Newsmakers

January 26, 2026

Mitchell Rieder, a fourth-year economics and computer science double major, and Jeffrey Wagner, professor in the Department of Economics, co-presented “The Law and Economics of Tradeable Satellite Debris Permit Market Design” on Jan. 20 at the virtual Space Economics Seminar. The seminar is co-organized by The Ownership Project at Harvard Business School and the European Space Policy Institute.

January 23, 2026

Esa Rantanen, associate professor in the Department of Psychology, has been appointed associate editor of Human Factors, the flagship journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

January 16, 2026

Amit Ray, associate professor in the Department of English, organized a special session to discuss agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance) in media and culture at the Modern Language Association Conference, Jan. 8-11 in Toronto. Participants from RIT, Vanderbilt, and Michigan-Ann Arbor delivered papers on topics relating agnotology to AI, Brazilian memes, and the prison system in British Colonial India. 

January 16, 2026

Kelley Holley, assistant professor in the School of Performing Arts, and Eric Severson, interpreter for NTID, received the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Field and Innovation grant for their project looking at the intersection of dramaturgy and ASL interpretation. This grant funds their work to develop processes and best practices for dramaturgs to support interpreters and for interpreters to engage dramaturgical practices.

January 14, 2026

Caroline DeLong, professor in the Department of Psychology, presented “Perception, memory, and problem solving in otters” at the Sixth Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan on Dec. 5 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The information used in this presentation was from research performed in the Comparative Cognition and Perception Lab.

December 15, 2025

Erica Haskell, director, and Ben Willmott, director of operations and administration, in the School of Performing Arts, appeared on “In The Spotlight,” a television program in the town of Penfield. The interview focuses on RIT’s development of a non-major performing arts ecosystem through the continued growth of the Performing Arts Scholarship program.

December 10, 2025

Katrina Overby, assistant professor in the School of Communication, presented on two panels at the 111th annual National Communication Association Convention in Denver. At the convention, Overby assumed the role of chair of the African American Communication and Culture Division, following her term as vice chair.

December 8, 2025

Christopher Schwartz, research scientist in the Department of Cybersecurity, and Matthew Wright, O’Sullivan Professor and chair of the Department of Cybersecurity, along with Andrea Hickerson, former director of RIT's School of Communication and current dean of the School of Journalism and New Media at University of Mississippi, published the book Fake-Checking: A Journalist’s Guide to Deepfakes. It serves as a practical reference for journalists and advanced media students who are increasingly required to identify and verify potential deepfakes and their future iterations. The guide aims to assist journalists in understanding the complexities of deepfakes from several angles, including philosophical, historical, technical, and methodological. 

December 8, 2025

Jessica Hardin, associate professor of sociology and anthropology; Katie Healey, adjunct faculty member in science, technology, and society; Kristoffer Whitney, associate professor in science, technology, and society; and Kaitlin Stack Whitney, associate professor in science, technology, and society, co-published the article “Design, Disability, and Critical Pedagogy in STS” in the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values. The article, which was co-published by Anna Carter ’25 (sociology and anthropology, biomedical engineering), Lee Smith ’24 (individualized study, sociology and anthropology), and Angeline Hamele ’25 BS (sociology and anthropology), MFA (industrial design) explores how the design of course assignments, curricula, classrooms, and buildings imagines particular learners and ways of being and how STS can provide liberatory ways to interrogate and intervene to make more inclusive, expansive futures in higher education and beyond.

December 5, 2025

Divya Ramjee, assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, co-authored “From ransoms to ruin: Are extortion payments by ransomware victims insurable?" The study supports the claim that extortion payments by ransomware victims should not be considered insurable by cyber insurance providers that use assumptions of classical ruin theory in their solvency determinations, encouraging an evidence-based approach for creating and applying cyber risk solvency standards by insurance regulators to ransomware-related extortion payments.