Congratulations to Fabio Semperlotti, awarded the DARPA Young Faculty Award for 2019, recognizing academic scientists who contribute to national security. Fabio builds computer simulations of hypersonic vehicles (traveling faster than Mach 5).

Patents. Trademarks. Copyrights. Trade secrets. Do engineers really need to know all these legal terms before entering the workplace? Purdue says yes, offering a class devoted to intellectual property, specifically for engineers.

Salvador Rojas worked his way up from being a janitor, to being a summer intern in engineering, to now being a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue's Programmable Structures Lab, under Prof. Andres Arrieta. Celebrate his story, and many others, during First Generation College Awareness Week.

Jet engines are obviously noisy machines. But Nicole Key has developed a method of "listening" for a specific vibration to catch premature blade failure in gas turbine engines.

"Humans are good at seeing nuance in a situation that automation can't," says Neera Jain, a Purdue ME professor who studies human–machine interaction.

Purdue University engineers have studied energetic materials (explosives, propellants and pyrotechnics) for many years. Now, for the first time ever, they have used high speed x-rays to look inside these energetic materials during an actual explosion, to determine exactly what causes them to react.

Energy companies have invested a lot in the potential of creating fuel from biomass, the leftover plant material from harvesting corn and other crops. But there's an unexpected problem -- moving the stuff through a pipe.

How can we get humans and robots to most efficiently collaborate? Karthik Ramani's C Design Lab has developed a system where humans perform an action, which can then be duplicated by an augmented reality "ghost."

Taylor Allred, a Ph.D. student under research associate professor Justin Weibel, has won the Nasser Grayeli Best Student Poster Award at InterPACK, the International Technical Conference and Exhibition on Packaging and Integration of Electronic and Photonic Microsystems, in Anaheim, CA.

Trevor Bird, a Ph.D. student under assistant professor Neera Jain, has won the Best Paper Award from the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee at the Dynamic Systems and Control Conference.