HIGH-LEVEL PHYSICS NEWS: Ivan Christov has been published in Physical Review Letters discussing "kink-antikink" interactions, where certain basic "topological defects" interact with each other. This provides valuable insights for material science, cosmology, and string theories.

Breanna Cappuccilli spent her spring in Texas, monitoring football players for risk of concussion. She received the Clare Boothe Luce Fellowship this year, and chose to work with Eric Nauman's Human Injury Research and Regenerative Technologies Lab (HIRRT) focusing on biomechanics.

Salvador Rojas worked his way up from being a janitor in California, to being a summer intern in engineering, to now being a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue's Programmable Structures Lab, under Prof. Andres Arrieta. Salvador wrote about his experience for the Los Angeles Times.

Valeria Andreoli, Ph.D. candidate at Purdue, has received the 2019 Howse, Ruffles, and Parker Award from Rolls-Royce, for the Best Doctorate Paper.

Check out this amazing story about Bob Ade (BSME '56), who has hand-made more than 15,000 kaleidoscopes!

Lithium ion batteries are everywhere: your phone, your computer, your car. Yet we still don't know a lot about how they work! Kejie Zhao and his team have been able to image these batteries in unprecedented detail, from the millimeter level all the way down to individual atoms.

In 1967, Honeywell supplied Purdue's Zucrow Labs the latest state-of-the-art data acquisition systems to study rockets and jet engines. 50 years later, the names are the same, but the technology has advanced exponentially! Now Purdue researchers can instantly analyze millions of data points per second, at the world's largest academic propulsion lab.

Congrats to two ME-affiliated teams of entrepreneurs, who won big at the International Business Model Competition in Utah! FlykeART (with Juan Ramirez) reimagines the airline serving cart, and Global Sign (with Heya Kaakeh) brings sign language interpretation to educational videos.

Few competitions encourage student learning like the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Collegiate Design Series. The Formula SAE (FSAE) competition challenges college students from all over the world to design and build a small racecar within one school year. The goal is to create an easily-reproducible, nonprofessional weekend autocross racecar prototype that costs about $30,000. The SAE’s various restrictions on the open wheel, open cockpit concept car are meant to inspire creativity among the teams. The best designs should be low cost, easily maintained, reliable, and -- of course -- fast.

Congratulations to Arezoo Ardekani, honored with an Early Career Research Award from Purdue Engineering! Prof. Ardekani studies complex fluid dynamics, such as microbes flowing through the human body, or plankton through the oceans.