Photo Spotlights

Forty participants of East House Career Services are taking part in a two-week college enrichment experience June 1–4 and June 8–11. The program is designed to broaden other treatment and rehabilitation services and to encourage participants who are recovering from mental illness or substance abuse disorders to pursue educational goals to achieve independence and self-sufficiency. Classes include wellness, Spanish, math, creative writing and more. Here, instructor Pat Swartzfager gives Alexander Aymar some direction in her pen and ink drawing class.

Nick Giordano, the new Student Government president at RIT, revisits Margaret’s House child care center, where he spent part of his preschool years on campus.

Mason Chronister, who graduated from NTID with an associate’s degree in administrative support technology, will soon begin his career with the U.S. Department of Defense. Chronister has overcome the odds and is living with Usher Syndrome, which is characterized by hearing loss, night blindness and loss of peripheral vision.

Kunsang Dorjee is a Tibetan refugee who lives in Dharmsala, India, home to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. After completing his MBA studies as a Fulbright student at Saunders College of Business, he will return home this June to work at the Central Tibetan Administration. His humanitarian mission is to connect Tibetans across the world to destitute Tibetan refugees in India.

RIT Staff Council hosted its yearly Bob Howie Memorial Classic Car Display May 27 as part of the annual Staff Appreciation Day and Community Picnic. On right, Brennan Coon, assistant director for intramurals and club sports, talks about his 1973 Volkswagen Campmobile with Charles Johnstone. Johnstone brought his 1962 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a car that has been in his family since it was shipped over from Europe in 1962.

The August Family Atrium in the Clinical Health Sciences Center was dedicated on May 26 in a private ceremony. The facility is the new home for the clinical programs in the College of Health Sciences and Technology, the Wegmans School of Health and Nutrition and a primary care clinic run by Rochester Regional Health Systems clinic. Burt August, center, is an RIT Trustee Emeritus.

Today and Saturday, RIT will confer degrees upon more than 3,800 undergraduate and graduate students, including 42 doctoral candidates. At the Academic Convocation, RIT recognized the accomplishments of graduates from all nine colleges, the Center for Multidisciplinary Studies, and the Golisano Institute for Sustainability by officially conferring degrees.

Students Carl Domingo, game design and development, and Mollie Pressman, mechanical engineering, celebrated at the seventh Annual Senior Class Toast on May 21.

Fourth-year advertising photography student Hannah Schwob, front, sorts food products left behind by students moving out of the dorms. The Goodbye, Goodbuy! plan, led by students, urges students moving out of their dorms and on-campus apartments to donate their furniture, clothes, canned goods and other items. The items will be sorted and what can be reused will be sold at thrift store prices to new students coming to RIT in August. Nick Giordano, a fourth-year political science and management information systems major, is the program manager.

RIT’s Center for Advancing Science/Mathematics Teaching Learning and Evaluation, or CASTLE, celebrated faculty and student research in improving STEM education at its second annual symposium on May 20. CASTLE, housed in the College of Science, encompasses several overlapping student-centered programs and discipline-based education research initiatives. RIT Provost Jeremy Haefner praised the Learning Assistant program, which, he said, is making a difference in challenging STEM courses. Undergraduates successful with courses are embedded in classes with high drop, withdraw and failure rates. The Learning Assistant program immerses undergraduates into experiential teaching and learning with a research spin and, he said, embodies the direction in which RIT is headed as a student-centered research university. Here, Charles Gaetano Loweecey discusses the workshop he and George Wyatt Seybold designed as Learning Assistants in professor Deana Olles’ Elements in Multivariable Calculus and Differential Equations class.

Research teams of graduate and undergraduate students in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science explore new ideas in vision science that demonstrate connections between eye movement and predictive memory and the role of vision in walking. From right, Kamran Binaee, an imaging science Ph.D. student; lab director Gabriel Diaz; and Andrew Smith, fourth-year imaging science student.

School for American Crafts students showcased their work during the annual Walkthrough on May 18. The school’s ceramics, glass, furniture design, metals and jewelry design studios were open to view work created by RIT students. Here, visitors tour the ceramics area.