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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June 2026

  • June 12, 2026

    Katrina Overby, assistant professor in the School of Communication, presented her paper, “Gotta Tell My Story: Storyworlding, Reflexivity, and Archiving as Praxis in the Future of Black Women’s Communication Scholarship,” at the International Communication Association Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Her presentation was featured on the panel, “(Re)Energizing ERIC: Communication, Inequalities, and the Future of the Scholarship.” Drawing from Black feminist theory, digital media studies, and reflexive ethnographic practice, Overby explored how storytelling, witnessing, and archiving can inform the future of communication scholarship and create space for more embodied, community-centered approaches to knowledge production.

  • June 10, 2026

    Eugene Jang, assistant professor of journalism, received the 2026 Herbert S. Dordick Dissertation Award from the Communication and Technology Division of the International Communication Association on June 7 in Cape Town, South Africa. Jang's dissertation examined how social media affordances influence social support exchanges in long COVID communities across Reddit and X, formerly known as Twitter.

  • June 5, 2026

    Caroline DeLong, professor of psychology, presented “Animal Detectives: Problem Solving in Orangutans and Otters” at the Little Theatre on May 31, ahead of a screening of Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, as part of the Science on Screen program. Science on Screen pairs screenings of films with presentations by notable local figures from the world of science, technology, and medicine. DeLong's presentation showcased research by graduate and undergraduate students at the RIT Comparative Cognition and Perception Lab.

  • June 4, 2026

    With support from the College of Liberal Arts Dean's Office, Assistant Professor Divya Ramjee and Professor Evan Selinger hosted a workshop at the Tait Preserve on June 4 to jump-start collaborative, interdisciplinary privacy research between scholars at RIT, Cornell University, Syracuse University, and University at Buffalo. Although upstate New York is home to leading researchers in the humanities and social sciences, this is the first in-person event in the region dedicated to facilitating cross-university projects on privacy ethics, privacy policy, and privacy education.

  • June 1, 2026

    RIT’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Lab hosted researchers from the National Gallery of Art on May 29, in support of an ongoing initiative called The CIIIPRESES Project. Developed by art historian Matthew Westerby, the digital research initiative is focused on medieval choir book leaves and was designed to aggregate dispersed manuscript fragments across different collections and support art historical and scientific research questions. Lab co-directors Juilee Decker and David Messinger helped facilitate the documentation of a choir book leaf from Eastman School of Music using hyperspectral, FORS, and UV imaging.

May 2026

  • May 27, 2026

    Amit Batabyal, the Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics and head of the Department of Sustainability, received an Editor of Distinction Award from Springer Nature for his work in Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences.

  • May 19, 2026

    Cecilia Alm, professor of psychology and artificial intelligence program director, was an invited speaker at a special session of the Global Science Forum of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Alm spoke on her work directing the National Science Foundation-supported IRES AI-PROWIL program, which involves an international research training partnership between RIT and University West in Sweden.

  • May 15, 2026

    Richard Fadok, assistant professor of anthropology, was selected to attend the Scholarly Writing Institute in July. As a part of this, Fadok will travel to the National Humanities Center in North Carolina to work on a chapter from his book Design’s Anthropologies.

  • May 7, 2026

    Muhammad Salar Khan, assistant professor of public policy, was an expert panelist for the U.S. Government Accountability Office report examining the opportunities, risks, and policy implications of artificial intelligence in federal small business contracting and innovation research programs. The report explored how AI could help agencies improve market research, proposal review, fraud detection, and communication with small businesses, while also highlighting concerns related to bias, privacy, transparency, and human oversight in government AI systems.

April 2026

  • April 27, 2026

    Psychology students Maya Garaway and Rose Khoobyar from the RIT Comparative Cognition and Perception Lab presented their research on visual perception in fish at the International Conference on Comparative Cognition on April 16 in Montreal. Caroline DeLong, professor of psychology and lab director, also presented work on hand preferences in olive baboons and big-team science efforts to study memory in otters.