“WiE found me:” 38 by 38 Purdue alums recall impactful influence of the Women in Engineering Program
Three recipients of the annual 38 by 38 awards at Purdue University, an award which recognizes outstanding alums from the College of Engineering who are 38 and under, have roots in the Women in Engineering (WiE) Program.
Three recipients of the annual 38 by 38 awards at Purdue University, an award which recognizes outstanding alums from the College of Engineering who are 38 and under, have roots in the Women in Engineering (WiE) Program.
Catherine Berdanier
Catherine Berdanier (MSAAE ’13, PhD ENE ’16) was excited to see familiar faces within the 38 by 38 honorees. A few were from research groups. Some were also from her time in WiE.
“(WiE) was absolutely instrumental to my personal commitments toward how I wanted to operate as an engineer and a professor,” Berdanier, from State College, Pennsylvania, said. “They were the people who kept me going in the day-to-day.”
Experiences as a leadership team member in the Graduate WiE Network shaped Berdanier’s future as a professor at Penn State and how she has chosen to design her research program. The inclusion of developing professional connections and professional skills, like improving communication of research, set Berdanier’s lab apart from other research groups, both as a student at Purdue and faculty at Penn State. These are skills she honed in WiE, both as a leadership team member from 2013-15 and in watching other graduate student mentors guide new students along the Purdue journey.
“It was mission critical to my professional success to invest time in my social connections, and I realized through (WiE) that made me tick,” Berdanier said. “I could not, I should not and don't want to go through my professional life alone.”
Berdanier’s connections through WiE continued past graduation. One became a close colleague at Penn State, and several other WiE friends that became professors have kept in touch via every-other-week Zoom meetings for 10 years and counting — critical to navigating the tenure path and motherhood during the pandemic. She is driven to keep her students curious as they pursue new and challenging projects in community with each other and others outside of the team.
“We might as well have fun together as we're doing this really hard work, too. It doesn't take anything away from the rigor of our work to also be having fun at the same time.”
Lindsay Hirsch
The first memory of Purdue for Lindsay Hirsch (BSChE ’10) went hand-in-hand with WiE.
She came to West Lafayette, Indiana, with her family to apply to Purdue in October 2005. Prior to digital applications, students came to Purdue with resumes and full list of qualifications for Purdue Engineering in the early morning on a Saturday. Students would get decisions by the end of the day.
Hirsch immediately noticed the friendly, thoughtful women who were answering questions and running the event.
Finding out that they were all WiE, and that there was a Learning Community she could join, finalized Hirsch’s college decision the moment she received her acceptance. She lived in Earhart Hall, where her whole floor was women spread out in their Purdue Engineering journeys.
“It was such a nice way to connect with people going through the same learning and curriculum that we were doing,” Hirsch said. “It was nice to have a sounding board and a community that could get through (engineering) together.”
Many of those friends she made in Earhart are still in her life 15 years later.
Hirsch was involved with the Mentees & Mentors Program (M&M) from 2006-10 and was a tutor in the WiE Learning Community from 2007-10. Her experiences as a mentor, a team member and a leader through WiE events and the Purdue Engineering curriculum helped Hirsch thrive when she interned at Procter & Gamble in 2008 and entered her full-time career — also at Procter & Gamble — in 2010.
She entered the working world with a go-getter mentality, cultivated through engineering courses and the multitude of teamwork opportunities Purdue presented.
“Purdue will give you really tough problems, and you have to figure it out with the tools that you are given,” Hirsch said. “That’s really how life is, and I’ve always felt very prepared and conditioned to not be overwhelmed by those challenges because of Purdue Engineering.”
After graduating, Hirsh spent three years at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati as an analyst and a project engineer, optimizing packaging production and reducing waste in the production process. She then moved to Houston, Texas, to work for McKinsey & Company as a consultant from 2014-2021, before breaking out of consulting and into business growth and strategy.
Sysco, where Hirsch has been working since 2021, provides food and food services to restaurants, hospitals, university dining halls and K-12 schools. As an owner and vice president of growth strategy, planning and design, Hirsch facilitates the online services and is piloting two brick-and-mortar stores in the Houston area to collect data about customer behavior and improve services for them in the future.
At Sysco, Hirsch has been promoted three times in four years, not only for innovative roles and curious spirit, but because of a dedication to mentoring and creating positive experiences within the work environment, she said.
In Hirsch’s current team of over 150 colleagues, she mentors young parents like herself who are learning how to balance work and family. While having children and engineering are two vastly different fields, Hirsch has found her Purdue Engineering-cultivated curiosity has kept her learning and growing in both.
While Hirsch’s job titles haven’t included “engineering” in 13 years, she is humbled to be recognized as 38 by 38 recipient. It’s another way she’s able to give back to Purdue — through an ongoing, continuously growing and inspiring career.
Krista Toler
Krista (O’Shaugnessey) Toler was looking for inspiration throughout her Purdue Engineering journey. She was nearly a senior in biomedical engineering (BME) when she interned at Biomet, the company that would see the flourishing of her groundbreaking research for 15 years.
“I decided to just accept that I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but that I could do almost anything I wanted with my Purdue engineering degree,” Toler, from Warsaw, Indiana, said.
WiE found Toler in the fall of 2005 when she came to West Lafayette to register for classes. An advisor’s recommendation of ENGR 19400 (Women in Engineering Seminar) piqued her interest, especially as a first-generation student who would need all the advice she could find to navigate college. Soon enough, Toler was hanging on to every word from the speakers in the course. When classes were tough, the alums who spoke about Purdue Engineering challenges and engineering careers inspired Toler to keep going. As a junior and senior, Toler mentored new students in WiE through M&M as they navigated college life and university-level courses for the first time.
Now, Toler (BSBME ’09, MSBME ’10) returns to Purdue around midterms most years to speak to the ENGR 194 courses about the challenges she faced as a student, ranging from creating a simple circuit to finding internships and maintaining friendships when she really, really needed to study. She credited 38 by 38 nominator Christine Krueger (BSBME ’09) and husband Jason Toler (BSBME ’09, MSBME ’10) for helping her through the BME curriculum and understanding enough to make a career.
“I never felt isolated when I struggled with the work,” Toler said. “With them and my parents, who had homeschooled me, I felt confident that I could figure out how to learn and be successful in Purdue Engineering.”
Toler’s primary takeaway from WiE and engineering, professionally, was how to solve problems. She had developed the skill to look at any problem of any size and be able to define constraints, create a starting point and develop solutions, which served her well when she returned to Biomet (now Zimmer Biomet) in 2010 after finishing a master’s degree.
Toler is now the associate director of research and development at Zimmer Biomet and leads the charge on preventing orthopedic infections and identifying infections in early stages.
See the complete list of 38 by 38 honorees, who were honored on Oct. 9, 2025.