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A transformational gift from serial entrepreneur and philanthropist E. Philip Saunders will help fund a major renovation and expansion to Max Lowenthal Hall, home of RIT’s Saunders College of Business.

Scientists began conducting research at the Tait Preserve of RIT for the first time this summer. Researchers from the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Laboratory were the first to use the site, collecting data using imaging technology flown on unmanned aerial systems, or drones.

Shaun Foster is leveraging $160,000 from an Epic Games MegaGrant to explore and develop dynamic virtual content that is opening the eyes of RIT faculty and students—and many others—to Unreal Engine’s myriad, multi­disciplinary possibilities.

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.

Analytical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, resiliency, and flexibility are among the top skills needed for emerging careers by 2025. Anticipating these rapid changes in the workplace—further accelerated by lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic—RIT is seizing on the opportunity to guide students to “new economy majors” that are multi­disciplinary, transformative, and future-focused.

Design work on the multipurpose Innovative Maker and Learning Complex continued after the COVID-19 pandemic closed the campus in March. The current plan is for work on the foundation to start in spring 2021, and the building to open in fall 2023.

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.

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.

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.

Students on co-op are picking up more than occupational and professional skills. As the pandemic unfolded last spring and summer, they saw firsthand how companies manage even in the midst of a crisis.

WXXI’s “Connections” program features Roger Easton, professor in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science; Lisa Enochs, second-year student double majoring in motion picture science and imaging science; and Zoë LaLena, second-year imaging science student.