Recognizing outstanding alumni

Outstanding Science Alumni Award

This award recognizes and rewards outstanding Penn State science alumni for their success as leaders in science and for the impact they have had on society and their professions. The award was established in 1995 by the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society Board. Nominees should exemplify the Penn State Values: Integrity, Respect, Responsibility, Discovery, Excellence, and Community. 

Submit a nomination here.

2025 Recipients of the Outstanding Science Alumni Award

Mario Ciabarra

1999 bachelor of science degree in science

Mario Ciabarra is the chief executive officer and founder of Quantum Metric, a customer-centered digital analytics platform for today’s leading enterprise organizations. In 2021, Ciabarra was named CEO of the Year by Colorado Biz. He is also a member of the college’s board of visitors and was recently featured on Invent Penn State’s podcast, “Dare to Disrupt.” 

Ciabarra graduated in 1999 from Penn State with a bachelor’s degree in science.

Thomas Gardner

1975 bachelor of science degree in biology and 1998 master of science degree in physiology

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 is a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, molecular and integrative physiology, and internal medicine at the University of Michigan, a Taubman Scholar, and a scientific co-director of the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative. 

He is a clinician, scientist, and educator who has experience working in a small-town private practice as well as large academic organizations. Working in these spaces has given him an opportunity to understand diabetic retinal disease and the treatment options associated with it. Gardner has applied precision medicine to ophthalmology, which includes the development of precision terminology for 21st-century medicine. 

Gardner earned his medical and physiology degrees at the Jefferson Medical College and Penn State College of Medicine. He continued his ophthalmology training at Northwestern University and the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute. His work has been recognized with many national grants, editorial positions, and an appointment as a leader of the Centers of Excellence at Penn State and Michigan. 

Madhumita Ghosh-Dastidar

1996 master of science degree and 1999 doctoral degree, both in statistics

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Madhumita Ghosh-Dastidar is the head of the Statistics Group and a senior statistician and data scientist at the nonprofit RAND. She has used evaluations of neighborhood-level intervention to improve diet and health, improve outcomes across HIV positive persons, and measure health disparity. She also led major studies to assess sexual assault and harassment in the U.S. military and to access the prevalence of mental health in Singapore.

Ghosh-Dastidar’s statistical expertise includes design, sampling, measurement, missing data, evaluations, and longitudinal/multilevel modeling. She is the 119th president and elected fellow of the American Statistical Association — the largest professional organization for statisticians and data scientists — and has been named to the Top 20 Women in Statistics and Data Science list. She earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science from Albright College and her master’s degree and doctoral degree in statistics in 1996 and 1999, respectively, from Penn State. 

Maura McLaughlin

1994 bachelor of science degree in astronomy and astrophysics

Maura McLaughlin is the Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at West Virginia University, and her research focuses on using radio timing observations of pulsars to detect and characterize low-frequency gravitational waves, as part of the North America Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves collaboration, where she has served as co-director since 2015. 

She previously served as a National Science Foundation distinguished research fellow at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the U.K. and has received multiple awards. Some of them include a Sloan Fellowship, Cottrell Scholar Award, Southeastern Universities Research Association Distinguished Scientist Award, and Shaw Prize. McLaughlin is also an American Physical Society Division of Astrophysics fellow, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the co-founder of the Pulsar Science Collaboratory program. 

McLaughlin earned her bachelor’s degree in astronomy and astrophysics from Penn State in 1994 and was a Schreyer Scholar in the Schreyer Honors College. In 2001, she received a doctoral degree from Cornell.

Janda Kirk Griffith Panitz

1966 bachelor of science degree, 1969 master of science degree, and 1975 doctoral degree, all in physics

Mario Ciabarra is the chief executive officer and founder of Quantum Metric, a customer-centered digital analytics platform for today’s leading enterprise organizations. In 2021, Ciabarra was named CEO of the Year by Colorado Biz. He is also a member of the college’s board of visitors and was recently featured on Invent Penn State’s podcast, “Dare to Disrupt.”

Ciabarra graduated in 1999 from Penn State with a bachelor’s degree in science.

John Panitz

1965 bachelor of science degree, 1966 master of science degree, and 1969 doctoral degree, all in physics

John Panitz is professor emeritus of physics at the University of New Mexico, where he developed a novel curriculum for his undergraduate electricity-and-magnetism laboratory. Prior to joining the University of New Mexico, Panitz worked at Sandia National Laboratory, where he advanced atom probe technology and received a landmark patent for what is now known as the imaging atom probe.

Pantiz’s career began at Penn State, where he received all three of his degrees in physics: a bachelor’s degree in 1965, a master’s degree in 1966, and a doctoral degree in 1969. He worked under the supervision of Erwin Wilhelm Müller, the inventor of the field electron emission and field ion emission microscopes. In 1967, Müller and Panitz introduced the concept of the atom-probe field ion microscope at the 14th Symposium of the International Field Emission Society. 

*recognized posthumously