Environmental Studies and Sustainability News

Artificial intelligence, robots, glass blowing, drones, cybersecurity tours, and performing arts are just a sampling of what lies in store for the thousands of visitors expected at this year’s Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 29.

Jennifer O’Neil enjoys thermodynamic memes, powerplants, and Marvel Comic heroes, especially Iron Man, and she has found ways to connect all of them for her engineering technology classes. She makes these connections through activities that bring to life complex topics that solidify learning for her students.

Salwan Georges of The Washington Post visited the RIT campus for a pair of lectures, including one that detailed his work photographing climate change for a project that received a Pulitzer Prize.

RIT and the Seneca Park Zoo Society will hold a special event at the Port of Rochester from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, April 15, to educate members of the public on how they can address plastic pollution and showcase some of the latest technology in the field.

Pete Van Camp played detective before he acted as a manufacturing engineer for his graduate capstone project. His project involved upgrading a Fanuc industrial robot, which had been sitting idle for a short time in the Fabrication and Robotics Lab located in RIT’s College of Engineering Technology. Limited documentation about functions, missing cables and components, and fewer technical people from the company to provide service support were just a few of the barriers Van Camp encountered as he began.

RIT’s concrete canoe and steel bridge teams are presenting their products in person at the regional Upstate New York-Canada ASCE Student Symposium on April 20-22 for the first time as a pair since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Sherralyn Sneezer was named this year’s Outstanding Graduate Woman for her commitment to working with indigenous communities to develop renewable energy systems on tribal land.

RIT is offering a graduate tuition scholarship to recent alumni seeking to expand their career potential through the university’s graduate programs. Alumni can enhance their skill set for the new economy through master’s degrees that build upon collaboration, analytical thinking, complex problem solving, and flexibility.

Researchers at RIT are investigating the combined physical effects of heat, chemical reactions, and seismic activity on concrete lining structures used to dispose of nuclear waste. Results from the work could improve nuclear waste infrastructure designs, better long-term safety management, and refine strategies to meet climate change targets.

Will Zhang, assistant professor in industrial and systems engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology talks about immersive technology on The Peggy Smedley Show. He says immersive technologies include several technologies such as AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), XR (extended reality), and the metaverse—and discusses the connections between each and how they are different.

While the pressure to publish starts early in an academic’s career, RIT doctoral student Israa Thiab has a strategy to get the work done without the anxiety. Thiab, a student in the Golisano Institute for Sustainability, is working on her first journal article, using techniques she learned at a writing retreat sponsored by RIT’s Graduate School.

When RIT students Julia LaMarra and Celina Alvarado heard about a trip to work on repairing hospital equipment in Guatemala during this past winter break, they jumped at the chance.