Appointments, honors and activities

• Faculty and staff honors:

- Mitch Tuinstra, the scientific director of Institute for Plant Sciences, was named a 2017 Fellow of American Society of Agronomy as well as Crop Science Society of America. He received recognition for both of these honors at the Alliance of Crop, Soil and Environmental Science Societies’ international annual meeting in Tampa, Florida. In addition to these distinctions, Tuinstra is also an agronomy professor of plant breeding and genetics and Wickersham Chair of Excellence in Agricultural Research. For more information about his research, go to https://ag.purdue.edu/agry/directory/Pages/mtuinstr.aspx.

- Daniel Dumbacher, a School of Aeronautics and Astronautics professor of engineering practice, was appointed executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the world’s largest aerospace technical society. Dumbacher, a 1981 alumnus, came to Purdue as a faculty member in 2014 after retiring from a three-decade career at NASA, most recently as deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.  For more, visit http://www.aiaa.org/DumbacherNamedAIAAExecDir/.

• Notables:

      Sorin Matei, professor and director of Purdue Data Storytelling Network and a professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication, has published a new book on community dynamics in social media. The book explores communities that rely upon commons-based peer production. “Structural Differentiation in Social Media: Adhocracy, Entropy, and the 1-percent Effect” represents 10 years of research. “The book presents some interesting findings about the way in which a new elite has emerged in the world of communication and about the way in which social media groups evolve,” Matei said. “Wikipedia is edited by a tiny group of just a half to one percent of its editorial body, which is responsible for a majority of the content. Adhocracy – the idea that crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia aren’t these decentralized and spontaneous ventures – but rather are orchestrated by an organizational system that combines a stable power hierarchy with individual mobility.” 

• Student honors:

- Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management was awarded first place by State Sen. Michael Crider at the Conexus Indiana Logistics Case Competition in Indianapolis. The competition provided students with a three-day experience with Indiana’s top logistics industry executives, while the event also pushed students to compete against others to develop a solution to a real-world logistics business case. Krannert team members included Lawson Drury, Shane Flanagon, Parker Campbell and Joshua Groh. For more information, visit https://www.cicpindiana.com/conexuscasecompetition2017/.