This spring, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the first technological research university in the United States, will award a total of 2,063 degrees — 119 doctoral degrees, 425 master’s degrees, and 1,519 bachelor’s degrees — to 2,033 students, some of whom have earned multiple degrees. These accomplishments will be celebrated during the 216th Commencement Ceremony on Saturday, May 21, beginning at 8:15 a.m. in the East Campus Athletic Village stadium on the Rensselaer campus.

Eli Schiff ’21 is this year’s recipient of the Nuvalence Builder Award, which recognizes one or more graduating seniors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who have demonstrated superior skills through extracurricular projects in hardware and software innovation.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai today announced the creation of the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM), one of the first centers in the nation to bridge engineering and engineering science with medicine. This undertaking will build on a wealth of shared basic research discoveries, explore unique therapeutic innovations in cancer, Alzheimer’s and a myriad of infectious diseases; educate a new generation of biomedical leaders; and develop new technologies and processes that enhance patient outcomes in unprecedented ways.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has named medical chemist Christopher L. Cioffi as its Thomas and Constance D’Ambra Professor of Medicinal Organic Chemistry. As a doctoral student in the laboratory of Mark Wentland at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Cioffi, B.S. ’94 and Ph.D. ’00, witnessed the birth of Samidorphan, a compound that is now part of the FDA-approved schizophrenia treatment Lybalvi.

Astrophysicists for the first time have calculated the original mass and size of a dwarf galaxy that was shredded in a collision with the Milky Way billions of years ago.

Organic molecules found in a meteorite that hurtled to Earth from Mars were synthesized during interactions between water and rocks that occurred on the Red Planet about 4 billion years ago, according to an analysis to be published this week in Science.

Whether a transformer catches fire in a power grid, a species disappears from an ecosystem, or water floods a city street, many systems can absorb a certain amount of disruption. But how badly does a single failure weaken the network?

A predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, demonstrates that when an outside threat – like war or a pandemic – fails to unite the group, the divide may be irreversible through democratic means. 

Having challenged the idea that our environment cannot alter our genetically controlled 24-hour sleep-wake cycle, circadian rhythm researcher Jennifer Hurley has embarked on a new project tracing the mechanism between environmental signals and the circadian clock.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer scientist Chuck Stewart will join a newly created institute aimed at using images of living organisms to understand biological processes like species evolution, genetic inheritance patterns, and even behavior. Stewart, an expert in the ecological applications of artificial intelligence and computer vision, will join the new Imageomics Institute, which is supported by a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer scientist Chuck Stewart will join a newly created institute aimed at using images of living organisms to understand biological processes like species evolution, genetic inheritance patterns, and even behavior. Stewart, an expert in the ecological applications of artificial intelligence and computer vision, will join the new Imageomics Institute, which is supported by a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).