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.

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September 2026

  • September 9, 2026

    Aiden Morris, a fourth-year electrical engineering student, has been awarded the SMART Scholarship, a highly competitive STEM scholarship for those who wish to pursue a career with the Department of War.

  • September 2, 2026

    Ali Baheri, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and affiliate of RIT’s ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute, has been selected for an award through the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Grant Program for the project “Red-Teaming and Assurance for Geometric AI in Defense Autonomy.” The project will develop new tools for assuring the safety of symmetry-aware AI systems and benchmarking geometric AI used in safety-critical autonomous systems.

August 2026

  • August 27, 2026

    Naresh Kshetri, lecturer in the Department of Cybersecurity, co-authored Securing AI-generated media with Blockchain technologies. The book addresses the profound challenges of cybersecurity risks, data privacy concerns, intellectual property disputes, missing information, deepfakes proliferation, and legal complexities by exploring the blockchain technology potential as a cornerstone for securing AI-generated content.

  • August 21, 2026

    Justin Pelletier, professor of practice in the Department of Cybersecurity and director of the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute Cyber Range and Training Center, received an award from the Department of War for continued support of RIT’s Cyber Service Academy program, which is designed to recruit top cyber talent and retain the current cyber workforce to help secure the United States against the threats of information systems and networks.

  • August 19, 2026

    Billy Brumley, O’Sullivan Professor of Cybersecurity, and Ravikumar Selvam, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cybersecurity, along with Neil Horman of OpenSSL Software Services Inc., are co-PI’s on a new award from the National Science Foundation for their project, Addressing Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL's Providers, Primitives, and Protocols.

  • August 17, 2026

    Christian Newman, associate professor of software engineering and software engineering graduate program director, earned a new award from the National Science Foundation for his project, Preparing Computer Science Students for Artificial Intelligence Assisted Software Development.

  • August 11, 2026

    Mohan Kumar, professor of computer science, received a new National Science Foundation (NSF) award for his project, EAGER: Service Composition with LLM-based Services for Pervasive Awareness. Kumar was on assignment to the NSF as a Program Director in the Computer and Network Systems Division of the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate from August 2022 to August 2025.