UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences has selected three faculty members to serve as Huck Leadership Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year. The competitive program prepares faculty for future leadership roles while engaging them in strategic initiatives that advance interdisciplinary research at Penn State.
Joshua Kellogg, associate professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences; Andrew Deans, professor of entomology and director of the Frost Entomological Museum; and Le Bao, professor of statistics, will participate in the fifth year of the Huck’s faculty professional development initiative, which involves faculty members in high-level decision-making at the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and encourages them to develop projects that contribute to the broader institutional mission.
“The Huck Leadership Fellows program reflects our commitment to developing faculty leaders who can shape the future of interdisciplinary research at Penn State and beyond,” said Research Professor Camelia Kantor, associate director of strategic initiatives at the Huck. “The projects proposed by Kellog, Deans and Bao are ambitious and interdisciplinary, exemplifying the creativity, collaboration, and impact that define the Huck community.”
Kellogg has proposed the creation of a Center for Appalachian Plants, bringing a new focus to the wealth of local biodiversity and harnessing the expertise of Penn State researchers in fields as diverse as anthropology, food science, economics, biomedical research and ecology. He also advanced a plan to create a formalized structure within the curriculum of the Huck graduate programs that would support students in applications for competitive federal fellowships from funding agencies like the Department of Agriculture, U.S. National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Deans, who serves as director of the Frost Entomological Museum and sits on the executive committee of the Penn State University Museums Consortium, intends to use the fellowship as a platform to strengthen life sciences collections across all Penn State campuses. That includes better data and asset management policies; strategies for growing, securing, maintaining and consolidating collections where appropriate; and promoting awareness of their utility as a resource to researchers, donors, administrators, students, instructors and alumni.
Bao will develop a reproducible framework for small area estimation and multi-source data integration to support disease mapping and risk-factor estimation in life-science applications, with an initial focus on bone health. His work builds on extensive experience developing statistical and AI-driven methods for public health, including HIV, global health, cancer research, and aging. Through the fellowship, Bao aims to strengthen interdisciplinary collaborations across the Huck Institutes and create scalable tools that turn fragmented health data into actionable evidence for population health decisions.
Since its launch in 2022, the Huck Leadership Fellows program has provided faculty with opportunities to explore academic leadership while advancing strategic initiatives across the University. Several former fellows have gone on to assume leadership positions, including departmental head, center director, and vice chair for research. For more information about the Huck Leadership Fellows program, visit the Huck Institutes website.