Congratulations to Amy Marconnet, named the 2017 ASME Electronics and Photonics Packaging Division Woman Engineer of the Year! Amy studies metrology and heat transfer of nanomaterials, such as those that make up lithium-ion batteries.

It was combustion that lit the fire of Robert Vogt (BSME '74, MSME '76) while he was at Purdue, and eventually in the oil and gas industry. But after selling specialized technical equipment, he realized that sales was his true passion. He started a company called Midwest Pressure Systems, now marking 30 years of designing and manufacturing air and gas pressure booster systems. He says becoming an entrepreneur was a calculated risk, but with his engineering expertise, he had an upper hand in selling and servicing technical equipment to his customers.

Getting "all shook up" is just part of the job for Mark Baldwin (BSME '97), who is the Occupant Protection Lead Engineer for the Orion spacecraft at Lockheed Martin. Orion will take the next generation of NASA astronauts on future manned missions.

A new technique developed by Karthik Ramani uses machine learning to create 3-D shapes from 2-D images, and is even "hallucinate" to create new, never-before-seen shapes.

Hector Gomez, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has won the Gallagher Young Investigator Award at the recent meeting of the United States Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM) in Montreal.

Tractor trailers carry 80% of the goods in this country -- and use 25% of the fuel. Can autonomous vehicles reduce that amount? Purdue ME says yes... and so does the U.S. Department of Energy. They recently awarded a $5 million grant to study how next-generation technology can help reduce the amount of fuel used by our nation's fleets of large trucks.

Congratulations to Katie Mao and the Purdue IEEE ROV Team for their multiple awards at the recent Underwater ROV contest in Long Beach. Purdue Engineers: "Good Under Pressure."

Low-income families spend 3 times more of their income on energy than the average family. What's being done to reduce these costs? A Purdue team, including Jim Braun (director of the Center for High Performance Buildings) is working on a solution that reduces these energy costs, while also reducing the environmental footprint of multifamily buildings (which make up a quarter of all housing in the US).

Congratulations to Michael Bradney for his 1st place student paper at the 2017 Summer Biomechanics, Bioengineering, and Biotransport Conference (SB3C).

A team of Purdue engineers are designing and building a vehicle for Hyperloop, the new transportation system first proposed by SpaceX. For its upcoming competition, Purdue has joined forces with Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV), in a unique trans-Atlantic collaboration.