News
Engineering Ph.D.

Susan R. Holliday ’85 (MBA), who led the turnaround and growth of the Rochester Business Journal during nearly three decades as president, publisher, and owner, has been named the 2022 recipient of the Herbert W. Vanden Brul Entrepreneurial Award, presented by Saunders College of Business.

Three new engineering doctoral degree programs at RIT were approved by the New York State Department of Education and are focused on using multidisciplinary approaches to solving today’s global challenges.

Several RIT research labs are ramping up work after several months of down time due to COVID-19. With the approval to reopen and prepare for fall classes, faculty-researchers have put in place some of the recommended guidelines for lab usage—from occupancy to cleaning protocols.

Alyssa Owens is contributing new ways to diagnose breast cancer and Poornima Kalyanram has discovered how fluorescent molecules might help to identify diseased cells. Karen Soule and Fatemeh Shah-Mohammadi are part of breakthrough work in developing carbon nanotubes and cognitive radio networks—advances in technology that will power tomorrow’s electronic devices. All four are on track to graduate with a Ph.D. in engineering.

Gears make the industrial world go ’round. And RIT engineering faculty and doctoral students are working to keep them moving efficiently.

Four multidisciplinary student teams got the opportunity to pitch their business ideas to potential investors at the RIT Student Accelerator Investor Demo Night earlier this month, each one hoping to jumpstart its ventures and transform its commercial concepts into real companies.

Faculty and student researchers at RIT, and physicians from the Rochester Regional Health System (RRHS), developed a non-invasive process using infrared imaging to better detect cancerous tumors.

Yahoo News UK features a toilet seat developed by RIT that contains devices that measure blood oxygenation levels, heart rate and blood pressure to signal when someone is at risk for congestive heart failure.

Emma Sarles ’17 (industrial design) has taken the road less traveled to become an engineer. Without ever earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Sarles has spent the last two years working toward a customized professional studies master’s degree that specializes in medical device engineering and applied biomaterials.

Postdoctoral fellow Nicholas Conn hopes to lower the hospital readmission rates of patients with congestive heart failure through a toilet-seat based cardiovascular monitoring system.

Yashar Seyed Vahedein, an engineering Ph.D. candidate, established the Doctoral Student Association (DSA) as a social and professional connection for RIT’s doctoral and prospective Ph.D. students.

Researchers at RIT will use photonic integrated circuit technology to improve the processing speed and energy consumption of brain-inspired computing techniques.