The Honest ABEs Grad Wallyball team (Garett Pignotti, Leah Liston, Colin Bell, Amudhan Ponrajan, and Andi Hodaj) came in first place in the Grad/Faculty/Staff league. The team beat the ABE JV squad in the semifinals and upset the previously undefeated Pharmacy squad in the finals to clinch the victory. To all knowledgeable sources this is the first-ever ABE GSA intramural championship team. Another ABE #1 thanks to the agility and valor of five noble grad students.

Student Soybean Innovation Competition Award Ceremony

Over the past two decades, student innovators have generated a variety of new soybean-based products for the Student Soybean Innovation Competition.  The Indiana Soybean Alliance invites you to join us as we showcase this year’s new ideas and reveal the winner of the 2014-15 competition!

Tuesday, March 24^th
Indiana Roof Ballroom
For directions, visit: www.Indianaroof.com
Reception:                        5:30 pm
Award Ceremony:           7:00 pm

Celebrating Young Thinkers

Meet the students, see their products and cast your vote for the “People’s Choice Award”
Hors d’oeuvres will be served
Please register by Monday, March 16 at www.IndianaSoybean.com/InnovationCompetition

Advisor & Student Recognition Reception

Tuesday, March 31^st
Dauch Alumni Center
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Come meet the participants of the 2014-15 competition on the Purdue campus!  Feel free to stop by anytime to congratulate students, faculty and departments for their outstanding work.  There will be light snacks provided, and everyone is welcome.

Those of you who are particularly observant may have already noticed a new feature on our homepage. For those less-observant among us, please check the right-hand side of the home page. In addition to Events, Announcements, and In The News, we have added an RSS feed from Agricultural Communications. This will display the top five stories coming from our in-house news service.

After months of preparation, the ABE Graduate Student Association (GSA) hosted the Second Annual ABE GSA Industrial Research Symposium on Thursday, Feb. 26th. Approximately 140 faculty, ABE and BME graduate students, visiting students, prospective graduate students, and industry representatives from eight organizations attended this whole-day event.

The main objective of this symposium was to promote networking and career opportunities for graduate students, as well as to give an opportunity for leadership and collaboration among students regarding event planning and execution.  The event featured research presentations, a poster session as well as the lunch with a plenary speaker and a dinner with a keynote speaker.

The morning presentation sessions focused on four areas: Environmental and Natural Resource Engineering, Food Process Engineering, Biological Engineering, and Bio-energy.  Sixteen students presented their on-going research and received feedback from their peers, faculty and industry representatives.  Lunch, catered by Juniper spoon, featured a plenary address from Daniel J. Hasler, the President and Chief Entrepreneurial Officer of the Purdue Research Foundation.  Mr. Hasler gave an enthusiastic talk about the helpful resources Purdue Research Foundation has to help students and faculty to transfer their idea from benchtop to owning their intellectual property.  Following the lunch, faculty, students from other departments, and prospective graduate students joined for poster session.  Sixty-five posters were displayed and placed in a friendly competition.  The respective 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd place winners were Ning Xiang, Jeremy Robison and Amanda Montgomery.  Dr. Engelberth announced the prizes and winners at dinner.

The event culminated with dinner served in the ADM Agricultural Innovation Center, catered by Sharma’s Kitchen.  The keynote address was given by Dr. Maureen McCann who spoke regarding the energy use of the world, the importance of biofuels to alleviate the current energy problems, and how a more efficient way of producing biofuel can be achieved by research being conducted at Purdue Energy Center.  ABE President Garett Pignotti offered closing remarks to end the event.

The ABE GSA received positive feedback from attendees.  The alumni that attended were highly complimentary of the symposium. Thank you to the planning committee members: Garett W Pignotti, Iman Beheshti Tabar, Amanda Kreger, Andi Hodaj, Caroline Hughes, Chinmay Joglekar, Colin Bell, Colleen Moloney, Elizabeth Hawkins, Fushcia Hoover, Mahdieh Aghazadeh, Neal Hengge, Rachel Sparks, Samaneh Saadat, Sanoar Rahman and Yi Cui.  And a special thanks to those who initiated the symposium last year and gave us tremendous support for this year’s symposium: Necla Mine Eren, Jen Kahn and Dr. Abigail Engelberth.

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