Chips industry exec, Indiana’s chief justice, Caltech’s president and Indiana Fever coach headline spring Presidential Lecture Series

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The CEO of a leading global semiconductor manufacturer, the new head coach of the Indiana Fever, Indiana’s chief justice and the president of Caltech will join Purdue President Mung Chiang this spring as part of the Presidential Lecture Series.

First up is Thomas Caulfield, president and CEO of New York-based chips manufacturer GlobalFoundries, who has an extensive career spanning engineering, executive and global operational leadership with major technology companies. His talk is at 6 p.m. Jan. 15 in Stewart Center’s Fowler Hall. This event is free and open to the public but requires a general admission ticket available here.

Stephanie White, a Purdue alumna who led the Boilermaker women’s basketball team to a national championship in 1999, will return to campus Feb. 11 as part of the Presidential Lecture Series, but the time and location for this event have not yet been scheduled.

Purdue alumna Loretta Rush, chief justice of Indiana and a longtime Tippecanoe County resident, also will be a PLS guest this spring, joining Chiang for a conversation on March 25. The time and location for that event are not yet confirmed.

A conversation also is set between two leading U.S. university presidents: Joining Chiang for an April 10 PLS event will be Thomas Rosenbaum, who has led the California Institute of Technology for over a decade. The time and location for this event have not been determined.

Thomas Caulfield

Caulfield, who has led GlobalFoundries since 2018, steered the company’s initial public offering in October 2021, which was the largest semiconductor IPO on Nasdaq that year. He joined the company in May 2014 as senior vice president and general manager of its Fab 8 semiconductor wafer manufacturing facility in Malta, New York.

Caulfield also spent 17 years at IBM in a variety of senior leadership roles, ultimately serving as vice president of 300-millimeter semiconductor operations for the company’s microelectronics division, leading its wafer fabrication and R&D operations in East Fishkill, New York.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from St. Lawrence University in New York and studied at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in materials science and engineering. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia’s Engineering Center for Strategic Materials.

Stephanie White

Selected as head coach of the Indiana Fever on Nov. 1, White is a West Lebanon, Indiana, native and Purdue alumna, graduating in 1999 with a degree from the Brian Lamb School of Communication. Before her return to the Fever last fall, White had spent six previous seasons coaching there — as head coach in 2015-16 and assistant coach from 2011-14.

She also played the bulk of her WNBA career with the Fever, which acquired her ahead of its inaugural season in 2000. White sits in the top 20 in franchise history in games played (112), assists (225), steals (115) and 3-point field goals made (92).

A standout at Seeger Memorial High School, White became a Boilermaker in 1995, leading Purdue as a senior captain and All-American to the 1999 NCAA national championship while also picking up the Big Ten Conference Player of the Year award. At Purdue, she scored 2,182 points and was inducted into the Leroy Keyes Purdue Athletics Hall of Fame in 2006.

Loretta Rush

A Purdue alumna, Rush was named Indiana’s 108th Supreme Court justice in November 2012 after being appointed by then-Gov. Mitch Daniels. She was retained by voters in 2014 and 2024. The Judicial Nominating Commission named Rush the first female chief justice of Indiana in August 2014, and she was reappointed in 2019 and 2024.

As chief justice, Rush supervises Indiana’s judicial branch, a role that includes working with the state legislature to secure funding and allocate resources appropriately, and overseeing a multiagency central administrative office that handles everything from caseload measures and technology updates to the admission and discipline of lawyers.

Rush is the immediate past president of the Conference of Chief Justices and was named the 2018 Indiana Chamber of Commerce Government Leader of the Year.

Prior to joining the high court, Rush spent 15 years at a Lafayette law firm and was elected three times as Tippecanoe Superior Court 3 judge. She earned an undergraduate degree in history from Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts and a law degree from Indiana University Maurer School of Law, both with honors.

Thomas Rosenbaum

Rosenbaum was selected as Caltech’s ninth president in July 2014 and also serves as the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and Professor of Physics. Before being named president at Caltech, Rosenbaum spent more than 30 years at the University of Chicago as a faculty member and leading researcher, and served as provost from 2007-14.

A pioneer in quantum mechanics of materials, Rosenbaum also was the James Franck Professor of Physics and the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and director of the National Science Foundation’s Materials Research Laboratory. He was director of the James Franck Institute, and vice president for research at the University of Chicago and for Argonne National Laboratory.

Rosenbaum earned his bachelor’s degree in physics with honors from Harvard College, and a master’s and PhD from Princeton University. He conducted research at Bell Labs during his time in New Jersey and briefly worked at IBM’s Watson Research Center before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1983.

About the Presidential Lecture Series

Launched in 2014 by then-Purdue President Mitch Daniels and continued by President Mung Chiang, the Presidential Lecture Series exposes Purdue students and the broader community to inspiring ideas, courageous leadership, and models of civic engagement and civil discourse. The Presidential Lecture Series has had over 40 guests of many viewpoints and perspectives and hosted some of the great intellectual, business and civic leaders of our time. As one of the world’s premier centers of scholarly leadership, Purdue is — appropriately and necessarily — a regular venue for great thinkers across a wide variety of disciplines.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four 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, including over 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 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 Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.