Many students at Penn State Berks take advantage of the opportunity to conduct research, working one-on-one with faculty members on campus. To celebrate these students’ success, Penn State Berks recently held its first Berks Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium on April 25. The next day, students presented at the Higher Education Council of Berks County Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference, hosted by Reading Area Community College.
Isabella Romig, a Penn State Berks psychology major with a minor in Spanish and a certificate in Spanish for health care, was selected as this year’s student marshal. She will deliver a speech titled “The Horrors Persist but So Do I” at the college’s commencement ceremony at 10 a.m., Saturday, May 10, at the Santander Arena.
Penn State Berks hosted the “Symposium on Community-Based Participatory Research: Food Security and Access for Healthy Futures” on March 19. The objective was to determine how institutions of higher education and community partners can collaborate more effectively to address challenges related to food access and nutritional health. This symposium is part of the “Food Bank Operations Optimization: Data-driven Societal Impact Approach (FOODSIA)” project.
Three Penn State Berks students — Samantha Acker, Kimberly Nicholas and Michelle Surine — received accolades and honors for their research presentation at the Eastern States Communication Association (ECA) in Buffalo, New York, from March 27 to 30.
Editor's note: This program has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date. The Penn State Berks global studies program will host a global forum titled "From Penn State to the Field and Back Again: Reflections on a Career in International Research for Development," presented by Katie Tavenner on Monday, April 7.
The 12th annual Penn State Berks Losoncy Lecture in Physics and Astronomy will be presented by Martha Constantinou, associate professor of physics and vice chair of department of physics at Temple University. Constantinou will present “Unlocking the Secrets of the Proton’s Spin: Insights from Simulations of the Core of Visible Matter” on Wednesday, April 9. A reception will begin at 4 p.m. in the college’s Perkins Student Center Multipurpose Room and the lecture begins at 4:45 p.m. in the Perkins Student Center Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.
Sadan Kulturel-Konak, professor of management information systems and the director of the Flemming Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development Center at Penn State Berks, has been selected as VentureWell Ecosystem Futures Fellows for the inaugural 2025 cohort.
The benefits of virtual reality (VR) appear to extend beyond video games, according to Penn State Berks senior kinesiology major Diana Stoltzfus and Associate Professor of Kinesiology Praveen Veerabhadrappa. They recently found that using VR during exercise can improve the experience and reduce the perceived effort for college students.
Current charging stations for electric vehicles, or EVs, can be expensive to install, and limited in the number of parking spaces they reach. Penn State engineering student Jonathan Smith and his team have spent the last three years creating a possible solution: smaller, mounted charging stations, which can move to cover as many as five parking spaces. As CEO of Streamline Charging, he’s used his Penn State education and customized coursework to get the team’s ideas to market.
With approximately 12% of the population in Berks and Schuylkill Counties living in poverty, food banks are a critical resource for those who face hunger issues. Penn State Berks faculty are collaborating with faculty at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of local food banks. The team has recently received a seed grant from the Penn State Institute for Computational Data Sciences as part of the Inter-Institutional Program for Diversifying Research to explore this issue.
