The Purdue Student Union Board created the honor to recognize students who exemplify education and scholarship, service and leadership, and research and innovation. It is open to juniors and seniors, and each awardee received a $1,000 scholarship.

ABE Professor Jenna Rickus has been serving as the interim vice provost for teaching and learning since May 1, when Dr. Frank Dooley was named chancellor of Purdue Global.

“I did something to make my family proud. A very small percentage of African Americans have graduate degrees. It’s an honor to be able to say I did this, I finished this and I can be an inspiration to other members of my family,” said Covington.

Currently housed in Purdue’s College of Agriculture’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, the National AgrAbility Project (NAP) supports all the state AgrAbility projects and provides limited services to farmers and ranchers in states without AgrAbility projects.

“Students from across the university have learned about agricultural products from soy and have applied their technical, business and marketing skills to develop novel consumer products. Several of these have resulted in commercialization as products on the store shelves today.” Professor Nathan Mosier

Sarah Daly, a recent Ph.D. graduate in agricultural and biological engineering, is tackling the dual issues of renewable energy and waste management. Her recent work used machine learning to model anaerobic digestion systems and examined large-scale implementation. Her future work aims to investigate the microbial response to microplastics, ultimately contributing to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, waste management, and the development of targeted biological systems to degrade plastics.

Clase expects many of the changes to her labs to remain.