When Jason Thiagarajan was weighing his college options, he wasn’t sure how he would pay for school, or which university would best prepare him for life and career. That uncertainty disappeared the day he opened his acceptance letter to Purdue University.

Inside was an invitation to join the inaugural cohort of the Lilly Scholars at Purdue (LSAP), a program that covered his full tuition and created a direct talent pipeline to one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. For Thiagarajan, a junior in agricultural and biological engineering from Bloomington, Indiana, it was the clarity he had been seeking.

Somali Chaterji leads a team that has developed AGILE3D, a cutting-edge 3D object detection system. She is an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering in Purdue’s College of Agriculture and College of Engineering and holds a courtesy appointment in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

When Lana Malek left Hoe, Slovenia, for West Lafayette, Indiana, she wasn’t just choosing a university — she was stepping into an entirely new world. As the first person in her family to pursue higher education outside of Slovenia, the decision to study in the United States came with excitement, uncertainty and ambition in equal measure.

Karthik Sankaranarayanan trained in two quite different scientific subfields as a graduate student and as a postdoctoral researcher. Now at Purdue University, he aims to combine those fields in a project that will use artificial intelligence to plan the synthesis of complex new pharmaceutical agents.

“Nature uses enzymes to effortlessly produce her complex small molecules. The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly interested in using enzymes to synthesize molecules that may be challenging to produce using traditional organic chemistry,” said Sankaranarayanan, an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering. With that in mind, he will design an AI algorithm to sift through the diverse set of enzymatic reaction chemistries that nature uses to produce molecules.

Amanda Wolf spent an entire semester cold-calling faculty members across Purdue, pitching what must have sounded like an absurd idea: Could a team of undergraduate peer learners work in a biological lab together, receiving regular genetic engineering mentorship despite having no formal training?

The conversational dead-ends piled up. Faculty after faculty said no. But Wolf had a strategy. She turned every rejection into opportunity by asking for referrals. "I asked all around Purdue, using the research connections of my peers and friends," she recalls. "While naturally there were a lot of no's, I was able to turn every no into more possible connections just by asking for referrals."

Growing up in Indiana, Emma Kessinger was no stranger to the rigor and prestige that come with a Purdue University degree. When she decided to pursue engineering, Purdue quickly stood out as the clear choice, offering both frozen in-state tuition and one of the nation’s top engineering programs. Just as important to Emma, though, was the culture.

Two Purdue Agriculture student athletes were named Academic All-Big Ten Honorees for the fall sports season. The Academic All-Big Ten team recognizes student athletes' outstanding classroom performance with a GPA of 3.0 or higher. Both Quintin Lowe and Julia Kane are multi-year honorees.

Purdue University researchers have developed a device for more conveniently detecting pathogens in health care settings, on farms and in food production operations.

Nafisa Rafiq, a PhD student in biomedical engineering, and Mohit Verma, associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering, described their new system in the IEEE Sensors Journal. Rafiq, Verma and Bibek Raut, also a PhD student in biomedical engineering at Purdue, have submitted a patent application for related technologies. Verma serves as chief technology officer of Krishi, a startup company that develops molecular assays.