Purdue researchers earn Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers


WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Five researchers at Purdue University received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) earlier this month. This award is given by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.
Class of 1939 Water Sculpture, Hovde Hall and the Purdue Bell Tower in the snow

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Five researchers at Purdue University received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) earlier this month. This award is given by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.

These researchers exemplify Purdue’s values of persistence and innovation. PECASE, given annually to select scientists and engineers, highlights the hard work, excellence and exemplary nature of Purdue’s research programs and personnel.

Rajamani Gounder

Rajamani Gounder joined Purdue in 2013 and was named the R. Norris and Eleanor Shreve Professor of Chemical Engineering in 2023. He has achieved seminal breakthroughs in catalysis and reaction engineering through the understanding and control of the structure of zeolite catalysts.

Zeolites are porous crystals with spaces in them created by a specific architecture of silicon, aluminum and oxygen atoms. Zeolite materials have enormous societal impact as catalysts, adsorbents and ion exchangers. They play major roles in providing clean air, clean water and lower energy usage and are key to future global sustainability and climate control.

Gounder earned the Early Career Award in Catalysis from the American Chemical Society Division of Catalysis Science and Technology, the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award, the National Science Foundation Early Career Award, and the prestigious and highly competitive Sloan Fellowship.

Joseph Lukens

Joseph Lukens received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and physics in 2011 from the University of Alabama and a PhD in electrical engineering from Purdue in 2015.

Lukens worked as a Wigner fellow and research scientist in the Quantum Information Science Section at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2015-22 and as senior director of quantum networking and research professor at Arizona State University from 2022-24. He is now an associate professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue.

His research interests encompass a variety of topics in photonic quantum information processing, optical networking and Bayesian inference.

David Purpura

David Purpura is a professor of human development and family science and the director of the Center for Early Learning , which is a research, practice and policy center focused on improving the lives of children from birth through the age of 8. His research focuses on how young children learn mathematics; cognitive and contextual factors that affect the acquisition of school-readiness skills; and the design, development and evaluation of early learning interventions and programs that support successful development.

Purpura and his research team have developed and disseminated 20 children’s picture books designed to enhance math and school-readiness skills. Purpura is a recipient of a Fulbright Global Scholar Award, which allowed him to develop international collaborations in his research.

He was awarded the Purdue Trailblazer Award for Outstanding Mid-Career Research and Scholarship in 2020, the Purdue College of Health and Human Sciences Early Career Research Achievement Award in 2017, and the Purdue Teaching for Tomorrow Award in 2015.

Kevin Solomon

Kevin Solomon is an adjunct professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue. His work focuses on the development of sustainable microbial processes to supply the energy, materials and medicines of tomorrow.

Solomon earned his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT, where he developed new tools to reprogram microbial metabolism for biochemical production and examined how cells respond to that intervention. His research and mentorship, at the intersection of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, were recognized with multiple awards, including a Lemelson Presidential Fellowship, an NSERC Julie Payette Award and a Science Education Leadership Award from SynBERC. 

Solomon’s research program combines both applied and fundamental approaches to better understand the design principles of metabolic flux and gene regulation in microbes, and expand the toolbox for synthetic biology. His research aims to harness these tools and principles to engineer microbes that can robustly adapt to their environment while performing new tasks as chemical factories, microbial computers and novel therapeutics.

Michelle Thompson

Michelle Thompson is an associate professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences in Purdue’s College of Science and an expert in the way rocks interact with and change due to their exposure to the vacuum of space — a phenomenon called “space weathering.” Using a combination of experimental techniques and returned sample analyses, she analyzes how planetary materials alter after their formation and how they change across time. Her results help scientists understand how water and minerals were distributed across the early solar system and where future exploration missions may be able to look for needed resources.

She was one of the first six people to study samples from the asteroid Bennu retrieved by OSIRIS-REx and has studied moon dust brought back from the Apollo 17 mission .

NASA awarded Thompson an Early Career Fellowship in 2017 .

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 107,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 58,000 at our main campus in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its comprehensive urban expansion, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at  https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives .

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