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.

You’ve got four teammates and a 3D printer, and one week to develop a brand-new product, develop a business plan, and present it to real-world judges. Could you do it? That’s the challenge presented to high schoolers during a course in Purdue University’s Summer College for High School Students.

In the high-stakes world of developing new cancer-fighting drugs, researchers face a daunting problem – most of the new formulas they create are not easily soluble by the human body. To tackle the problem of “hydrophobic drugs,” Purdue pharmacy researchers have joined forces with Purdue mechanical engineering researchers to develop a microfluidic device capable of encapsulating hydrophobic drugs in a controllable water-soluble coating at the nanoscale.

Nina Mahmoudian creates autonomous underwater vehicles. In light of the OceanGate Titanic submarine catastrophe, she explains why most deep ocean research is conducted with uncrewed vehicles.

There's a battle going on to create more efficient and environmentally friendly refrigeration and air-conditioning systems. But what if those systems are needed on an actual battlefield? The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has enlisted Purdue University researchers to explore refrigerants that are both sustainable, and safe to operate in combat conditions.

Amy Marconnet and Xiulin Ruan have developed a thermal regulating system for batteries and electronic devices, based on compressible graphene foam. Unlike current thermal systems which can only be "on" or "off," this system is continuously tunable to dial in the best temperature for every operating condition.

Greg Shaver doesn’t believe there should be a trade-off between protecting the air we breathe and achieving better engine efficiency of large vehicles on the road. Shaver, a mechanical engineering professor and director of Purdue’s Ray W. Herrick Laboratories, is part of a national effort researching the reduction of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and microscopic particle emissions and improving the efficiency of diesel engines on the road today.

Leaders from Purdue, federal government, and industry celebrated the opening of the Hypersonics and Applied Research Facility (HARF), a $41 million, 65,000-square-foot building at Zucrow Labs that is home to two cutting-edge wind tunnels – the only Mach 8 quiet wind tunnel in the world, and a hypersonic pulse (HYPULSE) reflected shock/expansion tunnel.

Purdue was well-represented at ITherm 2023, winning three paper awards and four poster awards. The Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems was held in Orlando, FL in June 2023.