Naomi Deneke earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 2017 from Prairie View A&M University, Houston, TX, and is a current PhD candidate in materials engineering at Purdue. As a researcher in the Illuminating Interfacial Mechanics Lab, she has developed an elastic adhesive with controllable adhesion through surface patterning via polymer thin film dewetting, investigated the effects of solid surface tension on soft materials due to stretching by axisymmetric indentation testing, and has constructed and programmed an adhesion testing device that performs indentation experiments. She completed a summer research and development internship at 3M, a chemical engineering internship at DuPont, and worked as a purchase product engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. At Purdue, she is funded as a George Washington Carver Fellow and is the outreach officer for the Materials Engineering Graduate Student Association. At Prairie View, she was named the Chemical Engineering Researcher of the Year in 2017. She holds memberships in the Adhesion Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and National Society of Black Engineers. Naomi’s future research will focus on translating fundamental adhesion science to practical haptics applications. As a professor, Naomi believes it is important to reassure students that they belong in an engineering classroom. She plans to use projects as assessments of understanding — as opposed to exams — so that potential is more easily identifiable.

Research Interests

Surface and Adhesion mechanics, Surface Modification