Photo Spotlights

Nearly 200 deaf or hard-of-hearing high school students from across the country attended RIT/NTID’s Explore Your Future Program to sample careers, experience life on a college campus, make new friends and have fun.

Community volunteers assisted 40 bikers during I Can Bike, held at the Gordon Field House and Activities Center July 8-12. The camp helps kids with autism learn how to ride a bike without training wheels, which organizers say builds self-confidence and provides inclusion with peers. Above, 7-year-old Mark Bress gets encouragement from Alison Durocher, a volunteer from Rochester. AutismUp, an organization that supports individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder and their families, hosted the event with help from many sponsors and volunteers.

From left to right, Casey Jordan, with Venture Creations Director Bill Jones and Jordan’s business partner, Patrick Borsek, celebrate the graduation of Jordan and Borsek’s company, Jorsek, from the RIT business incubator on July 10. Jorsek provides software to aid technical communications. Venture Creations helps young high-tech businesses grow through mentoring and support.

Everyday Engineering, a summer camp for girls entering grades 5-9, is a weeklong day program sponsored by the Women in Engineering program, part of the Kate Gleason College of Engineering. This year’s theme was “Energy and Environment” and the 40 campers designed, built, decorated and displayed their energy-efficient dog houses, one of the many hands-on activities during the camp designed to spark interest in engineering and technology fields.

Garry Clarke holds the distinction as the first “unofficial” student enrolled in the new chemical engineering program. The New York City native graduated in May.

RIT Press won two awards at the recent Book, Jacket, and Journal Show of the Association of American University Presses Conference held in Boston on June 22. Four jurors reviewed hundreds of entries and selected The Scythe and the Rabbit: Simon de Colines and the Culture of the Book in Renaissance Paris by Kay Amert and edited by Robert Bringhurst in the Scholarly Typographic category and Vignelli Transit Maps by Peter B. Lloyd with Mark Ovenden and designed by Bruce Ian Meader (CIAS) in the Trade Illustrated category.

Jon Brennan, a fourth-year New Media Design & Imaging student from Downingtown, Penn., landed a designing job in New York City early this year. Brennan began at production agency B-Reel shortly after graduating in May.

Dorrene Brown ’13 (software engineering) will make the move to Seattle in August to start with Microsoft as a program manager working on apps for Office. She worked on a co-op with the company last summer and was offered the full-time position in September. To read more, go to www.rit.edu/news/athenaeum_story.php?id=50046.

Microelectronic engineering faculty presented a weeklong, intensive training course on Integrated Circuit Fabrication, June 17-21. The course is a regional workforce development initiative, specifically for the Rochester Regional Photonics Cluster. RIT is part of a larger, collaborative team with the University of Rochester, High Tech Rochester and the New York State Department of Economic Development providing workforce training, and retraining, of workers in optics, imaging and photonics. At RIT, faculty from microelectronic engineering, the College of Applied Science and Technology and the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science provided the training in support of New York state and the Finger lakes Economic Development initiatives.

Siddharth Khullar, originally from New Delhi, India, received his Ph.D. in May from the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. In January, Microsoft Research hired him as a post-doctoral research fellow. Khullar was the graduate speaker at the RIT academic convocation and the College of Science graduate delegate.

Employees of Darkwind Media spend their days enabling video games to be played on new platforms, testing and debugging games and creating new games. In its sixth year, revenue has doubled each year for the business, which is based in RIT’s Venture Creations. To read more, go to www.rit.edu/news/athenaeum_story.php?id=50040

Students in the kindergarten class at Margaret’s House Child Care Center at RIT use iPads and Mac computers as tools to learn about everything from foreign languages to astronomy. The educational technology was purchased with a $5,000 grant from the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund. To read more, go to www.rit.edu/news/story.php?id=50104.