Learn and Play:
RIT students can do both

About 4,300 first-year, transfer, and graduate students began pursuing their dreams on RIT's main campus last fall. Students come here from all 50 states and more than 100 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

The Mark and Maureen Davitt Graduate Education Endowed Scholarship was established with a $500,000 gift to RIT by Mark and Maureen Davitt to help graduates from the Rochester City School District pursue advanced degrees.

RIT's endowed partnership with Genesee Country Village & Museum—which was established in September by a gift from RIT alumnus Philip Wehrheim ’66 (business) and his wife, Anne—is one of the ways students connect with the Rochester community.

SOIS students to take time off of school to focus on personal business ventures while still working toward their degrees. Students in the fellowship also receive a $15,000 award to create the time and space needed to build their businesses.

RIT’s cyber defense team took home third place at the 2019 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, held April 23-25 in Orlando.

The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor took first place overall at the 2019 Baja SAE Rochester challenge, an international student-design competition that challenges students to apply classroom knowledge with real-world applications. RIT placed 10th overall among 100 collegiate race teams that took on a daunting motor cross field and four challenging days of competition.

Three students from the biomedical sciences program traveled with RIT Professor Bolaji Thomas to his native Nigeria to understand the impact tropical diseases such as malaria have on the population and the medical protocols used in treatment.

Six recently graduated motion picture science students from RIT’s College of Art and Design wove together the captivating videos for a museum exhibit at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, the nonprofit cultural center located at the National Register Historic Site of the Woodstock festival in Bethel, N.Y.

RIT’s campus in Weihai, China, held its first commencement ceremony in 2019, recognizing the initial class of students to earn BS degrees in management information systems.

RIT Dubai aspires to be the region’s university of choice for engineering, computing, and business students.

Nearly 900 students are enrolled in the RIT campuses located in Dubrovnik and Zagreb, and RIT Croatia also continues to be a leader in global experiential education for students from the Rochester campus.

This year, RIT Kosovo established the Research Center for Human Rights to promote and advance interdisciplinary research in the field of human rights.

Peter Hauser has spent the past two decades studying how deaf people develop, learn, grow and live. Today, he is at the helm of a new project—a research-based incubator—where junior faculty at NTID can work together to understand the role of cultural and linguistic diversity in deaf people’s lives

Tourism has surged in Croatia in recent years, bringing with it direct economic benefits but also challenging the preservation of the natural systems that make the Adriatic Coast region so attractive to visitors. Callie Babbitt, an associate professor in RIT’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability, is using a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to study sustainable solutions addressing the growing challenge of food waste management along Croatia’s Adriatic Coast.

Associate professor Linwei Wang is leading an international group of researchers and clinicians developing computational systems for creating individualized 3D imaging of a patient’s heart. With these 3D heart models, clinicians now have a noninvasive way to study their patients.

An ambitious initiative along the Quarter Mile will transform RIT into a maker’s heaven, where the arts and technology converge and ideas percolate freely.

Transforming RIT: The Campaign for Greatness impacts every area of the university. The four pillars are: attracting exceptional talent, enhancing the student experience, improving the world through research and discovery, and leading future special initiatives.

At an Oct. 29 celebration at RIT, E. Philip Saunders announced a $7.5 million gift to the business college that bears his name. This transformational gift will be used to help fund a major renovation and expansion of the facilities in Max Lowenthal Hall, home of Saunders College of Business.