teaching

Information about courses Prof. Liddell teaches at Purdue.

Prof. Liddell teaches the following courses at Purdue University:

  • ME 463 Engineering Design: Fall 2023, Fall 2024
  • EEE 595 Carbon Accounting & Sustainability: Spring 2025
  • EEE 560 Environmental & Ecological Engineering In-Context (topics rotate): Spring 2024
  • Project-Based Courses: offered every semester by prior arrangement; see below

More details on Prof. Liddell’s courses can be found below.

ME 463: Engineering Design

Prof. Liddell teaches a laboratory section of ME 463, a required undergraduate course in Mechanical Engineering.

ME 463 is the senior-level capstone design course of Purdue’s ME curriculum. Students work in teams to engineer practical solutions to problems. Starting from a problem statement, the students investigate the reasons for the problem, and what others have done to solve it. They create and analyze new and better solutions to the problem (from concept level to detailed level). They build and test a prototype of their solution. Student groups are formed under the leadership of a primary instructor, who is responsible for oversight of the group work, and assigning grades. Some groups seek technical advice from other advisors, such as other faculty members, professional staff members, or experts outside of the campus community. Some groups also have outside sponsors that may be from industry or from within the campus community. This guided experience brings closure to the undergraduate ME curriculum by integrating previous course competencies with team and communication skills in this problem-solving course.

LINK: Course Website for ME 463

LEFT: A Fall 2024 senior design team collaborates to brainstorm design options in a functional decomposition exercise. RIGHT: An ME 463 student presents his team's final project at the Fall 2024 Malott Innovation Awards.


EEE 595: Carbon Accounting & Sustainability

Prof. Liddell teaches Carbon Accounting & Sustainability (temporary number: EEE 595), a new course for Spring 2025. This lecture-based course is open to graduate students and upper level undergraduates as an elective.

EEE 595 covers the techniques of corporate carbon accounting, broadly defined as the methods used to estimate the quantities of greenhouse gases (CO2-equivalent) emitted by corporate entities. The emphasis in this course will be on entities that manufacture physical products. Students will learn process-based and input-output techniques for carbon accounting (at the level of the product, facility, corporation, and industry/economy) and will gain practical experience applying these techniques in compliance with The Greenhouse Gas Protocol and other relevant standards. Current topics in carbon accounting will be explored through a series of “journal club” discussions, where we will critically and collaboratively discuss perspectives offered in a selection of high-impact recent journal papers. The course is divided into three approximately equal units, each about five weeks long, and culminates in an integrative course project emphasizing both practical skills and the bigger picture.

  • Unit 1. Direct carbon emissions (Scope 1 & 2)
  • Unit 2. Indirect carbon emissions (Scope 3)
  • Unit 3. Global sustainability and broader impacts of carbon accounting


    • LINK: Fall 2025 syllabus for EEE 595 (PDF download)


    Project-Based Courses

    Project-based courses at Purdue provide structured opportunities for faculty-mentored independent study and research at the undergraduate and graduate level. Prof. Liddell offers independent studies and research projects for credit in both ME and EEE. Current Purdue undergraduate students can refer to the undergraduate research webpages for ME and EEE (see links below) for more details. Undergraduate students can take independent studies for credit under course numbers ME 297, ME 498, ME 499, and EEE 498; and graduate students (pursuing non-thesis projects) can take ME 597 and EEE 598.

    LINK: Undergraduate Research in Mechanical Engineering (ME) (Webpage)
    LINK: Undergraduate Research in Environmental & Ecological Engineering (EEE) (Webpage)

    Short Courses and Workshops

    Outside of her core teaching, Prof. Liddell also teaches short courses and workshops on a range of topics at Purdue and externally.

    LEFT: Prof. Liddell gives a lecture on life cycle assessment (LCA) and design for sustainability to students enrolled in Purdue's 2024 Summer College for High School Students program. RIGHT: Prof. Liddell introduces a Challenge Session workshop at the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment's 2024 Conference (ACLCA 2024).