Research News

RIT’s Future Photon Initiative (FPI) and L3Harris have entered into a new industry partnership to develop quantum technologies. The partners will begin developing next steps for experiments and analysis focused on quantum information processing for communication, sensing, and computing.

RIT Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs Carmala Garzione received the 2020 William R. Dickinson Medal, which honors a mid-career research geoscientist who is significantly influencing the sedimentary geology community with innovative work.

RIT Professor Scott Franklin has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. The fellowship is a selective and prestigious recognition by peers for outstanding contributions to physics.

Professor Rajendra Raj and Associate Professor Xumin Liu have received a National Science Foundation award to develop a hands-on data science course for non-computing majors. The course will first be offered at RIT and then across the country, in an effort to promote computing for all.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration recently announced the discovery of GW190521, the most massive gravitational wave binary observed to date, and Rochester Institute of Technology scientists played an important role in identifying and analyzing the event.

RIT is one of 14 universities from around the globe that have collectively been awarded $12.5 million from the National Science Foundation to launch a new Biology Integration Institute. It will focus on better understanding ecosystem and climate interactions—like the thawing of the Arctic permafrost—and how they can alter everything from the landscape to greenhouse gases.

The National Science Foundation awarded RIT’s College of Science a three-year, $587,000 Building Capacity in STEM Education Research grant. The grant is part of a $1 million collaborative project that aims to extend the impact of the Professional development for Emerging Education Researchers (PEER) field school model to hundreds of emerging education researchers.

Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences, has developed a mathematical method that shows how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.

Two RIT students collaborated with faculty and co-authored their first paper which contributes to the body of knowledge surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

An RIT student is on a mission to help build detectors that could identify individual photons from distant, inhabitable planets. Justin Gallagher, a fifth-year student from Rochester, N.Y., pursuing his BS in physics and MS in astrophysical sciences and technology, is serving as project manager for a nearly $1 million grant funded by NASA to create a single photon sensing and number resolving detector for NASA missions.

The unexpected transition to remote learning during the spring semester challenged faculty across RIT to experiment, create, and deploy new methods of instruction to ensure student success. As the university gears up for in-person and online classes—or a combination of both—faculty members are applying a wide range of lessons learned from the spring to keep academic momentum moving forward in the fall.

CTV News talks to Nathan Eddingsaas, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Materials Science, about the presence of microplastics in the human body.