News by Topic: Interdisciplinary Studies

Scientists believe bats first transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans in December 2019, and while the virus has since evolved into several variants such as delta and omicron, a new study by scientists at RIT indicates the virus is still highly transmissible between mammals.

Essential emergency services play a key role in saving lives when snowstorms blanket the Northeast or a wildfire erupts out West. However, many communities are still being left out and face communication barriers during emergencies. At NTID, a team of researchers is studying how to identify and bridge gaps in emergency management resources and services for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community.

Tina Cannaday Chapman DaCosta ’04 MS, ’14 MFA is using her parents’ life stories to teach important lessons about diversity, equity, and inclusion. In fall 2022, the director of RIT’s Diversity Theater program released Dear Eleanor, her second short film based on her parents’ lives.

Numerous Rochester Institute of Technology faculty, professors emeriti, and postdoctoral researchers were recognized as top-cited scientists in their fields, according to a Stanford University study published by Elsevier.

Becoming the Silicon Valley of the Northeast may have as much power as the computer chips that will soon be designed and developed in the upstate New York region. The recent Chips 101 event, hosted by RIT on Nov. 16, kept to that premise. More than 50 regional government and corporate representatives learned how computer chips are designed and manufactured—and how universities, government, and workforce development initiatives will contribute to this area.

RIT is vying to be the first university to develop and have a game character accepted into the wildly popular online game Dota 2. The character, or courier, in the form of a tiger, was developed in MAGIC Spell Studios by a team of former RIT students and a faculty adviser.

RIT’s College of Liberal Arts plans to introduce new and revamped philosophy and communication curricula to help students across the university enhance their expressive and analytic communication skills. This was made possible by a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Teagle Foundation.

The RIT Graduate School has updated a list of graduate-level electives, first issued last fall, with more than 200 courses—from Ceramics to Applied Machine Learning to Topics in Health and Nutrition—open to graduate students during this academic year.

An early sunset didn’t deter the large crowd gathered at the National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House and the surrounding neighborhood for the RIT Big Shot on Sunday. The community came together to shine a light on voting rights and equal rights as part of the annual photography project hosted by RIT.

The National Science Foundation has awarded RIT $1.2 million for a cohort of four postdoctoral fellows to conduct STEM discipline-based education research. Each fellow will work with two mentors, encouraging cutting-edge research at the interface of traditional disciplines.

Assistant Professor Nourridine Siewe from RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences helped develop a new mathematical model that could aid doctors and patients assessing different approaches for treating metastatic cancer.

A gift from the Marie Golisano Graham Fund is supporting new ways for RIT to engage the public with the life and legacy of her brother, B. Thomas Golisano—Paychex founder, philanthropist, and civic leader.