MRI

While he had a significant impact as a researcher, Elburt Osborn also made his mark at Penn State in research leadership, promoting an interdisciplinary approach.

A. Welford (Will) Castleman Jr. joined the Penn State chemistry department in 1982. Castleman is perhaps best known for discovering conditions where a “columbic explosion” induced clusters of atoms that mimicking some of the properties of other elements.

Pauline Beery Mack was a brilliant interdisciplinary scientist and educator at Penn State between 1919 and 1950. She was the first woman to gain a doctoral degree at Penn State, awarded in Agricultural Biochemistry (1932). She made numerous scientific contributions; these included textile research, where she and her team developed standardization of dyes and dry-cleaning.

Thomas E. Mallouk and his research group were among the first to connect the fields of solid state and molecular chemistry through their molecules-to-materials approach. Their work formed the materials synthesis nucleus of the Penn State MRSEC, founded in 1999.

Harry Allcock works at the interdisciplinary junction between inorganic and organic chemistry, polymer chemistry, biomedicine, and materials science. His insight that incorporating inorganic elements into the backbone structure of polymers could give rise to a class of polymers with never before seen characteristics has led to several hundred new polymers with applications in medicine, aerospace materials, batteries, fuel cells, solar cells, and photonic materials.

Cross, who was Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, came to Penn State in 1961, an Englishman who served in the British Admiralty during WWII where he formed part of the group using high frequency direction finding to track German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. Along with close friend and collaborator Robert Newnham, Cross developed the underwater sonar transducers that helped the U.S.