Neera Jain (left) receives the Violet Haas Memorial Fellowship at a reception on December 7, 2021. Patricia Davies (right), fellow ME faculty, was a recipient of the 2019 Violet Haas Award.

Jain is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering and a faculty member in the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories at Purdue University. She directs the Jain Research Laboratory whose vision is to advance technologies that will have a lasting impact on society through a systems-based approach grounded in dynamic modeling and control theory. Dr. Jain earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and 2013, respectively. She earned her S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006.

The award, given out annually by the Butler Center, is named for Violet Haas, an electrical engineering professor from 1962 to 1986, who was instrumental in the early development of the Purdue chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. The fellowship is to support the science and engineering careers of junior female faculty with children.