News by Topic: Interdisciplinary Studies

The LiveAbility Lab is a partnership between RIT and the Al Sigl Community of Agencies, a collaborative network of organizations in Rochester that serves children and adults with special needs. The lab, which is located on Al Sigl’s Wolk Campus, opened in 2018. The goal is to develop a pipeline of accessible technology projects that are conceived at RIT and take root at the LiveAbility Lab on their way to development in the marketplace. 

Registration is open for the 2020 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) St. Lawrence Section Annual Conference. The event, taking place April 3 and 4 at RIT, will feature advances in the engineering field and trends in higher education.

The annual festival, now in its 13th year, is a showcase day for RIT. But Imagine RIT isn’t just a one-day celebration. Every day, RIT students, faculty and staff are working to pair technology, art and design in ways that move the world forward.

Kristina Klishko, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student from San Diego, spent her summer in Fremont, Calif., working for Tesla.

Intersections: The RIT Podcast, Ep. 31: A multidisciplinary contingent from RIT is creating design solutions to improve the quality of medical care and education in Central America. Mary Golden, interior design program chair and director of RIT Hope for Honduras, speaks with Christian Perry, a healthcare designer and co-founder of Little Angels of Honduras, about important initiatives to help reduce infant mortality in that region.

Undergraduate students from packaging science, graphic design and industrial design worked over the semester to improve packaging and branding identity for Milwaukee Tools and its Shockwave power drill bits as part of the Packaging Systems class challenge.

As part of an interactive games and media course, 12 RIT students made cardboard and digital pinball machines designed around themes of their own choosing. For the final exam, students brought their creations to The Strong National Museum of Play and had visitors give their physical and virtual pinball machines a test drive.

Ridding waterways of microplastics, delivering water to remote villages experiencing drought, and better ways to remove salt from water were just a few of the clean-water research projects recently presented by undergraduate students as part of RIT’s Grand Challenge Scholars program.

A team from RIT and the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía (IAR) upgraded two radio telescopes in Argentina that lay dormant for 15 years in order to study pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense magnetic fields that emit notably in radio wavelengths. The project is outlined in a new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Undergraduate students from RIT ROC-ed the Project during a local project management competition to increase awareness and volunteer services for Rochester’s M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. Their solution, “The Common Source,” took top honors recently in the annual ROC the Project competition, a regional challenge for college students.

RIT is among the colleges and universities from 20 states that are participating in the Degrees When Due initiative, which aims to reach the nearly 4 million near-completers and uncredentialled completers in the United States who stopped college for financial reasons, family obligations or a variety of other reasons. By joining the initiative, RIT will learn best practices in degree reclamation and provide targeted support while re-engaging students who have paused, or “stopped out,” their studies.

Claudia Alant, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student from Niskayuna, N.Y., has worked for the Writing Commons for five semesters. According to Alant, being a peer consultant for the commons is “one of the coolest jobs an undergraduate student can have” on campus.