Inventors & Innovators

Charles Alton Ellis

Golden Gate Bridge Engineer

Charles Alton Ellis, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue from 1934-46, was among the engineers who collaborated on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ellis wasn’t recognized for his contribution to the bridge until the 1980s, despite helping design, in his own words, “every nut and bolt on the darn thing.”

Leslie Geddes

Technological Innovator

Leslie Geddes was the Showalter Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Engineering. In 2004, Geddes received Purdue’s Outstanding Commercialization Award to recognize his 30 patents, many now licensed by Indiana companies. Patents and technologies emerging from Geddes’ laboratory have generated more than $15 million in royalties for Purdue.

He received the 2006 National Medal of Technology from President George W. Bush in a White House ceremony in 2007. The award is the nation’s highest honor for technological innovation.

Among the accomplishments during his career spanning 50-plus years were innovations ranging from burn treatments to miniature defibrillators, from ligament repair to tiny blood pressure monitors for premature infants.

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth

Industrial Management Pioneers

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were renowned as the “Father and Mother of Modern Management,” and their motion study work continues to interest and attract researchers. The Gilbreths’ research introduced using photography and motion pictures to study and help improve the efficiency of industrial workers and minimize worker fatigue. 

In 1935, Lillian Gilbreth became the first female professor in the College of Engineering. She also accepted the role of consultant for careers for women and helped establish a time and motion study laboratory at Purdue. She retired from the university in 1948.

The couple also raised 12 children together, and the story of their family life has been recounted in numerous journal articles, books and films, notably “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

Adel Halasa

Rubber Technology Pioneer

Adel Halasa is credited with developing the tire tread polymers for the Goodyear Aquatred tire, released in 1991. He received his doctorate in chemistry from Purdue in 1964.

Halasa has more than 250 patents and is a 1997 recipient of the Charles Goodyear Medal given by the American Chemical Society, Rubber Division, to members who “have exhibited exceptional technical competence by making significant and repeated contributions to rubber technology.” In 1998, 2000 and 2005 he was named Goodyear Inventor of the Year. He also received the 2003 Distinguished Science Alumni Award from Purdue.

Halasa established the first facilities in Kuwait for the use of sulfur in asphalt road applications.

Brian Lamb

Communication Leader

In 1977, Brian Lamb, a Purdue alumnus, founded C-SPAN — Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. The network’s initial telecasts of the U.S. House of Representatives commenced in 1979, and today there are three C-SPAN networks offering around-the-clock coverage of the political process.

Lamb earned his bachelor’s degree in speech in 1963 and received an honorary doctorate from Purdue in 1986. In 2007, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was named Washingtonian of the Year. In 2003, he was awarded the Freedom of Speech Award, the National Humanities Medal and the Harry S. Truman Good Neighbor Award.

In 1987, Lamb designated Purdue as the original home of the C-SPAN Archives, which records, indexes and archives all C-SPAN programming for historical, educational and research uses. Now located in the Purdue Research Park and operated and entirely funded by C-SPAN, the Archives records, stores and makes accessible every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, totaling more than 160,000 hours. In 2011, Purdue named the Brian Lamb School of Communication after the Lafayette, Indiana, native.

Before C-SPAN, Lamb was publisher of The Media Report, Washington bureau chief for CableVision magazine, freelance reporter for United Press International Audio and public affairs officer in the Navy for the Pentagon. Lamb also served as a military social aide for the White House under President Lyndon B. Johnson and as the media and congressional relations director for the Office of Telecommunications Policy during the Nixon administration.

Elwood Mead

Hoover Dam Engineer

An 1884 graduate in one of Purdue’s first agriculture classes, Elwood Mead was an irrigation expert who provided his expertise in Indiana and Wyoming as well as overseas in Australia, Palestine and South Africa. In 1924, he was named commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of Interior. He went on to become the chief engineer behind the construction of the Hoover Dam. The dam’s reservoir — the largest man-made reservoir — bears his name, Lake Mead.

Charles Pankow

Construction Pioneer

Purdue graduate Charles Pankow is credited with helping develop the concrete building frame that is exceedingly resistant to earthquakes. The Precast Hybrid Moment Frame was a result of the joint efforts of Charles Pankow Builders Ltd. and others. It utilized the precast concrete in providing a seismic framing system that outperforms structural steel.

The system is well known for its use in The Paramount, a 40-story apartment tower in San Francisco, among other structures.

Pankow came to Purdue in 1941 and — after stepping away to serve in World War II — graduated with a civil engineering degree in 1947. After 15 years of working at construction companies, he established his namesake company in 1947. The company is responsible for more than 200 buildings since then.

Through his company, he established a number of innovations in concrete forming technology and developed new ways of approaching the construction of buildings.

David Ross

Automotive Engineer

David Ross, an inventor with some 88 patents, was a Purdue alumnus who went on to become a trustee and noted university benefactor.

Born in 1870, Ross graduated from Purdue in 1893 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He went back home to the Brookston area upon graduation, but his creation of new devices for the young automobile industry caught the attention of car manufacturers, and he went on to form the Ross Gear and Tool Co.

Ross would return to Purdue, serving first on an alumni committee and later on the university’s Board of Trustees. He played a significant role in raising funds for the Purdue Memorial Union and was instrumental in developing Ross-Ade Stadium, faculty pensions and the Purdue University Airport. He also was behind the creation of the Purdue Research Foundation.

R. Games Slayter

Fiberglass Developer

A one-time tuba player in Purdue University’s “All-American” Marching Band is credited with the development of Fiberglas, the world’s first commercial fiberglass product.

R. Games Slayter, an Indiana native, graduated from Purdue with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1921. In the early part of his career, he worked at Owens-Illinois Glass Co. in Toledo, Ohio. It was there that he first created the coarse fibers that led to the production of Fiberglas.

Slayter continued his work in 1938 as vice president of research and development, refining Fiberglas’ production process to make it financially viable. He remained with the company, which merged to become Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., amassing more than 90 patents in fiberglass technology before retiring in the 1960s. Slayter even served as a consultant for NASA before the end of his career.

Thanks to a gift from Slayter and his wife, Marie, the Slayter Center of Performing Arts was constructed in 1964.

Richard Borgens

Multiple Sclerosis Medicine Developer

Richard Borgens was the Mari Hulman George Professor of Applied Neuroscience in the College of Veterinary Medicine and a professor of biomedical engineering. He was also a founding director of Purdue’s Center for Paralysis Research and a founding board member and chief scientific officer for Andara Life Sciences Inc.

Borgens, in collaboration with Riyi Shi and Andrew Blight (former Purdue professor), developed the drug Ampyra, which has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for improving motor function in patients with multiple sclerosis. Ampyra is the first and only FDA-approved therapy addressing walking impairment in MS patients — one of the most difficult and pervasive challenges of the disease. In clinical trials, patients who took Ampyra demonstrated an increased walking speed, regardless of which of the four major types of MS they exhibited (relapsing remitting, secondary progressive, progressive relapsing or primary progressive). Researchers at Purdue developed the original concept and basic science, and conducted initial animal studies at Purdue’s Center for Paralysis Research facilities. The first clinical testing of the drug in paraplegic canines occurred on the Purdue campus in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Borgens received his PhD in biophysics and experimental zoology from Purdue in 1977 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University for three years. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from North Texas State University in 1970 and 1973, respectively. He was a National Paraplegia Foundation Fellow at Yale and worked at Jackson Laboratory and the Institute for Medical Research before joining Purdue’s faculty in 1982.

Herbert Brown

Chemistry Pioneer

Herbert C. Brown was one of the leading American chemists of the 20th century. His Nobel Prize-winning work with boron compounds revolutionized synthetic organic chemistry.

His discoveries at Purdue opened entirely new avenues in both academic and industrial chemistry. Boranes are now used in the synthesis of many organic compounds, including medications such as the antidepressant Prozac and the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor. Brown came to Purdue in 1947. During the late 1950s, he and his students discovered that unsaturated organic molecules can be readily converted to organoboranes through hydroboration reactions, in which boron and hydrogen add to multiple bonds.

He supervised a very large group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers — most notably Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, 2010 Nobel laureates who studied with Brown in the 1960s. Brown retired in 1979 but continued to be an active researcher.

Arun Ghosh

HIV Medicine Developer

Arun K. Ghosh is the Ian P. Rothwell Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Purdue. He created a molecule that was developed into the first FDA-approved treatment for drug-resistant HIV.

Ghosh was born in Calcutta, India. He obtained his BS degree in chemistry in 1979 from Calcutta University and his MS degree in chemistry in 1981 from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. He received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1985 from the University of Pittsburgh.

He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 1985-88 and then joined Merck Research Laboratories at West Point, Pennsylvania, as a medicinal chemist. In 1994, he became an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He joined the Purdue faculty in 2005.

Ei-ichi Negishi

Pharmaceutical Industry Pioneer

Professor Ei-ichi Negishi was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling to link carbon atoms and synthesize molecules. In addition to its use in the development of the painkiller naproxen and the cancer treatment Taxol, it is estimated that “Negishi coupling” is used in more than one-quarter of all chemical reactions in the pharmaceutical industry. The technique also has been used in fluorescent marking essential for DNA sequencing and in the creation of materials for thin LED displays.

Born in 1935, Negishi came to the United States in 1960 after graduating from the University of Tokyo.

In 1962, while studying for his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, he met Purdue chemistry professor Herbert C. Brown — a pioneer in synthetic organic chemistry. With Brown as a mentor, Negishi arrived in West Lafayette as a postdoctoral researcher in 1966. He then moved to Syracuse University, where he served as an assistant professor (1972-76) and associate professor (1976-79).

Negishi joined the faculty at Purdue in 1979 — the same year Brown was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In 1999, he was named the Inaugural Herbert C. Brown Distinguished Professor in chemistry.