Purdue trustees ratify faculty and staff positions, award posthumous degrees, approve department name changes and resolutions of appreciation

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The Purdue University Board of Trustees on Friday (Oct. 6) ratified faculty and staff appointments, awarded posthumous degrees, and approved department name changes and resolutions of appreciation.

The newly ratified positions are:

• Yu Jeffrey Hu, who was named to the Accenture Professorship of Information Technology in the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business.
• Allison Gabriel, who was named the Thomas J. Howatt Chair in Management.
• Gus De Franco, who was named the Emanuel T. Weiler Professor of Management.
• Muhammad Ashraful Alam, who was named the Jai N. Gupta Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
• Enrique Iglesia, who was named the Michel Boudart Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Hu returned to Purdue earlier this year from Georgia Tech. He is an expert on AI, analytics, digital economy, digital transformation, electronic commerce, omni-channel retailing, offline commerce, social media and fintech, with his research using AI, econometric and analytical models to quantify consumer behaviors. He has been an associate editor for several top journals and organized many international conferences. Hu co-authored the first paper discovering the “long tail” phenomenon in internet markets, the first paper proving the value of social media in predicting stock markets and the first paper using interpretable AI to quantify ROI of marketing campaigns. He has been a Digital Fellow at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and won several research and teaching awards, including the inaugural Management Science Best Paper Award in Information Systems, Georgia Tech’s Course Instructor Opinion Survey Teaching Award and Fulltime MBA Elective Professor of the Year. He has built and led several degree and nondegree programs and centers on campus. Additionally, Hu has developed and taught executive education programs to numerous C-level executives. He previously served as an assistant and associate professor with tenure at Purdue from 2005-12.

Gabriel joined Purdue in June from the University of Arizona as a professor of management in the organizational behavior and human resources area with a courtesy appointment in industrial-organizational psychology. Her research focuses on emotions, motivation, interpersonal stressors/relationships and employee well-being at work. She serves as faculty director of the new Center for Working Well, which she helped originate and which aims to understand and address challenges facing modern workforces and employees’ desire to “work well.” Gabriel is an associate editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology — a flagship journal of the American Psychological Association — and has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and several book chapters. For her scholarly achievements, she has been the recipient of five early- to midcareer achievement awards, including the 2021 Academy of Management (AOM) Organizational Behavior Division Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award, the 2021 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Distinguished Early Career Contributions-Science Award, the 2020 AOM Human Resources Division Early Career Award, the 2019 AOM Sage Publications/Research Methods Division/Lawrence R. James Early Career Achievement Award, and the 2018 Western Academy of Management Ascendant Scholars Award. She was named a SIOP fellow in 2023 and was selected by Poets & Quants in 2018 as a Top 50 Undergraduate Business School Professor.

De Franco came to Purdue in the summer of 2023 as a professor of accounting in the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business. Like many of Purdue’s current students and alumni, De Franco is a first-generation college student. He is an active accounting researcher, with much of his work focusing on sell-side analysts, CFA charter holders, private firms’ accounting quality, relative valuation and firms’ choice of compensation peers. De Franco’s research has been published in numerous top scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Journal of Financial Economics and Management Science, Review of Accounting Studies and Contemporary Accounting Research. De Franco is serving his second term as editor of Contemporary Accounting Research and was awarded the Outstanding Reviewer Award by The Accounting Review. He has been recognized as Faculty Researcher of the Year by the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Born in Bangladesh, Alam came to the United States 33 years ago, earned his PhD from Purdue in 1995 and returned to the university from AT&T Bell Laboratories in 2004 as a faculty member in electrical and computer engineering. His research and teaching focus on physics; performance limits; and novel concepts in biosensors, solar cells and transistors. Alam has published over 300 papers, many of which have focused on the intrinsic reliability physics of the corresponding electronic device. Recently, his research has specifically involved creating a theoretical foundation of wearable, implantable, environmental electrochemical sensors that would allow reliable sensing in unreliable environments. His book “Principles of Solar Cells” is the first to integrate device, system, reliability and data science within a unified framework. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His awards include the 2006 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award for contributions to device technology, the 2015 Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence Award for fundamental contributions to reliability physics and the 2018 IEEE Education Award for educating, inspiring and mentoring students and electron device professionals around the world. More than 500,000 students worldwide have learned about semiconductor devices from his web-enabled courses.

Iglesia joins Purdue from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished professor and the Theodore Vermeulen Chair Emeritus in chemical engineering. He is one of the world’s most celebrated researchers in heterogeneous catalysis and chemical reaction engineering. His research focuses on the synthesis and structural/functional assessments of solids as catalysts for the production and use of energy carriers and chemicals with minimal environmental footprints. Iglesia works with the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources through research, industry innovation, entrepreneurship and educational activities. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and National Academy of Inventors and has received many honors, including the Donald Sterling Noyce Prize (the highest teaching award in the physical sciences at Berkeley), the 2019 Michel Boudart Award for the Advancement of Catalysis, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ William H. Walker Institute Award for Excellence in Contributions to Chemical Engineering Literature, and the Royal Society of Chemistry Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture. Iglesia served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Catalysis and as the president of the North American Catalysis Society. He will be appointed as the Presidential Fellow for Energy Transitions, advising Purdue’s president and dean of engineering on matters and new initiatives related to transitions toward the more diverse deployment of new energy sources and carriers.

Trustees also approved the ratification of three previously announced deanships and two senior leadership positions: 

• Lucy Flesch, the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science.
• Bernie Engel, the Glenn W. Sample Dean of Agriculture.
• James “Jim” Bullard, the Samuel R. Allen Dean of the Daniels School of Business.
• David Reingold, the senior vice president for policy planning.
• Dimitri Peroulis, the senior vice president for Purdue University Online.

In other action, trustees awarded a posthumous Bachelor of Science to Chloe Hannah and a posthumous Master of Science in defense engineering technology to Brent Kreinop, both from Purdue West Lafayette.

Trustees approved changing the name of the Department of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy to the Department of Industrial and Molecular Pharmaceutics. This change will bring the name into the modern area of pharmaceutics while aligning the department with other departments/divisions in the top 25 U.S. News & World Report College of Pharmacy rankings. When prospective graduate students search for programs in “pharmaceutics,” it is important that the term be in the department’s name. Furthermore, molecular pharmaceutics reflects the current drug delivery and development work that is occurring in the department. 

In addition, trustees approved resolutions of appreciation for friends of the university who recently contributed $1 million or more to Purdue. Those are:

• Scott and Julie Moorehead, to support the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business.
• Mary Findling, to support the College of Liberal Arts.
• Richard and Anne Borch, to support the College of Pharmacy.
• Thomas Gambrell, to support the College of Health and Human Sciences.
• Barbara Kile, to support the College of Science.
• Trimble Inc., to support Purdue Polytechnic Institute.
• An anonymous gift, to support the College of Engineering.
• An anonymous gift, to support the Division of Financial Aid.

In recognition of their long-standing generosity, service and leadership to Purdue, trustees approved the naming of the Borch Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology within the College of Pharmacy. Richard Borch is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Purdue, serving from 1996-2014. He also served as director of Purdue’s Center for Cancer Research, now Institute for Cancer Research, from 1997-2002. 

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research institution with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top 4 in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, with 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 12 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap, including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the new Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, and Purdue Computes, at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.

Sources: Patrick Wolfe

April Headdy

Yu Jeffrey Hu

Allison Gabriel

Gus De Franco

Muhammad Ashraful Alam

Enrique Iglesia