This year's awardees: Hailey Benfield - The Rachel Carson award, Delaney Partridge - The Wangari Maathai award, Nikki Zavodny - The Gaylord Nelson award. Though the three individuals for whom these awards were named were not Boilermakers, they had deep character and took giant leaps to protect the environment. The hope is that the recipients of these awards will embody some of the characteristics and passion of those for whom they are named.

"I feel incredibly fortunate to teach, inspire, and collaborate with our talented EEE students every day. EEE 472, Community-Engaged Engineering Design, holds my proudest moments as an educator. I'm not only proud of the curriculum and community-engaged experience I created for my students, but the growth I get to see in them. This is often their first opportunity to "own" a real-world engineering problem and thoughtfully collaborate with communities to address it. They continue to impress me more and more every year with their growth in this space." - Lindsey Payne

Congrats to Lindsey Payne (EEE), Marisol Sepulveda (FNR), and George Zhou (EEE/CE) for receiving funding from Indiana Water Resources Research Center and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). These three Purdue professors are researching "Bioaccumulation and Biosorption of PFAS and their precursors in the environment." They hope to involve women, minorities, and undergraduate students to deliver new PFAS detection methods to USGS.

This Spring, graduate staff members Tripta Bhattacharjee, Chris Copeland, and Kendrick Hardaway, and EEE staff members Michelle Indarjit, and Tammi Thayer received Employee Recognition Awards as part of the University’s employee recognition and retention efforts.

An interdisciplinary team of Purdue engineering students, led by associate professor Zhi (George) Zhou, is one of the top 15 teams among 225 teams in the country selected as finalists in the EnergyTech University Prize 2024 competition. These teams have been awarded $3,000 for their business plans and will advance to compete in the National Pitch Event this April at the Energy Thought Summit in Austin, Texas.

Congrats to Rebecca Ciez on receiving a 2023 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award! She was awarded $50,000 from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for her team’s project: “Plastic Waste to DAC: A Study of the Chemical and Lifecycle Feasibility of Converting Polyolefin Waste to Aminopolymers for Direct Air Capture.”

“I am grateful to have this support for my dissertation research. The EREF Scholarship affords me the opportunity to connect with EREF staff, companies, and industry professionals, enhancing and furthering my circular economy industrial waste research.” -Taymee Brandon

Urban Computes: Toward an Emerging Integrative Urban Computing Expedition, led by Daniel Aliaga (associate professor of Purdue Computer Science) and co-investigated by Brady Hardiman (associate professor of Purdue EEE and Purdue FNR), Professor Melba Crawford (Nancy Uridil and Frank Bossu Distinguished Professor in Civil Engineering and Purdue EEE courtesy professor), has been selected as a fall 2023 SPARK grant recipient. SPARK supports teams with up to $100,000 for critical development activities linked to external grant proposals of $7 million or more.

Chip Blatchley, Rebecca Ciez, Brady Hardiman, John Howarter, John Mulrow, Larry Nies, Lindsey Payne, Andrew Whelton, and George Zhou were named Outstanding Engineering Teachers based on their student course evaluations for Fall 2023.

Congratulations to Nadya Zyaykina (Purdue EEE Lab Manager) for receiving a Bravo+ Award from Purdue University! Derived from the Bravo Awards program established in 2013, Bravo+ honors the excellence found across all university areas and job functions by recognizing extraordinary employee achievements at every scale.