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.

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.