Research at RIT

Zhi Zheng’s robot is skilled at Tai Chi, and her research team hopes it will soon lead a class of older adults at a local community center. Zheng, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, developed a sophisticated humanoid robot as part of her assistive technology research.

Yidan Hu and Ivan De Oliveira Nunes have each won Meta Research Awards for their cutting-edge cybersecurity research. The assistant professors of computing security are working to protect people’s safety on their augmented reality and smart devices.

Applications being developed at RIT using artificial intelligence vary from sophisticated medical monitoring devices to the development of autonomous systems for Indy racecars. These represent some of the exciting and complex work underway at the university that will be featured prominently at the AI@RIT Summit: Discovering and Harnessing the Breadth and Depth of Artificial Intelligence at RIT.

Nathan Williams, an assistant professor in sustainability whose research focuses on African energy systems, will play a key role in a project made possible by a $5.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to accelerate development and promote climate resilient infrastructure investment across sub-Saharan Africa.

The outside of RIT’s Brown Hall looks the same, but inside everything has changed. Once the final details are settled, Brown Hall will house new laboratories for genomics, computer engineering, and soil and traffic studies, as well as several computer facilities and office space.

The Rochester Business Journal talks to Ryne Raffaelle, RIT vice president for research and associate provost, about expanding RIT's Battery Prototyping Center. (This content requires a subscription to view.)

Lishibanya Mohapatra, an assistant professor at RIT’s School of Physics and Astronomy, hopes that a better understanding of how living cells maintain the size of their organelles can lead to therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. She earned a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how cells control the size of organelles.

The Image Permanence Institute, housed in RIT’s College of Art and Design, received a National Leadership Grant for Museums from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for research into plastic deterioration of modern heritage collections, specifically their physical response to storage and display environments.