Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Deborah McGuinness, Ph.D., has been elected a fellow of the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, “for contributions to knowledge technologies including ontologies and knowledge graphs.” McGuinness is one of 68 fellows selected by her peers to receive the honor for transformative contributions to computing science and technology.

No birthday party is complete without ice cream.That’s why Stewart’s Shops is helping Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute kick off its bicentennial year with a new name for the store’s “Fireworks” ice cream flavor. The freshly dubbed “Quantum Freeze” will hit stores February 5, 2024. 

For 25 hours beginning at 10 a.m. on November 4, students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and other area universities will participate in a marathon of coding as they compete in HackRPI X. It will be held in-person at RPI’s Darrin Communications Center. Free registration is available online at https://hackrpi.com/.

For the first time ever, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host the National Organic Chemistry Symposium (NOS) June 22-26, 2025 at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. NOS is the premier event sponsored by the American Chemical Society’s Division of Organic Chemistry.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doctoral student Lucas Bowman Sutton has been selected as one of 60 recipients of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) award. The SCGSR prepares graduate students for science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) careers that are critical to the DOE Office of Science mission. Thanks to the award, Sutton will spend 12 months at Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducting research on the circadian clock.

With daylight savings time ending soon, we anticipate a change in the timing of daylight hours with the sunrise occurring earlier in the morning. Already, too many of us get far too little sleep, and disruptions to our circadian cycles like those caused by daylight savings time transitions may make us feel more than tired and out of whack. In the end, there is significant medical data that shows that sudden day/night-time changes may even make us sick.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Catherine Royer, Constellation Chair Professor of Bioinformatics and Biocomputation at the Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) and professor of biological sciences, has received a grant of over $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to investigate enzymes from organisms living in deep sea environments.

It is a scary fact that one in two women and one in three men in the United States will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime. One of the hallmarks of many cancers is the occurrence of errors during the cell division process called mitosis. Therefore, critical to enhancing treatments or perhaps even finding a cure for cancer and other diseases, is developing a better understanding of how mitosis works in both healthy and diseased cells.