From the Dean: April 2018

Dear Purdue Engineering Community,

Next Monday the College of Engineering will host a dinner recognizing our engineering student-athletes, together with Mike Bobinski (VP and Director of Intercollegiate Athletics) and some of the coaches. We are very proud of our student-athletes. You have heard of the stories of Elijah Sindelar (football quarterback and ECE sophomore) and Dominique Oden (women’s basketball guard and CE sophomore), and there are many more. We also saw, two weeks ago, how a team of engineering students lead by Professor Eric Nauman in Mechanical Engineering worked around the clock for over 30 hours, and used rapid prototyping and composite material engineering to make a special elbow brace for Isaac Haas. Boilermaker engineering students excel in classrooms as well as outside!

The entrepreneurial spirit of our students, faculty and alumni has also been running high. Purdue Engineering has a long history of patent filing: 369 Engineering faculty/staff have filed at least one disclosure and Purdue’s all-time issued US patents include 727 patents from Engineering faculty/staff. In the past several years, 61 of the 100+ startups from Purdue were created by engineering faculty and students. Graduate and undergraduate students were included in 13 and 7 of these start-ups, respectively. 2017-18 winners of Forbes "30 under 30” include boilermakers such as Ian Hamilton (co-founder and CEO of Atlas Energy Systems LLC, BSMSE 2015, MSNE 2017), You Wu (founder of Pipeguard Robotics, BSME 2011), Anurag Garg (co-founder and CEO of Dattus, BSEE 2009, MSEE 2015), Lane Konkel (Lean Leader, General Electric, BSIE 2013) and Jessica Traver (co-founder and CEO of IntuiTap Medical, BSME 2014, MSME 2017). Entrepreneurs not only turn what they learned and discovered in a land-grant university to economic growth and job creation; they sometimes also sharpen fundamental research by bridging the theory-practice gaps. In collaboration with PRF, alumni and student groups, our College is launching a suite of programs to support entrepreneurs, including the (summer) Engineering X-celerator, the Silicon Valley Roadshow, and ecosystem building with Indianapolis partners such as Launch Fisher and IoT incubator. A flyer showing detail of all the programs will be distributed next month.

Last month we had Open Forums with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty about the long-term aspiration and near-term steps for the College. Faculty working groups have been working on specific topics too. This month we will have more Open Forums: https://engineering.purdue.edu/Engr/AboutUs/MeetDean/RASF Anonymous suggestion box is available to everyone: https://purdue.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_earXJefJvWdmppj. I am looking forward to hearing candid feedback and creative ideas from all of you. Thank you.

Mung

Mung Chiang
John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering
Purdue University