Office of Faculty Diversity and Recruitment News

Shea McCombs and Jeff Stewart will present a behind-the-scenes look at the recent release of Activision’s Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2, as part of the kickoff lecture at 2 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24. The remastered game has been garnering outstanding reviews from critics and players alike.

INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine has recognized RIT as a 2020 Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award recipient and a 2020 Diversity Champion. This marks the seventh year in a row RIT has been named a HEED Award recipient and sixth consecutive year as a Diversity Champion.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration recently announced the discovery of GW190521, the most massive gravitational wave binary observed to date, and Rochester Institute of Technology scientists played an important role in identifying and analyzing the event.

RIT is one of 14 universities from around the globe that have collectively been awarded $12.5 million from the National Science Foundation to launch a new Biology Integration Institute. It will focus on better understanding ecosystem and climate interactions—like the thawing of the Arctic permafrost—and how they can alter everything from the landscape to greenhouse gases.

The National Science Foundation awarded RIT’s College of Science a three-year, $587,000 Building Capacity in STEM Education Research grant. The grant is part of a $1 million collaborative project that aims to extend the impact of the Professional development for Emerging Education Researchers (PEER) field school model to hundreds of emerging education researchers.

Niantic has donated $400,000 to create a new research lab at RIT that’s focused on location-based games. In the Niantic x RIT Geo Games and Media Research Lab, researchers will work to better understand how people interact with location-based games and how they can be used for good.

Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences, has developed a mathematical method that shows how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.

RIT is again considered one of the nation’s best universities for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review. The education-services company features RIT in the just-published 2021 edition of its annual book The Best 386 Colleges.

Natural gas-hydrates—crystalline compounds of gas molecules—are found in permafrost and marine sediments. While these gas hydrates can be used as alternative energy resources, they also pose a danger in terms of global warming. RIT researchers Patricia Taboada-Serrano and Yali Zhang developed a comprehensive model to better validate location of gas-hydrate deposits in marine sediments.

The Image Permanence Institute at RIT has received a grant award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for an unprecedented research project designed to identify the most cost-efficient and environmentally responsible methods of preparing paper-based collection objects for transit and display while maintaining preservation standards.

As part of a new $20 million National Science Foundation grant, RIT computer science professor Richard Zanibbi is using artificial intelligence to accelerate experimentation in chemistry, including finding more efficient ways to create solar cells.

Computer Science faculty members Minseok Kwon and M. Mustafa Rafique have received a best paper award in IEEE Cluster 2020 together with Krishna Neupane (GCCIS PhD student), and John Marshall (Cisco Systems and RIT alumnus). IEEE Cluster is a major international conference for sharing technical accomplishments in the field of cluster computing as well as the use of cluster systems for scientific and commercial applications.