Appointments, honors and activities

• Faculty and staff honors:

- Purdue University received four awards from the Indiana Council for Continuing Education at its annual awards ceremony in Indianapolis on Sept. 20. Janine Black, an agronomy e-Learning project manager in the College of Agriculture, received a Support Staff of the Year award. Mitchell Springer, director of ProSTAR and operations and strategic initiatives at the Polytechnic Institute, was selected as the Diversity Equity and Inclusion recipient. Melody Carducci, an online program specialist at the Polytechnic Institute, received the Master’s Student of the Year award. Bruce Erickson, education distance and outreach director at the College of Agriculture, received the Excellence in Teaching and Learning award. The ICCE is a professional organization that represents continuing education efforts at institutions of higher education and other organizations promoting adult learning in the state.

- John McConnell, the Burton D. Morgan Distinguished Chair of Private Enterprise (Finance) at the Krannert School of Management, was among seven scholars awarded an honorary degree from University College Dublin. McConnell received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws. More information online. 

• Notables:

- David Nolte, the Edward M. Purcell Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in Purdue’s College of Science, has written his sixth book. “Galileo Unbound: A Path Across Life, the Universe and Everything” traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. This book tells the history of spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems.  This new history of physics from a modern perspective will be released Sept. 26 and is available on Amazon.

• Alumni honors:

 - Two Purdue alumni, Cindy Fornelli (B.A. 1985) and Sarah Johnson Dobek (B.S. 2003), were included in Accounting Today’s annual list of the top 100 most influential people in accounting. Fornelli is executive director at the Center for Audit Quality, and Dobek is founder and president of Inovatus Consulting. More information is online.