Jasper Engines manager Brock Bawel named to Conexus Indiana Rising 30

Brock Bawel’s selection to Conexus Indiana’s Rising 30 is more than a personal honor for Jasper Engines & Transmissions. It puts a local quality leader who started as a 16-year-old intern at the center of a workforce story that matters in Dubois County: how a manufacturing-heavy county keeps engineering talent and leadership talent close to home.

Conexus announced its 2026 Rising 30 class on May 4 and recognized the honorees at an awards reception at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis. The program, now in its sixth year, honors Hoosiers age 30 and younger for early-career accomplishments and demonstrated impact in advanced manufacturing and logistics. This year’s class will also spend the coming year in Conexus programming focused on technology adoption, workforce development and the future of Indiana’s manufacturing and logistics industries.

Bawel fits that profile closely. He joined Jasper Engines & Transmissions as an R&D intern at age 16, later graduated from Purdue University in 2020 with a degree in industrial engineering technology and first moved into Jasper’s quality team full time after college. After about two years, he became a group leader focused on diesel engines. He now serves as quality engineering manager and leads a 50-person division.

That kind of progression matters at a company like Jasper, where quality work touches everything from remanufactured gas and diesel engines to transmissions, differentials, rear axle assemblies, marine engines and electric motors. Jasper says it is the nation’s largest remanufacturer in those categories and employs more than 2,300 associates across 52 branch and distributor locations. Bawel’s Rising 30 bio said his work has helped move Jasper’s quality operation from reacting to problems after they happen to solving them earlier, with better collaboration between engineering and floor-level execution.

For Dubois County, the recognition also reflects the economic structure that makes stories like this so important. The county has been described as more than four times as manufacturing-intensive as the United States overall, and manufacturers accounted for $1.2 billion of county GDP in 2021. Local manufacturing is especially concentrated in furniture, office furniture and motor vehicle parts, which helps explain why leadership development inside plants and engineering departments has outsized local impact.

Bawel is also co-founder of Brothers for Veterans, a nonprofit connecting active-duty military and veterans with the outdoors. But his Rising 30 selection reinforces a larger point for Jasper and the county around it: the region’s next generation of technical leaders is being trained not just in classrooms, but on local production floors where retention, advancement and practical problem-solving can keep young professionals in Dubois County.