A special honorary dinner was held for Professor Mysore Dayananda, Professor of Materials Engineering, Purdue University, in conjunction with the symposium �Multicomponent/Multi-Phase Diffusion.

MSE would like to welcome several new faculty members.

Our very own Karen Lynch has been given a TMS Scholarship Award in the Structural Materials Division. The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society will present Karen with her award with a complimentary trip to the annual TMS meeting.

Each year, the Purdue Student Engineering Foundation conducts a fundraising effort across our graduating seniors seeking pledges from those graduating to be collected at a later date. MSE's fundraising effort has continued to prove that just because Materials Engineering is small is no reason to count them out. For the third year in a row, MSE has achieved highest honors by winning both the Highest Average Pledge award and the Highest Percent Participation award.

Kendra Erk, senior in the School of Materials Engineering, recently was nominated to speak at the Undergraduate Student Speaking Contest, which was held during the Materials Science and Technology 2005 Conference and Exhibition in Pittsburgh, PA this fall.

Kendra Erk, senior in the School of Materials Engineering, recently was awarded an NSF Fellowship.

On January 4, 2006, Prof. Carol Handwerker was appointed to the 2006 National Materials Advisory Board (NMAB) by the Chair of the National Research Council .

The Paper titled, "Solidification Processing and Fracture Behavior of RuAl-Based Alloys," by our very own graduate student, Todd Reynolds, has been selected as a winner of a Ribbon Award. Ribbon Awards are given to the top 5% of manuscripts as selected by the organizers of each symposium.

T. R. Stratton, a graduate student in the School of Materials Engineering, was recently awarded a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Graduate Fellowship to support his work with Professor Jeffrey Youngblood.

There have been several recent promotions and awrads to faculty in MSE.