Appointments, honors and activities
• Appointments and promotions:
- Thomas Berndt's duties in the College of Health and Human Sciences have expanded, and his new title is associate dean for academic affairs and administration.
• Faculty and staff honors:
- Ahmed Hassanein, the Paul L. Wattelet Professor and head of nuclear engineering, has earned a rare distinction: He has received four fellowships for different citations and separate fields of research, earning two fellowships this year, one each from the American Nuclear Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He also had previously received two fellowships, one each from the international society for optics and photonics (SPIE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Karen Yehle, an assistant professor of nursing, received an honorable mention in the 2012 Indianapolis Star's Salute to Nurses. Yehle was honored at the award's 10th annual Indianapolis luncheon on April 25. The award recognizes her teaching and research, which focuses on patients with heart failure as well as health literacy and education.
• Alumni honors:
- The Department of Nutrition Science recognized four alumna in the 2012 department's Hall of Fame. On May 3, Evelyn Enrione, Karen Plawecki, Alice Spangler and Mary Ellen Zabik were inducted into the Hall of Fame for their contributions in the field of dietetics and nutrition science.
* Enrione is an associate professor of dietetics and nutrition at Florida International University.
* Plawecki is currently director of the Didactic Program of Dietetics at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and this fall she will be starting as an assistant professor of nutrition at Benedictine University in Lisle, Ill.
* Spangler is a professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at Ball State University. She served as the department head for 12 years.
* Zabik is a University Distinguished Professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Michigan State University.
More information about each alumna is available at https://www.cfs.purdue.edu/fn/about/awards/hall_fame.html
- Rick Knabb has been named director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Center in Miami. Knabb earned a bachelor's degree in earth and atmospheric sciences from Purdue in 1990. Since 2010 he served as the on-air tropical weather expert for The Weather Channel. He has also served as deputy director of NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu.
• Student honors:
- Peter Carlsgaard, a Purdue graduate of the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, received a scholarship to attend the World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering in Beijing, China, on May 23-31. He will present research done by him and three other students during their BME senior design project, titled "Portable, Low-Cost HIV/AIDS Progression Monitoring Device." J. Paul Robinson, SVM Professor of Cytomics in Basic Medical Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, was their project mentor. Carlsgaard's collaborators are Purdue BME students Xinran Lu, Aneesh Ramaswamy and Lindsay Wendel, and Brent Goodman, a medical student at Indiana University.
- Purdue students Levi Miller, Stephen Shaefer, Alex Kampf and Stephen Zabrecky teamed to win the PBS Kids Award at the 2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge in Washington, D.C. The Purdue entry, "Speedy Math Train," was designed to provide educational games focusing on math skills for children ages 4-8. The awards were announced during The Atlantic's Technologies in Education Forum.