Student Newsmakers

Brandon Rogers, a third-year advertising and public relations student, will begin a co-op as a corporate advertising specialist with Apple in Cupertino, Calif., this fall. He was selected by the company following a nationwide search. Rogers is a member of the Destler-Johnson Rochester City Scholars Program.

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Kamran Binaee, a Ph.D. student in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, was invited to deliver his talk, “Modeling Hand-Eye Movements in a Virtual Ball Catching Setup Using Deep Recurrent Neural Network,” at the annual meeting of the Vision Science Society May 19-24 at St. Pete Beach, Fla. Binaee won a student travel award to attend the meeting.

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Angelina Konovitz-Davern, a third-year museum studies major from Buffalo, N.Y., was named the 2017 Student of the Year by the Esri Development Center within RIT’s Department of Information Sciences and Technologies. The award honors students who develop innovative apps and projects on the ArcGIS platform, with a cash prize, certificate and Esri Press book.

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Joanna Cecilia, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, and Mehdi Mirakhorli, an assistant professor of software engineering, presented “Understanding Software Vulnerabilities Related to Architectural Security Tactics: An Empirical Investigation of Chromium, PHP and Thunderbird” on April 5 at the IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture in Gothenburg, Sweden. For their work, the team also received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award.

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Samuel B. Lum, a third-year mechanical engineering technology major from New York City, presented an environmental poster, “Microbial Fuel Cells for Effective Waste Treatment Heat and Power Production,” at the Emerging Researchers National Conference in STEM in Washington, D.C., on March 9. The conference was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

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Michael Hladky, Pearse Lehmann, A.J. Longabucco, Colin McGlynn, and Joseph Urbano competed in the U.S. Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Association’s Collegiate National Championship March 7-11 at Mt. Bachelor, Ore. Brian Schanbacher also attended, serving as their coach.

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Students and staff from RIT’s Center for Campus Life’s New Student Orientation program were named “Best Overall Undergraduate Program” by the National Orientation Director Association for Orientation, Transition and Retention at a meeting in Danvers, Mass., on Feb. 25.

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The Iota Psi Chapter of Theta Fraternity at RIT received the Amy Vojta Impact Award for Academic Achievement and the Mu Sigma Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Civic Engagement category at the Northeast Greek Leadership Association’s (NGLA) Annual Meeting in Hartford, Conn., Feb. 23-25. Additionally, for the sixth time in seven semesters, the RIT Fraternity and Sorority Community was awarded the Gamma Sigma Alpha National Greek Academic Honor Society’s Northeast Region Outstanding Scholarship Award. The award goes to the fraternity/sorority community in the Northeast region whose GPA is the highest above their campus undergraduate GPA.

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Justin Flory, a second-year networking and systems administration major from Cumming, Ga., won the 2017 People’s Choice Award from Opensource.com. Flory is editor-in-chief of Fedora Magazine and the Fedora Project’s Community Operations team lead. He first started writing for Opensource.com in 2016.

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Nargess Hassani, a Ph.D. candidate in color science from Tehran, Iran, presented “Color discrimination threshold for medical test devices” at the IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging in Burlingame, Calif., Jan. 29-Feb. 2. RIT Women In Science (WISe) awarded her travel funding to attend the conference.

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Rachael Thormann, a fourth-year computational math major from Williamstown, N.Y., won student travel grants from the Mathematical Association of America and RIT’s Women in Science, or WISe, program to attend the Joint Mathematics Meetings, Jan. 4-7 in Atlanta, Ga. She presented her research on the motion of a contact lens. Thormann works with David Ross, professor, and Kara Maki, assistant professor, in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences.

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p> Ryan McMullan, an environmental sustainability, health and safety major; Tim Snyder, a biotechnology and molecular bioscience major, and Daniel Baah, a graduate student in environmental science, presented a poster on the benefits of using microalgae to clean agricultural wastewater and make biofuels at the Rochester Academy of Sciences hosted by Roberts Wesleyan College on Nov. 12.

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Fatima Zara and Sam Alrobaie, biotechnology and molecular bioscience majors, presented talks on converting spent coffee grounds to energy at the Rochester Academy of Sciences hosted by Roberts Wesleyan College on Nov. 12.

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Student Government President Andrea Shaver and Vice President Amar Bhatt gave a presentation about RIT’s Paw Prints on Nov. 12 to the Student Assembly of the State University of New York in Albany.

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Ryan Ford, a Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, won the Best Student Oral Presentation award at the Systems and Technologies for Remote Sensing Applications Through Unmanned Aerial Systems (STRATUS) Workshop at RIT on Oct. 28.

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Zachary Mulhollan, a Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science from Derby, N.Y., presented “Optical Differentiation Wavefront Sensing for Freeform Optics Metrology” with Jie Qiao, associate professor in the Center for Imaging Science, at Frontiers in Optics: The 100th Optical Society of America Annual Meeting in Rochester on Oct. 19.

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The College of Science Student Advisory Board hosted an “Alumni, Faculty, Student and Families Speed Networking” event during Brick City Weekend on Oct. 15. It was organized by College of Science students Madison Ricco, Callie Donahue, Allen Sanford, Ashley Adair, Luke Laffey and Jordan Cardenas.

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Shagan Sah, a Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, participated in the International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2016 and presented “Key Frame Extraction for Salient Activity Recognition” and “Adaptive Hierarchical Classification Networks.” Shagan won a travel stipend by the International Association for Pattern Recognition to participate in the conference in Mexico.

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Alexander Rasskazov, a Ph.D. student in the astrophysical sciences and technology program from Astrakhan, Russia, presented “Evolution of massive black hole binaries in rotating galactic nuclei: Implications for gravitational wave detection” at the Cornell Astronomy Colloquium at Cornell University on Sept. 29.

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Graduate students Crystal Mendoza Paulin, Kurtis Kracke and Bradley Dunn, showcased ThermApparel at Upstate Special Needs Planning Disability Awareness Week at Al Sigl Center on Oct. 27. ThermApparel is a garment that assists patients with multiple sclerosis or other conditions by regulating body temperature in hot weather.

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Lauren Taylor, Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science from Marlton, N.J., and Jie Qiao, associate professor in the Center for Imaging Science, presented “Determining Optimized Laser Parameters for Non-Thermal Femtosecond Laser Processing of Silicon” at the Frontiers in Optics: The 100th Optical Society of America Annual Meeting in Rochester on Oct. 18.

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Alexandra Artusio-Glimpse, a Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science from Phoenix, was offered a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associateship to work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She will begin the three-year fellowship in September.

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Taylor Wolf, a fourth-year biochemistry major from Norwich, N.Y., presented a poster and a talk on “Drug Quality Assurance for Tuberculosis Medication,” at the National Undergraduate Research Symposium at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., on July 15-16. She seeks to develop a test to detect substandard and counterfeit tuberculosis medications.

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Claire Finnerty, a second-year biomedical sciences and public policy major, and Tayler Ruggero, a second-year criminal justice and public policy major, were awarded a Diplomacy Summit Scholarship from Rochester Global Connections to attend the U.S. Department of State’s regional summit, Women’s Empowerment: Keys to Leadership, June 1 in Albany, based on work at a study abroad in Rwanda.

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Noreen Gallagher, a graduate student in environmental science, presented her paper, “Isolation of Bacteria from Lake Waters Associated with Wastewater Effluents Capable of Degrading Various Pharmaceuticals,” at the International Conference on Environmental Science and Technology in Houston from June 4-11.

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Adam Kaufman, a fourth-year game design and development major, was selected for the Henry Clay Center for Statesmanship College Student Congress. The week-long program, in Lexington, Ky., brings students together with lawmakers to discuss the importance of applying the art of compromise to their work.

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Elizabeth Grese, a second-year international hospitality and service management student, received the Pedro Cruz Scholarship ($1,000) from the Rural & Migrant Ministry in recognition of her leadership and contributions to Colleges Against Cancer and volunteer work with Rochester’s Hope Lodge.

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Mario Saucedo-Espinosa, a microsystems doctoral student, received the 2016 Tomas Hirschfeld Scholar award, given by the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Society in recognition of a Best Paper based on his work in microfluidics.

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Nicholas Nenni, a master’s student in sustainable engineering, presented his paper, “Life-cycle and Economic Analysis of End-of-Life Strategies for Spent Coffee Grounds,” at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research conference in Anaheim, Calif., May 21-24.

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Kevin Cooke, a Ph.D. candidate in the astrophysical sciences and technology program, won sponsorship from the American Astronomical Society to attend the Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering workshop in Washington D.C., April 17-20. He learned about the federal science funding process and met with the science policy advisors for Sens. Booker, Menendez and Schumer.

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Elizabeth Bondi ’16 (imaging science) won the Best Paper Award and $1,000 for “Calibration of Unmanned Aerial Systems imagery inside and outside of shadows for improved vegetation index computation” at the SPIE Commercial and Scientific Sensing and Imaging conference in Baltimore April 17-21.

Raj Rengarajan, a Ph.D. candidate in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, presented “Modeling of forest canopy BRDF using DIRSIG” at the SPIE Commercial and Scientific Sensing and Imaging conference in Baltimore on April 21.

Lei Fan, a Ph.D. candidate in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, presented “Tensor subspace analysis for spatial-spectral classification of Hyperspectral data” at the SPIE Commercial and Scientific Sensing and Imaging conference in Baltimore April 17-21.

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Shagan Sah, a Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, won Best Student Poster for his research on “Graph Theoretic Approach to Convolution Neural Networks” at the 2016 IEEE Rochester Joint Chapters Meeting April 19.

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Natalia Dempsey, a third-year criminal justice and public policy major from Syracuse, N.Y., won a certificate of achievement for a research paper from the New York State Assembly, where she completed a 10-week internship on May 11.

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Smith Agyingi, a fourth-year biomedical sciences major from Rochester, presented a poster on “Susceptibility to Sickle Cell Co-Morbidities is Regulated by Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in the TOLLIP Gene” at the Experimental Biology Conference in San Diego April 2-6.

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Cody Cummings and Christine Kim, chemistry students at RIT/NTID, won the best analytical chemistry research award in April at the American Chemical Society’s Research Symposium, Rochester section, for the research they conducted with faculty David Meiggs, Morgan Bida and Todd Pagano.

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Hailie King, Adam Pirro, Sondus Bellow and Zachary Trombley, all hospitality and tourism management students, were selected for the prestigious Marriott Voyage global leadership development program in April to train the next generation of hospitality and service professionals.

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Kristina Punzi, a Ph.D. student in the astrophysical sciences and technology program, participated in a Congressional Visits Day sponsored by the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C., on March 16.

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Preethi Vaidyanathan, Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, won best paper for “Fusing Eye Movements and Observer Narratives for Expert-Driven Image-Region Annotations” at the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications in Charleston, S.C., March 14-17.

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Saddam “Sam” Alrobaie, Fatima Zara and Kim Callahan, third-year biotechnology majors, presented a poster on “Spent Coffee Grounds as a Viable Feedstock for Biofuels Production and Usable Byproducts” at the National Conference for McNairs Scholars and Undergraduate Research at the University of Maryland on March 10-13. They are research students in RIT professor Jeff Lodge’s biotech lab in the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences. Alrobaie and Zara are McNair Scholars.

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Claire Ryan, a fourth-year psychology major from Glenview, Ill., presented a poster on health literacy and deaf college students at the Student Research Forum of the National Conference in Health Disparities in Washington, D.C., on March 1.

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Emily Berkson and Tim Gibbs, graduate students in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, presented a poster on “Statistical Distribution of Spectral Anomalies in Varied Scene Content” and “NEFDS Contamination Model Parameter Estimation of Powder Contaminated Surfaces,” respectively, at the Conference on Data Analysis hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory in Santa Fe, N.M., March 2-4.

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Jacqueline McGraw, a fourth-year game design and development student, has been chosen as a 2016 International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Foundation Women in Games Ambassador. As part of the program, she received an all-access pass to the Game Developers Conference March 14–18 in San Francisco.

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Three members of Tiger Tales Toastmasters won during the Toastmasters Area 22 Club Contests on Feb. 20. Alex Turner won the first place and Abdul Saboor Mobariz won second place in the International Speeches Contest. Corey Wilson won first place in the Table Topics Contest.

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Mike Terzo Jr., a third-year environmental sustainability, health and safety major, received the Howard Freckleton and Roy Hamel Endowed Scholarship Award from RIT Ambulance for being active in the fire department and EMS service in the community. He has been an active member in the Rush, N.Y., Fire District since 2006 and was named captain in January.

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Computer science students Gregory Goh, Victoria Sardelli, Matthew Ku and Orens Xhagolli took third place at HackBU, a hackathon hosted Feb. 13–14 at Binghamton University. Their project, Chalk, is a smart schedule maker.

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Heather Williams, a second-year Motion Picture Science major from Watertown, N.Y., won second place in Rumba, first place in Swing and third place overall in Newcomer Rhythm at the Cornell Classic Dancesport Competition on Oct. 17. She is a member of the RIT Ballroom Dance Club.

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Fulbright Scholars from RIT and the University at Buffalo met in Watkins Glen State Park on Oct. 4 for a social event to bring scholars from different universities together. The event was organized by RIT Fulbright Scholars Association club with help from International Student Services in collaboration with the Fulbright Young Professionals Network - Western New York/North Western Pennsylvania Chapter.

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Quintina Frink, a fourth-year chemical engineering student, won the 2015 Susan L. Costa Memorial Scholarship, given to students for academic achievements and campus leadership. Frink is parliamentarian for NTID’s Student Assembly, serves in the Hands of Fire ministry and as RA at the university. She is from Arlington, Ohio.

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Thomas Close, undergraduate student, chemical engineering, Gaurav Tulsyan, graduate student, materials science, and Christiaan Richter, assistant professor, chemical engineering, co-authored “Reversible oxygen scavenging at room temperature using electrochemically-reduced titanium oxide nanotubes” in Nature Nanotechnology.

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Chaitanya Mahajan, engineering doctoral student, received the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference/Manufacturing & Design Div. 2015 Student Best Paper Award for “3D printing of carbon fiber composites with preferentially aligned fibers.”

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Alvaro Rojas, industrial engineering and imaging science doctoral student, won the 2015 Imaging Science & Technology association’s Itek Award for his paper, “Exploring surface defects on EP-based 3D-printed structures.” It will be published in the Journal of Imaging Science & Technology.

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Derek Kreider and Jacob Klaus, industrial and systems engineering students, placed second in the Simio Student Simulation Competition 2015, hosted by the IIE Annual Conference in June. Their entry on shipping container order, delivery and management was among 70 collegiate design entries.

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Engineering students Geni Giannotti, Megan Ehrhart, Noah Schadt, Tyler Leichtenberger, Jared Green and Adam Podolec won second place for their project, Soft Ankle-Foot Orthotic, in the undergraduate design competition at the Summer Biomechanics, Bioengineering and Bio-transport Conference in June.

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Chantel Charlebois, a third-year biomedical engineering student, won the Rochester Engineering Society's Keith W. Amish Memorial Scholarship, for $1,000, given to recognize academic excellence in a developing technology or energy-efficiency related fields and campus leadership. She is from Jericho, Vt.

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Melissa Mendoza, a third-year biomedical engineering student from Hollis, N.Y., had a research article, “It’s a non-dialysis day—Do you know how your patient is doing? A case for research into inter-dialytic activity,” published in the international journal Blood Purification.

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Annette Tavernese, a graduate student in secondary education of students who are deaf or hard of hearing, won first place in the graduate student oral presentation category at the Emerging Researchers National Conference in STEM in Washington, D.C. Tavernese is from Brick, N.J.

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Joey Bingham, a business major from Franklinville, N.J., and Tyler DeVore, a biomedical engineering major from Boonton Township, N.J., were members of the ice hockey team that participated in the 18th Winter Deaflympics in Russia, March 28–April 5.

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Kathleen Tigue, a fourth-year game design and development major, and Jackie Wiley, a third-year game design and development major, were two of 20 women to win Microsoft’s “Are You A Game Changer?” contest. They each received an all-access pass to the Game Developers Conference, March 2–6 in San Francisco, and a VIP ticket to Xbox’s Women in Gaming Awards Luncheon at the conference.

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Katie Pustolski, a fourth-year game design and development major, was selected as a 2015 International Game Developers Association Foundation (IDGAF) Intel Scholar and will receive an all-access pass to the Game Developers Conference, March 2–6 in San Francisco.

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Jonathan Bowman, a fourth-year game design and development major, was a Gold Winner in the Game Narrative Summit’s 2015 Student Narrative Analysis Competition and will receive an expo pass to the Game Developers Conference, March 2–6 in San Francisco.

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Jackie Bergin, a third-year advertising and public relations student, received the Charles S. Smith Scholarship from the Rochester chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. The scholarship helps students attend public relations conferences. RIT students have earned seven of the last eight Smith scholarships.

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Victoria K. McGowen, a third-year motion picture science student, and Matthew Ross Donato, a fourth-year motion picture science student, received the Louis F. Wolf Jr. Memorial Scholarship at the annual Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers conference in Los Angeles. The scholarship is designed to help students studying in motion pictures and television, with an emphasis on technology.

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JD Harper, a Master of Architecture student, was named recipient of the American Institute of Architects New York State Student Award for notable contributions and accomplishments by a student member of the American Institute of Architecture Students. There are more than 4,500 architecture students in New York state.

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A cappella group Eight Beat Measure received a place on the Varsity Vocals Best of Collegiate A Cappella 2015 album with their recording of “Talk Dirty,” originally performed by Jason Derulo. Download the song for free.

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Jie Yang, a Ph.D. student in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, won the Best Remote Sensing Paper for “A Combined Approach for Ice Sheet Elevation Extraction from Lidar Point Clouds,” co-written with John Kerekes, professor in the Center for Imaging Science, at the IEEE Western New York Image Processing Workshop held at RIT on Nov. 7. Yang is a resident of Suizhou City, Hubei Province, China.

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Selene Chew, third-year computational mathematics major in the College of Science, won the overall Best Paper Award for “Normalized Cuts with Soft Must-Link Constraints for Image Segmentation and Clustering,” co-written with Nathan Cahill, associate professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences, at the IEEE Western New York Image Processing Workshop held at RIT on Nov. 7. Chew is a resident of Ithaca, N.Y.

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Chelsea Wiedman, a fourth-year biochemistry student, and Matt Loiacono, a fourth-year student in applied mathematics and networking and system administration, were recognized at Tutor Con, hosted at RIT on Oct. 4. They are active participants in the College of Science Learning Assistant Program.

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Alexander Triassi and Matthew Wheatley, fourth-year biotechnology majors and lead authors, published “L,L-diaminopimelate aminotransferase (DapL): a putative target for the development of narrow spectrum antibacterial compounds,” in the Sept. 26 issue of Frontiers in Microbiology with Michael Savka and André Hudson, professors in RIT’s Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences; alumnus Han Ming Gan, Monash University Malaysia; and Renwick Dobson, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

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Megan Bernilla, an international studies major at NTID, taught English at Jorge Otte School for the Deaf in Santiago, Chile, for a co-op July 29 through Aug. 22.

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Franly Ulerio Nunez, a laboratory science technology major at NTID, presented “Fingerprinting the Biochemical Make-Up of Fruits Available to Migratory Birds via Multidimensional Fluorescence and Chemometrics” at the 2014 national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco on Aug. 11.

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Tia Canonico, a fourth-year illustration major; Sally-Rose Craigin, a fourth-year ASL-English interpretation major; Katie Bonfiglio, a fourth-year ASL-English interpretation major; and Kristen Cummings ’13 (psychology) were awarded scholarships by the Alpha Xi Delta Foundation.