Joseph Cotruvo, Jr.

2025 National Award Finalist — Faculty

Current Position:
Professor of Chemistry

Institution:
The Pennsylvania State University

Discipline:
Biochemistry & Structural Biology

Recognized for: Discovering and engineering proteins that selectively extract rare earth elements, enabling sustainable recycling and purification of metals critical to technology supply chains.

Areas of Research Interest and Expertise:
Bioinorganic Chemistry, Lanthanide and Actinide Chemistry, Separation Science, Chemical Biology

Previous Positions:

A.B., Chemistry, Princeton University
Ph.D., Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Advisor: JoAnne Stubbe)
Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley (Advisor: Christopher J. Chang)
Assistant Professor of Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University
Associate Professor of Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University

Research Summary:

Joseph Cotruvo, Ph.D. pioneers protein-based strategies for selective metal ion recovery, detection, and separation. Cotruvo’s lab identified lanmodulin, a highly selective lanthanide-binding protein that enables efficient purification of rare earth elements (REEs) from complex feedstocks. By elucidating molecular mechanisms that allow bacteria to distinguish between the 17 highly similar REEs, Cotruvo has demonstrated how biomolecules can outperform industrial separation methods. His work establishes key principles of lanthanide biochemistry and has led to technologies for sustainable REE recycling, radiochemical purification, and environmental remediation, offering scalable, environmentally friendly alternatives to conventional metal extraction and processing.

“Technology increasingly relies on access to highly pure, so-called “critical” metals – and so does every organism on Earth. My group uncovers biology’s solutions and engineers them into scalable technologies to more efficiently purify valuable metals.”