Trustees approve appointments, academic changes
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The Purdue University Board of Trustees on Friday (Feb. 4) approved the merger of two departments in the College of Technology and ratified appointments to four named and distinguished professorships.
The board also approved two name changes of academic units in the College of Health and Human Sciences and the appointment of a vice chancellor at Purdue North Central.
The trustees approved merging the departments of Industrial Technology and Organizational Leadership & Supervision. The Department of Technology Leadership & Innovation will bring new learning and research opportunities as well as administrative and curriculum efficiencies, said Dennis Depew, dean of the College of Technology.
The new department will have nearly 40 faculty members and approximately 700 majors and 1,500 minors in West Lafayette, 500 majors in Statewide Technology, and 200 graduate students.
"The merger is an outcome of the ongoing review of academic programs in the colleges and schools. It makes programmatic sense, first and foremost," said Timothy D. Sands, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost and the Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering. "Second, it should save money in the long run. We are looking for win-win opportunities like this all over campus."
Trustees also approved the appointments of James M. Caruthers as Reilly Professor of Chemical Engineering, Abhijit Deshmukh as the James J. Solberg Head of Industrial Engineering, John N. Duvall as the Margaret Church Distinguished Professor of English and Venkat Venkatasubramanian as Reilly Professor of Chemical Engineering.
James M. Caruthers
As director of the Indiana Advanced Electric Vehicle Training and Education Consortium, he helped Purdue obtain the first set of electric vehicle charging stations on any university campus in the nation. Under his leadership, Purdue faculty have begun development of a full set of courses in electric vehicles for Purdue undergraduate and graduate students, beginning the program to deliver educational material to engineers and technologists across Indiana.
As part of the program, the evGrandPrix electric go-kart race was established in 2010. On May 7, the evGrandPrix will expand to a national race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with an estimated 70 teams from colleges across the nation.
Caruthers received his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Purdue, he has managed the construction of both a 100,000-square-foot addition to Forney Hall as well as the renovation of the original part of Forney Hall.
Abhijit Deshmukh
Deshmukh arrived at Purdue earlier this month. His current research interests are in distributed decision-making, system complexity, mechanism design, health-care policy and cyberinfrastructure for engineering applications.
Before to coming to Purdue, Deshmukh was the Rockwell International Professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering and director of the Institute for Manufacturing Systems at Texas A&M University. From 2004-07, he served as program director in the National Science Foundation's Engineering Directorate and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Bombay, his master's degree from State University of New York at Buffalo and his doctorate from Purdue.
John Duvall
Duvall is a professor of English and American Studies. A member of the Purdue faculty since 1998, he has written four books and edited or co-edited six other books that explore American fiction from the latter half of the 19th century to the present. Duvall is internationally known for his scholarship on two Nobel Prize winning novelists, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. He has been the editor of Modern Fiction Studies, the English Department's journal of literary criticism that focuses on modernist and contemporary British, American, European and postcolonial fiction, since 2002. From 1999-2002 he was associate editor.
Since 1998 Duvall has been recognized five times by the English department's excellence in teaching committee and is the department's nominee for the College of Liberal Arts Teaching Award.
Before coming to Purdue, Duvall was a faculty member at the University of Memphis and Iowa State University. He received his bachelor's degree from Ohio State University, his master's degree from the University of Delaware and his doctorate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Venkat Venkatasubramanian
Venkatasubramanian is a professor of chemical engineering. He directs the research efforts of several graduate students and co-workers in Purdue's Laboratory for Intelligent Process Systems. His research interests include process risk management, pharmaceutical informatics, molecular products design and complex adaptive systems. He is the leader of the Integrated Systems Science thrust of the National Science Foundation-funded, multi-university Engineering Research Center on Structured Organic Particulate Systems.
A highly cited researcher who has won several best paper awards, Venkatasubramanian also is a co-author of two books and a co-editor two books. He won the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2009. He won the School of Chemical Engineering's Shreve Prize for outstanding teaching three times and in 2007 was elected a Fellow of the Teaching Academy at Purdue. Venkatasubramanian is as an editor of Computers and Chemical Engineering, an international journal.
Before joining Purdue in 1988, Venkatasubramanian worked as a research associate in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University and taught at Columbia University. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Madras, India, his master's degree from Vanderbilt University and his doctorate from Cornell University.
The trustees also approved changing the name of the Department of Child Development and Family Studies to Human Development and Family Studies and changing the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management to a school. Both units are in the College of Health and Human Sciences.
Modifying the focus from early childhood to include adolescent development and adult development is one reason for the change to human development, said department chair Doran French. He said other top university programs use the label "human," and that it will help in recruiting graduate students.
Paul McGuinness
Changing hospitality and tourism from a department to a school signals Purdue's leadership among other university programs, said Richard Ghiselli, head of hospitality and tourism management. He noted that the department consistently ranks in the top five in surveys of educators and industry executives, has three research centers, and an employment placement rate for graduates that exceeds 90 percent in most years. He said the change is consistent with programs at peer institutions.
In other business, the trustees approved the appointment of Paul McGuinness as vice chancellor for enrollment management and student services at Purdue University North Central. Since 1996 McGuinness has been at Purdue Calumet, where he has served as executive director of admissions and recruitment, executive director of admissions and financial aid and director of admissions and recruitment.
Writer: Greg McClure, 765-496-9711, gmcclure@purdue.edu
Sources: Timothy Sands, 765-494-9709, tsands@purdue.edu
James M. Caruthers, 765-494-6625, caruther@purdue.edu
Abhijit Deshmukh, 765-496-6007, abhi@purdue.edu
John Duvall, 765-494-3760, jduvall@purdue.edu
Venkat Venkatasubramanian, 765-494-0734, venkat@purdue.edu
Dennis Depew, 765-494-2552, ddepew@purdue.edu
Doran French, 765-494-9511, dcfrench@purdue.edu
Richard Ghiselli, 765-494-6844, ghiselli@purdue.edu
James B. Dworkin, chancellor of Purdue North Central, 219-785-5433, jdworkin@pnc.edu