Photo Spotlights

Construction continues for the future Gene Polisseni Center. The arena will be the home of the men’s and women’s hockey teams and is expected to be open for play in Fall 2014. Currently, 651 pipe piles are being installed before concrete footings are poured. Live streaming video of construction of the arena is available online at www.rit.edu/powerplay.

Ashley Carrington, a second-year accounting major in the E. Philip Saunders College of Business, is a founding “father” of Delta Sigma Pi-Epsilon Lambda Chapter. The professional business fraternity was resurrected after 60 years of extinction. She was instrumental in organizing the first Tiger Race fundraiser, a 5K race that raised $1,200 for the newly formed fraternity.

Students from 50 high school teams across the Northeast and Canada participated in Ultimate Ascent, the 2013 game in the annual FIRST Robotics competition held in RIT’s Gordon Field House March 1 and 2. Here, Victoria Dinoto, center, cheered for the East Rochester High School Robotics Team, #3157.

This season’s FIRST Robotics Competition featured robots flinging red, white and blue Frisbees into multi-tiered goals on the game field during two-minute matches. Students from 50 high school teams across the Northeast and Canada participated in Ultimate Ascent, the 2013 game in the annual FIRST Robotics competition held in RIT’s Gordon Field House March 1 and 2.

Forrest Shooster, a first-year game design and development honors student diagnosed within the autism spectrum, works to coordinate class schedules with his peer mentor, Amy Dasaro, from the Spectrum Support Program at RIT. To read more, go to www.rit.edu/news/athenaeum_story.php?id=49750.

Professor Dina Newman is improving the way undergraduates learn to be biologists. Newman is developing resources and outreach activities for BioSciEdNet, a digital library of biology educational materials managed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Bioinformatics student Wai Hon Chan has spearheaded Recover Rochester, part of the Food Recovery Network that diverts unused food from college dining halls that would end up in a landfill and delivers it instead to local soup kitchens.

Martha Morgan, assistant professor of archaeology in RIT’s College of Liberal Arts, studies garbage as a way to understand human behaviors in both the present and past. In her course, Garbage Archaeology, Morgan’s students learn about their immediate environment of Rochester through the collection, sorting and processing of garbage in their neighborhoods.

Sam Rinaldo, a fourth-year civil engineering technology/emergency management and safety student, is part of CAST professor Jennifer Schneider’s research team developing plans for emergency preparedness. He saw firsthand how important community plans are for disaster recovery when he spent part of the fall in New York City helping residents affected by Hurricane Sandy. Rinaldo went as part of his service in the U.S. Naval Reserves and worked in lower Manhattan, one of the areas hardest hit by the hurricane, supporting residents without food, water and electricity.

RIT’s Engineering House has inventive solutions for older cribs at Margaret’s House that no longer meet federal requirements. Instead of using them as kindling, students repurposed them as easels for classrooms. Here, 3-year-old Aditi Jagannath draws with first-year engineering student Linzey Miller. Other future projects for the crib parts are gates and shelves.

Jingjia Xu, a second-year computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, uses mathematics, computational methods and 3-D computer simulations to pinpoint and map the start of electrical propagation in the heart. To read more, go to www.rit.edu/news/athenaeum_story.php?id=49765.

John and Loriann Macko didn’t know each other as students when they were at RIT, but returned to work at NTID and eventually married. They are one of more than 20 married couples at NTID.