Penn State chemist receives Mildred Cohn Young Investigator Award
Joseph Cotruvo Jr., professor of chemistry at Penn State, has received the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s Mildred Cohn Young Investigator Award. According to the ASBMB, this award recognizes outstanding research contributions to biochemistry and molecular biology. Recipients must have no more than 15 years of experience since receiving their doctoral degree.
Cotruvo’s work is focused on understanding how cells handle metals. As he’s conducted his research, he has patented techniques for purifying and detecting rare earth elements, which stem from his discovery of lanmodulin — a protein that binds particular rare earth elements with specificity.
“Cotruvo has made great strides toward implementing lanmodulin-based constructs for rare earth element extractions and separations, as fluorescent sensors for rare earths,” said J. Martin Bollinger, Russell and Mildred Marker Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at Penn State and Cotruvo’s nominator for this award.
Cotruvo’s inspiration to study chemistry came from his father, a chemist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and as an undergrad, he studied how metals interacted with biological systems.
“The combination of that work and seeing how my dad used chemistry at the EPA showed me how chemistry can be used to solve some really important problems,” Cotruvo said.
In receiving this award, Cotruvo was invited to speak at the 2026 ASBMB annual meeting.
The Cotruvo lab uses biochemistry and chemical biology to understand metal selectivity in biological systems. The group studies how bacteria selectively acquire and utilize lanthanides — a group of 14 metallic chemical elements — and applies what they learn to design biotechnologies for rare-earth detection, recovery, and separation. The research team also develops and applies new chemical tools to study roles of transition metals, particularly iron and manganese, in infectious disease.
In 2025, Cotruvo was honored with Penn State’s Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement and the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry’s Early Career Award. Previously, he was honored with the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry by the American Chemical Society's Division of Biological Chemistry in 2024, the Ed Stiefel Young Investigator Award in 2022, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2021, a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2020, a U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2020, a Charles E. Kaufman Foundation New Investigator Award in 2018, a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2013, and a U.S. Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship in 2008.
Prior to joining the Penn State faculty in 2016, Cotruvo was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Princeton University in 2006.