New Graduate Student Spotlight: Bray Bonner

A Boilermaker Welcome! Bray Bonner joins us from Atlanta, Georgia. He has worked in academia for the last seven years serving as an engineering technology instructor and program director (department chair) at a technical college for four years. Currently, Bray is an IT project manager lead for Instructional Technology and Research, where he manages high performance computing (HPC) projects whose end users are national researchers, campus faculty and their students.

 

Bray Bonner

He earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, MS in (Business) Management, and MS in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech) and an MS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University.

Bray’s interests in engineering education are college student retention and career retention. “There are many K-12 programs and resources to help students enter the engineering pipeline.  However, attrition rates are high when these students matriculate through college and after entering the workplace.  I wish to research the causes and determine some remedies to the high attrition rates,” said Bray.

We asked, “What Purdue?”

The ENE research occurring at Purdue is fascinating and covers a wide range of topics.  The faculty, staff, and ENE students made themselves available to discuss ongoing ENE research or to answer any program questions I possessed. Purdue is also a premier research institution, so I decided Purdue was the university to pursue my PhD.