Photo Spotlights

The 2015-2016 Outstanding Undergraduate Scholars were celebrated with a reception and awards ceremony April 7. In order to receive the scholars designation, students must have earned a GPA of 3.85 and completed more than two-thirds of the credit hours required for a bachelor’s degree. Selection is also based on factors complementing their academic achievement, including creative work, independent research and community service. More than 100 students were honored at the event.

As part of the third annual Graduate Education Week at RIT, a reading of the award-winning play Photograph 51 was held April 6. Written by Anna Ziegler, the play is about the working life of Rosalind Franklin and her involvement in the discovery of DNA. Tina Chapman DaCosta, a senior lecturer in RIT’s Department of Performing Arts and Visual Culture, read the main part of Rosalind Franklin. After the reading, Ziegler joined a panel of RIT scientists via Skype, to discuss the gender issues involved with the play.

Five teams of RIT student entrepreneurs pitched their business ideas to a panel of Rochester-area investors on April 6 during the annual Tiger Tank competition held in Ingle Auditorium. The five student teams—selected from more than 60 that submitted proposals—competed for a chance to win $4,750 in cash prizes and up to $160,000 in scholarships for graduate studies at RIT’s Saunders College of Business, as well as the opportunity to launch their products or businesses. The winning team was AWARE, a fatigue detection and alert system designed to combat drowsy driving. The system uses video-based monitoring of a user’s head position, eye movement and blink rate to detect physiological signs of fatigue. AWARE team members are mechanical engineering students Teryn Rynone and Claiborne Grosshans; electrical engineering students Zach Moxley and Emmanuel Dodoo; and Amanda Murray, a biomedical engineering student.

Manhattan-based office furniture retailer Poppin was the industry partner for Metaproject 06. The project assignment for RIT industrial design students was to create innovative accessories for Poppin’s office furniture that accent, improve or add to their use. On April 5, students presented their projects to Poppin designers. Here, Sara Schult described her nesting cup and carafe set to the group. On left, Jonathan Hopkins interprets. The venue for student output is the 2016 International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York City this May.

Professor Luis A.N. Amaral of Northwestern University is the keynote speaker for the spring Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking Lecture. He will discuss “A Matter of Life and Death: When Thinking is Critical,” at 4 p.m. April 5 in Webb Auditorium. On April 4, Amaral led a class on “Thinking Critically: The Complexity of Climate Change.”

Members of Alpha Sigma Alpha coordinated the Heel Violence walk on April 3. First-year students, from left, Mario Hanna, Christa Cerosimo and Hayes Shannon walked the mile in heels for the fundraiser. The proceeds from the mile-long walk benefit the Advocacy Services for Abused Deaf Victims (ASADV) and will be donated through the RIT United Way Campaign. ASADV is a local organization that provides free services to people who are deaf and hard of hearing who have experienced domestic violence or sexual abuse.

More than 60 RIT students worked in teams to develop products and service solutions for Rochester Regional Health, as part of the annual RIT Idea Lab event, April 2-3. Six projects were presented to sponsors.

RIT improv teams performed April 1 and 2 during the Improvamonium festival in Ingle Auditorium. Work in Progress was one of the teams doing a 30-minute skit. The free festival, now in its eighth year, features all of RIT’s improv groups as well as other college and professional teams.

Accepted students and their families participated in the Engineering Diversity Retreat on April 1 at the university. The future RIT Tigers met with campus representatives from Co-op and Placement, the McNair Scholars program, Alumni and the Office for Diversity and Inclusion prior to spending the afternoon touring the Kate Gleason College of Engineering and talking to faculty about degree programs. As part of the retreat, the accepted students were also hosted overnight in campus dorms by student-leaders of the Society of Professional Hispanic Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers.

Chemistry for a Cause is one of the projects competing in this semester’s Tiger Tank new business competition, hosted by the Albert J. Simone Center for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Here chemistry students Jacky Lim, left, and Ryan Le Tourneau run tests in the lab. Chemistry for a Cause offers targeted molecular imaging agents designed for photoacoustic imaging— an inexpensive and non-invasive method for the detection of cancer. To read more about the competition and the other teams, go to rit.edu/news/story.php?id=55129.

U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter visited RIT on March 30 to celebrate RIT’s contribution to the first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes earlier this year by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. Slaughter presented researchers in RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation with individual copies of her Congressional Record statement, from Feb. 25, commending their role in the discovery. In turn, Manuela Campanelli, right, director of the center, presented Slaughter with an RIT poster that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education celebrating the RIT team, and a signed copy of the landmark discovery paper that published in Physical Review Letters on Feb. 11.

Third-year management information systems student Jake Benabe from Queens, N.Y., decides on a T-shirt at the Student Government event to unveil its new logo. Student Government Vice President Andrea Shaver, a third-year graphic design major, designed the logo that will be used on all SG materials.