Dr. Kathleen Arrington is a postdoctoral scholar in Agricultural Sciences within Ecosystem Science and Management. She works on two organic agriculture projects related to cover crops (planted in between cash crops to benefit the soil). One project is focused on how cover crops affect soil fertility for corn and the second uses cover crops as part of a biological treatment to reduce pests and pathogens in vegetables. For the first project, Kathleen's role includes testing and refining the biogeochemical model underlying a tool with site-specific nitrogen fertilizer recommendations as well as communicating with farmers to design a useful tool. Her second project team builds on research in organic fruit and vegetable production in Florida to adapt techniques for growers in Pennsylvania.

Dr. Matthew Bahnson is a postdoctoral scholar in Engineering, specifically the Engineering Cognitive Research Laboratory with Dr. Catherine Berdanier. Matthew’s research focuses on postdoctoral mentorship experiences in engineering and computer science and sociocultural inequality in engineering graduate education. He has published in Journal of Engineering Education, Studies in Engineering Education, and International Journal of Engineering Education. His conference participation includes coordinating engineering education sessions at American Educational Researcher Association (AERA) in 2022 and 2023. He also presented papers at American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), and The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD), Frontiers in Education (FIE).

Dr. Manushanker Balasubramanian is a postdoctoral scholar in the Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering. He works as a researcher under the supervision of Dr. Douglas H. Werner. He has extensive experience in asymptotic methods, a multilevel fast multipole method (MLFMM), and development of ray tracer for scattering and radiation problems. His current research interests include anisotropic media, gradientindex lens design, local and global optimization, and physical optics-based techniques for reflector antenna shaping.

Dr. C. Andrew Conway is a postdoctoral scholar for the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center. His research interests focus on the mental health and well-being of Latino immigrant youth and families. He is also interested in Latino immigrant youth’s unique Adverse Childhood Experiences and their impact on mental health. Andrew seeks to move the field beyond thinking of childhood adversity as household dysfunction and towards recognizing the significant influences of social-level factors, including the effects of racism, oppression, and colonization. In 2020, Andrew was named a Research Scholar at the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families.

Dr. Katherine E. Frye is a postdoctoral scholar in the College of Education. Her research interests broadly include social-emotional learning (SEL) assessment and practical application of SEL in schools. She is also interested in researching the intersection of children’s social-emotional development, mental wellbeing, and academic achievement. Her developing research program consists of two interrelated strands: (1) social-emotional and behavioral assessment and (2) conceptual foundations of SEL-related skills and practices. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary School Psychology and School Psychology Review and presented nationally at the National Association of School Psychologists annual convention.

Dr. Vinodh Kumar is a postdoctoral scholar in Neurology for the College of Medicine. His research interests include the neural basis of multisensory integration during speech and language processing. He has performed psychophysical experiments involving the McGurk effect (an auditory illusion) in tandem with electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings to understand how the brain seamlessly integrates visual and auditory information during speech perception. His current research focuses on understanding sound-symbolism, the idea that just the sound of a word can convey its meaning. He uses functional brain imaging techniques and electrophysiological recordings (from patients undergoing epilepsy monitoring) to understand the neural basis of sound-symbolism. His research has implications for speech disorders such as aphasia.

Dr. Hao Liu is a postdoctoral scholar in Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research interests include traffic flow modeling, traffic flow optimization, and connected and autonomous vehicles. He's very interested in transportation research and has five journal publications, including two first-authored papers in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and one first-authored paper in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.

Dr. Primal Pappachan is a postdoctoral scholar in Information Sciences and Technology, where he works with Dr. Anna Squicciarini. Primal's research focuses on data management and privacy, particularly designing and implementing data protection mechanisms. He has published in top-tier venues, including VLDB and SIGSPATIAL, and has received awards to support his postdoctoral work from the Penn State Center for Security Research and Education Seed Grant and the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible AI Collaboration Pilot Funding. In addition to his research, he has served on program committees for conferences and workshops and co-organizes a workshop (ASTRIDE) for ICDE 2023.

Dr. Na Zhang is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Physics. Na’s research focus is on the controlled synthesis, spectroscopic characterization, and application of low-dimensional materials, including the two-dimensional layered materials, quantum confines 2D polar metals, and doped carbon nanotubes.