Scholar Profiles
George Khoury '08
Major: Chemical Engineering
“Every time I come back to Penn State I get the tingles. I really do. I come back and think ‘I belong here and I’m going to do something good.”
George Khoury has a T-shirt that reads: “Eat. Sleep. Chemical Engineering.” And he is proud to wear it.
George, a senior chemical engineering major in the College of Engineering and Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College, certainly lives up to this slogan. In 2007, the Schreyer Scholar’s ideas on eradicating chemical pollutants from the air got the attention of the American Chemical Society, which published an article about him in its annual report. George was the only student featured in the publication.
“I was presenting my research posters at a regional ACS meeting, and a woman came up and talked to me for about a half hour about my findings,” he said. “I didn’t know until afterwards that she was the president of ACS.”
As a result, George’s photo and an article mentioning his research are found alongside the pages of renowned researchers and doctors in the ACS annual report.
Today,George’s research is focused on redesigning proteins with Dr. Costas Maranas’group for the Department of Chemical Engineering. The group’s current project is binding ligands to proteins to create a less expensive way to produce the sugar substitute xylitol, and George, one of only two undergraduate students in the group, donates many hours to the research. But don’t expect to find him in a lab all day.
“Right now I’m really proud that I’m able to do so many things: vice president of the Council of Commonwealth Student Governments, resident assistant, faculty senator, research full-time, a grader, and a bazillion other things,” he said.
CCSG, one of the largest Penn State organizations, acts as a voice for the nineteen Penn State campuses. Student, Governmental, Academic, and Diversity affairs are addressed to allow students to incite change.
As CCSG vice president, George said, “I love seeing how we can affect so much change in Penn State overall.” His involvement has even inspired him to work toward one day being a dean at a university.
With so many things to do--admittedly sometimes at the expense of sleep--George appreciates that he can find support from the Schreyer Honors College community.
“I feel like I have a large support and resource network of students and faculty and alumni and administration,” he said, “Having that feeling makes you be able to do all these things because, at the end of the day, what do you have to fall back on if all else fails?”
George even misses living in Atherton, one of the Honors College dormitories, where he spent many late nights studying in what Scholars have nicknamed the “Zombie Lounge.”
“I loved being surrounded by all these great people all the time,” he said. “Everyone has great stories to tell and different backgrounds, and they’re all brilliant…they’re all so smart. And being surrounded by that makes you smarter, I think.”
George takes advantage of experiences both on and off Penn State’s campus. This past summer,he co-oped with Sanofi Pasteur of the Sanofi-Aventis vaccines group to do validation work for a new meningitis vaccine. It was just the latest of a series of internships George has held while a student. Yet, even as a senior, he is always excited to return to the university.
“Every time I come back to Penn State I get the tingles,” George said. “I really do. I come back and think ‘I belong here and I’m going to do something good.’”
— By Ashley Glowinski '08 Public Relations-Advertising
