When Scott Tingle (MSME '88) heads to the International Space Station in September 2017, he'll be bringing several items from Purdue, including a placard with the Purdue Engineering logo on one side, and on the other a helpful reminder: "Don't worry, I'm a Mechanical Engineer."

Several Purdue ME students and graduates were recognized at Noise-Con, the annual conference of the Institute of Noise Control Engineering, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Purdue Volleyball setter Ashley Evans has always excelled at both athletics and academics. She's a two-time Academic All-Big Ten honoree, and also won the All-American Strength and Conditioning Athlete of the Year Award in May 2016. But she works just as hard in the classroom. In this profile, she discusses why she chose mechanical engineering, and how hard work enables her to do *two* things that she loves.

The possibilities seem to be endless for microrobots (robots smaller than a millimeter), from medicine to manufacturing. But there are also plenty of challenges. Dave Cappelleri and his team at Purdue have already tackled one of these challenges -- how do you get something to move that is too small for a motor or a battery? Now they are tackling another: how can a microrobot use just the right amount of force to manipulate an individual cell? The answer lies in tracking them visually.

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Kevin Drummond, winner for Best Paper Award in the Emerging Technologies Track of this weekend's IEEE ITherm Conference in Las Vegas.

Congratulations to Purdue's Baja SAE team, returning from the collegiate championships in California. Despite a rollover accident in the 4-hour endurance race (no one was hurt), Purdue's team finished 36th out of 94 teams -- defeating schools from all over the US, Canada, Mexico, China, Korea, India, and Dubai. The competition also judged the design and cost of constructing the car, for which Purdue also finished in the top 25. It's a year-long process, requiring know-how in mechanical engineering, product design, fluid mechanics, material science, manufacturing, and economics. Students run the team, attract sponsors, validate the design work, manufacture nearly every single piece of the vehicle (except the engine and shocks), and test the vehicle for acceleration, durability, and safety. It gets engineers out of the classroom and into a real-world application of all they've learned at Purdue.

Imagine a Rubik's Cube-like device that could morph from a smartphone to a game controller. That's the idea behind Cubimorph, a concept jointly developed by the University of Bristol in England and Purdue's C Design Lab. Tiny touchscreen cubes, connected via custom-designed turntable hinges, allow the user to reconfigure their device, while all the tiny screens stay connected and coordinated. After the project was presented last week to the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Stockholm, Cubimorph received big media attention from Yahoo, Discovery News, CNet, Engadget, Gizmodo, and many others.

Purdue University graduate Jennifer Rumsey (BSME '96) is the VP and Chief Technical Officer for Cummins, Inc. -- a $19 billion global corporation best known for its diesel engines. In this alumni profile, she talks about her time at Purdue, the benefits of engineering knowledge in the boardroom, and why women should pursue mechanical engineering as a path to a rewarding career.

Purdue is well known for its graduate research programs, but thanks to a donation by Jim & Marilynn Dammon, undergraduates also have the opportunity to team up with a faculty member and pursue top-level research in mechanical engineering. The Bottomley Scholars (named after Marilynn's father, H. William Bottomley, a 1943 Purdue ME graduate) team up with a faculty member and pursue research projects in nanotechnology, rocket fuel, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and more. They presented their findings to the public at a recent poster show.

Julayne Moser, director of Graduate Studies in Purdue University's School of Mechanical Engineering, was elected to the board of directors of the American Society for Engineering Education.