News by Topic: Creativity And Innovation

More than 1,000 openings in the Finger Lakes region for skilled machinists are projected in the coming years. Local academic researchers and industry partners are developing new training options to fill the expected gaps—integrating gaming and virtual reality to appeal to a younger generation of manufacturing professionals.

A hospitality workforce training program run by Saunders College of Business is responding both to the needs of underserved immigrants and refugees seeking meaningful work and an industry that has been devastated by staff shortages wrought by the pandemic.

The Open Work in Academia Summit will be held Sept. 7-9 at the Hyatt Regency Rochester, in downtown Rochester, N.Y. The event is hosted by RIT’s open source programs office Open@RIT.

RIT’s MAGIC Center has developed a Memorandum of Understanding with Rochester Community TV to partner on an initiative to equip Rochester City School District high school students with actionable skills and provide exposure to future career opportunities in the growing video game industry.

The Undergraduate Research Symposium, RIT’s annual showcase of innovative projects, takes place from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on July 28 and more than 200 students are expected to participate. The event will feature some of the best in undergraduate research ideas and solutions.

A feature film with several RIT connections has left its mark on the Netflix streaming platform. The Mystery of Her hit No. 9 on the list of most downloaded films on Netflix Global Streaming last week.

WXXI’s “Connections” program talks to Erich Lehman ’97 (electronic media publishing), ’99 MS (crossmedia publishing), systems administrator in the College of Art and Design and co-curator and lead organizer of WALL/THERAPY, an art and community intervention project.

RIT will establish two new endowed professorships in the College of Science thanks to a $2 million donation from Jeffrey Harris ’75 and his partner, Joyce Pratt. RIT matched their donation with $4 million in funding as part of a $20 million challenge to encourage alumni, parents, and friends of the university to support faculty recruitment, retention, and research critical to RIT’s priorities and trajectory.

RIT will begin offering two new Ph.D. programs beginning in the fall of 2023: business administration and cognitive science. Today, RIT enrolls 300 students in 11 Ph.D. programs.

Jorge M. Rodriguez ’15 (online Executive MBA), chief executive officer of Salt Lake City-headquartered Sorenson Communications, has more than 30 years of experience in the telecommunications and information technology industries—including in both domestic and international markets.

Research at RIT into new energy-efficient materials for computing could improve the bottleneck that often occurs when retrieving large amounts of data, hindering processing throughput and energy efficiency.

NASA announced new funding for a project led by RIT alumni, faculty, and students that could power spacecraft to orbit the sun’s poles for the first time. The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program will provide funding to the Diffractive Solar Sailing project led by Amber Dubill ’20, ’20 MS of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.