United States Army Lieutenant Madeline Lenkart — a master’s student in the Purdue Engineering School of Industrial Engineering and a Purdue Military Institute Research Fellow — is working on creating a circular space economy.

Solving a Rubik's Cube is a challenge for most people. For a team of students from Purdue University's Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it became an opportunity to redefine the limits of speed, precision and automation and officially make history.

A new business buzzword is supply chain resilience. Hazel He is tackling this challenge head-on as a PhD student in the Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering.

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."

For Brenna Losch, Figuring out her specific engineering major was a challenge. During her first year at Purdue, she changed her intended engineering major multiple times. She eventually learned about industrial engineering at an information session, drawn to the field's focus on finding efficiencies and reducing waste.

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.