Five receive Faculty Scholar Medals

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Five University faculty members have received 2025 Faculty Scholar Medals for Outstanding Achievement.

They are Allison Beese, professor of materials science and engineering in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) and mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering; David Almeida, professor of human development and family studies in the College of Health and Human Development; Joseph Cotruvo Jr., professor of chemistry in the Eberly College of Science; Lauren Zarzar, professor of chemistry in the Eberly College and materials science and engineering in EMS; and Nicolas de Warren, professor of philosophy and Jewish studies in the College of the Liberal Arts.

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.

Allison Beese

Nominators said Beese’s pioneering research has led to a fundamental understanding of how microstructures and defects dictate the deformation and failure in additively manufactured metals and alloys. She also designs experiments for functionally graded metals in which properties change throughout, which leads to more purposeful components with tailored multifunctionality. She received the Faculty Scholar Medal for Engineering. 

“Beese is an internationally acclaimed researcher in additive manufacturing and metallurgy. She is providing leadership on campus that is advancing this important area of research and education,” a nominator said. “She has been an energizing presence in our additively manufactured metals community and a true asset to Penn State.”  

Nominators said she is taking novel approaches to creating materials and researching areas where they fail, which offers the necessary foundation for designing new metals, particularly additively manufactured alloys.  

“Dr. Beese’s hybrid experimental-computational approach has led to feasibility diagrams that are being adopted worldwide for the qualification of parts made by additive manufacturing towards enabling their safe adoption in structural components for point-of-need manufacturing, addressing supply chain issues, for complex geometries enabling light-weighting and for customized implants,” a nominator said.  

Nominators called her approach to research “meticulously detailed,” adding that her work on deformation and failure of these materials under realistic conditions is paving the way for adopting additively manufactured parts in structural components. This innovation will reduce energy, waste and lead times for manufactured components, nominators said.  

Beese’s approach to understanding additively manufactured metals uses computations to predict phases and link microstructural features, including porosity, to properties including fracture behavior. Her team uses machine learning to link processing signals to microstructure and mechanical properties, a process that has garnered international attention, nominators said. 

One area Beese has made an impact is in highlighting the impact of defects introduced during the additive manufacturing process. Beese’s research shines a light on the complex physical processes at play during the interaction of energy sources and the materials being fed to the manufacturing machines. Nominators called her approach unique and creative because she simultaneously combines novel experiments with advanced simulations and computational models that give results consistent with real-world manufacturing and the challenges associated with creating these high-tech materials. 

“I cannot think of anyone who is more qualified for this recognition than Dr. Beese,” a nominator said. “Her sustained achievements, intellectual contributions and broad impact is felt both here in the U.S. and abroad. She has demonstrated exceptional leadership in the field of processing-structure-mechanical property relationships in materials. The international materials science and engineering community is fortunate to have her as a member of our professional team. She is a true pioneer who not only solves existing problems but defines future directions for an entirely new field.” 

David Almeida

Nominators said Almeida has had a transformative impact on psychology, human development and gerontology thanks to his pioneering research on stress, health and daily life experiences. They said his contributions have advanced both research and practical applications by enhancing the measurement and understanding of psychosocial stress in daily life. He earned the Faculty Scholar Medal for Social and Behavioral Sciences. 

Almeida is a lifespan developmental scientist who studies the linkages between stress and health, with a particular focus on the role stress plays on physical health and well-being at home and in the workplace. 

Almeida’s work focuses on the interplay between biological and psychological responses to daily stressors. In the past three decades, he’s introduced methods for understanding and researching stress. His method, the daily inventory of stressful events, has shown how seemingly minor daily stressors can have cumulative effects and impact long-term health outcomes. Nominators said this groundbreaking work on the spillover effects of stress show how stressors in one area can influence others, offering valuable insights into the complexities of work-family dynamics. His work is continually funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for three decades. 

“It is no exaggeration to say that his name has become synonymous with the study of daily stress and health, particularly through his use of novel methodologies to explore how daily stress in various contexts impacts well-being at home and work,” a nominator said. “His work has been instrumental in proving that the impact of daily stressors on health and well-being can often be more profound than that of major stressful life events, essentially helping to prompt a paradigm-shift in psychology.” 

More recently, Almeida’s research explores reactions and resilience to stressors as well as how factors such as age, socioeconomic status and race relate to stress and daily life experience. 

Almeida is director of the National Study of Daily Experiences, a 30-year longitudinal study of over 3,000 American adults. He also directs the Workplace Practices and Daily Family Well-Being Project, one of several projects comprising the NIH-sponsored Work, Family, Health Study. This project explores the impact of a workplace-based program that increases employee control and flexibility over their workload and work output and increases supervisors’ support and understanding of work-family issues. His research looks at how this increased control can have positive crossover effects on family dynamics such as marriage or raising children. 

Some of the key findings led by Almeida and reported in American Psychologist and Scientific American found that reported stress is on the rise. Follow-up research found that stress in midlife adults has been increasing and linked to increases in societal dysfunction. His recent research also shows that either very high or very low daily stress is linked to poorer health and well-being in adults. Almeida speculates that high stress can overwhelm coping mechanisms while low stress can be a sign of disengagement from life that, over time, can predict poorer mental and physical health outcomes.  

“Dr. Almeida’s research contributions have clearly added to the University’s stellar reputation in the social sciences and his influence will undoubtedly shape the field of stress and health research for years to come,” a nominator said. 

Joseph Cotruvo Jr. 

Nominators said Cotruvo has made discoveries related to the essential role that lanthanides, a series of chemical elements, play in biology. He’s also leveraging this series of groundbreaking discoveries for the development of sustainable technologies for the recovery and separation of rare earth elements (REEs). REEs, a group of elements that includes the lanthanides, are deemed by several government agencies as among the most critical resources for U.S. energy and national security because of their irreplaceable uses in a range of technologies from smartphones to MRIs to wind turbines. He received the Faculty Scholar Medal for Life and Health Sciences. 

Cotruvo’s research centers around using biomolecules, such as proteins, to detect, recover and separate REEs from ores and waste material. In one breakthrough, published in Nature, Cotruvo showed how one such protein is especially sensitive to the radius of the rare earth ion that it binds and can be used to efficiently separate two REEs to high individual purities. Nominators added that “separating these technologically critical elements is something of a holy grail in that field.” 

“Cotruvo has established a highly visible and dynamic research program centered on addressing how biological systems recognize and utilize metal ions,” a nominator said. “His program stands out for its success in addressing the biochemistry of both frequently studied transition metals as well as the more exotic lanthanides and actinides. His work is of high quality, and his program shows outstanding creativity.” 

The characterization of these biochemical processes has caught the attention of industry. Cotruvo’s methods for selective REE detection and extraction have led to seven international patent applications, several of which have already been licensed to startup companies for commercialization. 

He’s secured funding from NIH, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. He’s also part of a team that secured a multi-million-dollar DARPA grant to develop and scale up a process for REE mining in which his novel lanthanide-binding protein, which he called lanmodulin (LanM), plays a central role. 

Nominators said he first made an impact with his discovery of LanM, which binds REE ions with exceptional selectivity. This discovery came at a time when very little was known about how bacteria are able to use lanthanides, and it played a major role in catalyzing the development of what is now a very active field of fundamental and applied research. Recently, he discovered the first lanthanide chaperone protein, LanD, which delivers rare earth metals to LanM inside many lanthanide-utilizing bacteria. 

“This breakthrough significantly advances our understanding of lanthanide biology while also opening up new approaches to recognizing specific lanthanide ions,” a nominator said.  

“His intellectual abilities, his willingness to tackle important problems of basic and translational interest and his discoveries at every stage in his career, make Cotruvo deserving of this honor,” a nominator said. “He is an international superstar who has made his mark at Penn State.” 

Lauren Zarzar

Nominators said Zarzar is unusual and stands out in terms of her scientific creativity and impactful contributions to the fundamental chemistry and materials science research communities. They said she has a passion for creativity and believes it is not an innate talent but rather a skill that needs to be constantly exercised and refined. She received the Faculty Scholar Medal for Physical Sciences.

One of Zarzar’s discoveries, published in Nature in 2019, is a novel way to use the properties of a material to generate structural colors.

“Zarzar showed that light with different paths of total internal reflection interfere to create color,” a nominator said. “What is stunning is that the effect occurs in structures with dimensions that are orders of magnitude larger than visible light wavelengths, so it was not intuitive that this mechanism should exist, and indeed, had likely been observed but ignored for a very long time.”

This approach showcased Zarzar’s creativity and inquisitive mind, nominators said. Chemists have long known glittery droplets change color with size but Zarzar set out to explain why.

“She realized that the phenomenon at play was not from periodicity, nor dispersion, nor diffraction, as one might expect,” a nominator said. “Rather, it was an optical interference effect, but this was not obvious from the outset because the typical droplet sizes are tens to hundreds of microns in diameter. To me, creativity is the ability to see and understand what others before have not, often in commonplace materials and phenomena — just like Dr. Zarzar has done here.”

Zarzar isn’t content to invent just in the lab, nominators said. She wants to see her work grow through innovations, technologies and inventions outside of the lab. She patented her structural color technology and earned funding through the NSF Partnerships for Innovation PFI program to pursue applied research aimed at manufacturing, scaling and commercializing the technology.

Zarzar is also innovating polymer films with structurally colored research. She and her team produced industrial scale ways of producing colored films and are exploring ways to commercialize the technology. She, along with a former graduate student, founded the company Chromatir Technologies LLC, which is seeking ways to introduce optical security features to prevent product counterfeiting and fraud.

“Clearly Dr. Zarzar has a passion and knack for both fundamental research and technology translation, which situates her well to have a career with long-lasting innovative impact,” a nominator said.

Another focus of Zarzar’s research is adaptive, responsive soft materials that give off chemical and mechanical signals. This approach can make more life-like materials and also has the potential for advances in the biomedical field and beyond. Her discovery, which she used to create Janus droplets, shows that different chemical compositions can become a source and a sink, communicating with one another.

Zarzar also researches laser-directed micropatterning, where she uses lasers to force nano-size chemical reactions. Nominators said the process opens the door for exciting advances in the creation, patterning and integration of nanomaterials. The process creates new materials not found in bulk form.

“The most interesting science is unexpected,” a nominator said. “Most scientists assume ideas have occurred to others and that certain applications have been done before. What sets Dr. Zarzar apart is that she has found ways to see the uncommon in the common and tackle difficult problems from different points of view.”

Nicolas de Warren

Nominators called de Warren the preeminent expert in phenomenology, which is a philosophical movement that started in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century by the philosopher Edmund Husserl. Universities across the globe have invited him to teach because of his credentials on this important area of philosophy originating just before World War I, nominators said. He earned the Faculty Scholar Medal for Arts & Humanities. 

Nominators said his career spans from being a distinguished and respected commentator on German phenomenology to a prominent phenomenologist in his own right. They said his work pulls from philosophy, literature, history and film to “unearth new insights into the nature of topics such as time, forgiveness, war, nuclear waste and the afterlife.”  

De Warren has published several books, including the 2023 work “German Philosophy and the First World War.” One reviewer called it “a philosophically rich, beautifully written book."  

“De Warren’s work is not only a carefully realized examination of philosophy within one particular historical context, but is also a book on the philosophy of the philosophy of history,” a nominator said. “It lays out not only the reactions German philosophers had to the event of the First World War but also, and more importantly, how the war acted upon their very philosophical projects and ideas.” 

Nominators called the book "a tour de force in intellectual history," saying de Warren “investigated every existing source relating to German philosophers living at the time.” 

De Warren turned his attention to ethical concerns in his 2020 book “Original Forgiveness,” which tackles topics related to trust and forgiveness and how one’s existence is related to others. Nominators praised its significance in defining the nature of “evil.”  

“Because trust starts at the earliest moment of a human life, original trust implies original forgiveness,” a nominator said. “De Warren explains this claim about original forgiveness by arguing that trust, by definition, includes the possibility of betrayal — and then the possibility of betrayal implies the possibility, or better, the requirement of forgiveness. To put this in a way that might seem paradoxical, de Warren is arguing that the possibility of betrayal necessarily or essentially includes the possibility of forgiveness.” 

De Warren’s most recent project, “We Nuclear People: Responsibility for Nuclear Waste in the Vastness of Time,” addresses a seemingly unphilosophical topic: nuclear waste. In this work, de Warren addresses questions concerning the kind of responsibility we have towards future generations given the pollution and waste we are leaving behind. To support this research, de Warren visited the decommissioned Soviet nuclear reactor at Ignalina in Lithuania as well as the nuclear disaster site of Fukushima in Japan.  

In another current book project, “Souls of the Departed,” on the ways in which the living relate to the dead, de Warren explores different aspects of mourning and melancholia as well as how the ghosts of the past continue to make claims on the present.

“That we hold onto the life of another implies a kind of afterlife of the person I’ve lost,” a nominator said. “In this expansion of Nicolas’s research, we can see a kind of shift from the beginning of life to the end of life, or more precisely, to the afterlife.”