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.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

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
• Brian A. Larkins – molecular biologist
• 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