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RIT spent more than $8.2 million to make RIT’s campus as safe and clean as possible so that students, faculty, and staff could study and work confidently and comfortably. The university’s Infrastructure and Health Technologies Task Force implemented a variety of changes to RIT’s academic settings, housing, and dining designed to fight the spread of the coronavirus.

When demonstrations calling for police reform and racial equality occurred in cities across the country in 2020, alumni and faculty of RIT’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences were there to capture the gripping moments through their camera lenses.

For too long, cybersecurity has been an afterthought. In a preemptive strike on cyber­security threats across the world, RIT has created the Global Cybersecurity Institute (GCI). Late last fall, the GCI opened the doors to its 52,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility on campus. With the institute, RIT is on its way to becoming one of the best places in the world for cybersecurity education, training, and research.

First, RIT was forced to close campus operations in March and transition to alternative learning methods. Then, faculty and staff were tasked with developing a creative academic portfolio of online, blended, and in-person classes for the fall. Now, RIT is preparing for the spring, which will be a mix of best practices from the last year aimed at maintaining the high academic standards for which the university is known.

Dark Reading talks to Justin Pelletier, director of the GCI Cyber Range and Training Center, and computing security student Sunggwan Choi about RIT’s Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition.

Simplemost references a tweet by Mitch Goldstein, associate professor in the School of Design.

Debugger talks to Ricardo Figueroa, interim co-director of the School of Film and Animation, about the technical limitations to the Princess Leia hologram.

Researchers have used pulsar measurements to help uncover new information about the density of dark matter in our home galaxy. In a new study led by RIT Associate Professor Sukanya Chakrabarti, researchers have now obtained the first direct measurement of the average acceleration taking place within the Milky Way.

RIT had its best year ever for sponsored research funding. For fiscal year 2020, which ended June 30, RIT received 382 new awards totaling $82 million. The record funding follows almost $58 million in research expenditures in fiscal year 2019, also a record.

Essay co-written by Callie Babbitt, associate professor in Golisano Institute for Sustainability, published by The Conversation.

As part of a summer faculty development workshop sponsored by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), Patricia Cyr was recommended by workshop leaders for the fellowship because of her work during the program and while teaching at RIT to advance engineering course activities and to improve student learning outcomes.

Faculty-researcher Cory Merkel recently received a grant from the Air Force Research Lab for developing more secure AI functionality including how it defends against system attacks, and, through training the system, how it could learn to anticipate triggers for possible system attacks.