Andrew Koivuniemi, an MD/PhD student in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering with Professor Kevin Otto, was awarded the Geddes-Laufman-Greatbatch Award. The award has been given every year since 1988 to recognize a student or post-doctoral fellow for outstanding research during an academic year.

Two Purdue faculty members received the Army Research Laboratory Director's Challenge Coin - the top U.S. Defense Department award. Edward J. Delp, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and William J. Chappell, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were selected to receive the award after technologies they developed saved lives on the battlefield.

John A. Pearce, Purdue University alumni and current Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering Advisory Board Member, was recently named among the top 10 most inspiring professors by Texas Exes for his "soulful teaching style, even while teaching Electrical Engineering."

Dr. Corey Neu, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and students from his BME 695 Mechanobiology course recently wrote a manuscript that was accepted to the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology Journal.

A design incorporating flow cytometry for low-cost HIV detection was recently recognized by Engineering World Health. The HIV Diagnostics Team; Peter Carlsgaard, Lindsay Wendal, Aneesh Ramaswamy and Dan Lu, was mentored by Professor Paul Robinson. The team came in second place behind a team from Oxford and followed by a Johns Hopkins team. Congratulations to the team for their hard work and efforts!

Winners of the BMES 2011 Graduate and Undergraduate Student Awards (Extended Abstract) were announced last month. The BMES Awards Committee selects students on the basis of scientific merit, originality, and quality of written presentation. Jamie Brugnano and Akhilesh Gaharwar were among the honorees for this year.

Adam Griebel and Tyler Novak took 2nd place in the undergraduate poster competition at the recent ASME conference held in Pennsylvania.

Trisha Eustaquio, a Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering graduate student working with Professor Jim Leary, was selected as one of 137 outstanding individuals world-wide to receive a scholarship from SPIE (the International Society for Optics and Photonics).

Purdue University researchers, led by R. Graham Cooks of chemistry and Zheng Ouyang of BME, recently took their miniature mass spectrometer grocery shopping to test for traces of chemicals on standard and organic produce.

The end of the semester included a flurry of honors for several of our outstanding graduate students.