Newsmakers | College of Liberal Arts

Highlighting the professional and academic accomplishments of College of Liberal Arts 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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August 2026

August 3, 2026

Evelyn Brister, professor of philosophy, co-authored “Filling the Network Gap in Research Ethics: Analyzing Ethical Issues at Scale in Big Team Science” in The Hastings Center Report, which maps the unique challenges that face extended research teams.

July 2026

July 21, 2026

Cedric Bone, computing and information sciences Ph.D. student and member of the Computational and Speech Processing Lab, was the first author of “A Multimodal Investigation of Controllability and Cognitive Load in Interactive Machine Learning,” co-authored by Parth Kapur, artificial intelligence MS student, and Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and artificial intelligence program director.
July 16, 2026

Muhammad Salar Khan, assistant professor in the College of Liberal Arts, co-authored “AI capability and labor productivity in low- and middle-income countries: An absorptive capacity approach” in Technovation, a leading journal in technology and innovation management. The article contributes to debates on AI, digital transformation, innovation policy, and development in the Global South by shifting attention from frontier AI innovation to the broader conditions that make AI useful for productivity growth.
July 13, 2026

Evan Selinger, professor in RIT’s Department of Philosophy, published a co-authored article, “On Predicting and Stopping Dystopia,” with Woodrow Hartzog in Boston University Law Review Online. Their article was featured in a Spring 2026 Book Symposium centered on a new publication, Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach, by University of Washington Professor Ryan Calo. Selinger and Hartzog’s work was one of four featured articles responding to Calo’s work.
July 10, 2026

Rebecca Scales, professor in the Department of History, presented several papers in June and July. She presented “La Colonie de Saint-Fargeau: un centre de rééducation modèle pour les polios ou une exception à la norme?” at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris on June 24; “Polio and Politics: Managing Epidemics in Mauritius, Madagascar, and Reunion during the Era of Decolonization, 1945-1949” at the Annual Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Association in Maynooth, Ireland, on June 26; and “Mobilizing for Polio: Disability, Philanthropy, and the Charitable Welfare State in France, 1950-1968” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of French History in Groningen, Netherlands, on July 1.
July 1, 2026

Silvia Benso, professor of philosophy, co-directed and co-organized the ninth annual meeting of the Society for Italian Philosophy, June 17-19, at the Edinburgh Futures Institute of the University of Edinburgh. The conference provided an international forum for the discussion of Italian philosophy in an international and global context.
July 1, 2026

Calvin Nau, Ph.D. candidate in RIT's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is the first author of “Fairness Without Discrimination: Individually Fair Outcomes in the Kidney Exchange Problem” in Decision Analysis. The article was co-authored with Katie McConky, department head, and Ali Baheri, assistant professor, both in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering; Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and artificial intelligence program director; Reynold Bailey, professor of computer science; and researchers at SUNY Buffalo.

June 2026

June 30, 2026

Evan Selinger, professor of philosophy, published the article “On the Right to Obscurity” in California Law Review. Co-authored with Woodrow Hartzog, the article argues for a legally protected right to obscurity—one of the most common yet underappreciated forms of privacy—that is tied to human dignity and the fundamental capabilities that enable us to flourish.
June 29, 2026

Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and artificial intelligence program director, participated in the NSF-organized panel “Transforming Graduate Education through the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship and Innovations in Graduate Education Programs” at the 2026 conference of the American Society for Engineering Education on June 23. She presented on AWARE-AI + Extensions and contributed to the panel discussion.
June 25, 2026

Tracy Worrell, professor in the School of Communication, presented her work, “Defending Science: The Use of Community Notes for Crowd-Sourced Fact-Checking on X,” at the International Communication Association pre-conference on The “Dark Side” of Social Conversations Around Science: Contemporary Challenges and Potential Solutions for Science Communication, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Part of the larger ICA conference in Cape Town, the full-day pre-conference was held at Stellenbosch University and explored the darker dimensions of science communication to identify constructive, evidence-informed ways forward.