Environmental Studies and Sustainability News

Students on co-op are picking up more than occupational and professional skills. As the pandemic unfolded last spring and summer, they saw firsthand how companies manage even in the midst of a crisis.

RIT has announced an extension to a tuition scholarship program for RIT graduates seeking to further advance their career opportunities while the job market recalibrates and the country responds to the coronavirus pandemic.

RIT recently received a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop course modules that will provide students with guidelines and best practices in standards information toward helping organizations manage crisis situations.

The RIT student-designers on Team Frears placed second in the 2020 Paperboard Packaging Student Design Challenge for their packaging designs of a toolkit for educators to be distributed by the national program Trees into Cartons, Cartons into Trees, (TICCIT).

Many of RIT’s international students who were accepted at the Rochester campus but were unable to get to the U.S. because of travel and visa restrictions have found enrollment alternatives and connections to classmates at all the university’s campuses.

While the pandemic touched RIT locally, Ruben Proano, associate professor of industrial engineering, saw it from a global perspective, as part of a year-long sabbatical at UNICEF in Copenhagen, Denmark. His work extended ongoing research on making the vaccine market more affordable and profitable.

Spectrum News features George Zheng ’15 (mechanical engineering technology), co-founder of Leep Foods.

Two companies associated with RIT’s Venture Creations technology business incubator have advanced to the round two finals of the Grow-NY competition. Grow-NY is a food innovation and agriculture technology business challenge focused on enhancing the emerging food, beverage and agriculture innovation cluster in Central New York, the Finger Lakes, and Southern Tier regions.

Despite restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students at RIT are still finding ways to participate in hundreds of clubs and organizations this semester, including dancing, designing games, and even skydiving.

RIT engineering professor Iris Rivero will be part of the newest class of the Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science, also known as ELATES. The national program based at Drexel University is intended to prepare senior women faculty into leadership roles within their respective institutions.

Michael Guglielmo never envisioned that he would spend a summer co-op helping his university prepare to fight off a pandemic. But the fifth-year student from Henrietta, N.Y., pursuing his BS in industrial engineering and ME in industrial and systems engineering helped put measures in place that will make everyone who sets foot on campus this fall safer.

Brian Chontosh ’00 (mechanical engineering technology) has been nominated for the prestigious Congressional Medal of Honor, one of the oldest and continuously issued awards given to U.S. Armed Forces personnel for courage, valor, and leadership.