News

After a year’s hiatus due to COVID-19, the popular Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival returns virtually on Saturday, May 1, with more than 250 exhibits of projects, research and performing arts of students, faculty, and staff at RIT.

The Distinguished Alumni Awards are presented annually by each of RIT’s nine colleges and the School of Individualized Study to alumni who have performed at the highest levels of their profession or who have contributed to the advancement and leadership of civic, philanthropic, or service organizations.

The National Science Foundation awarded Guoyu Lu, an assistant professor in RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, more than $583,000 to spearhead the project.

Andrea Ghez, a 2020 Nobel Prize winner in physics for her research in discovering one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe—the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy—will be a 2021 RIT commencement speaker on May 14 and 15. Ghez joins Eric Avar ’90 (industrial design), Nike’s vice president and creative guide of innovation design who was honored with the College of Art and Design Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016, as the university’s first-ever dual commencement speakers.

When the James Webb Space Telescope—the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope—becomes operational in 2022, one of its first orders of business will be mapping the earliest structures of the universe. A team of nearly 50 researchers led by principal investigator Jeyhan Kartaltepe and other scientists at RIT and University of Texas at Austin will attempt to do so.

Quinn Kolt, a fourth-year applied mathematics and computer science double major from Solon, Ohio, has been awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the premier undergraduate research scholarship in the fields of math, natural sciences, and engineering in the United States.

Emmett Ientilucci's rapport with students is earning him recognition as the recipient of this year’s Richard and Virginia Eisenhart Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, which recognizes tenure-track faculty who excel in teaching and leadership on campus.

Embracing experimentation in the classroom has worked well for Associate Professor Nathaniel Barlow, who is receiving an Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching—RIT’s highest honor for tenured faculty—in just his first year as tenured faculty.

Professor Mark Fairchild, head of the Integrated Sciences Academy and director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory and the program of color science in RIT’s College of Science, received the 2021 Otto Schade Prize, which recognizes vision scientists, human factor engineers, and engineers whose efforts have led to major improvements in the visual quality of electronic displays.

Scientific American talks to Jeyhan Kartaltepe, assistant professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, about the program she is leading to use the James Webb Space Telescope to study thousands of the earliest galaxies in the universe.

Erika Holmbeck, who has been working as a postdoctoral associate with Associate Professor Richard O’Shaughnessy in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation since fall 2020, will begin as a Hubble Fellow in fall 2021.

RIT graduate programs are among the best in the nation, according to the U.S. News & World Report annual statistical survey of graduate programs.