News by Topic: Partnerships

Nearly 300 people gathered on Friday evening at the beginning of Brick City Homecoming and Family Weekend as RIT officials marked the successful conclusion of Transforming RIT: The Campaign for Greatness. RIT’s largest-ever fundraising campaign raised $1,059,581,463 to propel the university forward in its pursuits at the intersection of technology, the arts, and design.

RIT was recently awarded $2 million as part of the Biden Administration’s “Investing in America” program to focus on creating jobs in the high-demand areas of infrastructure and transportation.

Tom Connor, former vice president of creative marketing at Walt Disney Co., has been appointed assistant provost at RIT. In addition, Connor, an alumnus of RIT’s School of Film and Animation, has also been named the Paul and Francena Miller Chair in International Education and will serve as a professor of practice in RIT’s College of Art and Design.

RIT is receiving $500,000 from the Google Cybersecurity Clinics Fund to train new cybersecurity professionals, while providing services for public good at the same time. The funding from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, is part of a $20 million collaboration with the Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics that Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced in June.

Dozens of young scholars will convene at RIT next year as the university hosts the next a2ru Emerging Creatives Student Summit. The student participants will work in interdisciplinary teams from across the a2ru network to create arts-integrative projects responding to the theme “PLAY: The Impact of Play on How We Create and Relate to the World.”

As part of RIT’s ongoing commitment to academic and cultural exchanges, several cohorts of international students, including those from Ireland, Germany, and Indonesia, visited campus this fall. The visits were spearheaded, in part, by RIT Global, which has developed partnerships with nearly 100 countries.

Nearly 4,000 RIT students looking for co-ops, internships, or full-time employment are attending RIT’s University-wide Career Fair today in the Gordon Field House and Activities Center. Recruiters from more than 250 local, regional, and national employers are on hand, including General Dynamics, National Grid, Moderna, Redcom, Penske, Liberty Pumps, Wegmans Food Markets, and Samsung, among others.

On Sept. 29, fourth-year packaging science major Kassidy Burrows, along with fellow packaging science majors Baylee West and Daniel Pinigin, will travel to Binghamton University to present their research at the “Keep it Fresh!” Student Packaging Research Symposium.

Natali Valdez, assistant professor at Purdue University and Presidential Fellow at Yale University, will visit RIT to share her research on social and political factors surrounding maternal medical policy as the featured speaker for the 2023 Eugene H. Fram Signature Lecture in Critical Thinking.

Comics fans have a super friend in RIT and a new place to pay homage to legendary DC Comics artist and educator Joe Kubert. The Kubert Lounge and Gallery opens to the public this fall at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection in RIT’s university library. Marvel Comics artist and RIT alumnus Adam Kubert ’81 donated his father’s archive to inspire young artists.

On Wednesday morning, RIT President David Munson, K-12 University Center Executive Director Donna Burnette, and Rochester Mayor Malik Evans cut the ribbon in front of the K-12 University Center’s new home at 40 Franklin St., in the heart of downtown Rochester. This move from RIT’s Henrietta campus to the city will allow the center to greatly expand the connections it has already forged with the Rochester community.

RIT scientists have once again used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey to change the way we think about the universe and its distant galaxies. Jeyhan Kartaltepe and Rebecca Larson co-authored a paper confirming very bright galaxies in the early universe, while also disproving the identification of what would have been the most distant galaxy ever found.