Penn State Glass Research News

Sept. 7, 2023. A new glass for the future: Taking LionGlass out of the lab and into the market. The science of inventing and commercializing a glass with 10x the strength and half the carbon footprint of standard glass. Read More 

Aug. 18, 2023. The eco-friendly glass that’s hard to crack. There’s laughter over the phone as John Mauro calls out my question to one of his researchers: just how much pummelling with a mallet does it take to break the new glass they have developed? Read More 

June 30, 2023. Worldwide, glass manufacturing produces at least 86 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. A new type of glass promises to cut this carbon footprint in half. The invention, called LionGlass and engineered by researchers at Penn State, requires significantly less energy to produce and is much more damage resistant than standard soda lime silicate glass. The research team recently filed a patent application as a first step toward bringing the product to market. Read More 

June 23, 2023. Evaluating the quality of research and researchers is neither easy nor simple, particularly when evaluating fundamental scientific studies. Even with interesting and important results, the road from discovery to societal impact is long and riddled with barriers. Thus, judging research means assigning value to many intangible qualities, such as influence within and beyond academia. Read More 

June 13, 2023. Glass: neither a solid nor a liquid, this common yet complicated material is still surprising scientists. Glass is a material of many faces: It is both ancient and modern, strong yet delicate, and able to adopt almost any shape or color. These properties of glass are why people use it to make everything from smartphone screens to fiber optic cables and vials that hold vaccines. Read More 

June 13, 2023. Retiring the Kauzmann paradox–a call to focus future glass research elsewhere. Knowing when to call it quits is not just a struggle for people in romantic relationships. Any relationship or activity you’ve invested time, money, and energy into is hard to step away from, especially if you previously benefitted from it. Read More 

Apr. 26, 2023. LionGlass is a new family of glass chemistry developed by a team of glass researchers at Penn State University. LionGlass is meant to replace soda lime silicate glass — the common glass used on everyday items including windows, jars and drinking glasses. LionGlass can lead to more sustainable form of glass manufacturing. Read More 

Apr. 25, 2023. The Strange Life of Glass: Glass is perhaps the most frequently overlooked material in history. It is essential to our lives, more so even than plastic. A world without glass is more unimaginable to me than terraforming Mars (practically an impossibility, most scientists agree). Without this banal marvel, you wouldn’t be able to use a touch-screen phone, switch on a lamp, look out a window, put on your glasses, sip from that bottle on your nightstand. You wouldn’t be able to receive emails or phone calls or access the Internet. Read More 

Nov. 22, 2022.  After a prolific 18-year stint at Corning Incorporated, Dr. John Mauro decided to bring his expertise to Penn State six years ago. He said the university was a clear choice — no pun intended. Check out Dr. Mauro’s full interview with Happy Valley Industry here. Read More

Nov. 16, 2022.  Raise a glass—to glass! Pennsylvania State University’s Dr. John C. Mauro marked the United Nations International Year of Glass 2022 with MIT’s distinguished Wulff Lecture. Mauro’s talk celebrates the long history and promising future of one of humankind’s most important materials. Read More 

Apr. 25, 2022.  Dr. John Mauro to serve as principal investigator on a new project in partnership with Remark Glass. As part of the Manufacturing PA Initiative, the project aims to improve glass recycling rates and develop the first modeling tools specifically made to aid glass recycling. Read More

Feb. 9, 2022.  Dr. John Mauro elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for “developing and applying data-driven models and machine learning that enable high-strength, damage-resistant glasses.” Dr. Mauro is one of 111 new members and 22 international members elected in 2022. Read More 

Dec. 8, 2020. Dr. John Mauro named a 2020 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). The program as roughly 1200 fellows worldwide from 250 prestigious universities. Only 175 new members will be inducted for the year 2020.  Read More

Sep. 15, 2020. Two Penn State PhD students, Rebecca Welch and Collin Wilkinson, created a virtual event called the Young Researchers Glass Conference. The conference took place in July and featured 65 undergraduate and graduate attendees. Read More

July 31, 2020.  Jonathon Foreman, writing for the American Ceramic Society, details research led by Dr. Mauro on viscosity predictions using thermal expansion and heat capacity. Dilatometry and DSC are key techniques used for this research.  Read More

Apr. 10, 2020. Four graduate students at Penn State: Katelyn Kirchner, Nicholas Trainor, Patrick Rondomanski and Rebecca Welch, were awarded the NSF graduate research fellowship. The award is a highly competitive. Read More

Sept. 5, 2019. Katie Kirchner, an undergraduate student working with Dr. John Mauro, was awarded the highly competitive Astronaut Scholarship for her exceptional leadership, academic performance, and success in MatSe. Read More

July 9, 2019. Graduate student, Katy Gerace, was awarded the prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on studying glass-ceramic optical fibers. Read More