News by Topic: Grants

Moumita Das, an associate professor in RIT’s School of Physics and Astronomy, received funding from the National Science Foundation to better understand the fundamental rules that allow bacteria to compartmentalize the functions within their cells.

RIT’s Behavioral Health program is expanding in new directions with a clinic on campus and federal funding to deliver addiction treatment in rural communities in upstate New York and rural New Hampshire.

Toilet seats with high-tech sensors might be the non-invasive technology of the future that could help reduce hospital return rates of individuals with heart disease. A joint project by researchers at RIT and the University of Rochester Medical Center will determine if in-home monitoring can successfully record vital signs and reduce risk and costly re-hospitalization rates for people with heart failure. The five-year, $2.9 million venture is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Matt Huenerfauth, professor and expert in computing accessibility research, is part of a team that has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to use artificial intelligence to better understand the role of facial expressions in signed and spoken languages.

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.

RIT is preserving a rare collection of Hebrew wood types used by the Jewish-American press at the turn of the 20th century. RIT Cary Graphic Arts will print, digitize, and publish its collection of 30 different wood types of the Hebrew alphabet with a grant from the Rochester Area Community Foundation’s Historic Preservation, Restoration, and Literature Fund. 

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.

The Image Permanence Institute at RIT has received a grant award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for an unprecedented research project designed to identify the most cost-efficient and environmentally responsible methods of preparing paper-based collection objects for transit and display while maintaining preservation standards.

As part of a new $20 million National Science Foundation grant, RIT computer science professor Richard Zanibbi is using artificial intelligence to accelerate experimentation in chemistry, including finding more efficient ways to create solar cells.

RIT is joining University of Rochester and others in a National Science Foundation-funded project to learn about the different creative skills that tomorrow’s workforce needs. The study is centered on the idea that intelligent machines are replacing the routine tasks that people do and creative skills will become even more valuable for future workers.

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.