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RIT scientists will be the lead researchers on a $1.8 million NASA grant to study electromagnetic signals from merging supermassive black holes.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand visited RIT on Dec. 11 to deliver news on two federal funding initiatives: RIT’s Semiconductor Fabrication Lab and NTID.

Resistance Mapping is a local, collaborative digital humanities project focused on how Monroe County, N.Y., has been shaped by histories of institutional racism and collective community resistance. Scholars and students affiliated with RIT’s humanities, computing, and design program and the University of Rochester’s Digital Scholarship at River Campus Libraries helped create a website to host the educational content.

Betsy Dell, professor in the College of Engineering Technology, and Makini Beck, assistant professor in the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Individualized Study, are leading a National Science Foundation-funded project to support minoritized women students in STEM through a co-mentoring network.

Students, faculty, and alumni at RIT are participating in NASA’s national Moon to Mars initiative to build a training device and monitoring tool to help make extended space travel healthier for astronauts.

More than $200 million has been given to Transforming RIT to support scholarships and the student experience to ensure the best and brightest minds can attend RIT regardless of their financial circumstances. The campaign, launched publicly in 2018, is bringing RIT’s strategic plan to life by investing in student success, creating world-class facilities, advancing research and discovery, and innovating careers of the future.

The DeafTEC program at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf has received a renewal grant for $1.6 million to continue its work serving as a resource for high schools and community colleges that educate deaf and hard-of-hearing students in STEM-related programs and for employers hiring deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. 

The Battery Prototyping Center at RIT was awarded nearly $2.2 million through the Empire State Development Grants program to expand its facility. Upgrades and expansion of the center will nearly double its current space, add new equipment, and increase training capacity in the areas of lithium-ion battery research, manufacturing, and development.

Emiliano Brini, assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Materials Science, has received an award from the National Institutes of Health to support his research on building the next generation of drugs. Brini and his team of students will develop computational tools that can predict the strength of the interaction between two proteins and how drugs will modify this interaction.

Faculty in RIT’s Modern Languages and Cultures department received an International Research and Studies grant from the U.S. Department of Education to fund the development of new materials and curricula for Chinese, Italian, and Spanish courses that focus on STEAM. Associate Professor Zhong Chen, Principal Lecturer Elisabetta D’Amanda, and Department Chair Sara Armengot will spend the next three years developing, testing, and implementing the new materials in the classroom.

Astrophysicist Jason Nordhaus is breaking cultural and disciplinary boundaries by helping to grow the number of deaf, hard-of-hearing, and Hispanic researchers. And, in doing so, he is enabling these future scientists to drive discoveries in one of his areas of expertise—neutron star astrophysics.

Lucia Carichino, assistant professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, has received a Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) award from the National Science Foundation for her research in computational modeling of the interaction between the eye and a contact lens.