News
Department of Clinical Health Professions

The coronavirus canceled Professor John Oliphant’s international travel plans and led to an unexpected opportunity to help a local health system manage the impact of COVID-19 on its hospital workforce.

Many RIT faculty, students, staff and alumni are among the collaborations here and across the nation, providing expertise to improve or create much-needed equipment and protective gear for medical personnel fighting the Coronavirus.

Carestream Health Inc. continues to support the education of sonographers at RIT through a new donation of ultrasound equipment valued at more than $1.2 million. This is the second donation Carestream has made during this academic year to RIT’s diagnostic medical sonography program, with a combined total exceeding $1.4 million.

Michelle Magee ’05 MS, senior associate director for Employment Engagement in the Office of Career Services and Cooperative Education; Hamad Ghazle ’88, director of the diagnostic medical sonography program; Kerry Hughes ’03 MS, project and events manager for the Office of the Provost; and David Long ’16 Ph.D., director of RIT MAGIC Center, and were honored with the Golden Brick Award for going above and beyond their duties to volunteer or serve in leadership roles at RIT.

The donation includes four premier and mid-tier ultrasound systems, transducers, simulators and related devices. The addition to the RIT sonography scanning suite enables students to practice on different models before beginning their clinical internships.

Elena Zambito will graduate this May from RIT’s diagnostic medical sonography program, and she is already finding ways to enhance her new field. Her goal is to land a cardiac sonographer position at a leading research hospital like the Mayo Clinic and discover ways to reduce the high rates of injury among sonographers.