Joseph Cotruvo Jr., professor of chemistry, and Lauren Zarzar, professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering have received 2025 Faculty Scholar Medals for Outstanding Achievement.

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.

Image

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.” 

Image

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.”