—-

Graduate Students

The group interviews Masters and PhD students every hiring cycle for recruitment. Please use the link above to indicate lab interest, and apply to Purdue ME! Note that grad students can participate in lab research through the 4+1 Purdue program, the MS Thesis program, and the ME Professional Masters programs; the latter graduates faster, but spends less time in the lab and is unfunded. Notably, many application fee waivers are available, e.g. for diverse students, and for any who remotely attends the fall Graduate Showcase. An interesting note, PhD students from the lab will have an interesting academic lineage.

Visiting Students & PostDocs

Visiting students (grad or undergrad) are strongly encouraged, and are usually funded from their home institution or country, although the Warsinger Lab will assist with funding applications such as through Fulbright. Ideally visiting students develop or are part of collaboration plan with their home Principle Investigator, begin their work well before their arrival, and stays of >9 months are needed for reasonable productivity. For accepted visiting students, detailed visa steps are here.

For students educated in India, Purdue provides some funded programs: one such program to fund visiting PhD students and PostDocs is WARI, another is SERB, and their is an Indian-specific Fulbright scholarship too. For Indian undergrads, PURE may be an option.

For students from Europe, the TraVERSE application (Trans-Atlantic Visiting Engineering Research Scholarship Experience) is a great option for masters students looking to do their thesis in the US.

For particularly well-published PostDoc applicants, the Lilian Gilbreth Fellowship is another option.

Undergraduate Research

New positions: Warsinger lab is actively recruiting undergraduates. Multi-time period commitments are preferred (e.g. Summer and Fall). Most students work for credit: lab-funded paid positions are usually reserved for increasing lab diversity to those who cannot afford not to do paid work, although pay is also possible to recruit exceptional upperclassman.  Two of the openings, related to membrane distillation apparatus creation and nanomaterial membranes, are at this link. University-sponsored paid positions are usually done through DURI (summer and semesters), OURS (summer and semesters), SURF (summers only), ME Projects, as well as the Bottomley and Ralph T. Simon research scholarships (during semesters). Students are responsible for submitting to those those applications. Students may also be recruited by grad students/visiting scholars directly, who serve as their mentors.

Regarding course credit, students may take it in multiple departments, including ME, EEE, ECE CHEME, etc. For ME: Sophomores take ME 298, Juniors or Seniors without past research courses take ME 498, and others take ME 499. For those who want research not in ME; ask your academic advisor for your department’s process. Example form for the research contract. and the variable title form. Typically students take it for a grade, for 3 credits (12 hours/week).

Type of Undergraduate work: A wide variety of experience is possible, including apparatus building and testing, machining, running experiments, controls work, technical writing, patents, academic diagrams, data analysis, and mathematical modelling. New positions include all areas mentioned on the research page.

Ensuring undergraduate success: David tries to find opportunities for students to be coauthors on conference and journal papers. Occasionally he has even taken undergrads to conferences. To ensure long-term success of mentees, David will do award nominations, recommendation letters, and long-term career advice. Past undergrads have received awards from their work with David including the MIT MechE superUROP award, the MIT Peter Griffith Prize, and shared awards including the Best Poster Presentation Award at the ACE15 Conference in Anaheim, California. Past undergrad mentees have gone off to graduate school at MIT, Stanford, Purdue, UMD, etc, and have gotten jobs at companies including SpaceX, Tesla, Stroud, Cummins, ExxonMobil, RWL Water, International Development Enterprises (iDE), and the PA Consulting Group.

Promoting Diversity

The Warsinger lab emphasizes diversity in recruitment, and strives to represent groups of different ethnicity, socioeconomic background, gender, and country of origin. The lab also strives to create a supportive environment for different cultures, religions, and the LGBTQ community. Beyond the obvious diversity, current and incoming members collectively speak over a dozen languages, and include first generation college students and members from developing countries. We believe that diverse perspectives enhance scientific creativity.

Types of training

The Warsinger lab aims to support two primary focus of training: a scientist track and a entrepreneurship track. Projects types, skill development, recommended goals, and career planning help focus on these two areas.

Why join Purdue and the Warsinger lab?

Purdue University is a leading institute for mechanical engineering (ranked 6th currently, and 1st for the online MSME, 4th for both Engineering grad and undergrad) and nanotechnology (consistently top 7) ¹ ².  Purdue is ranked 4th for patents, which the lab takes full advantage of. The lab's home, the Birck Nanotechnology Center, is the cornerstone of Purdue's Discovery Park, which itself has been ranked the top university research park. The lab runs its larger experiments at the Maha Fluid Power Center, the USA’s largest university fluid power facility, and Herrick labs, the world’s largest academic HVAC facility. Through these institutes, Purdue links university research to interdepartmental collaboration and industrial implementation. Purdue is also well-known for Heat Transfer Research (Warsinger’s teaching area): about 70% of undergrad institutes use the textbook by Purdue faculty Incropera and Dewitt. Purdue is located between Indianapolis and Chicago. The cost of living is exceptionally low as well, with housing costs from $400-650/month, and the lowest graduate tuition of any top 10 school. It’s also ranked as the #1 safest university in America. West Lafayette also was ranked by the WSJ as having the nation’s best Emerging Housing market, an evaluation that includes “strong local economy and appealing lifestyle amenities.” Also, Purdue’s PhD program aims to achieve a nurturing and less-stressful culture, in contrast to some of the weed-out cutthroat approaches of appears. For instance, we have qualifying exam waivers and only require a 3.0 GPA in our classes (e.g. compared to Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and UMich, which all require 3.5).

Warsinger’s lab has a strong record with mentoring students and PostDocs, with high graduate rates, below average time-to-degree, high publication rates, etc. Alumni have great track records in getting jobs, including 8 who have secured tenure-track faculty jobs (as of August 2024), at many good schools.