” she says.
The international locations allow more children to enroll in Penn State’s clinical trials, which has multiple benefits. “It’s not only helping children where they live, it’s helping the research accelerate,” she says. “So we can get to the answers more quickly and move on to the next trial.”
Sholler has been focused on lowering the neuroblastoma relapse rate since the pediatric oncologist had a life-altering experience caring for her first patient, a 5-year-old named Tyler. Tyler did not survive, leaving his older siblings, then 9 and 13, to ask Sholler why she couldn’t save him.
She has been trying to save others like him ever since, helped largely by fundraising and support from families of children who’ve had the disease. Her first DFMO success story is Will Lacey, who was diagnosed with neuroblastoma in early 2005 as a 5-month-old and is now 21 and cancer-free. Lacey’s father, Pat, founded the Beat Childhood Cancer Foundation, which was instrumental in financially supporting the consortium’s research. The foundation announced a new $3 million commitment to the consortium this spring.
Sholler is not about to rest. “A 15% relapse rate is not good enough,” she says. “We need all children to stay in remission.” Last fall, her team opened a national clinical trial that combines DFMO with a new drug called AMXT-1501. The trial is for cancer patients age 21 and younger who have neuroblastoma, central nervous system tumors, and sarcomas.
“We’re trying to do even better than we already did,” she says of the trial supported by Four Diamonds, Aminex Therapeutics, and the Beat Childhood Cancer Foundation. “Coming to Penn State has been an incredible opportunity for our entire research program.”
Yun Jing, professor of acoustics in the College of Engineering, approached his latest research project for the same reasons many professors do. First, says Jing, “it was something interesting to achieve that no one has ever done before.” And second, he adds, “the idea combines two different [existing] technologies.”
Rare lightning-bolt discoveries aside, the fact is that the bulk of Penn State research advances technology or knowledge importantly yet incrementally: Each discovery builds on one that came before, with every experiment and novel dataset refining or expanding an existing concept.
In Jing’s case, the two already understood technologies were the parametric array, which creates narrow beams of audible sound using ultrasonic transducers; and ultrasonic self-bending beams, which have curved trajectories. Jing and former postdoc scholar Jia-Xin Zhong combined these to produce an audible enclave, a small zone inside which sound can be heard, but not by those standing nearby, outside the zone.
The technology, once refined, could be useful in certain public spaces. “If you are in a museum, or at the ATM, those are scenarios where you want to have a private audible zone but you don’t want to use headphones,” Jing says.
The advancement in audio engineering was covered by the online news sites Gizmodo and VICE, as well as in Scientific American and other publications.
Jing and his co-authors worked with Penn State’s Office of Technology Transfer to secure a provisional patent, which protects patent rights to the intellectual property while giving the researcher and their tech officer more time to advance the intellectual property and prepare a regular patent application.
Bin Yan, associate vice president for research, manages the Office of Technology Transfer, the centralized technology transfer arm of the Penn State research enterprise. “Penn State researchers produce hundreds of new discoveries each year, but not every new technology is commercializable. Part of our job is to identify those discoveries that have commercial potential,” Yan says. Because Penn State is a nonprofit, it is not in the business of manufacturing products. “To turn those discoveries into products, we have to work with for-profit companies or startups. So, we identify companies and license the patents to those companies.” The license grants permission for the company to turn the discovery, invention, or technology into a product, while Penn State remains the owner of the technology.
In 2024, 35 U.S. patents were issued for inventions made at the university, and five startups were formed to commercialize inventions that were not licensed to existing companies. But that’s a small percentage of the amount of overall university research conducted, considering there were 232 invention disclosures filed that same year, and 728 articles were published by Penn State researchers in top-tier journals. Jing’s audible enclave is among the scores of findings that are merely momentary stops along a much larger track of advancing technology.
For now, the team is focusing on making its discovery more practical and more efficient. “I think this will contribute to fields like augmented reality and virtual reality, where people can benefit from personalized audible zones,” Jing says. “Those are very hot topics right now.”
Nine years ago, grad student Claire Reynolds-Peterson ’17 PhD Sci and Scott Selleck, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, were studying the connection between a motor neuron and the muscle it stimulates, when Reynolds-Peterson noticed something peculiar: Compromising a certain molecule on the muscle side of the synapse ramped up autophagy, which is how cells get rid of damaged mitochondria.
“It turned out that [by lowering the function of a specific cell service molecule] we had turned on this repair system at breakneck speed,” says Selleck. “No one had ever identified our class of molecules in playing a role in this process.”
The discovery itself was exciting, but far more thrilling were its possible implications: One of the causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s is a gene’s inability to identify damaged mitochondria and mark them for removal. The researchers wondered if compromising the class of cell service molecule they’d identified could compensate for that deficit in a cell’s surveillance ability by increasing the capacity of the cell to get rid of damaged mitochondria.
Reynolds-Peterson conducted an experiment on fruit flies with a gene mutation model for Parkinson’s to see if their hypothesis was correct. “It worked so well, I didn’t believe it,” Selleck says. “Animals with mutations in the parkin gene show both neuron and muscle loss and their flight muscle cells and mitochondria are so damaged, the poor fruit flies drag their wings on the ground; they couldn’t lift them enough to fold them onto their backs. And when we compromised that class of molecules that showed the increase in autophagy traffic, we restored the flies to completely normal flight.”
In 2010, Selleck had lost his mother after her heartbreaking decline due to Lewy body dementia, another neurodegenerative disease. In those tiny flies, he saw a tremendous amount of hope. “This cell repair pathway is defective in virtually every neurodegenerative disorder out there,” he says. “It’s defective in Alzheimer’s, it’s defective in Parkinson’s, it’s defective in ALS, it’s defective in frontotemporal dementia. It’s even defective in chronic traumatic encephalopathy.”
After Reynolds-Peterson graduated in 2017, Selleck spent the next handful of years conducting studies to show that the idea worked in models of several neurodegenerative diseases. Once a composition of matter patent had been filed, Selleck began looking for outside investors.
Eventually, he connected with Jim Larrick, who had started a biotech company, Corsalex, to develop therapies for the C9orf72 gene mutation, which causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This wasn’t targeting that gene, but Larrick and his partner, Piero Mendez, thought what Selleck had was intriguing enough to warrant further research.
“The concept is very interesting,” Mendez says. “A lot needs to happen before someone can get very excited about this. But at the stage where he is, it’s as positive as it can be.”
Mendez has seen many interesting ideas, but the translational step—creating a safe and effective pharmaceutical that delivers on the promise of that interesting idea to the patients who need it—is where a lot of attrition occurs. “Our model is to find promising projects and fund them, take them to key derisking steps, and then decide if they’re worth taking them to the clinic,” he says.
Corsalex invests in projects like Selleck’s in stages, and their initial investment is about $100,000, with a long-term goal of funding it into a clinical trial and, if all goes well, licensing the technology for commercial use. “Scott is a driving force; without his passion a lot of people wouldn’t have been able to do what he’s done. But also, Penn State has taken a bet with this project. And I think it’s to their credit, and pretty exciting and important, because translating things is not easy,” Mendez says. “Universities typically play in a sandbox that’s not really conducive to allowing technology to breathe and expand, and they’ve been really good about that. That’s really commendable. We work with a lot of universities, and that’s not always the case.”
Penn State and Life Sciences Greenhouse of Central Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that helps to fund promising biotech research projects, are supporting the work alongside Corsalex. Since 2013, more than 9,000 such industry research projects have been conducted at the university, with research expenditures from industry, foundations, and other private funders totaling almost $135 million in fiscal year 2025 alone.
To turn their idea into a compound that can be brought to market, Selleck has brought in collaborators from other academic institutions who have the biochemistry and pharmaceutical knowledge that he lacks. “The biology is sound,” he says. “I’m also aware that going from really good biology to the development of a therapeutic with a good safety profile, that’s a long path.”
Mendez estimates the project is still five years from reaching clinical trials, if it gets there. Selleck has his eye on a goal well beyond that. “Penn State and Life Sciences and Corsalex together said, ‘Here are the objectives we need you to achieve. And if you achieve them, we’re going to buy your technology. And we’re going to save the world.’”
