The blizzard of ’78 in West Lafayette, IN (October 1978)
The aftermath of the blizzard of ’78 in front of the Purdue Union (October 1978)
One of the earliest pieces of equipment for the lab was a Banbury polymer mixer used in our polymer plasticizer work (September 1978)
Our first Instron apparatus for study of the small deformation mechanical behavior of hydrogels (March 1978)
The Andrej Potter building was inaugurated in 1978. In this new building named after the Purdue Dean of Engineering of forty years, Purdue created the first biomedical engineering program along with independent laboratories for biomedical and biochemical engineering. In the third floor of this “interdisciplinary engineering building” we had a laboratory for our artificial kidney and biomaterials research. (January 1978)
Prof Peppas in his office when he was assigned to teach ChE 529, a course in Organic Chemical Technology, a course that Norris Shreve had started 40 years earlier…
A differential scanning calorimeter (Perkin Elmer DSC-1B) was the first equipment of the Peppas laboratory purchased in October 1976 with $10,500 start-up funds!...
First month at Purdue University. The Engineering complex (September 1976)
Dr Nicholas Peppas served in the Greek Army. He graduated as a second Lieutenant in the School of Officers of the Ordnance Corps of the Greek Army. As the leader of his class, he represented his class of officers at the graduation ceremony in Lamia, Greece in August 1974
The first paper of Prof Peppas. It was published in the AIChE Journal and reported results of his studies on the thermodynamics of multivalent polyelectrolytes. This was the result of work he had done under the supervision of Prof. Herman “Fritz” Meissner while he was a teaching assistant in the spring 1972! Fritz Meissner was Peppas’ academic grandfather as he was the supervisor of Prof Merrill in 1945-47. The paper shown here is part of a series of papers published on this subject by Fritz Meissner and his then graduate students including C Cusik and Jeff Tester, now an MIT ChE professor.
At the MIT Biomaterials Laboratories of
Prof. Edward Merrill
From left: Steve Rose, Hossein Banijamali
(now with Canadian Petroleum Processing,
Inc.),
Tim Burke, Michael Sefton (now at the Univ
of Toronto) and Nicholas Peppas (May 1972)
The MIT Cobalt-60 (gamma irradiation unit) was the only equipment in the small building E-66 that year. The building was demolished at the end of 1972 and became the site of the new Chemical Engineering building (E66) that was inaugurated two years later… (March 1972)
Nicholas Peppas as a first year graduate student in Ed Merrill MIT laboratories of biomaterials. The samples in the jars are semicrystalline poly(vinyl alcohol) gels. (January 1972)
IAESTE internship at the Shell company in Pernis,
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Here with NTU Athens classmate Costas Lamnatos
(left, now Director Ferronikeli Complex L.L.C.). The movie theater was playing MASH that had just started showing in Europe (July 1970)
