Logan wins award from Popular Mechanics magazine

Logan wins award from Popular Mechanics magazine

University Park, Pa.--Bruce Logan, the Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering at Penn State, was named one of the winners of the Popular Mechanics 2005 Breakthrough Award at a ceremony in New York City today (Sept. 29).

Logan is one of only eight to receive the inaugural award from the magazine. He is being honored for his work with microbial fuel cells, an environmentally-friendly method of producing electricity or hydrogen. Logan's process uses wastewater to generate energy and also cleans the wastewater.

Logan has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 1997. He is the director of the College of Engineering's Environmental Institute and director of Penn State's Hydrogen Energy Center.

His awards and honors include the inaugural Association of Environmental Engineering Professors' Malcolm Pirnie Frontiers of Research Award and the 2004 Paul L. Busch Award from the Water Environment Research Foundation Endowment for Innovation in Applied Water Quality Research. Logan is on the board of directors of the National Hydrogen Association.

Prior to coming to Penn State, he was a professor at the University of Arizona.
Logan earned his B.S. in chemical engineering and M.S. in environmental engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

Logan is a former Fulbright Scholar and Leverhulme Fellow.

The winners of the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards were selected from a list of 60 candidates. A panel of ten scientists, authors, thinkers, and academics helped to make the final selections.

The award winners and their work will be featured in the magazine's November issue.