Photo Spotlights

Rodolfo “Rudy” Montez Jr. will be the first student to earn his doctorate from RIT’s Astrophysical Sciences and Technology program. His dissertation focused on X-rays emitted from planetary nebulae, or dying stars.

Sue Northrup, kindergarten teacher at Margaret’s House, sorts through pajamas collected for The Great Bedtime Story Pajama Drive. The RIT community is asked to drop off new pajamas to boxes at Margaret’s House and the Campus Center. For each pair of pajamas collected, Scholastic Book Club will donate one book to children in need. The drive continues through Dec. 3.

Autumn Geer, Brick City Catering, created flavored cupcakes for the holidays. The cupcakes are available for purchase by the half dozen and come in three flavors—Chocolate Peppermint (chocolate cake with peppermint extract, chocolate butter cream frosting, and candy cane garnish), Gingerbread (spiced yellow cake with cream cheese frosting and cinnamon candies), and Snow White (white cake with coconut butter cream frosting and coconut flakes). Orders may be placed through the catering sales office at 475-2346.

Mary Barnard, a senior staff assistant in the School of Film and Animation, helps assemble care packages for the military on Nov. 22. The Alumni Relations department collected toiletries, games, snacks and even Girl Scout cookies to give members of the Armed Forces with ties to the university a little taste of home this holiday season. Barnard’s son, Josh, is deployed in Afghanistan.

RIT President Bill Destler, left, joined Jeremy Haefner, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, and Don Boyd, vice president for research, to discuss the vision for research at RIT. The Nov. 22 presentation served as the opening event to the two-day Grant Writers’ Boot Camp, sponsored annually by the Wallace Center and Sponsored Research Services.

From left, Kris Campbell, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boise State University, Simone Raoux, a research scientist from IBM’s T.J. Watson Research, RIT microelectonics engineering professor Santosh Kurinec and Ph.D. Candidate Archana Devasia were on hand as Devasia defended her doctoral dissertation, “Towards Integrating Chalcogenide Based Phase Change Memory with Silicon Microelectronics.” She has been working with Kurinec throughout her Ph.D. studies and joined her last fall during her sabbatical at IBM. All four women were part of a research team continuing development of phase-change memory for microelectronic devices.

RIT students provided hearty Thanksgiving meals to five Henrietta families in need with the help of donations received during the annual Thanksgiving food drive. Students delivered the care packages Nov. 18. The effort was coordinated by the Center for Women and Gender and the Community Service Center.

RIT played a crucial role in eGameRevolution, the latest permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Play at The Strong, which opened Nov. 20. RIT Interactive Games and Media professor Steve Jacobs and two RIT students—third-year interactive new media development major Ned Blakley and third-year game design and development major Matt Fico—helped devise and execute the strategy behind the exhibit, which chronicles the history of electronic games.

Local entrepreneur and philanthropist, Janis F. Gleason, signed copies of her new book, The Life and Letters of Kate Gleason, on Nov. 18. RIT’s College of Engineering is named after Kate Gleason, an industrialist, mechanical engineer and real estate developer. The book, published by RIT Press, came to fruition after the author’s husband, James S. Gleason, the grandnephew of Kate Gleason and chairman of the Gleason Corp., allowed her access to family files that were discovered on the top floor of Gleason Works.

Students Brandon Mercer, Mady McKenna and Katherine Zickgraf, right, indulge in a hot, late-night meal during Midnight Breakfast Nov. 12. The annual event, hosted by the Center for Residence Life, helps students ease the stress of end-of-quarter finals by being served breakfast by faculty and staff members.

David Lallemant, an engineer working in Haiti with the World Bank Group, talked about ongoing challenges facing the disaster-response effort following the earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince earlier this year. The Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science hosted Lallemant’s visit to RIT as the keynote speaker at its annual workshop Nov. 12. Imagery collected from the disaster by RIT, and made freely available on the Internet, has led to a flood of innovative information products. Getting those products to the right decision makers is part of the challenge facing engineers and scientists working in remote-damage analysis, Lallemant says.

RIT officially launched Tiger Power Play—The Campaign for RIT Hockey at a news conference Nov. 12 in Ritter Arena. The initiative aims to raise $15 million toward construction of an arena seating up to 6,000 fans. President Bill Destler (at podium) introduced alumnus Stephen Schultz (left), co-founder and chief technical officer of Pictometry Corp., and his wife, Vicki Schultz, an RIT alumna. The couple presented the campaign’s opening gift of $1 million. Men’s hockey head coach Wayne Wilson (standing behind Destler) looks on.