Photo Spotlights

RIT’s Women in Computing group created a Techie Tree for the holiday season. Students, faculty and staff decorated the tree, which is located in the Golisano Hall atrium, with ornaments that they created out of computer hardware. Jennifer Piepenburg, a fifth-year computer science major, puts the finishing touches on her ornament.

RIT President Bill Destler was presented with a special award on Dec. 2 recognizing the university community’s outstanding commitment to the Red Cross blood program. Kay Schwartz, CEO of American Red Cross Biomedical Services, says RIT’s participation over the past five years has positioned the university as an academic leader across the state and throughout the Northeast in regards to lives saved.

In an effort to boost school spirit, RIT Student Government hosted a kick-off event for its “We Are RIT” spirit campaign on Dec. 3 in the Campus Center. Student Government leaders also turned the Campus Center fountain orange as a display of RIT spirit.

Award-winning graphic artist Alison Bechdel discussed her artistic process and the use of graphic narrative during the talk “Drawing Words, Reading Pictures” Dec. 2 at RIT. The presentation was sponsored by the Caroline Werner Gannett Project’s “Visionaries in Motion IV” lecture series. Bechdel’s nationally syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For ran from 1983 to 2008 and was one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture.

A FIRST Lego League team coached by Stephanie Ludi, an associate professor of software engineering, and mentored by students from the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, practices for a recent FIRST regional championship. The team is comprised entirely of girls, an underrepresented group in computing. From left, Mike Dapiran, a second-year graduate student in game design, Rachel Wells, a fifth-grader at Indian Landing School, and Katrina Myers, an eighth-grader from Berger Middle School.

Rodolfo “Rudy” Montez Jr. will be the first student to earn his doctorate from RIT’s Astrophysical Sciences and Technology program. His dissertation focused on X-rays emitted from planetary nebulae, or dying stars.

Sue Northrup, kindergarten teacher at Margaret’s House, sorts through pajamas collected for The Great Bedtime Story Pajama Drive. The RIT community is asked to drop off new pajamas to boxes at Margaret’s House and the Campus Center. For each pair of pajamas collected, Scholastic Book Club will donate one book to children in need. The drive continues through Dec. 3.

Autumn Geer, Brick City Catering, created flavored cupcakes for the holidays. The cupcakes are available for purchase by the half dozen and come in three flavors—Chocolate Peppermint (chocolate cake with peppermint extract, chocolate butter cream frosting, and candy cane garnish), Gingerbread (spiced yellow cake with cream cheese frosting and cinnamon candies), and Snow White (white cake with coconut butter cream frosting and coconut flakes). Orders may be placed through the catering sales office at 475-2346.

Mary Barnard, a senior staff assistant in the School of Film and Animation, helps assemble care packages for the military on Nov. 22. The Alumni Relations department collected toiletries, games, snacks and even Girl Scout cookies to give members of the Armed Forces with ties to the university a little taste of home this holiday season. Barnard’s son, Josh, is deployed in Afghanistan.

RIT President Bill Destler, left, joined Jeremy Haefner, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, and Don Boyd, vice president for research, to discuss the vision for research at RIT. The Nov. 22 presentation served as the opening event to the two-day Grant Writers’ Boot Camp, sponsored annually by the Wallace Center and Sponsored Research Services.

From left, Kris Campbell, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boise State University, Simone Raoux, a research scientist from IBM’s T.J. Watson Research, RIT microelectonics engineering professor Santosh Kurinec and Ph.D. Candidate Archana Devasia were on hand as Devasia defended her doctoral dissertation, “Towards Integrating Chalcogenide Based Phase Change Memory with Silicon Microelectronics.” She has been working with Kurinec throughout her Ph.D. studies and joined her last fall during her sabbatical at IBM. All four women were part of a research team continuing development of phase-change memory for microelectronic devices.

RIT played a crucial role in eGameRevolution, the latest permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Play at The Strong, which opened Nov. 20. RIT Interactive Games and Media professor Steve Jacobs and two RIT students—third-year interactive new media development major Ned Blakley and third-year game design and development major Matt Fico—helped devise and execute the strategy behind the exhibit, which chronicles the history of electronic games.