Gratitude to the Purdue University faculty.

Thank you for the dynamical-systems and halo-orbit trajectory work that helped route real NASA missions along the Interplanetary Superhighway, and for being Purdue AAE's first tenured woman who opened the door for so many after you.

Thank you for advancing aircraft design under real-world uncertainty and for leading Purdue's storied School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the cradle of astronauts, with such care for its students.

Thank you for decades of low-gravity fluid dynamics research and for championing hands-on suborbital flight experiments that let students fly their science to space.

Thank you for building the methods and tools that make sense of vast systems-of-systems, from air traffic to advanced air mobility, and for serving Purdue research so broadly.

Thank you for the NEGF framework and the books that taught a whole generation how electrons really move through nanoscale devices, work honored by both the National Academies of Engineering and Sciences.

Thank you for the nanotransistor scaling insight that helped the world reach 10-nanometer chips, and for nanoHUB, which put device physics in reach of learners everywhere.

Thank you for the reliability physics that keeps transistors trustworthy and for technology-agnostic solar-cell and bio-sensor models that reach from the chip to human health.

Thank you for pioneering brain-inspired, energy-efficient computing and for mentoring more than eighty doctoral researchers who now carry that work across industry and academia.

Thank you for combustion and radiation research aimed squarely at cleaner, more efficient energy, and for shepherding generations of Purdue graduate students in the field.

Thank you for blending human-centered AI with spatial computing to reinvent how people design, make, and learn with their own hands.

Thank you for lifetime-achievement hydrology work on water, watersheds, and climate, and for leading Purdue's Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering with such steadiness.

Thank you for research that keeps aging infrastructure safe and resilient, and for opening doors for women in construction as the inaugural recipient of ASCE's award in their honor.

Thank you for a career defining database and network security, and for building the labs and mentoring the students who keep our data honest and protected.

Thank you for advancing databases that handle uncertain data and guarantee integrity and privacy, and for guiding Purdue Computer Science and its faculty through years of growth.

Thank you for pioneering biophotonics like the BioCD and dynamic optical coherence imaging, and for teaching so generously that Purdue named you its top undergraduate teacher.

Thank you for studying the violent deaths of massive stars and for leading the James Webb Space Telescope look at Cassiopeia A, tracing the very atoms that make life possible.

Thank you for the patient hunt for dark matter with the XENON experiment and for founding the Windchime effort to feel for it through gravity alone.

Thank you for tandem mass spectrometry and desorption ionization methods that let us weigh and identify molecules in the real world, from the operating room to the field.

Thank you for pioneering distonic radical cation chemistry and laser-induced acoustic desorption, and for methods that read the structure of molecules straight out of complex mixtures.

Thank you for the folate-targeting chemistry that guides drugs and dyes to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue, work that became an FDA-approved tool lighting up tumors in surgery.

Thank you for the Langlands-Shahidi method that carries your name and deepens our grasp of L-functions at the heart of the Langlands program.

Thank you for mapping the structures of Zika, dengue, and other RNA viruses, and for helping reveal the antibody that can block Zika, work that arms us against emerging disease.

Thank you for the bold fifth-force question that pushed physicists to test gravity ever more precisely, and for a lifetime of curiosity about the forces that shape our world.

Thank you for proving the Bieberbach conjecture, a puzzle open since 1916, now known as de Branges's theorem, and for the beautiful theory of Hilbert spaces of entire functions behind it.

Thank you for steadying Purdue by returning as interim president, and for years of holding tuition flat so more families could afford a great education.

Thank you for guiding Purdue's academic mission while keeping your own scholarship in the mathematical foundations of data science alive and rigorous.

Thank you for leading one of the world's top agriculture colleges, drawing on decades of your own work modeling water quality and sustainable land use.

Thank you for revealing how plants make scent and flavor, work that connects pollination, food, and the chemistry of the living world.

Thank you for breeding climate-resilient maize and sorghum so agriculture can adapt to a warmer, drier world.

Thank you for decades of patient soil science, showing how cover crops and no-till farming protect both the land and the water.

Thank you for leading animal sciences and for mentoring students across the globe in food safety and international agriculture.

Thank you for nearly four decades of service to Purdue, from the classroom to the provost's office, and for returning to teach the students you love.

Thank you for building Purdue's academic health vision while never losing the teacher's heart of a neuropharmacologist and pharmacist.

Thank you for designing the hands-on pharmacy practice experiences that turn students into confident, caring pharmacists.

Thank you for connecting Purdue Pharmacy to the community and for teaching students the practice of caring for real patients.

Thank you for a career advancing medication safety and health services research, and for the students and colleagues you shaped along the way.

Thank you for bringing a longtime Federal Reserve president's judgment to Purdue, and for shaping a STEM-driven, data-first business school.

Thank you for studying what makes work healthy and humane, so people can thrive rather than merely endure their jobs.

Thank you for illuminating the economics of digitization and for pioneering hands-on data dives that let students learn by doing.

Thank you for championing the humanities at a great STEM university, grounded in your own careful scholarship on freedom and German idealism.

Thank you for helping us understand how media and the presidency shaped modern America, work honored by a 2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Thank you for recovering the hidden histories of women's health and childbirth, and for building Purdue's medical humanities program.

Thank you for scholarship on colonial Bengal and social history that has reached readers in more than thirty languages and earned the 2025 John F. Richards Prize.

Thank you for leading health and human sciences with the same care you bring to studying how the environment shapes brain health.

Thank you for a lifetime studying how we taste, hunger, and eat, work that quietly shaped national dietary guidance.

Thank you for advancing global nutrition and maternal and child health, showing how iron deficiency shapes minds and futures.