About Joey

Joseph Cotruvo, Jr. is Professor of Chemistry at Penn State University. He was born in 1984 and grew up in Washington, D.C. He graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. from Princeton University (2006), where he developed his interest in bioinorganic chemistry in the laboratory of Prof. Edward I. Stiefel. He pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he obtained his Ph.D. in 2012 under the guidance of Prof. JoAnne Stubbe and where he was an NDSEG fellow. Joey pursued postdoctoral studies with Prof. Christopher J. Chang at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow. He began his independent career as an assistant professor and Louis Martarano Career Development Professor at Penn State in 2016, being promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2022 and to full professor in 2024. His group is interested in discovering and characterizing new mechanisms of metal ion selectivity in biological systems, with applications spanning from development of genetically encoded tools to study metal ions in cells to development of scalable protein-based separations of valuable metal ions, such as the lanthanides. His laboratory’s work has been honored by several awards, including DOE Early Career and NSF CAREER awards, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Stiefel Young Investigator Award from the Metals in Biology GRC, the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry from the ACS Division of Biochemistry and Chemical Biology, and most recently he was named a Blavatnik National Awards Finalist.

Honors and Awards

Teaching