VIP mentor, Prof. Yeon-Ji “Kristen” Yun, leads an NSF funded project using AI to improve musical performance. Several VIP undergraduate students are working with her on the AI for Music (AIM) team.

The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program announced the VIP Spring 2023 Awards during the last week of April. These awards are our way to congratulate and thank the undergraduate students, graduate mentors, faculty and staff mentors for a successful year.

Along with their VIP mentors, Profs. Wei Zakharov and Yung-Hsiang Lu, VIP undergraduates publish article analyzing visual data from five countries and three U.S. states to evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown policies to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

VIP student, Meredith Clark, participates on the VIP MEP GoKart team and has been selected as a Pattie Grace Smith Fellow.

Carla B. Zoltowski, Assistant Professor of Engineering Practice in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been chosen to receive the 2023 IEEE Computer Society Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. The award honors outstanding contributions to undergraduate education through teaching and service, and for helping to maintain interest in the field and make a statement about the importance with which the IEEE Computer Society views undergraduate education. Zoltowski is being recognized “for leadership in developing applied multi-disciplinary team-learning opportunities for engineering students and for promoting professional development education, engineering ethics education and inclusive teaching and mentoring."

Long-time VIP mentor acknowledged for cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research.

Students across Purdue's College of Engineering, including the VIP Solar Sail team, are contributing to the largest solar sail project ever to be deployed. Solar sails have the potential to provide a new type of propulsion, one that uses no fuel, for many types of space missions.

Almost 500 research talks and posters sessions were delivered at the 2022 Spring Undergraduate Research Conference. The eHealth team in Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) received 1st place in Academic Unit Awards - Posters for the In-Person College of Engineering category, and SWARMS received 3rd place in Interdisciplinary Awards for Research Talks.

Robert Sego has been awarded the Department of Defense (DOD) Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship. Sego is a member of the Imaging Processing and Analysis team, and he credits the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program for helping him grow professionally and technically. Professors Ed Delp and Carla Zoltowski have been his VIP mentors for six semesters.

Isaiah Baptiste and Morgan Fuller took the national stage to tour their startups during Opportunity Hub's HBCU@SXSW pitch competition on March 11 at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. The mechanical engineering students have also been involved in the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program at Purdue University. Baptiste worked on an autonomous COVID-19 disinfecting robot, and Fuller has been an undergraduate teaching assistant for the MEP GoKart team.