Science and Math News

Twelve alumni from RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering were honored with alumni awards during a reception at the Joseph M. Lobozzo Alumni House last month.

The students took a 12-week, online class prior to their 11-day visit to the two countries of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in May, to talk with survivors of the 1991-1999 war in the former Yugoslavia region of Europe.

A team at RIT has been named the winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Inclusion and Diversity Prize, which celebrates those who strive to improve access to the chemical sciences and progression for all.

A team of RIT scientists is poring over NASA data for new insights about Earth’s youngest, closest neighbors. Joel Kastner, a professor in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy, received nearly $400,000 for a NASA archival study to advance our understanding of newly formed stars and planets.

Zoraa Victor, a fourth-year student in the dietetics and nutrition BS program in the Wegmans School of Health and Nutrition, will spend six weeks studying the plant-based Mediterranean diet at Perrotis College in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece.

TikTok has become one of the most popular social media apps to hit the market in a decade. Billions of social media users have found both community and entertainment in the vertical short videos that are central to TikTok’s format. With a combined nearly 1 million followers and 25 million “likes” between them, four RIT alumni are establishing themselves as social media influencers.

Brenda Abu, assistant professor in RIT’s Wegmans School of Health and Nutrition, seeks to understand the effect pica, iron deficiency anemia, and food insecurity have on maternal health during pregnancy. Pica refers to excessive craving and/or eating of non-food items, such as, clay, soil, paper, ice, and paint chips.

RIT College of Science students were recognized as part of a select group in the 2022 cohort of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Honor Society.

Astrophysical sciences and technology Ph.D. student Olivia Young earned a competitive fellowship from the National Science Foundation to develop machine learning algorithms that will help scientists use radio telescopes to study transient objects such as pulsars and fast radio bursts.

Maria Morcos ’22 BS/MS (physician assistant) will spend the next academic year conducting a clinical asthma trial at the Royal College of Surgeons in Bahrain. It will be the first asthma clinical trial in the area.

Associate Professor Ben Zwickl will head to the University of Oslo this fall to research what he calls one of the most understudied aspects of the undergraduate physics curriculum.

Associate professor Michael Murdoch received a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to develop new techniques to study visual adaptation in augmented and virtual reality.