Gilbreth Fellowships offer 'great opportunity' for postdoctoral researchers
Engineering pioneer Dr. Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) continues to inspire engineers through Purdue Engineering’s Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. These fellowships are awarded in honor of Gilbreth, the first female engineering professor at Purdue (1935-1948) and a world-renowned engineer and psychologist whose work epitomized interdisciplinary research and its impact on industry and society.
The goal of Purdue’s Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is to attract and prepare outstanding individuals with recently awarded PhDs for a career in engineering academia through interdisciplinary research, training and professional development.
“As the first female faculty member at Purdue Engineering and the first female member of the National Academy of Engineering, Lillian Gilbreth leaves a tremendous legacy here and across the country,” executive vice president for strategic initiatives and the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering Mung Chiang said at the inaugural fellowship ceremony in 2018. “We are excited to celebrate this legacy through the establishment of the Lillian Gilbreth Fellowship, and to provide the intellectual freedom for these bright young minds to carry out top-caliber research across the boundaries of disciplines, in the spirit of Lillian Gilbreth’s own work.”
Four past and current Gilbreth Fellows share their stories.
Research skills and freedom
Caitlin R. Proctor, assistant professor in Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University, was a member of the inaugural Gilbreth Fellowship cohort in 2018. Proctor was chosen from hundreds of applicants from around the world after earning her PhD in Life Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology at Eidgenössische Technische (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland.
“The Gilbreth Fellowship offered me a great opportunity because I did my PhD abroad,” Proctor said. “I had to become reacquainted with the American system for funding and research and how it's done here. I was able to come back to the U.S. and learn some of those skills, including grant writing. And I was also able to take advantage of Purdue's many professional development opportunities.”
For the fellowship, Proctor joined a drinking water and materials research project with Andrew Whelton, professor of Civil Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering; John Howarter, associate professor of Materials Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering; and J. Paul Robinson, the SVM Professor of Basic Medical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. Proctor also mentored undergraduate and graduate students and sat on several graduate committees.
Proctor appreciated the research freedom she had during her Gilbreth Fellowship.
“I was able to apply for a number of grants and I'm still working on some of those research questions,” she said. “I'm working on the COVID-19 questions we have about stagnation in buildings, and we have an entire setup in the hydraulics laboratory of Hampton Hall, where we're continuing to test some hypotheses.”
She also took advantage of professional development opportunities.
“During my post-doc, I was able to participate in many Purdue programs, including a valuable hands-on teaching workshop with external speakers,” Proctor said. “I was also able to travel to both international and national conferences, which helped me form connections and develop my faculty package.
“My fellowship really taught me that I loved academia, so I was able to have the freedom to work on different research projects to get involved with disaster response in those research projects and also work directly with graduate students on new problems that expanded my horizons."
Collaboration, independence and peer review
Jeffrey S. Lowe, also a member of the 2018 fellowship cohort, is an electrochemist at General Motors. Lowe earned his PhD from the University of Michigan. During his postdoctoral fellowship he worked with Jeff Greeley, professor of Chemical Engineering, and Christina Li, assistant professor of Chemistry, on research to develop a combined computational/experimental approach to develop structure-property relationships for electrocatalysts.
In his research, Lowe showed how a metal that is underexplored in catalysis, indium, may be promising for an important set of reactions in renewable energy. For example, he demonstrated how indium oxyhydroxide can be used to remove carbon monoxide contaminants in fuel cells, a longstanding challenge in renewable energy research. Potential future directions from his work are to consider indium-containing catalysts for other types of reactions, such as the renewable production of hydrogen.
“Having the Gilbreth Fellowship enabled me to collaborate across departments, since the intent of the Gilbreth Fellowship is to be interdisciplinary in nature,” Lowe explained. “In my specific instance, I was able to collaborate in chemical engineering and in chemistry, which made my projects more impactful.”
Besides the collaboration, Lowe expanded his expertise by working more independently on research projects than he did during his PhD.
“(The fellowship) really enabled me to develop my skills in the area of fuel cells and electrocatalysis, which are distinct from what I did during my PhD when I focused on next generation batteries,” he said. “In my position at GM, I'm able to develop unique strategies in this area based on my related experience at Purdue.”
As part of the Gilbreth Fellowship cohort, Lowe and the other fellows met approximately weekly prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which enabled them to get together and write.
“It was beneficial to be there as a cohort because we could also do some peer review for the various writings that we were working on,” he said.
Lowe is enthusiastic about the Gilbreth Fellowship.
“It's a great program, and I’m so happy to be a part of it,” he said.
Mentoring with multiple advisors
Ke Ma, a 2019 fellowship awardee, is continuing her postdoctoral research work in Letian Dou's lab in Purdue’s Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. She earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“My Gilbreth Fellowship research is focused on our device fabrication of solar cells, understanding the fundamental knowledge about them and trying to improve it,” Ma said.
Specifically, Ma studies the semiconducting material called perovskite, an emerging, promising material for future solar cell devices. Perovskite materials are used in solar cell devices as an alternative to expensive silicon crystals, because they can be manufactured at lower cost and using less energy. Her research uses combination of perovskite and organic semiconductors to solve the charge transfer and stability issue at the junction between two materials in perovskite solar cells and to construct efficient, stable next-generation solar cell devices. She hopes to market and commercialize the perovskite solar cells, and the fellowship has helped her advance this research.
“The Gilbreth Fellowship has allowed me to have multiple advisors from chemical engineering and also from chemistry,” Ma said. “They provided the advices and suggestions from all different disciplines that allowed me to advance my technology and the knowledge in my research project.”
Ma said that the fellowship offered her opportunities to diversity her research experience and learn different lab management styles from different professors.
“That's definitely a help for me as an independent researcher in the future,” she said.
She also appreciated the opportunity to present her research at the 2021 Virtual MRS Spring Meeting “because of this opportunity through the fellowship, more people are noticing the importance of organic semiconducting interlayer in building stable and efficient perovskite solar cells. This joint effort allowed our group to be selected for an award by the Department of Energy.”
Interdisciplinary collaboration and career path
Melinda A. Lake was named a Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019, and is continuing her fellowship research with her advisors, Jacqueline Linnes, Marta E. Gross Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Steven Wereley, Professor of Mechanical Engineering; and Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, Marta E. Gross Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering; all at Purdue University. Lake earned her PhD from Ohio State University.
“For my Gilbreth Fellowship Research, I developed microfluidic devices for point-of-care diagnostics of diseases such as malaria and HIV in blood and detection of Vibrio cholerae, which causes cholera, in water,” Lake said. “The devices are intended to help eradicate these diseases someday by improving diagnostic tools.”
Lake appreciated the Fellowship’s emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration.
“As a mechanical engineer, I work on teams of biologists and biomedical engineers so that we can develop this technology to be scalable,” she said. “Through the Gilbreth Fellowship, I have developed as a researcher because of the interdisciplinary collaboration to build my devices to be compatible with the biology that the biologists and biomedical engineers develop.”
In terms of professional development, in August 2019 Lake presented her PhD work at the Africa International Biotechnology & Biomedical Conference (AIBBC) in Mombasa, Kenya. In October 2021, she presented a poster on her HIV diagnostics project at MicroTAS 2021 in Palm Springs, California, and also attended the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) 2021 conference to present at the Meet the Faculty Candidate poster session in Orlando, Florida.
Having the fellowship helped Lake know what she wants to do in her career.
“The Gilbreth Fellowship helped clarify my path, and I'm currently seeking to become a tenure track assistant professor," she said.
The fellowship also helped Lake realize that she wants to develop her future lab to build translatable, scalable technology to help people.
“With the tools that I'm developing, manufacturers could produce them in bulk and distribute them to populations that need them,” she said. “We could have these point-of-care devices tested in the field or used in hospitals and directly impact patients and improve their quality of life.”