 I'm Mark Lundstrom. I'm the acting dean of the College of Engineering this year, and before we recognize these three outstanding alumni, I'd like to update you about what's happening in the college during these incredible times. First of all, let me say a few words about what it's like to be on campus in fall 2020. Our campus is open, and believe it or not, we set a record for enrollment this semester. Most of our courses are offered in a hybrid mode with much of the content available online and face-to-face sessions in a de-densified setting for questions and answers and working problems, etc. Our faculty and staff have really risen to the challenge, restructuring our courses and labs for this new reality on campus, and offering at the same time a set of fully online courses. The spring semester looks to be very similar, but we're hoping that fall 2021 will be more nearly normal. What is remarkable is that in the midst of all this, the work of the college continues, not only continues, but is gaining momentum. I was recently asked to prepare a one-page summary of the College of Engineering. I knew that we were a big part of campus. Some call us the 800-pound gorilla, but after doing this summary, I've concluded that we're more like a thousand-pound gorilla. So let me read you some of these numbers. We now have more than 10,000 undergraduate students registered in the College of Engineering. That's 28 percent of produced total. We're almost five years ahead of the growth plan for enrollments. 20 percent of our students are online this year, as I mentioned. To address this year's challenges, we're partnering with the College of Science to put the entire first-year engineering program available online. Since 2013, enrollment in the college has grown 26 percent compared to the overall university growth of 14 percent. Undergraduate student to faculty ratio in the college is 23. That's the highest of any college on campus. 30 percent of engineering students are Indiana residents. We have a record number of Indiana residents this year. 70 percent of our students come from outside the state of Indiana, either from the U.S. or international. More than 70 percent of our students now have experiential learning experiences. Outside the classroom, such as study away, study abroad, research experiences, 97 percent of our students are placed within six months of graduation with a starting salary of over $70,000. The Gateway Complex, two buildings with 255,000 square feet of space shared with the Purdue Polytechnic Institute, will enhance the experience of engineering students and transform the experience of our first-year students. This is the first building designed for the post-COVID era. Research continues to grow. About one month ago, the National Science Foundation announced four new engineering research centers, and Purdue plays a major part in two of those four. The IoT for Ag Engineering Research Center is a partnership with the College of Agriculture that combines planable sensors, data processing, and cloud computing with robotics for precision agriculture. The second center, Aspire, focuses on developing new infrastructure that facilitates the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. Last year, we had 13 engineering-related startups. That was 60 percent of Purdue's 2019 total. And we recently launched the John Martinson Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship to support faculty and staff, student entrepreneurs, to build on our number three ranking for university startups. Last year, we generated 112 U.S. patents. That's over 60 percent of all patents from Purdue. Now, you all are some of the more than 100,000 living alumni of this college. That's almost 20 percent of all of Purdue's alumni. And you've accounted for 45 percent of all of the donations to the university. In the last campaign, we were the first college of engineering anywhere to raise more than $1 billion in a single campaign. The College of Engineering raised more than $17 million on the recent day of giving. That was the largest of any college in the universe. So we're the nation's largest program in the top 10. We're the sixth largest in terms of faculty. We're the fourth largest in terms of enrollment. We're the fifth largest in terms of research expenditures. And we are the third largest in terms of degrees granted. So as I said, engineering really is a thousand-pound gorilla. Engineering excellence at scale provides our students with a world-class affordable education and supports our mission of service and economic development and improving the quality of life for the citizens of Indiana, the United States, and the world. With 20 percent of Purdue's faculty, we teach 30 percent of its undergraduates, 40 percent of its graduate students, produce 60 percent of the startups, and over 60 percent of the patents. The College of Engineering truly is an example of excellence at scale. But we're dealing with some challenges too. Growth and undergraduate enrollments has been so fast that we have not been able to grow the faculty and the staff quickly enough to catch up. We now have 1,000 first-generation engineering students and need to provide them with the kind of support and resources that they need to be successful at the same rate as our other students. As a first-generation student myself, who grew up in a small rural community, I appreciate how an education at a land-grant university can change people's lives. But we're not providing that opportunity to all of our citizens. The percentage of black students in the college has not changed in decades. We must do better. There is a university-wide task force looking into how we can address this long-standing challenge. It is led by Don Thompson, an engineering alumnus and member of the Board of Trustees. I'm leading a College of Engineering task force, looking specifically at what we should be doing in the college. Both task forces will report their recommendations and conclusions by the end of the semester, but one thing is clear right now. More resources will make a huge difference. We have wonderful programs that prepare students to be successful at Purdue, but we can only offer them to a few students. We have an urgent need for more scholarships. This year, we had only 27 new black students join the college. That's the same number that we had in 1975 when the National Society for Black Engineers was formed. We believe that if we had adequate scholarship support, that number could have been 100. We all know that Purdue Engineering is a global leader and has been for decades, but today we are at an inflection point with the rapid growth, stressing the college, the pandemic, resetting student expectations, and the declining demographics as we look to the future. Sitting on our laurels would be dangerous. We must separate ourselves from the path and join that elite group of universities at the pinnacle of excellence. Doing so will position Purdue, the College of Engineering choice for students across the US and across the world, the place to be for graduate students and faculty, and the partner of choice for companies everywhere. It will shift economic development into high gear. Achieving this pinnacle of excellence will ensure the long-term success of Purdue Engineering for all of its stakeholders. I hope this gives you some sense of what's happening in the college. Although you have graduated, you haven't left Purdue. You are an important part of the College of Engineering. When you do great things, it reflects on the value of a Purdue Engineering degree. When you bring your experience, expertise, and passion back and engage with students, faculty, and the leadership of the college, you make us a stronger college. Today, we will recognize three outstanding alumni with the Young Alumni Award, the Innovator Award, and the Loyalty Award. To kick off this portion of the event, let me introduce Kevin Metrocavige, an Arrow grad from 1996 and Engineering Alumni Association Board President. Thank you, Dr. Lundstrom, for the introduction, and thanks to all of you at home for tuning in to the 2020 Purdue for Life Engineering update. I know we're all living in unprecedented times, but I'm grateful we are able to take a break from our busy lives to hear about our alma mater and to recognize some extraordinary alumni. I graduated from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1996. Now, as an alumnus, I have the pleasure of staying connected with the college and serving as the president for the Engineering Alumni Association Board of Directors where I have served as a board member for the last four years. This experience has allowed me to stay engaged with the College of Engineering, its students, and other alumni. The connection with your alma mater does not end with graduation. Purdue for Life encompasses alumni lifetime learning and engagement programs like the Engineering Alumni Association. The Engineering Alumni Association's goal is to generate and maintain a lifelong passion than all Purdue Engineering alumni by providing enriched alumni connections, being a strong advocate for the Dean of Engineering's key initiatives, and inspiring the next generation of Purdue engineers. The Engineering Alumni Association is proud to announce that we have successfully established the Engineering Alumni Association Scholarship through the generosity of our fellow alumni and friends. We have also awarded the scholarship to its first recipient, Hayden Schultz, an electrical engineering student with hopes of pursuing a career in the aerospace industry. Now more than ever, we take pride in knowing we are able to support students pursue their dreams of pre-gumming a Purdue engineer for life. We are also happy to recognize our outstanding alumni for their personal and professional accomplishments. Alumni serve a vital role within the University by being our biggest cheerleaders through networking, feedback, advocacy, and volunteerism. You are a reflection of our past, representation of our present, and a link to our future. The alumni awards were designed to recognize alumni for their professional and philanthropic achievements, and today we are here to formally congratulate three alumni on behalf of the College of Engineering. Thank you all for being a part of a great tradition of recognizing our alumni. Our first award is the Young Alumni Award, which recognizes a graduate of Purdue's College of Engineering who is 35 years old or younger and has achieved significant rapid advancement in his or her chosen field. This year's Young Alumni Award recipient is Jessica Traver Ingram. While at Purdue University, Jessica led a variety of research projects, ranging from sports injury and concussion prevention to customizable prosthetic and exoskeleton design. For her master's thesis, Jessica designed a product development framework that could be implemented in institutions, hospitals, and private companies, enabling teams to successfully innovate in healthcare. This research helped her build out the highly coveted TMC Biodesign Innovation Fellowship, where she worked on a multidisciplinary team to identify pain points in the healthcare system and develop novel solutions utilizing design thinking and value innovation framework to design competitive products. After graduation, Jessica co-founded the startup Intuitap, blending expertise and passion in product development and business strategy with a strong technical background in mechanical engineering. There, she has been successfully leading the creation of a device that helps physicians more accurately and efficiently, performs spinal punctures for epidurals, drug delivery, pain management, and diagnostic purposes. Her innovative work recently landed her a spot on the esteemed Forbes 30 under 30 list. Jessica holds both a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Purdue. The College of Engineering is proud to present the Young Alumni Award to Jessica Traver Ingram. I want to start off by saying thank you so much to the Engineering Alumni Association for honoring me with the Distinguished Young Alumni Award. This is such an incredible recognition. I'm honored and I'm humbled to have received it. I also of course want to thank my parents for always telling me that I can do anything and be anything if I just apply myself and for encouraging me to take risks and letting me know that it's okay to fail and stumble as long as I learn from my experiences and continue to move forward. And of course I want to say thank you to my incredible husband who's also a Purdue engineering grad boiler up for always being so supportive and for believing in me even when I haven't believed in myself. I know it is not easy being married to a startup CEO. I decided to pursue engineering because I wanted to blend my love of physics with my desire to have an impact on this world. So once I decided that I was going to pursue engineering in college, Purdue was immediately on the list. If you had told me five to ten years ago that I would be sitting here, there's no way I would have believed you. I was shocked and thrilled when I was told I won this award. Now I was never pegged as someone who would be an engineer. Nobody ever thought that I would be interested in math and science and to be fair I struggled most of my academic life actually. Not very good at taking tests. I didn't graduate with honors so I'm sure some of you are thinking how did she end up here? Well when I think back on the past 10 years there are a couple of moments in people that really stand out as having a huge impact on getting me to where I am today. A few incredible engineering professors at Purdue. Dr. Nauman, Dr. Adams, Dr. Ramani and Dr. Oaks as well as an amazing advisor, Terry Brickler. They all deserve so much recognition. All of these people are incredible in their own right but when it comes to me they definitely have one thing in common. They saw something in me that I didn't even see in myself and they decided to take a chance on me to help me to advise me to encourage me and to inspire me and without them I would not be here receiving this award. I found my footing in grad school and I really started to excel. I was involved in research and I loved the classes I was taking. I became kind of obsessed with understanding what made startups fail at such a high rate specifically healthcare companies and how they could better set themselves up for success. This all became the basis for my thesis and what ended up sending me down to Texas to accept a coveted spot in the Texas Medical Center's Biodesign Fellowship out of which my company Intuitap Medical was born. Looking back on my experience as a startup CEO I realized that a lot of the skills that have enabled me to be successful I developed by going through the Purdue Engineering program. As an engineering student I dealt with setbacks and I persevered. I doubted that I was smart enough to pass a class or two or many and found out that in fact I was and I learned to deal with stress and failure without crumbling or falling apart. These experiences led me to develop a skill set that is rare but very important in the workforce and in life. I came to realize that the challenges I faced at Purdue have given me the resilience and mental fortitude that sets me apart from my peers and has primed me for success. So I want to end by thanking Purdue and specifically engineering. It definitely wasn't easy but things in life that are truly worth anything rarely are. Next is the Innovation Award. Given to a graduate who has developed a product, idea or process that has had significant impact on industry or society. This year's Innovation Award recipient is Ujwal Singh. Ujwal knows what it means to build something meaningful. He is an entrepreneur who has founded and worked for four different startups. His most recent startup, say now, an online service that lets fans share voice messages with the likes of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers was acquired by Google. This venture led him to starting and leading the Google Hangouts project. While at Google, Ujwal was a partner at Area 120, a workshop for Google's experimental products. After Google, Ujwal became the Chief Technology Officer of GoFundMe Incorporated, which operates a social fundraising platform enabling clients to raise money online for life's important moments and personal causes. He led the build out of kids, music and gaming efforts for the YouTube channel. Currently, Ujwal is in charge of exploring new products at Facebook. Ujwal holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Purdue's Electrical and Computer Engineering Program and master's degrees from the University of California Berkeley and Indira Gandhi National Open University. The College of Engineering is proud to present the Innovation Award to Ujwal Singh. This award, it actually is super meaningful for a number of reasons. One, I have a long history of like family members going to Purdue. I actually went to school in West Lafayette, met the person who would become my future wife in West Lafayette. She went to Purdue. Her parents, her grandparents, and I think even her great-grandparents may have gone to Purdue. My dad was a professor. My brother went to Purdue. My mom worked at Purdue. I have brother-in-laws who've gone there. I think we are basically black and gold. The other reason it means so much is, as I mentioned, Purdue's actually shaped quite a bit of how I look at how I've approached my professional life, of what I've gravitated towards. This acknowledgement of that, that I've made the right choices or I've been successful in the choices. It was Purdue that kicked me off on that journey. It's pretty amazing. I always knew I wanted to study computers and engineering. I also really liked the fact that Purdue had at the time what was pretty unique, a computer and electrical engineering program. It was sort of a natural given the family history, as well as the sort of combination of engineering and computer science made a ton of sense for me. One of the interesting things, and I tell people this as I interview folks as well, one of the interesting things like when you get out in the real world is I think it's you come out sometimes from academia sort of wanting to solve just really hard problems. I think what Purdue did was, and still does I think today, it's really good at sort of that balance of hard problems, but also real problems. Like sometimes if you're just solving the hard problems, you're not solving today's problem because those are the real problems. And I think Purdue strikes that balance. Like if you think about some other schools that like talk about how great their engineering programs are, they tend to be solving tomorrow's problems. And I think Purdue strikes are really good balance. And I've always found that like work wise, that's what I've gravitated towards. Like I like the hard problems, but they have to be grounded in reality. I like solving real problems, not just hard problems. If I had the world's attention for 30 seconds, I would say a couple of things. One, I think it's a world-class engineering program, going back to the point about like, you know, you are you're learning to solve these both hard and real problems. But also, I think you are given its location, you also get a really balanced and sort of grounded view of life. Again, having lived in Silicon Valley and knowing people who've gone to other schools, whether here or not, there tends to be a different view. It's a less balanced view of life. And so I would sort of say the 30 second pitch would be world-class education with the world-class life. You know, I think it's sort of the tag line I would use. Our final award is the Loyalty Award, given to a graduate who has demonstrated extraordinary loyalty to the college in advancing its stated mission and goals. This year's Loyalty Award recipient is Steven Buranic. Following graduation from Purdue University, Steve went on to serve over 27 years in various executive management and consulting positions for a series of Fortune 500 companies that included Illinois Toolworks, Siemens Automotive, Myer Najem, Calderon Textiles, Myer Spring Company, Herman and Kittle Properties Incorporated, Cardon and Associates, and others. Now with Buranic and Associates, he leads the charge in strategic planning and analysis for privately held businesses. He's a founding member of the Engineering Alumni Board, during which he served as president for two years and headed up the outreach efforts. He and his wife Susie also served on the Leadership Council of the Purdue Presidents Council, where for years they have been life members. Steve is a champion for Maurice J. Zucco Laboratories, including a gift made toward the expansion project for a control room laboratory in the new ZL-8 building. He and Susie are proud Purdue parents and grandparents and help support others receiving a Purdue education with a scholarship within mechanical engineering. Steve holds a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The College of Engineering is proud to present the Loyalty Award to Steven Buranic. So I was born in 1939, grew up in the 40s and the 50s, and during that time the automobile became a major factor in the American economy and in American life. And I became a gearhead. I loved cars, loved engines, and wanted to learn how to design automobile engines. So I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. Because of my background, my father was a steel mill worker. My parents weren't in a position to send me to school. So I was probably going to go to Penn State, a state school that was affordable for people like me. But I wanted something better. And Purdue was a well-known outstanding engineering school, and so I applied to Purdue, hoping that somehow I would get in. The defining memory was the acceptance letter to Purdue. I can remember coming home, my parents sending me the letter, opening the letter, and reading it and saying that I was accepted to Purdue. And I can't tell you the joy I felt having seen that, because I understood that now I had a chance to really become something, assuming I was able to graduate from Purdue. And I can tell you that I was determined to do that when I came here. And I was fortunate enough to be able to complete my degree in mechanical engineering, and it opened so many doors for me that I can't even begin to describe it. I would say that Purdue Engineering is at the pinnacle of engineering education in the world, because we've never deviated from the principle of teaching what engineering really is. So that when you graduate from Purdue, you're able to come in and pretty quickly make a meaningful contribution to whomever hires you. Plus, because of the success and the achievements of Purdue engineers over the decades, companies understand that when you hire a Purdue engineer, you're hiring somebody who can perform, who can produce, who can make a difference. And to me, that says it all. Well, my award is humbling to me. I'd say this because it's true when I was called by the young lady who's the president of the Engineering Alumni Board to tell me I'd been awarded this. I told her, there's a mistake. You better go check your records because this can't be. I don't see myself as being worthy of this award. I'm humbled by it because all I've done is what I thought anybody would do in my situation. I thank the Engineering Alumni Board for even considering me, let alone making this award to me. And I will continue to be as loyal to Purdue as I'm capable of being as long as God allows me to do that. All hail, hail, hail to old Purdue. All hail friendship may she never lack. Ever grateful, ever true, let's be raised our song adieu. Of the days we spent with you, all hail our old Purdue. When in after years we're turning all the water back to you. May our hearts with love be yearning for the scenes of old Purdue. That come among your pathways, why didn't let us see what lies before. Fond of slopes and lanes are binding while we sing of days of yore. To old Purdue, all hail to our old golden black. Hail, hail friendship may she never lack. Ever grateful, ever true, let's be raised our song adieu. Of the days we spent with you.