Alumni News

RIT physician assistant students from the Class of 2020 met in front of the Clinical Health Sciences Center one evening last month for a special tradition and rite of passage—the White Coat ceremony.

Keith Jenkins, vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion, provided an update to the community on Tuesday about the university’s efforts on antiracism and social justice. Jenkins said that he and university leaders spent the summer engaging with students, faculty, staff, and alumni groups to generate a list of roughly 100 ideas of ways RIT can do more on these fronts.

The Democrat and Chronicle features Orlando Ortiz '04 (manufacturing engineering technology) '08 (MBA).

A team of RIT researchers has been working to blast-clean some 360 door handles from buildings across campus to restore the surface copper. Copper has been found to have antibacterial properties that can kill the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19.

US Lacrosse Magazine features Ryan Lee '17 (finance).

WHAM-TV features Julianna Truesdale '11 (graphic design).

Tiffany Panko, M.D., has been named director of the Deaf Health Laboratory in the Research Center on Culture and Language at NTID. Panko, an alumna of RIT who received support from NTID, earned her undergraduate degree in applied arts and sciences, with concentrations in premedical and psychological studies, in 2008. She earned her MBA from Saunders College of Business in 2009, and her medical degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in 2016.

The College of Art and Design offered three courses as part of RIT's First Class Academy, a tuition-free, credit-bearing online experience that introduced incoming freshmen to the RIT and Rochester communities this summer.

Douglas Merrill, who inspired countless students during his 40-year tenure in the College of Science and the College of Health Sciences and Technology, has retired. He developed the Premedical Advisory Program and created the Center for Bioscience Education and Technology. And he retires with numerous honors recognizing his outstanding teaching and commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Friends and family of a beloved former staff member at NTID are honoring her memory with a new scholarship. The Stephanie Smith Albert Memorial Endowed Scholarship was created in memory of the college’s first director of Diversity and Inclusion, who passed away in 2018.

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.

Seventeen interdisciplinary teams of students presented their innovative designs developed this summer in the Studio 930 design consultancy.