Purdue ECE honors outstanding undergraduates with 2026 excellence awards
Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is recognizing undergraduate students whose work strengthens every part of the school’s mission, from teaching and research to service and design.
The annual ECE Undergraduate Excellence Awards celebrate students who serve as undergraduate teaching assistants, contribute to research, lead and volunteer across the school, and complete innovative design projects that apply classroom learning to real-world challenges. The awards also recognize ECE students who have earned notable external honors.
Dave & Marsha Meyer Undergraduate Teaching Awards
Undergraduate teaching assistants are a vital part of Purdue ECE’s teaching mission. Each year, hundreds of undergraduate students support ECE courses by holding office hours, assisting in labs, helping with course materials and ensuring students have the resources they need to succeed.
The Dave & Marsha Meyer Undergraduate Teaching Awards honor outstanding UTAs who demonstrate exceptional performance and go above and beyond in support of student learning.
The 2026 recipients are:
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 Electromagnetics 1, ECE 30411.
Emmanuel I. Chang, for outstanding UTA performance in ECE 27000 over two semesters, delivering engaged lab instruction, reliable administrative support and consistently top-ranked, high-quality responses on Piazza.
Logan Orosco-Murphy, for his dedicated, hands-on approach and commitment to helping students learn in ECE 36200.
Amit & Rashee Rohatgi Excellence in Undergraduate Research Awards
As home to one of the largest research programs at Purdue, ECE provides undergraduates with opportunities to contribute to work that advances technology and addresses real-world challenges. Undergraduate researchers help design and conduct experiments, develop new systems, write papers and contribute to Purdue’s nationally recognized research enterprise.
The Amit & Rashee Rohatgi Excellence in Undergraduate Research Awards recognize outstanding undergraduate researchers for their creativity, independence and achievement.
The 2026 recipients are:
Michael Xianzhe Zhang, for his outstanding work on a research paper about using computer vision to provide real-time feedback on mobile phones to help music students improve their posture. The paper has been published at HCI 2026, the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
Arjun Gupte, for exemplary leadership and independence in research on intelligent computing systems.
Undergraduate Service Awards
Purdue ECE undergraduates help build community through mentoring, outreach, events, student organizations and volunteer service. Their work supports prospective students, current students, families and the broader ECE community.
The Undergraduate Service Awards recognize students who have made meaningful and sustained contributions to the school.
The 2026 recipients are:
Celine Lu, for her consistent, dedicated and outstanding service, including with the ECE Ambassadors program, Purdue for Me events and Family Day events.
Chelsie Rayl, for her consistent, dedicated and outstanding service, including with the ECE Ambassadors program, Purdue for Me events and Family Day events.
Jash Pola, for outstanding service as an ECE ambassador and for fostering external connections as an ambassador with Purdue’s Office of Professional Practice.
Undergraduate Design Awards
Undergraduate design projects give students the opportunity to apply their technical knowledge to open-ended engineering challenges. Through these projects, students develop hands-on experience, strengthen communication and teamwork skills, and create solutions with practical impact.
The Undergraduate Design Awards honor teams that demonstrated excellence in design, implementation and engineering practice.
The 2026 award-winning teams are:
Sydney Belk, Nicholas Ganino, Yashar Nishaburi and Connor Powell, for design excellence in the development of a high-fidelity, low-cost, plasma discharge tweeter speaker system.
Ryken Adams-Barnes, Giovanni De Geronimo, Ryan Jordan and Trent Seaman, 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.
Matyas Kubon, Evelyn McCarthy, Julia Spihlman and Alex Valdes, for design excellence in the development of a smart GPS collar for pet tracking while demonstrating excellent engineering practice and teamwork.
Neil Agrawal, Blas Aramburu, Hunter Biggs, Alyssa Brewer, Luis Diaz Granados, Chase Grimm, Anteo Jafari and 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.
Ali Afrose, Leon Engle, Christopher Campos, Carson Wright and Chinwendu Ayogu, for design excellence in the development of the Farnsworth Fusor system to expand hands-on nuclear fusion education and research training.
Alison McClow, Gunner Imel, Nicholas Saint and Ruth Olvia Rodriguez, for design excellence in developing an autonomous plant-growing station to address limited access to reliable, user-friendly food cultivation.
External Awards
Purdue ECE also congratulates students who earned external recognition for their academic achievement, leadership and promise.
Arjun Gupte was selected as a 2025 Astronaut Scholar by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.
Amber Lu was selected as a recipient of the 2025-26 IEEE PES Scholarship Program.
Photos of the event can be found here.