Institutes and Centers
Penn State is divided into 12 different Colleges, including the Eberly College of Science (ECoS) that houses Chemistry. We also have 13 different Institutes, including the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Materials Research Institute, Institute for CyberScience, and Institutes of Energy and the Environment. The Institutes operate separate from, but in coordination with, the Colleges. The Institutes provide outstanding facilities for research, as well as graduate programs for recruiting graduate students in allied areas life sciences such as Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences and Bioinformatics and Genomics. Faculty members in the Department of Chemistry actively participate in several interdisciplinary institutes and centers at Penn State. These collaborations strengthen the research program at Penn State and provide additional training opportunities for our graduate students.
Institutes and Centers
CLSF (Center for Lignocellulose Structure and Formation) is a DOE Energy Frontiers Research Center focused on developing a detailed understanding of lignocellulose, the main structural material in plants, from cellulose synthesis and fibril formation to a mature plant cell wall, forming a foundation for significant advancement in sustainable energy and materials.
The Center for Nanoscale Science is a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DMR-1420620. The Center supports collaborative, interdisciplinary research efforts in the area of nanoscale materials.
The Huck isn't easy to explain. It covers a lot of ground. It might best be imagined as a web—or maybe as a series of bridges, built and maintained by dedicated laborers, between various University institutions that would have otherwise been isolated islands.
The more these bridges are built up, the better we get at communicating and collaborating across the life sciences, and the better we get at solving problems.
The Institute for CyberScience is one of five interdisciplinary research institutes within Penn State’s Office of the Vice President for Research. ICS brings researchers together to develop and apply innovative, high performance computation methods.
Take a virtual tour of the Materials Research Institute
Penn State’s investment in its interdisciplinary research institutes, including the Materials Research Institute (MRI), has created a culture of strong collaborations across disciplines. At Penn State, many researchers have the support of both their academic departments and the university-wide institutes, such as MRI. By encouraging crosscutting research, MRI and its sister institutes open up traditional silos of knowledge to the stimulus of other viewpoints and new ideas. This mingling of disciplines, often called “convergence,” brings together the physical and life sciences with engineering and computation to solve the most complex problems facing society today and in the future.
The Institutes of Energy and the Environment (IEE) is one of seven interdisciplinary research institutes at Penn State. With more than 500 extraordinary faculty, staff, and students advancing the energy and environmental research missions of the University, IEE works to build teams of researchers from different disciplines to see how new partnerships and new ways of thinking can solve some of the world’s most difficult energy and environmental challenges.