List of Purdue University faculty

The following is a partial list of Purdue University faculty, including current, former, emeritus, and deceased faculty, and administrators at Purdue University.

Notable faculty

Agriculture

Ralph Merrill Caldwell – Plant breeder
Gebisa Ejeta – Professor of Agronomy, winner of World Food Prize
Philip E. Nelson – food scientist, winner of the World Food Prize

Engineering and technology

Rakesh Agrawal (Professor of Chemical Engineering) – a winner of National Medal of Technology
Arden L. Bement Jr. (Professor of Nuclear Engineering) – Director of the National Science Foundation, former Director of NIST
Lonnie D. Bentley – professor of computer and information technology
Sabine Brunswicker – associate professor and director of Research Center for Open Digital Innovation (RCODI)
Jean-Lou Chameau (Professor of Civil Engineering) – President of California Institute of Technology
Clarence L. "Ben" Coates (Head of the School of Electrical Engineering) – computer scientist and engineer known for his work on waveform recognition devices, circuit gates and accumulators
Supriyo Datta (Professor of Electrical Engineering) – researcher of nanoelectronics
Rui de Figueiredo (Professor of Electrical Engineering)
Charles Alton Ellis (Professor of Structural Engineering) – designer of the Golden Gate Bridge
Reginald Fessenden (Professor of Electrical Engineering) – first wireless voice transmission
W. Kent Fuchs (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering) – Provost of Cornell University
R. Edwin Garcia (Professor of Materials Engineering) - researcher and author^[1]
Leslie Geddes (Showalter Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Engineering) – National Medal of Technology recipient
Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (lecturer) – industrial engineer
Lillian Gilbreth (Professor of Industrial Engineering) – efficiency expert, first female member of U.S. National Academy of Engineering
F.W. Hutchinson – engineer and researcher of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning
Kathleen Howell - astrodynamist known for deep space spacecraft mission design using halo orbits
Frank P. Incropera (Professor of Mechanical Engineering) – ISI highly cited researcher on heat transfer
Leah Jamieson (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dean of Engineering) – a winner of Gordon Prize
Avinash Kak (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering) – researcher of information processing
Rangasami L. Kashyap (Professor of Electrical Engineering) – applied mathematician
Linda Katehi (Professor of Electrical Engineering and Dean of Engineering) – Chancellor of University of California, Davis
Ronald Latanision, Neil Armstrong Distinguished Visiting professor
Daniel B. Luten (Instructor in architectural and sanitary engineering) – bridge builder who patented the Luten arch
Robert E. Machol (Professor of Electrical Engineering) – early writer on systems engineering
Shimon Y. Nof (Professor of Industrial Engineering)
Nicholas A. Peppas (Professor of Chemical Engineering) – biochemist and engineer best known for his research in hydrogels for drug delivery
R. Byron Pipes (Professor of Engineering) – former President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
A. Alan Pritsker (Professor of Industrial Engineering) – pioneer in simulation modeling, creator of GERT and SLAM programs
Vladimir Shalaev (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Biomedical Engineering) – researcher of metamaterials, transformation optics, nanophotonics and plasmonics
R. Norris Shreve (Professor of Chemical Engineering)
Shu Shien-Siu (Professor of Engineering Science)
Mete Sozen (Professor of Structural Engineering)
Rusi Taleyarkhan (Professor of Nuclear Engineering)
Yeram S. Touloukian (Professor of Mechanical Engineering) – founder of the Thermophysical Properties Research Center
Raymond Viskanta – ISI Highly Cited researcher in the field of heat transfer
Steve Wereley (Professor of Mechanical Engineering) – co-inventor of micro-particle image velocimetry
Jerry Woodall (Professor of Electrical Engineering) – inventor of first commercially viable red LEDs, a winner of National Medal of Technology
Henry T. Yang (Professor of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering and Dean of Engineering) – Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara
John W. Sutherland (Professor and Fehsenfeld Family Head of Environmental and Ecological Engineering (EEE))

Humanities and social sciences

Dorsey Armstrong – editor-in-chief of Arthuriana
Louis René Beres – Professor of Political Science
James A. Berlin – theorist in the field of composition studies and the history of rhetoric and composition theory
Marianne Boruch – poet and essayist
Robert X. Browning – Professor of Political Science
Ronald Verlin Cassill – novelist, short story writer, reviewer, editor, painter, and lithographer
Philip B. Coulter – political scientist
Paul Draper – philosopher of religion, editor of the journal Philo
William H. Gass – novelist and short story writer
Roxane Gay – writer and editor
Mark Harris – novelist and biographer
Djelal Kadir – literature academic
Brigit Pegeen Kelly – poet
Emma Montgomery McRae – Professor of Literature, Dean of Women
Robert Melson – political scientist specializing in ethnic conflict and genocide
Cheryl Mendelson – professor of philosophy, novelist, non-fiction writer
Alan H. Monroe – creator of Monroe's motivated sequence
Annie Smith Peck – professor of archaeology and Latin, mountaineer
Victor Raskin – Professor of Linguistics, founding editor of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
W. Charles Redding – professor of communication, "father" of organizational communication
Gunther E. Rothenberg – military historian
Kermit Scott – professor of philosophy, advocate for the poor, previously thought to be the namesake of Kermit the Frog
Michael Stohl – political scientist

Management and economics

Charalambos D. Aliprantis – economist who introduced Banach space and Riesz space methods in economic theory
Frank Bass – Professor of Industrial Administration, a founder of marketing science who developed the Bass diffusion model
Michael A. Campion – Professor of Management, psychologist
Alok R. Chaturvedi – Professor of MIS, Founder and the Director of SEAS Laboratory of Krannert School of Management
Elizabeth Hoffman – economist, now Provost of Iowa State University
Raghavendra Rau – Rothschild Professorship of Finance at the University of Cambridge
Stanley Reiter – economist
Vernon L. Smith – Nobel Laureate in Economics in 2002
Shailendra Raj Mehta - President & Director of MICA

Pharmacy, health and human sciences

Sugato Chakravarty – professor of consumer science, Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Markets
Lisa Hopp – nursing educator
Henry L. Roediger III – researcher of psychology and the human memory
Peter Schönemann – professor of Psychological Sciences
William H. Starbuck – researcher of cognitive psychology, organizational behavior, and organization theory
Wei Zheng – pharmaceutical scientist

Science and mathematics

Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar – Professor of Mathematics, known for his contributions to singularity theory
Ross H. Arnett, Jr. – entomologist and beetle researcher
Struther Arnott – molecular biologist and cancer researcher
Mikhail Atallah – computer scientist, researcher on algorithms and computer security
Louis Auslander – mathematician
David Avison – physicist and photographer
John D. Axtell – chemist, agronomist, a discoverer of high-lysine sorghum
Harry Beevers – plant physiologist
Jeffrey Bennetzen – Professor of Genetics
Elisa Bertino – computer scientist, director of CERIAS
Dale L. Boger – medicinal and organic chemist
Carl R. de Boor – assistant professor at Purdue University, won the John von Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1996
Louis de Branges de Bourcia – Professor of Mathematics, proved the Bieberbach conjecture
Herbert C. Brown – Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1979
Alok R. Chaturvedi – professor in the Department of Computer Sciences; the Director of Purdue Homeland Security Institute; technical lead for the Sentient World Simulation project
Douglas Comer – computer scientist, Internet pioneer
R. Graham Cooks – chemist, mass spectrometrist
Ronald DeVore – mathematician known for approximation theory, wavelet theory, compressive sensing
Richard Duffin – physicist
Ahmed K. Elmagarmid – computer scientist, Executive Director of the Qatar Computing Research Institute
Paul Erdős – Professor of Mathematics, winner of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1983/4
Ephraim Fischbach – physicist known for research on the fifth force
Harley Flanders – mathematician and textbook author
Joseph Francisco – atmospheric chemist, President of the American Chemical Society
Walter Gautschi – mathematician, contributor to numerical analysis
Jayanta Kumar Ghosh – statistician
Melvin Hochster – commutative algebraist
Otto F. Hunziker – early head of Dairy department, supervised construction of Smith Hall
Meyer Jerison – mathematician known for his work in functional analysis and rings
Minhyong Kim – mathematician
Robert R. Korfhage – computer scientist who contributed to information retrieval
Karl Lark-Horovitz – pioneer in solid state physics, contributed to the invention of the first transistor
Chris J. Leaver – botanist, now at the University of Oxford
László Lempert, professor of mathematics, winner of Stefan Bergman Prize, 2001
Jingjing Liang, associate professor of forest ecology
Bernard J. Liska – food scientist
Sergey Macheret – physicist and aerospace engineer
Fred McLafferty – chemist who described the McLafferty rearrangement in mass spectrometry
Edwin T. Mertz – chemist and biochemist who co-discovered high-lysine corn
Dan Milisavljevic - astronomer and physicist
David S. Moore – statistician
John Ulric Nef – chemist who discovered the Nef reaction
Ei-ichi Negishi – Professor of Chemistry, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 2010
Albert Overhauser – Professor of Physics, discovered the Overhauser Effect
Alan Perlis – Professor of Mathematics, the first person to win the Turing Award in 1966
Justin Jesse Price – mathematician
John R. Rice – Professor of Computer Science, founding editor of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software
Arthur Rosenthal – mathematician, proved the Hartogs–Rosenthal theorem
Michael G. Rossmann – Professor of Biological Sciences, Member of National Academy of Sciences, mapped human common cold virus, pointed out the Rossmann fold
Robert G. Sachs – theoretical physicist, director of Argonne National Laboratory
David Sanders – Professor of Biological Sciences
Otto Schilling – algebraist
Julian Schwinger – Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1965
Freydoon Shahidi – mathematician, a namesake of the Langlands–Shahidi method
Shen Chun-shan – physicist, president of National Tsing Hua University
Yum-Tong Siu – professor of mathematics
Jeffrey H. Smith – algebraic topologist
Eugene Spafford – Professor of Computer Science and Director of CERIAS, computer security expert
Lonnie Lee VanZandt – Professor of Physics, formed the molecular biological physics group at Purdue
Jeffrey Vitter (Professor of Computer Science and Dean of Science, 2002–2008) – computer scientist known for his work on external memory algorithms, provost of University of Kansas
Clarence Abiathar Waldo – Professor of Mathematics, noted for his role in defeating the Indiana Pi Bill of 1897
George W. Whitehead – algebraic topologist who defined the J-homomorphism
Harvey Washington Wiley – Professor of Chemistry, first FDA commissioner and advocate for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906
Arthur Winfree – theoretical biologist, MacArthur Fellow, winner of the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics
Myron E. Witham – Professor of Mathematics, college football coach
Arif Zaman – Professor of Statistics, researcher of pseudo-random number generation and computer science
Jian-Kang Zhu - Distinguished Professor of Plant Biology

Other

Richard Blanton – anthropologist and archaeologist
David A. Caputo – former Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, later president of Pace University
Amelia Earhart – women's career counselor, aviator
Joel Fink – Purdue University Theatre, currently Associate Dean of Roosevelt University
Benjamin Harrison – trustee, President of the United States
Ruth Lawanson – volleyball assistant coach, Olympic bronze medal in volleyball (1992).
Charles Major – trustee, novelist^[2]
Gary Lee Nelson – composer
Jay Nunamaker – researcher of information systems
Lynn Okagaki – Commissioner of the National Center for Education Research
John Purdue – founder and namesake
Timothy Sands – provost, former acting president, materials engineer, President of Virginia Tech
Mark Smith – Dean of Graduate School, 1984 Olympic fencer.^[3]
Dorothy C. Stratton – first full-time dean of women (1933–1942), Director of the SPARS during World War II
Lee Watson – Broadway and television lighting designer
Randy Woodson – former provost, now chancellor of North Carolina State University
Al G. Wright – former Director of Bands, now Chairman of the Board of the John Philip Sousa Foundation
Rolv Yttrehus – contemporary classical music composer

References

^ "R. Edwin García". IEEE Xplore. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
^ "The Charles Major Papers". Retrieved September 15, 2014.
^ Lauren, Westberg (July 28, 2012). "Olympic fencer teaches students, reflects on games". Purdue Exponent. Retrieved July 28, 2012.

[1] "R. Edwin García". IEEE Xplore. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 7 June 2023.

[2] "The Charles Major Papers". Retrieved September 15, 2014.

[3] Lauren, Westberg (July 28, 2012). "Olympic fencer teaches students, reflects on games". Purdue Exponent. Retrieved July 28, 2012.

[1]

[2]

[3]