Purdue University College of Agriculture

Every morning, Barry Pittendrigh, Purdue’s John V. Osmun Endowed Chair in Urban Entomology and Director of the Urban Center, sits down with his coffee and taps open the back-end data display associated with an application. On his phone screen is a map covered in dots. There are clusters over Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond. These dots represent the impact of a new app from SAWBO (Scientific Animations Without Borders), a digital library of extension information in the form of animated videos. Pittendrigh and Julia Bello-Bravo, an assistant professor of agricultural sciences education and communication, launched the application last year after working on SAWBO since 2011. The app takes the basic idea behind extension – sharing research and innovation with stakeholders in the community – and scales it globally. It has been downloaded by approximately 200,000 users, reaches 1,000 users a day and is being used around the globe to share research for development (R4D) knowledge.

There were more than 1,000 crashes involving vehicles equipped with automated driving systems or Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems in the first half of 2025, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Whether on highways or farms, automated systems must remain safe despite sensor failures, GPS disruptions, network dropouts or even cyber-attacks. That’s why Purdue University is leading CHORUS, a multi-institution research center funded by a $7 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, to build resilience into cyber-physical systems (CPS). The name is inspired by the Egyptian god Horus, who symbolizes protection from disasters, with the “C” added to emphasize the center’s cyber focus.

Heather Neave researches animal welfare, a field focused on understanding what practices can improve the lives of animals on farms, which also makes them more productive. Lately, she’s been trying to tackle the big question of how to read an animals’ emotions.