Alumni News

Caroline DeLong, professor and undergraduate program director of psychology, and a team of researchers at RIT and Carnegie Mellon University are exploring the idea of engaging children with STEM skills through the lens of interacting with animals. They are working with a group of olive baboons at Rochester’s Seneca Park Zoo.

For years, Joseph Hill, assistant dean of NTID Faculty Recruitment and Retention and an associate professor in the Department of ASL and Interpreting Education, has studied how the segregation of southern Black Deaf Americans, along with their history and culture, has impacted the linguistics of today’s Black Deaf youth. Hill hopes his research will continue to uncover and preserve Black American Sign Language.

Fox Rochester talks to Katie Linendoll ’05 (information technology) about the latest developments in consumer technology.

Karin Wuertz-Kozak described her lab test equipment as a gym for cells. Stretching and compressions tests using bioreactors—her lab equipment—can make a difference in understanding how cells respond to mechanical cues and how that affects disease progression, specifically for spinal disc degeneration, common to millions of Americans.

The mother and brother of a late NTID faculty member and alumna are paying tribute to her memory by establishing the Skyer Family Foundation Endowed Scholarship to assist deaf and hard-of-hearing students achieve success in STEM-related majors.

In a study led by RIT researchers, scientists analyzed new measurements showing that the light emitted by stars outside our galaxy is two to three times brighter than the light from known populations of galaxies, challenging assumptions about the number and environment of stars are in the universe.

The National Science Foundation will award Don Figer, director of RIT’s Center for Detectors and the Future Photon Initiative, more than $315,000 over the next year to continue work on a grant to provide the astronomy community with a new family of detectors that have very large formats, very low cost, and state-of-the-art performance.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy features Austin McChord ’09 (bioinformatics), member of RIT's Board of Trustees.

RIT recently became one of the inaugural academic partners in the BrainChip University AI Accelerator Program. As part of the partnership, RIT’s computer engineering program will receive hardware as well as lecture modules for classes detailing how the novel chips can be programmed and used to provide neuromorphic computing solutions to real-world problems.

Forbes has named RIT alumnus Colin McDonald among the top young entrepreneurs helping to make tomorrow a brighter day. McDonald ’22 (computer science) and his software development agency, Moonsworth, were named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2023 in the Games category.

Student Janessa Steenberg’s plant-based Parmesan-style cheese start-up company, Panacheeza, has earned her a spot in Venture Creations’ Ignite initiative, which gives promising entrepreneurs the power they need to become successful business owners.

Plug Power Inc., a leading provider of turnkey hydrogen solutions for the global green hydrogen economy, is partnering with RIT to provide scholarship support to a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in engineering, sustainability, and the sciences. The first Plug Graduate Scholarship was awarded this year to Mamta Choudhary, an industrial and systems engineering MS student from India.