Newsmakers

Highlighting the professional and academic accomplishments of College of Computing and Information Sciences students, faculty, and staff.

Newsmakers are a quick and easy way to acknowledge the professional and academic accomplishments of RIT students, faculty, and staff, such as publishing an article in a scholarly journal, presenting research at a conference, serving on a panel discussion, earning a scholarship, or winning an award. Newsmakers appear in News and Events as well as the "In the News" section on faculty/staff directory profile pages.

Submit a Newsmaker

October 2025

  • October 27, 2025

    Dave Schwartz, director of the School of Interactive Games and Media, and Chad Weeden, director of Esports and CyberSecurity Range, were a part of the panel “Cybersecurity and Defense: Strategies for Critical Infrastructure in an Interconnected World” at VDS.tech in Valencia, Spain. 

  • October 15, 2025

    Jye Cocker, a game design and development student, and his team's game Sector Down, have been selected as a finalist for the 2025 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge at December's Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando, Fla. Students and faculty developed Sector Down in partnership with the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, as part of an effort to educate users about responding to cyberattacks.

  • October 6, 2025

    Linwei Wang, Bruce B. Bates Professor in the computing and information sciences Ph.D. program, was awarded a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a hybrid artificial intelligence system for treating scar-mediated ventricular tachycardia (VT). The award, which builds on her previous NIH-funded research, will support the development of a hybrid neural-physics AI system designed to accurately model and identify the three-dimensional construct of the VT's reentrant circuit beneath the heart's surface.

  • October 3, 2025

    Jaiden Johnson, a first-year software engineering student, debuted his voice-acting experience in Casino Casualty, a point-and-click Five Night’s at Freddy’s-inspired survival horror game. Johnson voices the character Red Rover, the hatchet-wielding robot appearing at the left of the pinball machine.

September 2025

  • September 17, 2025

    Igor Polotai, a fourth-year game design and development and history double major, published the study “The RIT Iceberg: A Case Study Documenting Collegiate Student Folklore and Traditions” in the Journal of Folklore and Education. The ongoing research covers the folklore, secrets, myths, and culture of RIT and the university’s student population and advocates for more scholarly research in the field of collegiate folklore.

  • September 12, 2025

    Haibo Yang, assistant professor in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences Ph.D. program, received an award from the National Institutes of Health for his project, “Optimizing Nanobody Sequence Design through Multi-Objective Engineering.” Yang’s research centers around distributed/federated learning and optimizations algorithms.

  • September 10, 2025

    Luke Whited, a first-year game design and development MS student, recently published REDSHIFT, a miniature game described as a first-person psychological horror short story. REDSHIFT has sold over 20,000 copies in its first two weeks, and it reached the top of the charts for “new and trending” games on Steam. The game was developed as part of Whited’s entrepreneurial co-op. He created his own indie games studio under the guidance of Sean Boyle, principal lecturer in the School of Interactive Games and Media, and collaborated with other RIT students in areas such as sound design and digital art. 

  • September 10, 2025

    Joe Geigel, professor in the Department of Computer Science, presented the talk “XRLive: A Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) Using Extended Reality in Live Performance to Motivate Interdisciplinary Education and Scholarship” at the SIGGRAPH 2025 Educator's Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia. The talk focused on the details of the XRLive VIP, which is part of the newly created VIP program at RIT.

  • September 5, 2025

    Chao Peng, associate professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media, presented the game VR Lunar Roving Adventure at the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The annual conference brings together researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists, and business professionals with a shared interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Pioneers in VR, as well as developers from companies like NVIDIA and Meta, explored the team's VR game during the conference.