Newsmakers

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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November 2026

  • November 11, 2026

    Noah Baumgaertel, a fourth-year political science and industrial design student, and Divya Ramjee, assistant professor of criminal justice, presented “AI Tools and Sentencing Decisions: Analysis of Pennsylvania Sentencing Data for Legal Financial Obligations” at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management conference on Nov. 7. Co-authored with Ashique KhudaBukhsh, assistant professor of software engineering, and Sreeja Reddy Bobbili, a data science graduate student, the paper uses Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing data to assess the accuracy of AI tools for judges and examine technical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding their use in sentencing.

  • November 11, 2026

    Katrina Overby, assistant professor in the Department of Communication, published “#GirlDad: Exploring the Re-presentations of Black Fatherhood in Digital Spaces,” co-authored with colleagues from Jackson State University and North Carolina State University, in Communication, Culture & Critique. The study examines how Black fathers use #GirlDad to challenge stereotypes of absentee fatherhood, affirm their involvement in their daughters’ lives, and build community.

  • November 11, 2026

    Savannah Tellander, a second-year cognitive science Ph.D. student, presented “Coordinating attention, coordinating turns: Communicative behaviors in deaf preschoolers’ signed interaction,” co-authored by Rain Bosworth, associate professor in the Department of Liberal Studies, and Allison Fitch, assistant professor of psychology, at the Boston University Conference on Language Development in Boston on Nov. 6. Fitch and Bosworth also presented “Associations between motor development and Communicative Development Inventory measures in English- and ASL-exposed preschool children” at the conference and co-authored “Caregiver nonverbal communicative behaviors across speaking, signing, and bimodal dyads” with Sarah Bella Sellers ’26 (psychology).

  • November 9, 2026

    Jillian Stebbins, a cognitive science doctoral student, presented “Including Non-Manual Markers in Studies of American Sign Language Dialogue” at the Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue Workshop, held alongside the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Budapest, Hungary. Co-authors included Amber Hamilton, a criminal justice undergraduate student; Emily Nover ’26 MA (data science); Stephanie Patterson ’26 (human-computer interaction); Allison Fitch, assistant professor of psychology; Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and artificial intelligence program director, and peers from Gallaudet University.

  • November 4, 2026

    Jack McLaughlin '26 MS (computer science) presented “TurnStyle: Suggesting Style Prompts for Instruction-Guided Text-to-Speech Using Bimodal Dialogue Contexts” at the Speech and Audio Language Models Workshop at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. The work was co-authored with Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and artificial intelligence program director.

  • November 2, 2026

    Sara Armengot, chair in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, presented “Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish for Science and Technology: Shared Goals, Different Approaches” at the 29th Annual Colloquium on International Engineering Education. The presentation highlighted the College of Liberal Arts’ language curriculum for STEM students and was co-authored by Zhong Chen, associate professor, and Mizuho Johnson, adjunct professor, in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, and Patricia Iglesias Victoria, associate professor, and Isaac Pérez Raya, assistant professor, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. 

  • November 2, 2026

    Katrina Overby, assistant professor of journalism in the School of Communication, served as an invited panelist following an Oct. 29 screening of Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The documentary captures a 1972 gathering of Black cultural figures reflecting on the Harlem Renaissance. Drawing on her research on Black media, digital culture, identity, and Black feminist approaches to community and belonging, Overby discussed Black cultural memory, storytelling, creative expression, and connections across generations.