News

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) today announced two special honorands for its Bicentennial Commencement celebrations. Astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman ’97 will return to RPI as the Bicentennial Commencement Speaker, and Emily Warren Roebling, who led the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge to completion, will receive a posthumous honorary degree, the first to be awarded in the history of RPI.Reid Wiseman ’97

Two students in the Bachelor of Architecture program have been selected for the 2024 Metropolis Future100.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Boleslaw Szymanski, Ph.D., and Chunyu Wang, M.D. Ph.D., have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement Science (AAAS). Steven Cramer, Ph.D., who was elected AAAS Fellow in 2017, was elected Council Member of the Section on Engineering.

In 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Bostock vs. Clayton County that transgender people are legally protected from employment discrimination. This came at a time of increased visibility, but also of legal and social challenges to the rights of transgender individuals. Meanwhile, there has been very little study of labor market discrimination against them. Rensselaer researcher Billur Aksoy, Ph.D., has recently conducted an innovative survey of Americans’ attitudes toward transgender people in the workplace.

Six RPI students have been awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host its annual GameFest on Saturday, April 27, from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) on RPI’s campus.

When we think of evolution, we think of a process that happens over hundreds or thousands of years. In research recently published, a team led by Rick Relyea, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences and David M. Darrin ’40 Senior Endowed Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, found a species of frog that has evolved over the course of merely 25 years. The adaptation was spurred on by something many assume is innocuous: salt.

For the 2023-2024 academic year, Rensselaer’s Science and Technology Studies Department experienced significant growth with the addition of three new faculty members. Tankut Atuk, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research is situated at the intersections of public/global health, medical sociology/anthropology, social epidemiology, and sexual health. Adam Biggs, Ph.D., focuses on race, civil rights, and the history of medicine. Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Ph.D. is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine in the U.S.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Esther Wertz, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, has been appointed Rensselaer’s faculty fellow of UPWARDS for the Future. UPWARDS stands for the U.S.-Japan University Partnership for Workforce Advancement and Research & Development in Semiconductors. It was established in May 2023 by Micron and Tokyo Electron Limited to “to bring together 11 universities from across the U.S. and Japan to develop leading semiconductor curricula, creating opportunities for cross-collaboration.”

Jonathan Dordick, Ph.D., Vice President for Strategic Alliances and Translation and Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), has recently received two prestigious honors.