At the annual "Evening of Excellence" event, three alumni award winners shared what the Great Valley community meant to them and how it changed them. The ceremony also celebrated donors whose generous gifts at various levels place them among the campus’ most dedicated supporters.
Josh Pruett, senior sourcing manager, said earning his Six Sigma Black Belt “attached a rocket ship” to the continuous improvement projects he and Tyler Dolan, sourcing analyst, and their team started at their company. The four-course Six Sigma program focuses on boosting quality and effectiveness.
Because her veterans' education benefits didn't cover the full cost of her graduate studies, Chiquitta Evans applied for and received a scholarship as she pursues her MBA at Penn State. With that additional financial support, Evans said she looks forward to completing her degree next year and achieving a personal goal she set not only for herself, but also for her family.
Years before Cansu Akkol got the chance to work with Google, her finance professors recognized her talent. With their coaching, Akkol went on to build an international career in pricing across different sectors and countries — Turkey, Canada, Ireland and now the United Arab Emirates, where she is pricing principal at Google Cloud.
The 2026 Alumni Fellows returned to Penn State to receive the Alumni Association’s highest honor and celebrate their achievements, impact and connection to the University.
Penn State graduate students in a research-based degree program are invited to participate in Penn State's annual Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT), hosted by the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School. 3MT helps graduate students improve their research communication and presentation skills, permitting just three minutes and one static presentation slide to effectively communicate their research and its impact to an audience outside their field.
To support graduate student success across the University, the Fox Graduate School released a new set of mentoring resources, including the Mentoring Blueprint, a guide for faculty mentors and graduate student mentees. The materials include discussion guides, case studies, the theory of mentoring, a list of University mentoring resources, and assessment approaches.
Penn State Great Valley graduate students Venkata Sai Renusree Bandaru and Faizan Raza both said they had to read the emails more than once before it sank in that they had received Penn State’s prestigious Fox Scholar awards, which celebrate graduate students for their exceptional academic achievement, research and professional impact.
At Penn State Great Valley’s annual student research poster competition, students presented a variety of projects to faculty and guests. The three winning posters focused on a job posting data pipeline for management research, a multi-agent system to automate data science tasks for non-data scientists and reinforcement learning for optimized urban energy harvesting.
A panel of industry experts and Penn State faculty awarded a total of $29,000 to student teams at the Nittany AI Challenge Celebration. The winning teams will use their prize money to further develop projects that apply artificial intelligence to address real-world challenges and benefit society.
