News by Topic: Deaf Community

It’s been nearly 30 years since T.J. Griesenbrock first attended RIT. But he never could call himself a graduate because he needed just two more courses to earn his degree.

After a year’s hiatus due to COVID-19, the popular Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival returns virtually on Saturday, May 1, with more than 250 exhibits of projects, research and performing arts of students, faculty, and staff at RIT.

The Distinguished Alumni Awards are presented annually by each of RIT’s nine colleges and the School of Individualized Study to alumni who have performed at the highest levels of their profession or who have contributed to the advancement and leadership of civic, philanthropic, or service organizations.

For the first time on a national scale, groundbreaking research at NTID will help determine the level of reproductive health knowledge in women who are deaf or hard of hearing. The research also addresses concerns that deaf and hard-of-hearing women encounter significant barriers to receiving appropriate reproductive healthcare services and health information.

The goal of the Dyer Arts Center’s project, “Shaped by the American Dream: Deaf History through Deaf Art,” is for the public to develop a greater understanding of the Deaf community’s place in American history.

Transitioning demanding engineering classes to the online environment throughout the pandemic was a challenge, but Associate Professor Amanda Bao adjusted by supplementing lectures with a series of interactive and accessible materials that enhanced student learning.

Inside Higher Ed interviews Miriam Lerner, interpreter; Keith Cagle, chair, Department of ASL and Interpreting Education; students Marshall Hurst and Zee Chuan; and Kristi Love, interpreter and director, Randleman Program, about technical and discipline-specific sign language and the important role of interpreters of color.

Congressman Joe Morelle announces that $470,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation has been awarded to RIT to support the DeafTEC Ready Pilot Program housed at NTID to help deaf and hard-of-hearing students learn IT technical skills to better prepare them for the workforce.

Ammina Kothari, an associate professor and program director in RIT’s School of Communication in the College of Liberal Arts, is receiving an Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching this year, RIT’s highest honor for tenured faculty.

This year’s recognition of RIT’s Alfred L. Davis Distinguished Public Service Award winners will be a double celebration, as faculty and student recipients from 2020 and 2021 are honored April 13. Luane Davis Haggerty will receive the 2021 Four Presidents Distinguished Public Service Award, and Bhuvish Mehta will receive the 2021 Bruce R. James ’64 Distinguished Public Service Award. Thomas Warfield was awarded the 2020 Four Presidents Distinguished Public Service Award, and Çlirim Sheremeti was awarded the 2020 Bruce R. James ’64 Distinguished Public Service Award.

The founding director of RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, D. Robert Frisina, died in Florida on Monday, March 29. He was 96. An international author and lecturer, Frisina was a visionary and a pioneer in the field of deaf education.

While it isn’t surprising that infants and children love to look at people’s movements and faces, recent research from NTID studies exactly where they look when they see someone using sign language. The research uses eye-tracking technology that offers a non-invasive and powerful tool to study cognition and language learning in pre-verbal infants.