James Jones, associate professor and associate head of mechanical engineering, is NAMEPA's Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award recipient, and the late Eric Furgason, professor of electrical engineering, was posthumously given the Legacy Faculty Award. NAMEPA also honored Purdue's Minority Engineering Program's (MEP) Academic Boot Camp program as its Retention Program Award recipient.

An avid supporter of diversity, equity and inclusion at Purdue, Jones serves as the main advisor for all African-American mechanical engineering students. He also was instrumental in preparing a successful proposal to the Office of the Provost at Purdue to enhance recruitment, enrollment, and retention of underrepresented minority (URM) students, faculty and staff, and to study factors affecting inclusiveness and success of URM students and faculty within mechanical engineering.

During his time at Purdue, Furgason helped more than 8,000 URM students while he accumulated over 17,000 small-group, student-contact hours for MEP. He also spent hundreds of hours advising students and organizing MEP activities. The NAMEPA Legacy Faculty Award, which Furgason was given posthumously, was established to annually honor a faculty member who has catalyzed change to help students from URM populations overcome historic barriers.

MEP's Academic Boot Camp (ABC) is the 2016 NAMEPA Retention Program Award recipient. ABC aligns with NAMEPA's mission to provide quality service, information, and tools to students. It has broadened URM student participation in engineering and STEM fields at Purdue. ABC has contributed to first-year retention for URMs, which has increased from 63 percent to 85 percent. For the 2015-16 academic year, the first-year URM retention rate exceeded the first-year retention rate for the majority in the total engineering cohort.