David Ebert, the Silicon Valley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, has been appointed director of Discovery Park's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, effective Aug. 1. Ebert has served as interim director since November 2018.

A Purdue ECE team comprising faculty members Saurabh Bagchi, Milind Kulkarni, Felix Lin, and Xiaokang Qiu, has won a $1.25M award from the National Science Foundation to unlock the power of accelerator-based platforms to a broad group of programmers and scientists.

The Purdue College of Engineering is recognizing outstanding teaching from the Spring 2019 semester. These exemplary faculty, lecturers and other staff received teaching evaluation scores of 4.7 or higher in classes with enrollments of 10 or more, and 50% or higher response rates, based on student evaluations from courses taught in Engineering in spring 2019.

The field of topology or the study of how surfaces behave in different dimensions has profoundly influenced the current understanding of matter. The prime example is the topological insulator, which conducts electricity only on the surface while being completely insulating inside the bulk. Topological insulators behave like a metal, i.e., silver on the surface, but inside, it would behave like glass. These properties are defined using the conductivity or flow of electrons depicting whether there is a highway or a road-block for their motion. One major driver of future applications for topological insulators is in the field of spin-electronic devices since these electrons spin in unison, all aligned with each other while flowing on the surface.

Purdue ECE Prof. Charles A. Bouman is a founding member of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging journal, and Prof. Stanley H. Chan is currently an associate editor. The journal recently received its first journal impact factor (JIF) for the year 2018.

ECE Prof. Manfra, who is also the Bill and Dee O’Brian Chair Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a professor of materials engineering, is involved in a newly announced $37 million effort by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Science to study and advance the emerging field of quantum information science.

Prof. Zubin Jacob has been awarded a prestigious Director’s Fellowship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2017, Jacob won the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA). Now, Jacob has been selected for the highly competitive Director’s Fellowship. The award extends his YFA research for a third year.

Purdue ECE faculty member, Shreyas Sundaram, has joined the Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes (CRISP) as Associate Director. He succeeds Milind Kulkarni as Associate Director. Kulkarni has become the co-director of another center at Purdue called PurPL, based in ECE and Computer Science.

Anna Kristie graduated with her BSEE in 2013. She currently works as a Software Engineer at Ball Aerospace.

New infrared chemical imaging work involving research by BME Prof. Ji-Xin Cheng and ECE Prof. Ali Shakouri, the Mary Jo and Robert L. Kirk Director of the Birck Nanotechnology Center, aims to change the paradigm, allowing better microscopic studies of tissue to detect what is there and cut down on unnecessary surgeries.