Before summer 2024, Richard Voyles from the School of Engineering Technology joined several colleagues spread across engineering and the Polytechnic to showcase robotics technology to the U.S. Senate.
Voyles, Purdue Polytechnic’s Daniel C. Lewis professor and the director of the Robotics Accelerator center, was accompanied to Washington, D.C. by Ragu Athinarayanan (engineering technology professor and an architect of Purdue Polytechnic’s new Smart Manufacturing curriculum) and the College of Engineering’s Martin Jun (a mechanical engineering professor with interests in micro- and nano-technology).
“I think the people in D.C. actually reached out to us about this originally,” Voyles said. “They invited us specifically because [senior senator from Indiana] Todd Young is one of the co-sponsors of this caucus. And this is a great sign, because we haven’t really had some who’s been as much of an advocate for tech in higher education than him.”