Purdue's Seed for Success Acorn Awards recognize research projects that were awarded external research funding of $1 million or more for a single proposal.

During a Nov. 19 ceremony, Purdue honored 231 researchers across 100 projects with the prestigious Seed for Success Acorn Awards.

The annual event recognizes research projects — and the Purdue principal investigators and co-investigators who lead them — that were awarded external research funding of $1 million or more for a single proposal. This year’s honorees included 74 first-time award recipients.

“It’s a significant milestone to be awarded $1 million in funding,” said Dan DeLaurentis, Purdue’s executive vice president for research. “Purdue’s robust and growing research is a testament to the innovation and impact of our researchers, as evidenced by Purdue’s rising number of transformative partnerships.”

In fiscal year 2025, Purdue’s research proposals reached a new record of $3.1 billion in submissions, up 5% from the previous year. Purdue also set a new research expenditure benchmark, spending a record of over $1 billion on research and development. Owing to strong award funding levels across all sources, overall research expenditures for fiscal 2025 rose 12% over the previous fiscal year and increased almost 40% over the past three years.

Purdue also signed 10 new or renewed master research agreements so far in 2025 alone, bringing the active roster to a record 63 agreements. Major research collaborations include critical fields such as defense and aerospace, pharmaceutical manufacturing, life sciences, semiconductors, and AI.

Below are projects that include faculty from the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Purdue ECE participants are marked in bold.

1. Saurabh Bagchi, Timothy Cason*, Somali Chaterji, Aravind Machiry, Shreyas Sundaram*. Collaborative Research: CPS: Frontier: CHORUS: Resilient Distributed CPS through Rational and Dynamic Decision-Making Among Multiple Stakeholders. National Science Foundation. $4,224,761.
2. Arnab Banerjee, Alexandra Boltasseva, Vladimir Shalaev, Pramey Upadhyaya. Uncovering Elusive Kitaev Topological States with Metasurfaces. W.M. Keck Foundation. $1,200,000.
3. Nikhilesh Chawla, Greg Buzzard, Hany Abdel-Khalik*, Charles Bouman. FuSe2 Topic 2: High Resolution Imaging of Defects in Semiconductors: Detection, Reliability, and Mitigation. National Science Foundation. $1,600,000.

4. Meng Cui, Takaki Komiyama.^^ Light Pipe Microscope for Ultra-Large-Scale Cellular-Resolution Whole-Neocortex Two-Photon Calcium Imaging of Mammalian Brains. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. $1,886,913.
5. Shengwang Du*. QuSeC-TAQS: Nanodiamond Quantum Sensing for Four-Dimensional Live-Cell Imaging. National Science Foundation. $1,634,839.
6. Vijay Gupta*, Mahsa Ghasemi*. Securing High-Density Urban Airspaces. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. $1,079,923.
7. Libai Huang, Hadiseh Alaeian*, Alexandra Boltasseva, Jonathan Hood, Tongcang Li, Vladimir Shalaev, Valentin Walther*. Quantum Photonic Integrated Design Center (QuPIDC). U.S. Department of Energy. $12,740,604.
8. Martin Byung-Guk Jun*, Inseok Hwang, Byunghoo Jung*. Battery Management System for Flight Range Optimization and Stability Enhancement of AAM Aircraft with Non-Intrusive Sensor Fusion and Battery Diagnosis. Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology. $1,811,624.
9. Martin Byung-Guk Jun*, Stephan Biller*, Sabine Brunswicker*, Hua Cai*, Gary Cheng, Inseok Hwang, Byunghoo Jung*, Chi Hwan Lee, Damon Lercel*, Ajay Malshe, Byung-Cheol Min, Shaoshuai Mou, Crystal Murray*, Brandon Pitts, Vilas Pol, Leon Robert*, Julia Sibley, Ganesh Subbarayan-Shastri, Justin Weibel, Wenzhuo Wu. Center of Operation and Research for Industrial Advancement (CORIA) at Purdue as one of the Global Industrial Technology Cooperation Center (GITCC) of KIAT. Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology. $1,815,000.
10. Younghyun Kim*. High-Fidelity and Trustworthy Teleinteraction Platform. National Research Foundation Korea. $1,008,189.
11. Haitong Li*, Anand Raghunathan, Peide Ye. FuSe2 Topic 1: Bridging Atomic Layers and Foundation Models: An Indium-Oxide-Based Versatile Neural Computing Platform. National Science Foundation. $1,754,245.
12. Dimitrios Peroulis. USNTPS Academic Curriculum Support Services. U.S. Department of the Navy. $9,171,952.
13. Anand Raghunathan, Sumeet Gupta, Vijay Raghunathan, Kaushik Roy. COCOSYS: Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems. Indiana Economic Development Corporation. $1,515,000.
14. Kaushik Roy, Sumeet Gupta, Anand Raghunathan. CHEETA: CMOS+MRAM Hardware for Energy-EfficienT AI. National Security Technology Accelerator. $25,989,760.
15. Justin A. Weibel, Fengqing Zhu. Machine learning Enabled Two-pHase flow metrologies, models, and Optimized DesignS (METHODS). Office of Naval Research (ONR) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program. $4,435,247.

A full list of award recipients is available at the Seed for Success Acorn Awards webpage.

Source: Purdue honors researchers with Seed for Success Acorn Awards