News

Cosimo X invests in businesses that use digital assets and blockchain protocols to advance the digital economy. According to industry experts, the investment by RIT marks the first time that any university in the United States has directly invested in a tokenized venture fund. The fund’s parent company, Cosimo Ventures, was co-founded six years ago by RIT alumnus Robert Frasca ’88 (mechanical engineering).

What began as an idea to provide a one-stop resource to provide technical support has become a center where RIT students, parents, faculty, and staff can find answers to so much more, including the latest COVID-19 guidelines.

What happens when you witness someone who isn’t being as COVID-careful as they should be? An online COVID Violation Reporting Form went live just over a month ago to afford faculty, staff, and students the opportunity to officially log concerns they feel should be addressed.

Students, faculty, and staff who have returned to the RIT campus can’t help notice the numerous changes in place to help people keep safer during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they may not know how much thought went in to make those changes, and the work that occurred—and continues to occur—in classrooms, residential areas, offices, dining facilities, bathrooms, and common spaces.

Michael Guglielmo never envisioned that he would spend a summer co-op helping his university prepare to fight off a pandemic. But the fifth-year student from Henrietta, N.Y., pursuing his BS in industrial engineering and ME in industrial and systems engineering helped put measures in place that will make everyone who sets foot on campus this fall safer.

New and returning students will move into the residence halls over the next week, in a carefully staged process aimed at ensuring a safe reopening of the campus amid the COVID-19 pandemic. New students will move in today through Aug. 15; returning students will move in Aug. 16-18.

Changes are in place at 21 locations on the RIT campus that will serve thousands of breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and dinners to students, faculty, and staff members returning to campus. Online ordering, cashless checkouts, reduced occupancies, outdoor and spaced-out seating, and increased cleaning protocols are all new features offered by RIT Dining in response to COVID-19 precautions.

As RIT makes changes and enhancements to the campus’s infrastructure, cleaning, and safety procedures to prepare to reopen this fall, it is doing so largely thanks to the help of American-manufactured and sourced supplies.

In a biology lab in Gosnell Hall, Professor André Hudson has been spending hours this summer testing products to see whether they are effective at killing and filtering microorganisms such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi. The effort is part of RIT’s Infrastructure and Health Technologies task force, which is putting changes in place to make RIT’s campus as safe and clean as possible in the fall.

Jo Ellen Pinkham has been named associate vice president and chief human resource officer at RIT. She will join the university in August. Pinkham comes to RIT from Nazareth College, where she most recently served as associate to the president and coordinated Nazareth’s presidential search, COVID-19 response and fall planning task force.

Darci Lane-Williams, assistant director of Title IX and Clery Compliance, has received the 2020 Edwina Award for her significant contributions to enhance gender diversity and inclusiveness at RIT. In addition, 10 graduating students were also named as “Legacy Leaders.”

RIT’s utilization of nearly 71 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually represents more than 92 percent of its total power needs, placing it No. 21 on the EPA’s Top 30 College & University List of the largest green power users among higher-education institutions in the agency’s Green Power Partnership.