Faculty and staff accolades (August 2012)

College of Technology department heads Ragu Athinarayanan and Fatma Mili will attend the 2012 CIC Department Executive Officers (CIC-DEO) Seminar Oct. 11-13 in Chicago. They will have the opportunity to discuss critical issues and common challenges with colleagues and experts from other institutions. All expenses for the participants are covered by the Office of the Provost. Athinarayanan leads the Department of Technology Leadership & Innovation, and Mili heads the Department of Computer and Information Technology.

Gary Bertoline, dean of the College of Technology, received the 2012 Career Achievement Award from the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University (EHE) this spring. The Career Achievement Award honors EHE alumni who have proven records of career accomplishments and have made outstanding contributions to their professions. Read more.

Melissa Dark, the Furnas Professor of Technology and professor of computer and information technology, has been appointed faculty director for Purdue University's Innovation and COmmercialization Center (ICC). Purdue’s Innovation and Commercialization Center is a "one-stop shop" for Purdue faculty, staff and student inventors and provides assistance in areas such as professional mentoring, prototype development and market testing. In some cases, the ICC may provide first-year startup funding with capital donated by alumni entrepreneurs.

Danielle Gilbert, academic advisor for computer graphics technology and building construction management, received the Margaret Church Memorial Award during the 81st Literary Awards in the spring. Gilbert, who was pursuing a second bachelor's degree in 2011,  earned the award for best work of short fiction, titled "The Senior Prom."

Graduate student Jason St. John and Tom Hacker, assistant professor of computer and information technology, received the ASEE Computing and Information Technology Division Best Paper Award at the annual ASEE conference in San Antonio, Texas. The paper is titled "Developing Virtual Clusters for High Performance Computing Using Open Nebula." Open Nebula is a open source product used for data center virtualization.

Robert Herrick, Robert A. Hoffer Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering Technology, was named a fellow of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) this past summer. The fellow grade of membership is conferred on an ASEE member in recognition of outstanding contributions to engineering or engineering technology education for at least 10 years.

Rick Homkes, associate professor of computer and information technology at the Purdue College of Technology at Kokomo, has been elected secretary/treasurer for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education (ACM SIGITE). ACM SIGITE has over 400 members worldwide and helps drive curricular and accreditation standards of the computing discipline of information technology. The next SIGITE conference on IT Education and IT Research will be held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in October 2012. Homkes is also the author of a chapter on assessment in the book Service-Learning in the Computer and Information Sciences: Practical Applications in Engineering Education. The book, recently published by IEEE Wiley, was edited by Brian Nejmeh of Messiah College. The book features a number of models and case studies for service-learning, which is a means of integrating service to the community with learning by students. The book seeks to improve service-learning projects so that both student learning and community nonprofit organization computing is enhanced.

Vahid Motevalli, professor of mechanical engineering technology and advisor to the Purdue EcoCAR 2 team, was elected to the EcoCAR 2 Faculty Advisory Board during the second year of the three-year competition.

Because of an ongoing relationship with the Komen Tissue Bank and the Indiana University School of Medicine, John Springer, assistant professor of computer and information technology, has been appointed an adjunct associate professor in IU's Department of Surgery.

Two College of Technology faculty were recently recognized by the Boeing Company for exceptional performance. Mike Suckow, clinical associate professor of aviation technology, and Erin Bowen, assistant professor in the Department of Technology Leadership & Innovation, were nominated by Boeing program managers for their contributions toward development of the company’s Qatar Technical Training Institute proposal. The Purdue team leaders were cited for providing “leadership skills and efforts that contributed immeasurably to our success.”