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James Myers — Bernard Osher Foundation. Endowment for the Osher Reentry Scholarship (Multidisciplinary Studies)
Julie Blowers — Bernard Osher Foundation. Endowment for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
James DeCaro — Nippon Foundation. Operating Support for Postsecondary Education Network (PEN) International
Donald Figer — Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. Research funding for a Zero Noise Detector for the Thirty-Meter Telescope
David Pankow — Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. Endowment for the Melbert B. Cary Graphic Arts Collection
Sandra Rothenberg — Alfred B. Sloan Foundation. Sloan Industry Research Fellowship
Marc Marschark — Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation. Funding to develop web site for parents of hard-of-hearing children
James Myers — Center for Multidisciplinary Studies
 James Myers
Director—Center for Multidisciplinary Studies
The Osher Reentry Scholarship program was established with a $1,000,000 gift from the Bernard Osher Foundation. The Scholarship offers funding to support reentering adult college students who seek to advance their education in multidisciplinary studies. The program has become a regional resource for people seeking to reengage with the university and upgrade their skills.
What makes these scholarships unique is the emphasis on reentry students—students who are 25 years of age or older who have had their college education interrupted due to circumstances beyond the student's control. The stories behind the scholarship awards are some of the most inspirational student stories at RIT.
"For the past two years, we have administered Osher Reentry Scholarships and awarded 21 scholarships totaling more than $100,000!" — James Myers
The Bernard Osher Foundation was founded in 1977 by businessman Bernard Osher. It seeks to improve quality of life through the support of post-secondary scholarships and lifelong learning programs at institutions of higher education across the country as well as arts and culture initiatives in the San Francisco Bay area and in Maine. The Foundation also funds integrative medicine centers at Harvard University, the University of California San Francisco, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Julie Blowers — Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
 Julie Blowers
Program Director—Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at RIT—an affiliate of RIT since 1987 — is an academic-based and membership-led organization that stimulates minds and forges friendships among people ages 50 and older who live in Greater Rochester. The Institute was established with operating support from the Bernard Osher Foundation, and recently received an additional $1 million from the Foundation to establish a permanent endowment.
As Peter Luce, council chair for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at RIT, explains, "At this time, we are among 121 university-based Osher lifelong learning institutes nationwide which together provide educational programming for over 70,000 people. The Osher endowment award is a major national recognition of the value of our program. We are pleased and proud of that recognition."
"The Osher endowment will provide support to help us grow and enhance our lifelong learning program at RIT,"" says Julie Blowers, program director for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at RIT. "New initiatives will be made possible such as the Osher Arts and Lecture Program, which combines special music performances with guest speakers in a variety of topics ranging from foreign policy to Internet technology." — Julie Blowers
The Bernard Osher Foundation was founded in 1977 by businessman Bernard Osher. It seeks to improve quality of life through the support of post-secondary scholarships and lifelong learning programs at institutions of higher education across the country as well as arts and culture initiatives in the San Francisco Bay area and in the state of Maine. The Foundation also funds integrative medicine centers at Harvard University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
James DeCaro — Postsecondary Education Network (PEN International) at NTID
 James DeCaro
Director—PEN International
The Nippon Foundation of Japan has played a pivotal role in helping RIT's National Technical Institute for the Deaf improve education and career opportunities for deaf people around the world. Since 2001, The Nippon Foundation has awarded NTID $10 million to help colleges across the globe improve technological education for their deaf students through a program called Postsecondary Education Network International (PEN-International).
Deaf students attending specific colleges in Japan, China, Russia, the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Czech Republic will continue to benefit from PEN-International's expertise through improved curriculum, increased access, new technology, multi-media labs and trained faculty. More recently, PEN-International has been conducting training in the areas of sign language instruction, interpreter training, automation technology and counseling skills.
"The dedication, enthusiasm and commitment of our partners and the NTID PEN team have resulted in PEN-International far exceeding the original expectations I had for this program." — James DeCaro
To date, more than 1,000 educators from partner countries have participated in PEN-International hosted workshops. A total of 52 workshops were conducted by partner institutions in their home countries as a result of skills learned through PEN-International training initiatives. The result is 900 new people being trained through their own exporting initiatives.
PEN-International's enormously successful efforts will improve the lives of deaf and hard-of-hearing students around the world indefinitely. Their accomplishments have resulted in the National Association of the Deaf (USA) nominating PEN for the prestigious 2007 World Federation of the Deaf Solidarity Merit Award.
Don Figer — Rochester Imaging Detector Laboratory
 Don Figer
Director—Rochester Imaging Detector Laboratory
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation recently awarded Rochester Institute of Technology $2.8 million to design, develop and build a zero-noise detector for the future Thirty Meter Telescope. Expected to be operational in the next decade, the telescope's light-collecting power will be 10 times that of the largest telescopes now in operation.
The detector's new sensing technology promises to penetrate the darkness of space with the greatest sensitivity ever. It could also have applications on Earth to improve everything from cell phone cameras to secure communications and surveillance systems. Imaging sensors produce their own "noisy" signal that often degrades images, especially under low-light conditions. The noise can sometimes be seen as the grainy, salt-and-pepper speckling found in pictures snapped in a dark room. In applications like astrophysics, that noise can do more than ruin a picture; it can mean the difference between making a discovery or not.
"Development of the detector will enable us to quadruple the power of a telescope. The only other way to get that kind of power is by making a telescope twice the size, which would cost billions of dollars and would be a monumental engineering challenge." — Don Figer
Figer leads a team of scientists from RIT and MIT's Lincoln Laboratories to create a detector unlike any available today. Figer and his colleagues will adapt prototype technologies developed at Lincoln Labs that already have some of the basic circuitry required to detect a single quantum of light. These circuits are currently used for LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) applications that detect pulses of light or bunches of photons.
David Pankow — The Cary Graphic Arts Collection
 David Pankow
Curator, Cary Collection
The Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology has been supported by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for decades, most recently through a $1 million grant to endow the development of outreach programs and the management of the collection's growing digital assets.
The Cary Collection was originally established at RIT in 1969 as a small library based on Melbert B. Cary Jr.'s personal collection of books on printing history and the graphic arts. The present-day collection includes some 40,000 volumes as well as manuscript material and historic printing artifacts. Holdings on bookbinding, papermaking, type design, calligraphy, book illustration and typographic exemplars are also part of the collection.
"This significant endowment for the Collection will enable us to promote it to wide audiences through an ambitious outreach program that will include an expanded Web site, greater digital access to holdings and new exhibitions." — David Pankow
The Cary Collection, as well as related programs in RIT's College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, has been generously supported by the Cary Trust and a nationally recognized graphic arts resource. It offers a broad perspective to students and scholars who are trying to understand the history of graphic communications technologies. Total support from the Cary Charitable Trust since 1969 exceeds $4.4 million.
Sandra Rothenberg — Sloan Printing Industry Center at RIT
 Sandra Rothenberg
Associate Professor — Saunders College of Business
Dr. Sandra Rothenberg, assistant professor at the E. Philip Saunders College of Business in the Department of Management, was one of only six faculty from across the country to receive the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Industry Studies Fellow award in 2005. As part of the award, Professor Rothenberg received a grant of $40,000 to carry out research in the printing industry, in conjunction with her work in RIT's Sloan Printing Industry Center.
2005 marked the inaugural year for the fellowship award, with other recipients including faculty from Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Northwestern University, and University of Michigan. These competitive fellowships are intended to provide support and recognition to highly qualified scholars in the early stages of their careers on the basis of their exceptional promise to contribute to the field of industry studies, to the advancement of knowledge, and to U.S. industrial development and economic competitiveness. "The Sloan Fellowship was extremely helpful in supporting my research activities, leading to several publications. It also supported the co-creation of the Sustainable Print Systems Laboratory at RIT, a collaborative of researchers focused on understanding sustainability issues in printing systems. The main objective of the Lab is to develop insights and tools specific to the print industry that can be used in product development to better integrate environmental, social and economic considerations into the R&D decision-making process." — Sandra Rothenberg
The Sloan Printing Industry Center at RIT studies major business environment influences in the printing industry brought on by new technologies and societal changes. Established in 2001 through a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the RIT Sloan Center is one of 26 Sloan Industry Centers. It is a joint program of the School of Print Media in the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences and RIT's E. Philip Saunders College of Business. This partnership emphasizes the foundation's long-standing tradition of applying a broad multidisciplinary approach to industry investigations and findings
Marc Marschark — Center for Education Research Partnerships at NTID
 Marc Marschark
Director — Center for Education Research Partnerships, NTID
A $30,000 grant from the Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation enabled NTID's Center for Education Research Partnerships to develop a new Web site for parents of deaf and hard-of-hearing children. The Web site, www.educatingdeafchildren.org is intended to answer questions from parents, teachers and other professionals who work with deaf children.
The information on the site will to provide full and objective information to parents of deaf children, 90% of whom are hearing, so are unfamiliar with resources available for their children. A number of resources are listed, and visitors to the site are able to post questions to be answered by experts in that field. The Web site also has a calendar to list upcoming events of related interest. Submissions from the community are encouraged.
"Our federal grants provide us with support for our research, but this was something completely different, aimed at providing parents and professionals with information about raising and educating deaf children. Private foundation funding made this project possible, and the feedback we have been receiving from around the world tells us just how important it really is." — Marc Marschark
Project partners include the American Society for Deaf Children, Hands & Voices, the National Deaf Children's Society and the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
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