Photo Spotlights

The RIT Baja team unveiled its 2010 off-road vehicle on March 20. RIT driver Mike Hargrave zipped around in front of the Louise M. Slaughter Building to demonstrate the car’s agility. RIT’s team will host nearly 90 other teams at the Baja SAE Rochester Wet World Challenge June 11–13.

The United Way Campaign kickoff took place in the Student Alumni Union on March 18. The RIT goal is set at $415,000 this year, hoping to be met through pledges and support of special events.

Mary Beth Cooper, vice president of student affairs and James DeCaro, a member of the selection committee, congratulate third-year biomedical sciences major Ryan Buckley, center, who was honored with the 2010 Bruce R. James ’64 Distinguished Service Award during a ceremony March 16. Buckley was selected for his commitment to community development and service both in Rochester and around the world. He spent last summer in Kenya volunteering as a health care worker for Kikuyu Hospital, in the city of Kikuyu.

Criminal Justice professor Lavern McQuiller Williams fixes the boutonniere for Four Presidents Distinguished Public Service Award winner John Klofas before the award ceremony March 16. Klofas, chair of the criminal justice department, was honored with RIT’s highest public service award for his three decades of community work in the areas of crime reduction and community development.

“Every airline in the world is our customer and we’ve gone from the highway to the runway,” says Marshall Larsen, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Goodrich. Larsen was the guest speaker for the E. Philip Saunders College of Business Executive Leaders Network Luncheon on March 16. During Goodrich’s 140-year-lifetime, the manufacturer has become an international leader in aerospace and defense, and Larsen credits its success to “dynamic people who know it, believe in it, own it and execute it.”

Mike Good, a second-year networking, security and systems administration major and WITR-FM (89.7) staff member, emerges from a dunking booth set up on RIT’s Quarter Mile March 12 to help celebrate the station’s new slogan—“WITR 89.7 The Pulse of Music”—and logo. Visitors to the “Dunk a DJ” event received WITR T-shirts and other station prizes. The student-run radio station also unveiled a new Web site. Taylor Osmonson, a second-year mechanical engineering technology major and WITR promotions director, looks on.

The 2010 Eat Well Live Well challenge is March 14-May 8. RIT hosted a kick-off event on March 11 with food displays, samples, raffles and personal trainers and wellness coaches available to answer questions about the program.

Photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa met with graduate students from RIT’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences during a visit to his alma mater on March 11. Mthethwa came to RIT on a Fulbright scholarship and earned a master’s degree in imaging arts in 1989. He has just released a new, comprehensive monograph of his work which focuses on the economic and political realities of present-day South Africa.

Members of RIT’s Alpha Phi Omega fraternity are spending a few days living in a cardboard ‘Shanty Town’ to raise money for Harbor House, a Rochester-based agency providing temporary lodging needs during health emergencies for individuals and families. Here, fraternity members Joseph Voellinger, a first-year civil engineering technology major, left, and Kari Hazzard, a sixth-year international business/economics major, help finish the structure located by the tiger statue near the Eastman Kodak Quad. The fundraiser ends March 12.

The RIT Formula SAE Racing Team participated in the 2010 Rochester International Auto Show, March 5-7, displaying several models of their racecar. The new Formula One car will be unveiled May 1 during the Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author David Cay Johnston presented his thoughts on the current economic crisis and what can be done to fix it March 9. The presentation, “A Path Back to Prosperity for America,” was part of the Caroline Werner Gannett Project’s Visionaries in Motion series.

Past Meets Present: Recovering the History of Women at Rochester Institute of Technology, 1885 - 1945, was edited by Tina Olsin Lent, Becky Simmons and Donna Rubin. This volume is the result of a yearlong joint effort of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the University Archivist and the director of the RIT Women’s Center to explore and highlight the roles women have played on the RIT campus since 1885. Hear Tina Olsin Lent and Becky Simmons discuss the book: www.rit.edu/news/podcasts.