2025-2026 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.
Ryan Wans: For excellence as an undergraduate teaching assistant in ECE 30200, including through interaction with students and lecture material preparation.
Mekaeel Iqbal: For exceptional instructional impact and initiative, and for ensuring high quality learning and support for students in ECE 20001 while guiding and mentoring the UTA team.
Tabitha Hibbs: For serving as a critical resource in helping students learn the material in the Electromagnetics 1 (ECE 30411) course.
Emmanuel I Chang: For outstanding UTA peformance in ECE 27000 over two semesters, delivering engaged lab instruction, reliable adminstrative support, and consistently top-ranked, high-quality responses on Piazza.
Logan Orosco-Murphy: For his dedicated, hands-on approach and commitment to help students learn in ECE 36200.
Amit & Rashee Rohatgi Excellence in 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.
Michael Xianzhe Zhang: For his outstanding work on a research paper on using computer vision to provide real-time feedback on mobile phones to music students improving their postures, which has been published at HCI 2026 (International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction).
Arjun Gupte: For exemplary leadership and independence in research on intelligent computing systems.
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.
Celine Lu: For her consistent, dedicated, and outstanding service including with the ECE ambassadors program, the Purdue for Me events, and Family Day events.
Chelsie Rayl: For her consistent, dedicated, and outstanding service including with the ECE ambassadors program, the Purdue for Me events, and Family Day events.
Jash Pola: For outstanding service as an ECE ambassador and for fostering connections externally as an ambassador with Purdue’s Office of Professional Practice.
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.
High-fidelity, low-cost, plasma discharge tweeter speaker system: Sydney Belk, Nicholas Ganino, Yashar Nishaburi, Connor Powell
- For design excellence in the development of a high-fidelity, low-cost, plasma discharge tweeter speaker system.
AI-powered iOS application to detect parking spaces around Purdue: Giovanni de Geronimo, Ryan Jordan, Trent Seaman, Ryken Adams-Barnes
- For design excellence in the development of a crowdsourced, AI-powered iOS application that detects, maps, and assigns available parking spaces in real time around the Purdue campus.
Smart GPS collar for pet tracking: Matyas Kubon, Evelyn McCarthy, Julia Spihlman, Alex Valdes
- For design excellence in the development of a smart GPS collar for pet tracking while demonstrating excellent engineering practice and teamwork.
Central supervisor system for SES network: Neil Agrawal, Blas Aramburu, Hunter Biggs, Alyssa Brewer, Luis Diaz Granada, Chase Grimm, Anteo Jafari, Rochelle Xue
- For design excellence in the development of a central supervisor system for SES network systems, which monitors system health, enables quicker recovery, and enhances system availability.
Farnsworth Fusor system: Ali Afrose, Leon Engle, Christopher Campos, Carson Wright, Chinwendu Ayogu
- For design excellence in the development of the Farnsworth Fusor system to expand hands-on nuclear fusion education and research training.
Autonomous plant growing station: Alison McClow, Gunner Imel, Nicholas Saint, Ruth Oliva Rodriguez
- For design excellence in developing an autonomous plant growing station to address limited access to reliable, user-friendly food cultivation.