A team of engineering students led by assistant professor Lupita Montoya collaborated with students from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP) on a project entitled "Casa Ecologica Andina" (Ecological House for the Andes). Their project was selected as one of 30 finalists from a field of more than 800 entries in the Mondialogo Engineering Award.

Wai Kin “Victor” Chan, assistant professor of decision sciences and engineering systems, is among the 83 rising stars invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 13th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium.

A unique research project led by Rensselaer and conducted in New York’s Capital Region was recognized in June for its innovation by the Intelligent Transportation Society of America.

When it comes to identifying, planning for, and achieving career goals, undergraduate students are getting a head start from the Career Development Center at Rensselaer.

The new supercomputer at Rensselaer has been ranked seventh in the world, and it is the most powerful of any system based at a university, according to the 29th edition of the closely watched Top500 list.

Thomas Zimmie, professor and acting head for the department of civil and environmental engineering, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the David M. Darrin Counseling Award. The Darrin Award will be presented to Zimmie during Rensselaer’s 201st Commencement on May 19.

Rensselaer’s Lally School is one of nine new schools to be named to BusinessWeek magazine’s list of top 50 undergraduate business programs.

A delegation from Rensselaer will travel to Europe March 15-22 to meet with leading representatives from government, industry, science, and higher education.

Rensselaer’s Lally School and Albany Law School today announced plans to offer two innovative master’s degree programs in the fields of technology transfer and commercialization.

In a lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, President Shirley Ann Jackson called for a renewed focus on science in key public policy deliberations.

Rensselaer’s annual series of welcoming events called Navigating Rensselaer and Beyond has been awarded the 2006 NASPA Excellence Gold Award.

Brian Schulkin, winner of the first-ever $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize, has invented an ultralight, handheld terahertz spectrometer.

Four entries were recognized today as the winning ideas of Rensselaer’s “Change the World Challenge” competition.

As part of their ongoing effort to improve traffic management in New York state and across the country, a team of Rensselaer researchers will be testing an array of wireless, solar-powered readers to monitor traffic flow. In the coming months, the units will be deployed to collect traffic data during the morning commute on busy Capital Region roads. The portable units, which are based on the same technology as E-ZPass tag readers, could eventually be used to provide valuable data for a variety of applications, from decreasing congestion in work zones to assisting emergency evacuations.

On Sept. 8, Rensselaer announced an in-kind contribution commercially valued at almost $514 million from the Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE). PACE is a joint philanthropic initiative of General Motors, EDS, Sun Microsystems, and UGS Corp. to support key academic institutions worldwide with computer-based design tools to prepare students to compete in the future.

As part of a major international project to design more earthquake-resistant woodframe buildings, an engineer from Rensselaer will be testing a damping system designed to act as a seismic shock absorber. The dampers, which have never been tested before in wood construction, will be installed inside the walls of a full-scale, 1,800-square-foot townhouse — the world’s largest wooden structure to undergo seismic testing on a shake table.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has released video footage of a small-scale centrifuge model of the 17th Street Canal. Made by researchers at Rensselaer, the video illustrates the preliminary findings from the March 10, 2006 IPET status report.

In testimony Nov. 17 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Tom Zimmie, professor and acting chair of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer, offered his perspective on the degree to which the preliminary findings on the failure of the Gulf Coast levees are being incorporated into the restoration under way in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and on lessons learned for levee systems around the country.

Researchers investigating levee failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have released their preliminary findings. In a report presented to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Nov. 2, the team, which included an engineer from Rensselaer, suggested that many of the New Orleans levee and floodwall breaches occurred at weak-link junctions where different levee or wall sections came together.

Rensselaer researchers are working with colleagues across the nation — and even the globe — on the causes and effects of earthquakes.

Tom Zimmie, professor and acting chair of civil and environmental engineering, is headed to New Orleans as part of an expert team investigating levee failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The researchers, who are funded by a special exploratory grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), plan to take lessons from the disaster and apply them to the design of levee systems across the country.

Tarek Abdoun, assistant professor and manager of Rensselaer’s Geotechnical Centrifuge Research Center, is leading a team of scientists to develop a wireless sensor designed to warn against geotechnical hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and floods.