John Bernardin (MSME '93, Ph.D. '96) may have looked like a headbanger in his Purdue yearbook photo, but today he's a rock star of a different kind: a 26-year veteran research engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who helped to build instruments for two different Mars rovers.

Chi Hwan Lee has developed a smart contact lens that can detect intraocular pressure changes to help diagnose glaucoma.

When you watch a space launch, what you might not see is the thousands of people who work behind-the-scenes, sometimes for years, to make that mission a success. NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, is just such a place – where thousands of workers develop the power, propulsion, and communications technologies that enable the newest cutting-edge aircraft and spacecraft to succeed. Purdue alum James “Jimmy” Kenyon (MSE ’98) was recently appointed Director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center, and discusses how being a Boilermaker has helped him support some of the best researchers in the world.

Issam Mudawar's Flow Boiling and Condensation Experiment (FBCE) has been collecting data on the space station since August 2021. Now part 2 of the experiment is launching to ISS, investigating how condensation works in a reduced-gravity environment.

Xiulin Ruan has received the 2023 Brillouin Medal, given to honor a specific seminal contribution in the field of phononics. This highlights Ruan's groundbreaking work on four-phonon scattering.

Biological creatures have thousands of muscles that help them to move effortlessly. Duplicating that in a robot would require numerous actuators, wires, and other machinery. Purdue University researchers have borrowed technology from pixel-based displays to create flexible, paper-thin surfaces that can morph into detailed 3D shapes without bulky infrastructure.

Issam Mudawar has worked in many aspects of heat and mass transfer, from cooling spacecraft to electric vehicle charging cables. His decades of work have recently been recognized in several international metrics as being one of the most highly-cited researchers in the field.

In the world of heat and mass transfer, Purdue University is an acknowledged leader. Distinguished Professor Emeritus Suresh Garimella has reached a milestone that puts that influence into hard numbers: achieving an h-index of 100.

It’s been two decades since the first intrepid cohort of Purdue students traveled to Karlsruhe, Germany to inaugurate GEARE, Purdue’s groundbreaking global engineering and work experience program. Since then, nearly 1,000 Purdue students have participated in this unique combination of study abroad and work abroad.

In May 2023, many of these students and professors returned to Karlsruhe for a 20th anniversary reunion: sharing stories about renegade carousels, Formula 1 road trips, and how the percentage of Purdue ME students studying abroad increased from 1% to 40%.

Nina Mahmoudian has built marine vehicles capable of autonomously exploring the seas for months at a time. But there’s only one way to truly test them – by actually exploring the seas! Mahmoudian has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to spend five months in Portugal researching autonomous marine exploration.