In the span of four days, Sam Budagher lost everything. He lost his Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship. He lost his position on the wrestling team. And he lost his maternal grandmother. That could have been the end of his college years at Purdue University. And it almost was. After all, he was only in his first year.

When Oliver Juarez found out he'd been accepted to Purdue University after applying to 15 colleges through a nonprofit program, he freaked out. The 18-year-old didn't just freak out because he got in. Juarez is the first in his family to go to college. And the first from his small Texas high school to attend Purdue.

Purdue saved Marek Gibson. "I was in a rough place," he said. "If I didn't have Purdue, I don't think I would have made it through that time as well as I did."

When Brenna Losch was growing up, her parents made it clear that they would not pay for college. So she knew she had to get good grades. After her parents divorced when Losch was in middle school, she made the difficult decision to live with her dad in Crown Point, Indiana, where she would have more opportunities to take advanced placement classes in high school.

For as long as she could remember, Alyssa Brewer wanted to go to Purdue University. Growing up in foster care near Fort Wayne, she wasn't sure that would ever be possible.

Among the Purdue faculty in Indianapolis is Chris Finch, site director of the Purdue Motorsports Engineering Program and professor of professional practice in the School of Mechanical Engineering. Professor Finch has a 30-year professional history in motorsports and got started even earlier than that — he’s been working on cars since he was eight years old. We sat down with him for a chat.

In this episode of "This Is Purdue," we're talking to Alex Psomas, assistant professor of computer science in Purdue University's College of Science and College of Engineering.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are everywhere in our lives. LIB application fields are even growing into military missions and advanced exploration, which require resistance to severe cold in the polar region of the Earth and in outer space. But even state-of-the-art LIBs suffer from huge performance degradation as temperatures decrease, and they stop operating at all in extreme cold.

The excitement today around neural engineering is palpable, holding the promise of developing personalized treatments for neurological disorders and more options for understudied and undertreated conditions. It's this combination of engineering and medicine that captivates Damen Wilson, a third-year MD/PhD student in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering.

In a matter of months, Purdue AI Racing took giant leaps to reach two major milestones: competing in "Tier 2" during the Indy Autonomous Challenge at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and recording a personal speed record of 159 mph!