Trustees approve named and distinguished faculty, resolutions of appreciation and namings

INDIANAPOLIS — The Purdue University Board of Trustees on Friday (Oct. 9) approved a named chair, a distinguished professor and three named professors, along with resolutions of appreciation and namings.

The newly ratified faculty are:

• Ozan Ciftci as the William R. Scholle Endowed Chair in Food Processing
• Mara Faccio as a Distinguished Professor in the Mitch Daniels School of Business
• John Morgan as the Steven and Frances Swanson Professor of Chemical Engineering
• Xiulin Ruan as a Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering
• Chih-Chun Wang as the Hewlett-Packard Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ciftci came to Purdue in August as a professor of food science. He also serves as director and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation Global Center for Food Innovation and Diversification to Advance the Bioeconomy (FoodID), an international collaboration focused on developing crops, processing technologies and novel foods to advance the bioeconomy. Ciftci’s research focuses on sustainable and clean food processing, supercritical fluid technologies, integrated biorefining and waste upcycling, particle engineering for food functionality and human health, and next-generation food design, including 3D food printing. He has authored more than 80 refereed publications, secured over $24 million in competitive research support, holds multiple patents and technology disclosures, and co-founded Adonis Biosciences Inc. His scholarly work has been cited extensively with more than 3,400 citations. Ciftci also serves as associate editor for the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society and as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Food Science. His work has resulted in several awards and honors, including the American Oil Chemists’ Society Timothy L. Mounts Award, the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology International Award in Bioinnovation, the Agricultural Research Division’s Junior Faculty Excellence in Research award, the Darrell W. Nelson Graduate Student Advising Excellence Award and more. He is the 2026 recipient of the North Central Region Excellence in Agricultural Research Innovation Award and the 2026 National agInnovation Excellence in Agricultural Research Innovation Mid-Career Award. The William R. Scholle Endowed Chair in Food Processing was established in 2003 by the family of the late William R. Scholle. Scholle was a 1938 Purdue alumnus, inventor of the bag-in-box packaging and founder of Scholle Chemical Co. The intent of this endowed chair is to advance excellence and leadership in food processing through scholarship, innovation and industry engagement.

Faccio joined the Purdue faculty in 2007 as an associate professor of management and now holds the Tom and Patty Hefner Chair in Finance and professor of management (finance) in the Mitch Daniels School of Business. Her primary research interests are in international finance and corporate finance. Faccio is the immediate past president of Financial Management Association International, where she has also served as vice president-program. She is the current advisory editor for the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and was the managing editor from 2020-23. She serves or has served as an associate editor (or equivalent) for the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Corporate Finance, the Journal of International Business Studies, Financial Management, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, and other major journals. Faccio has been on the board of directors of the American Finance Association, is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the European Corporate Governance Institute, and a fellow of the International Corporate Governance Society. Her work has been recognized with several awards and honors, including the All-Star Paper Award from the Journal of Financial Economics, the Best Paper runner-up for the BlackRock/Brennan Award from The Review of Financial Studies, and a two-time recipient of the William F. Sharpe Award for Scholarship in Financial Research from the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Her work has also been nominated for the Brattle Group Prize by The Journal of Finance, and she is ranked as the 2022 No. 1 female scientist in academic finance by Renée Adams and Jing Xu.

Morgan came to Purdue in 2000 as an assistant professor of chemical engineering. He is now the associate head of the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, director of graduate studies, a professor of chemical engineering and holds a courtesy appointment as a professor of biochemistry. His research focuses on the development and application of experimental methods and mathematical modeling that enable quantitative understanding of metabolism. His modeling work on the mass transport of small volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in plants helped to identify the first active transporter of numerous VOCs in the plasma membrane of petunia flowers. Morgan currently serves as editor in chief for Biotechnology Progress and has been an editorial board member for Biotechnology Letters, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Frontiers in Plant Systems and Synthetic Biology, and Frontiers in Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity. Morgan’s awards and honors are many, including being named a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, being named a Purdue University Faculty Scholar, receiving a National Science Foundation CAREER award and more. The Steven and Frances Swanson Professor of Chemical Engineering is an endowed professorship established in 2010 by Purdue alumnus Steven J. Swanson and his wife, Frances A. Swanson. Steven was a 1971 graduate of the now-named Davidson School of Chemical Engineering.

Ruan joined the mechanical engineering faculty at Purdue in 2007. His research focuses on heat transfer and nanoscale energy transport, advancing fundamental understanding in phonon scattering, machine learning methods for thermal transport, high and low thermal conductivity materials, interfacial heat transfer, and thermal radiative transport. These findings also led him to the invention of radiative cooling paints that cool below the ambient temperature under sunlight. The invention earned the 2022 Guinness World Record for “world’s whitest paint” and led Ruan to found NanoChill Technologies Inc. Ruan has received more than 18,000 citations, with more than 10 of his publications as senior author recognized by Clarivate as Highly Cited Papers. He has held many leadership positions in the field, such as serving as committee chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) K-8 Theory and Fundamental Research committee in heat transfer. Twenty-four of his former mentees have joined academia, while 28 have pursued leadership positions in industry or established their own startup companies. He is a fellow of ASME. His awards and honors include receiving the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, the ASME McDonald Mentoring Award, the Brillouin Medal from the International Phononics Society and an NSF CAREER award; being recognized as a Purdue University Faculty Scholar; and receiving the College of Engineering Faculty Excellence Award for Research and the South by Southwest Innovation Award for Sustainability. The Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering professorship honors Vincent P. Reilly, a 1922 Purdue alumnus and founder of Illinois Gear and Machine Co. The endowment was created in 1969.

Wang joined Purdue in 2006 as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. His research focuses on network coding, broadcast and erasure channels with feedback, graph-based error-correcting codes, low-latency streaming codes, and age of information. He is particularly well known for providing rare and powerful characterizations of multisource and delay-constrained network communication problems and for introducing graph-theoretic and optimization-based frameworks that have yielded both physical insight and implementable algorithms. He has received strong research support from NSF grants totaling over $6 million for fundamental research and has held several leadership positions within the scientific field, including serving on the editorial board of IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Transactions on Information Theory, as general co-chair of the IEEE INFOCOM Age and Semantics of Information Workshop, and as technical program committee co-chair of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop. Wang has also been a key member of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Program Committee, contributing to dozens of symposia for the organization. His awards and honors include being named a fellow of IEEE, a Purdue Seed for Success Acorn Award, an NSF CAREER Award and more. The Hewlett-Packard Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering is an endowed professorship established in 2006 by the Hewlett-Packard Co.

Trustees also approved resolutions of appreciation for friends of the university who recently contributed $1 million or more to Purdue. Those are:

• Roland G. Parrish, to support the Mitch Daniels School of Business
• The Chapman Charitable Trust, to support Purdue Fort Wayne
• Bernard and Judith Williams, to support the College of Pharmacy
• Bob and Carol Williamson, to support the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics
• An anonymous gift, to support the College of Health and Human Sciences

Additionally, trustees approved the following namings:

• The future Mitch Daniels School of Business building the Roland G. Parrish Hall of Business in recognition of a gift by Roland G. Parrish
• A space within the future Darr-Chaney Hall of Pharmacy and Dauch Hall of Nursing the Bernard K. and Judith A. Williams Clinical Skills Suite in recognition of a gift by Bernard and Judith Williams

 In other action, trustees approved revisions to systemwide post-tenure review procedures in compliance with state requirements and the launch of a Master of Science in multidisciplinary quantitative sciences, which will be offered through Indianapolis beginning in fall 2027. The board also reviewed the 2025-26 performance evaluation for former President Mung Chiang and voted to approve 76% of his at-risk pay. He will receive $201,191.38 in at-risk compensation.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a research institution ranked among the top 10 public universities in the United States. More than 111,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. As a land-grant university committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free.