The COVID-19 pandemic has caused chaos for many students, removing any chance they had to gain work experience over the summer. The School of Mechanical Engineering saw this need and created the Summer Projects program, giving students the chance to perform meaningful research, and get some financial assistance along the way.

Aaron Afriat, an ME master's student under Prof. Steve Son, has received the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Abe M. Zarem Graduate Award for Distinguished Achievement. His paper proposes a new propulsion system for a Mars descent vehicle.

For Kevin G. McIver, a second-year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering, his hard work keeps paying off. Just last month, he was named a recipient of the 2020 ACM SIGHPC Computational and Data Science Fellowship. This fellowship is awarded to underrepresented minority graduate students to help increase diversity in research areas employing computational modeling and simulation. McIver's current research involves modeling and simulation of traumatic brain injuries.

The Internet of Things benefits everyone -- even farmers! That's why Purdue is part of a new $26 million Engineering Research Center to develop advanced agricultural technologies to address food, energy and water security challenges. David Cappelleri is a co-principal investigator.

Adranos Inc. began at Purdue's Zucrow Labs, researching solid rocket propellants under Prof. Steve Son. Now they've secured more than $1.1 million in contracts from the U.S. Army to adapt their propulsion system into potential hypersonic vehicles, traveling faster than Mach 4.

Which is better for the environment, paper or plastic? The answer isn't clear-cut, once you factor in the source materials, manufacturing, usage, and end-of-life processing. That's called "life cycle engineering," and Fu Zhao discusses it in this podcast about industrial sustainability.

In the field of autonomous vehicles, Purdue University researchers are making advancements every day in engineering, manufacturing, data science, and more. Thanks to a grant from leading mobility supplier DENSO, Purdue will soon be bringing these advancements into undergraduate classrooms.

3D printing enables engineers to customize the design of everything, even a heat sink designed to cool down computer processors. A team of Purdue ME students -- Soumya Bandyopadhyay, Julia Meyer, Adeline Naon, and Saeel Pai -- have designed an award-winning 3D printable heat sink inspired by shark skin, Formula 1 cars, and human lungs.

Systems like facial recognition have more than just technology barriers to overcome -- they also must address sociological and psychological issues in order to become useful. Neera Jain explains in her latest Forbes article.

Omnivis, a lab-in-a-smartphone created by Katie Clayton (PhD '17) to quickly diagnose cholera in Haiti, has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to develop the same technology for a rapid COVID-19 test.