Dear alumni, friends, students, staff and faculty,

This is the fourth edition for which I get to provide a welcome letter to Aerogram. That also means it is the fourth time that I get to highlight records for the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

As a sign of our continuing success as a top aerospace engineering academic program, our 1,176 undergraduate and 604 graduate students represent a six-fold increase from when I started as an assistant professor at Purdue in 1995. Our U.S. News and World Report rankings have us at 5th for both undergraduate programs and graduate programs. According to the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), we graduated the most aerospace engineers with bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. last year.

To keep up with our seemingly ever-increasing enrollment and to bolster our research capabilities, we added two new faculty members this year. Husheng Li joins us as professor in our autonomy and control area. He has an electrical engineering background. Husheng conducts research and will teach courses relevant to aerospace communications and avionics (Page 31). Keith LeGrand joins us as an assistant professor in our astrodynamics and space applications area. Keith works on multi-target tracking amongst other important issues for access to and use of space, which aligns very well with the AAE-led college initiative in Cislunar space (Page 30).

Another record for AAE is our research expenditures. While this is an imperfect measure of our research productivity, I am nonetheless pleased to report that our total for the academic fiscal year (July 2021-June 2022) was nearly $22 million, which far exceeded last year’s $17.5 million. The Department of Defense, NASA and our industry partners are our three largest research partners by expenditures.

William Crossley, Uhrig and Vournas Head of Aeronautics and Astronautics

We have many valued industry partners and, at the time of this letter, Purdue has just finalized a master research agreement with Northrop Grumman, which will make it easier for faculty, students and research staff to interact with Northrop Grumman on topics of interest.

Similarly, Purdue’s renewed partnership with Rolls-Royce has a $75 million value over 10 years. This will reinforce the base research AAE has with Rolls-Royce in experimental capabilities of gas turbine engines, and is an opportunity for new areas of collaboration.

In another facet of our industry partnerships, we were able to restart the William E. Boeing Distinguished Lecture this fall by welcoming Grazia Vittadini, the chief technology and strategy officer for Rolls-Royce, as the lecturer. Her talk was an excellent overview of the challenges the industry faces, balanced with the promise we bring to make aviation a sustainable and societally necessary enterprise. We were also grateful to have Todd Citron, the chief technology officer for Boeing, visit Purdue and introduce Vittadini for her lecture (Page 33). Sustainable aviation is an important issue for us; while it does not appear in this issue of Aerogram, many of the AAE faculty — including me — are working on efforts to enable aerospace and aviation to "make the world smaller" while remaining a steward of our environment.

With the current size of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, I cannot begin to cover all of our exemplary achievements, groundbreaking research and educational efforts. In addition to the themes of sustainable aviation and Cislunar space that I have mentioned here, we are also pursuing work in maintaining national defense and security and in enabling new opportunities through aerospace. There are several highlight stories in this issue of Aerogram, but there is so much more going on in AAE at Purdue. I encourage you to follow us via social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) or visit our website.

We are ever grateful for your continuing interest in AAE. Your support enables our success.