The Sustainability Education Gateway is here to help each and every student find their academic path to a more sustainable life. We want to help you find sustainability in as many learning environments as possible. Whether you want to write music or design landscapes, run a farm or advocate for walkable communities, support community health in north Philadelphia or rural south Asia, or finance and engineer the next generation of solar energy systems, Penn State has ways for you to become a more sustainable individual, citizen, and professional.
Penn State provides powerful experiences in sustainability outside of the walls of a classroom. We have programs and projects that connect students with our campuses and communities where they confront real-world challenges in climate planning, green labs, watershed assessment, and even human resources. Penn State hosts award-winning sustainability research in nearly every college as well competition opportunities where discovery and ambition meet. Of course, there are a plethora of opportunitiesin student clubs and other organizations where you can learn, serve, and have fun.
Sustainable Communities Collaborative (SCC)
The SCC facilitates partnership between PSU faculty, students, and staff with local communities to address sustainability challenges through an engaged, collaborative effort, to help develop and support thriving, healthy communities and advance student learning about the scholarship of sustainability.
Office/Unit: Penn State Sustainability
Facilitator: Ilona Ballreich
Region/Geographic Distribution: State-wide
Campus as a Living Lab
Living Labs at PSU provides an ecosystem for learning that enables unique features of communities, facilities, campus grounds, and reigonal neighborhoods to serve as test beds for the development of innovative solutions to real challenges.
Office/Unit: Penn State Sustainability
Facilitator: Krista Bailey
Region/Geographic Distribution: University Park
Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science (SAFES)
SAFES provides an interdisciplinary infrastructure and platform to address complex landscape-level challenges for a collaborative community of researchers, students, and stakeholders in their discovery of responsible and sustainable policy options, business management solutions, and best practices.
Office/Unit: College of Agricultural Sciences
Facilitator: Heather Preisendanz
Region/Geographic Distribution: State-wide
Agriculture and Environment Center (AEC)
The AEC work with a wide array of public and private partners to collaboratively address today’s water quality challenges related to land use and land management, from integrating research and extension to enriching student experience with engaged scholarship and community engagement.
Office/Unit: College of Agricultural Sciences
Facilitator: Kristen Koch
Region/Geographic Distribution: State-wide
Student Farm
As part of the Sustainable Food Systems Network program, the Student Farm provides opportunities for engagement with sustainability challenges and solutions in food and agricultural systems through engaged scholarship and outreach activities.
Office/Unit: Penn State Sustainability
Facilitator: Leslie Pillen
Region/Geographic Distribution: State College
Franco Harris Pittsburgh Center
The center connects PSU with Pittsburgh region to support healthy, sustainable, innovative, and equitable communities through research, local outreach, engaged scholarship and educational opportunities.
Office/Unit: Outreach
Facilitator: Tom Bartnik
Region/Geographic Distribution: Pittsburgh, Central PA
EnviroMentors
Under the Global Council for Science and the Environment, this program mentors and motivates high school students from underrepresented and underserved communities in STEM by pairing them with a faculty/staff/undergraduate student mentors to conduct a research project in an academic year.
Office/Unit: Penn State Sustainability
Facilitator: Peter Buck
Region/Geographic Distribution: State College, Harrisburg, Shenango, Schuylkill
Local Climate Action Program
This award-winning program is centered the belief and practice that a secure and stable climate begins in partnership with the places we call home. The Local Climate Action Program connects students with Pennsylvania municipal, county, and state agency partners to conduct greenhouse gas inventories and support climate policy and planning. The program is a partnership between Penn State’s John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, Penn State Sustainability, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability.
Office/Unit: Penn State Sustainability
Facilitator: Peter Buck
Region/Geographic Distribution: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Riparia
This center focuses on supporting research, teaching and community outreach focused on water, watershed, and wetland science, and governance.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Trevor Birkenholtz
Health and Environment Landscapes for Interdisciplinary eXchange (HELIX)
This lab focuses on supporting research, education, and outreach to facilitate new and transformative interdisciplinary collaborations between faculty and students working at the health-environment interface.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Brian King
GeoSyntheses Lab
This lab focuses on research that contributes to knowledge, understanding, and communication of policy-relevant science and scholarship in the field of agrobiodiversity, food, land use, climate change, livelihoods, sustainability, and political ecology.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Karl Zimmerer
Health and Play Lab
The Health and Play Lab conducts human-computer interaction (HCI) research and focuses on health and play as two important human values. Fundamentally, we explore how technologies could support people and communities to be healthier and more playful
College/Department/Unit: College of IST
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Xinning Gui
Red Cell Analytics Lab
The Red Cell Analytics Lab provides hands-on experience using structured analytic techniques and critical thinking to examine real-world issues, such as criminal, cyber, terror, biological, physical, or natural threats. This lab teaches adversarial and defensive thinking, identification of blind spots and points of weakness and potential exploit in systems in place today. Furthermore, the lab facilitates simulated security exercises examining various scenarios that allow students to evolve their way of thinking.
College/Department/Unit: College of IST
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Gregory Kruczek
The RAISE Lab
The RAISE Lab is a group of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers that makes foundational contributions to the field of Responsible AI for Social Emancipation. Their goal is to advance the state-of-the-art in AI tools and algorithms to solve critical challenges faced by marginalized communities around the world, while ensuring that our algorithms do not exacerbate existing health, social, and economic inequities in society.
College/Department/Unit: College of IST
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Amulya Yadav
Spatial Information and Intelligence Laboratory
The Spatial Information and Intelligence Laboratory supports research activities that integrate computer vision, natural language understanding, human-computer conversation interactions/HCI, geographical information systems/visualization, collaborative systems, and geospatial decision-support technologies to address the grand challenge of large-scale, geo-collaborative applications in digital government, crisis management, and civic engagement.
College/Department/Unit: College of IST
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Guoray Cai
Wellbeing & Health Innovation Laboratory
The Wellbeing & Health Innovation Laboratory aims to develop novel human-computer interaction and UbiComp technologies to improve health and wellbeing at scale. Our research leverages mobile phones, sensors, and online data to passively model health behaviors and contexts. We also design data-driven and just-in-time interventions with a focus on sustained engagement. Our interdisciplinary research includes passive sensing of sleep and circadian disruption, relapse detection in bipolar disorder, and using Amazon Alexa for effective PTSD interventions.
College/Department/Unit: College of IST
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Saeed Abdullah
Water, Health, and Nutrition Lab
This lab is designed to understand how humans meet their water needs across distinct ecological contexts and how this relates to both acute and long-term health, hydration status, nutritional status, stress, and disease risk. Their research examines how humans respond behaviorally and physiologically to varying degrees of water access and insecurity, nutritional and epidemiological transitions, changing environments and resources availability, and shifting socioeconomic circumstances.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Biobehavioral Health, College of Health and Human Development
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Asher Rosinger
Family and Child Health Project
The Family and Child Health Project focuses on identifying behavioral, biological, and neurocognitive factors associated with the development of obesity in children, with a specific focus on children exposed to poverty and other adverse childhood experiences. (Email: familychildhealth@gmail.com)
College/Department/Unit: Department of Biobehavioral Health, College of Health and Human Development
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Lori Francis
Mechanism of Emotion, Stress, and Health (MESH) Lab
This lab seeks to better understand the associations between psychological stress and stress responses with physical health and well-being. A major emphasis is the role of emotion and related processes in the connection between stress and health. We examine diverse health-related outcomes, including inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk, cognitive aging, and physical pain. We also study individual differences in how such phenomena are linked and use complex models that integrate behavior and social/demographic factors. (Email: stress@psu.edu)
College/Department/Unit: Department of Biobehavioral Health, College of Health and Human Development
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Jennifer Graham-Engeland
Epidemiology and Genetics across Populations & Societies (Epi-GaPS) Lab
The lab seeks to 1) elucidate the complex etiology of chronic diseases, and 2) identify drivers of health disparities in the United States. The lab conducts bio-psychosocially integrated studies of reproductive and cardiovascular traits in under-studied and marginalized populations.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Biobehavioral Health, College of Health and Human Development
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Lindsay Fernandez-Rhodes
Youth’s Experiences and Later Health Lab
This lab focuses on how adolescents experiences and their interaction with environment, such as child maltreatment, poverty, family characteristics, and others, can impact long-term health and chronic disease risk.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Biobehavioral Health, College of Health and Human Development
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Hannah Schreier
Ethnographic and Qualitative (EQUAL) Studies in Health
This lab aims to explore intersections between culture, environment and health. EQUAL Lab use a diverse range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine the impact of farmwork practices to farmworkers’ health outcomes, including pesticide safety behaviors, pesticide exposure, occupational injuries, access to care, and experiences with discrimination.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Biobehavioral Health, College of Health and Human Development
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Shedra Amy Snipes
Center for the Business of Sustainability
College/Department/Unit: Smeal College of Business
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Suvrat Dhanorkar
Center for Supply Chain Research
College/Department/Unit: Smeal College of Business
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Tracie Shannon
Science Communication Program (SCP)
This center supports research and innovation that advance effective communication related to science issues.
College/Department/Unit: Donald P. Bellisario College of Communication
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Lee Ahern
Smeal Undergraduate Sustainability Case Competition
A hands-on opportunity for students to work on a cross-disciplinary team and to use business and economic principles to solve real-world social justice and environmental conservation challenges.
Fee: N/A
Eligibility: Team of 4-5 students, open to only undergraduate, from UP or any CWC, at least one Business major
Organizer: Smeal Center for the Business of Sustainability and Smeal Diversity Enhancement Programs
Limitation: Only for Penn State students
People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) Student Design Competition
Fee:
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Organizer: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Limitation:
Global Sustainability Challenge
A competition to create a study abroad program portfolio that expose students to the complex intersection of climate science, research, history, economics, politics, and the cultural implications of threats to our environment. Through submitting a 500-word proposal and 5-minute video, the proposal must be scalable and tailored for students to focus on climate change in various international context.
Fee:
Eligibility: Team of researcher, faculty, or staff from at least 2 different institutions to work collaboratively, at least 1 student and 1 faculty. Max. 4 members, may include members from outside the US and/or NGOs.
Organizer: Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE)
Limitation: Only for institution members of CIEE
Architecture at Zero
Design competition for decarbonization, equity and resilience (add more context that it takes place somewhere for a building school in California?)
Fee: $
Eligibility:
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Global Climate Law and Governance Essay Competition
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WERC Environmental Design Contest
Team serves as consulting engineers to solve real issue through engineering a Request for Proposal, include making Technical Report, doing Oral Presentation, and a Benchscale Demonstration. Team may choose a theme from the pre-selected topic or choose their own environmental challenge.
Fee: $980.00
Eligibility:
Organizer:
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Solar Decathlon Design Challenge
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Collegiate Wind Competition
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Solar District Cup
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Race to Zero
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Penn State Sustainability
OPP
Auxiliary Business Services
Career Services’ network
Student Sustaianbility Network
SSAC
EcoAction
Eco Action promotes sustainability through campus and community initiatives. In partnership with OPP Landscape Services, it leads the Sustainable Landscape Implementation Plan (SLIP), funded by PSU’s Environmental Sustainability Fund. The project develops practical strategies for sustainable campus landscapes, supporting PSU’s goal to reduce carbon emissions by 2035.
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Derek Kalp – Advisor
Penn State UNS-USA
Environmental Resource Management Society
The Environmental Resource Management Society (ERMS) supports students with education on environmental issues, internships, professional development, sustainable events, service activities, and guest speakers.
College/Department/Unit: College of Agricultural Science
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Terra Ingram – Advisor
Community Environment and Development Club
The Community, Environment, and Development (CED) Club fosters community service and networking to support sustainability and economic growth in State College.
College/Department/Unit: College of Agricultural Science
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Tim Kelsey – Advisor
National Electrical Contractors Association
The Penn State NECA Student Chapter, sponsored by the Penn-Del-Jersey and Western PA NECA Chapters, engages students in competitions, service projects, and activities in the electrical construction industry. Members gain practical knowledge in energy efficiency, clean energy, project management, and finance while benefiting from mentorship, networking, scholarships, and industry connections provided by NECA.
College/Department/Unit: Penn-Del-Jersey and Western PA Chapters of NECA
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Somayeh Asadi (sxa51@psu.edu) – Advisor
Horticulture Club
The Horticulture Club offers students opportunities to engage in horticulture, plant science, and community service through events like flower sales, the National Collegiate Landscape Competition, and the annual Hort Show.
College/Department/Unit: Department of Plant Science
Birding Club
Solar Decathlon Team of Penn State, SDPS
The Penn State Solar Decathlon team is an interdisciplinary group of students that collaborates to design a net zero-energy ready residential building that blends building science, technological advances, market potential, and design excellence.
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Blaise Waligun (bfw5111@psu.edu) – Contact person
Wind Energy Club
The Wind Energy Club aims to help students explore the wind energy industry, develop skills for success, and pursue their passion. Members participate in the Collegiate Wind Competition to enhance project development and turbine design expertise. The club provides hands-on experience and opportunities to address real-world challenges for students across the University Park Campus.
College/Department/Unit: Penn State Aerospace Engineering and Penn State College of Education – Center for Science and the Schools
Director/Advisor/Facilitator: Mark A. Miller and Susan W. Stewart – advisors
United Nations Association at Penn State
Engineers for a Sustainable World
As part of Global Water Brigades, Pennsylvania State University students are empowered to work alongside communities and experts to design and implement sustainable water systems in developing regions.
