Department of Chemistry and Physics at Purdue University Northwest

03/02/2026

Congratulations to Dr. Neeti Parashar for mentoring students at PNW in groundbreaking research in high energy physics.

"It is important to share these opportunities with students because these are world-class laboratories. Not every physics student gets to experience this, especially at an undergraduate level.”

Neeti Parashar, professor of Physics at PNW, has earned many opportunities and achievements as a physicist and academic.

12/09/2025

Congratulations to Charles Steele (Lecturer of Physical Science) for receiving a patent for his Fingerprinting System and Method for the production of nano-particle carbon black for fingerprinting. The work was initially funded on an NIJ grant (US Patent # 12474048)

12/09/2025

Neil deGrasse Tyson with Dr. Neeti Parashar and Chancellor Chris Holford at the Sinai Forum at Purdue Northwest on Sunday, December 7th

07/13/2025

I want to thank the Indiana Business Journal and other sponsors for inviting students from Purdue University Northwest (PNW) to the Innovate Northwest Indiana luncheon last week. It was a great opportunity for them. During the networking session, they had the opportunity to meet Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner and Kelly Anthony from Senator Young’s office, discussing the student research at PNW. Our students are contributing to real science, addressing real-world needs. The group that went is engaged in a wide variety of projects, including forensic DNA analysis, gait analysis, destruction of forever chemicals like PFOA, biofuel development, kinetic analysis of bullets, post-mortem interval determinations, desalination of seawater, and tire mark identification. Some of them are working on the development of commercial applications for these technologies with Purdue Polytechnic students in a cross-campus merged capstone class through the SoET engine. Others are generating academic presentations for top-tier conferences like the ACS, IAI, ISFG, etc.

05/21/2025

Professors from multiple Purdue locations, cross-disciplinary students, and industry have all joined together with a singular focus: safer water.

PNW's very own Associate Professor of Chemistry Rey Barreto and Physical Science Lecturer & Forensic Science Coordinator Charles Steele are developing groundbreaking technology aimed at drastically improving water quality: https://bit.ly/4jfXZvo

05/18/2025

Congratulations, Rey Barreto, Charles Steele, and all of the students working on this project at the Westville campus; Fred Berry, James Condron, and all of the students working on this project at Polytechnic.

This project began with Dr. Barreto's discovery and evolved into a collaboration involving multiple elements of Purdue, resulting in a device capable of destroying "forever" chemicals like PFAS in water.

Follow the link for the press release:
https://stories.prf.org/purdue-collaboration-destroys-forever-chemicals/

04/15/2025

Congratulations to Neeti Parashar and the PNW Center for High Energy Physics for being part of the CMS Collaboration, winner of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

For detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extrem...

03/02/2025

02/04/2025

Congratulations to Dr. Dan Suson (Professor of Physics and Astronomy) for his recent publication entitled 'Search for extended GeV sources in the inner galactic plane' in ArXiv. You can read the abstract at https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07162 Department of Chemistry and Physics at Purdue University Northwest

12/17/2024

Congrats to Chemistry Professor Nick Ernst on his latest publication in the ACS journal Langmuir - "Cu2O/CuO Nanoparticle-Cotton Fiber Biocomposite Catalyst: Self-Improvement through Morphological Changes during Methyl Orange Degradation"

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.langmuir.4c02405