More than 1,100 (and counting) area students and their families will visit Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to participate in the 12th annual Black Family Technology Awareness Day event, to be held February 6. The event, designed to spur young people’s interest in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, (STEM) and the arts, will be hosted by Rensselaer’s Office of Institute Diversity and the Office of Academic Outreach Programs. Rensselaer’s Black Family Technology Awareness Day is part of a nationally celebrated week of the same name.

Engineering professor Timothy Wei and students at Rensselaer, are employing science and technology to help the U.S. skeleton team trim track times and gain an edge over other sliders.

Sanmay Das, assistant professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has won a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has so far received more than $10 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

More than 13,200 high school students have filed applications to attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, according to numbers released today by Rensselaer Admissions. Applications are still being counted, but the current record total represents a growth of more than 8.8 percent since last year at this time.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announced today its Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems (DSES) will be renamed the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE).

Despite the power of computers to crunch numbers with unfathomable speed and perform quadrillions of calculations per second, the machines are still quite primitive in their ability to truly understand human language.

Innovator and industry veteran Robert F. Karlicek Jr. has joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as director of the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (ERC). His appointment was effective January 4, 2010.

Peter Bohlin, a 1958 graduate of the School of Architecture at Rensselaer, has been selected as the 2010 Gold Medalist by the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Rensselaer has announced the launch of a new undergraduate degree program in cognitive science.

Rensselaer has joined together with regional companies and institutions of higher education to develop a support network for new professionals, often hired as professors and researchers at area institutions, and their families.

After 55 years at the Institute, Associate Dean of the School of Science and Professor of Chemistry Samuel Wait ’53 will retire on Dec 31, 2009.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have secured a $7 million federal grant to develop a new comprehensive system for monitoring and assessing the condition of aging levees and dams.

Robert Linhardt, the Ann and John H. Broadbent Jr. ’59 Senior Constellation Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been selected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

A floor-mounted cane that may help the elderly avoid falls, an inexpensive portable device that can separate gold and silt without the use of chemicals, an electronic prescription pad, and a technique to manufacture environmentally safe plush animals on a large scale are among the winning ideas in the fall 2009 Change the World Challenge contest at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Professor and bone expert Deepak Vashishth has been named head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The appointment is effective November 1.