News Stories

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.

RIT welcomed 3,129 first-year students last fall. For students seeking a bachelor’s degree, their average SAT score was just under 1300, and the average ACT score was 30. Sixty-three were at the top of their high school graduating class.

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.

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.

2020 threw the book at us—a global pandemic, racial unrest, economic uncertainty, a fierce political battle for leadership of our nation. I’m proud to say RIT faced it all head on, pulling together our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustees who guided us through—and eventually will guide us out of—these turbulent times.

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.

Space.com features work by Sukanya Chakrabarti, associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy.

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