Student Awards and Honors

2023-2024 Undergraduate Student Awards and Honors

Dave & Marsha Meyer Undergraduate Teaching Awards

ECE has about 200 undergraduates who help out in classes as teaching assistants. They hold office hours, help design and grade assignments, and generally keep our classes running smoothly.

Vickrant Sreekanth: For taking a lead role as UTA for ECE 46100 in redesigning and porting the project autograder from Java to Python.

Zoe Drechsler: For taking on time-sensitive responsibilities above and beyond the UTA role in ECE 20001.

Arpita Rattan: For leadership in the TA training program and for mentoring junior UTAs in ECE 20007.

Yashar Nishaburi: For helping students above and beyond the regular office hours, and for being among the most appreciated UTAs as measured in the performance surveys.

Mihir Bhandarkar: For his proactive initiative in motivating students to take on a mini-projects in ECE 36200 and for providing design review support to the project teams.

Justin Hatter: For his exceptional dedication in answering student questions on Piazza, his proactive involvement in lecture assignments, and his excellent execution of lab TA responsibilities.

Honorable Mentions: Jacob Chappell and Elizabeth Riegle

Undergraduate Research Awards

Purdue ECE runs the largest research program of any School at Purdue, and undergraduates play key roles in our research agenda. These students design and run experiments, write papers, present results, and support our top 10-nationwide program. These awards recognize the top undergraduate researchers, as measured by drive and accomplishment.

Adam Piaseczny: For his work on evaluating the impact of adversarial node placement in decentralized federated learning networks.

Kyle Robinson: For his work on preventing supply chain vulnerabilities in Java.

Honorable Mentions: Shubham Saluja Kumar Agarwal and Zachary Au

Undergraduate Service Award

Through organizations such as the ECE Student Society and HKN, Purdue undergraduates provide camaraderie, advice, tutoring, mentoring, and coffee and donuts to the ECE community. This award recognizes students who have performed extraordinary service to the School over the year.

Aidan Prendergast: For his years of service to ECE by serving as an ECE Ambassador, Undergraduate TA for ECE 33700 and the STARS summer program, and for always doing far more than is ever expected.

Senior Design Awards

Senior Design is a required capstone experience which allows students to apply the knowledge they have gained from their ECE courses to a semester or year-long project. Through this project, students gain hands-on experience, enhance their written and oral technical communication skills, and develop their team work abilities. The Senior Design Awards recognize teams that achieved excellence with their projects.

Software: Pranav Chintareddy, Prateek Jannu, and Brock Holman

For their design and implementation of a single-shot (low cost) AI-based image generation service.

Atlas Sentinel: Ben Taylor, Adi Bhatnagar, Faaiz Memon, and Ali Shah

For their design and implementation of a single-propeller drone which substitutes expensive mechanical components with sophisticated control algorithms.

Magnetohydrodynamic Watercraft: Joshua Hanback, Gergo Petruska, Michael Ferconio, and Lance Li

For their design and implementation of a remote-controlled cargo ship with an innovative magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) propulsion system.

Smart Air Hockey Table: Alan Chung Ma, William Dobert, Trevor Moorman, and Benjamin Owen

For their design of a smart air hockey table with a matrix of RGB LEDs under the playing surface that react to the position of the puck and pushers.

HE-NES (Hardware-Emulated NES): Antonio Butera, Grant Daniel, Aidan Prendergast, and Eric Rodenkirch

For their design and implementation of a FPGA-based hardware emulation of the original NES platform, released by Nintendo to US markets in 1985.