As with all land grant universities, the College of Agricultural Sciences offers degrees in Agronomy or Turfgrass Science. Penn State just happens to be the oldest and most well known. They are funded better than most universities. As I've said before, 90% of creeping bentgrass varieties were developed at Penn State. Highlands CC has greens comprised of Penn A4, a PSU variety. The croquet courts are Penn A1, another variety.
In the early to mid 1990's. Penn State led the way on soft spike research. As you remember, there was a push to get away from traditional metal spikes that many golfers felt damaged the putting surface. PSU also does a tremendous amount of athletic field research as well. One aspect of that is studying the footing and traction athletes get on different surfaces based on the shoes they wear. The machine above, the PennFoot, was developed for this. The PennFoot is used to study wear patterns and traction of different types of spikes in golf and other sports by applying constant pressures at different angles. This replication leads to consistent data.
You may also recall in the 1990's, there was a trend to get professional sports fields back to natural turf. Products like AstroTurf (which is a specific brand) ran their course and injuries like turf toe, led athletes to desire grass fields. Since then, newer types of artificial turf have been developed and they are certainly better. This also led to the newer types of driving range mats that require topdressing with sand and crumb rubber to add resiliency to the surface. As this research continues, I think it proves there are little to no substitutes for natural grass!