News

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Career and Professional Development introduced its new Peer Career Advisor (PCA) program during the Fall 2023 semester, culminating in a successful inaugural year in Spring 2024. This student-support initiative has provided a platform for current RPI students to foster community and offer career guidance to peers across all majors and academic levels, encompassing both undergraduate and graduate students.

Brianna Casey ’26 is one of 40 undergraduate students nationwide to be selected for NASA’s Europa ICONS (Inspiring Clipper: Opportunities for Next-Generation Scientists) internship program. The program supports the Europa Clipper mission, with the goal of determining whether Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has “conditions suitable to support life.” Scientists predict that an ocean lies beneath Europa’s icy shell, so massive that it is bigger than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

The Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has established a new master’s degree program that will prepare students for careers of biomedical data science, a fast growing engineering specialty.Those with expertise in biomedical data science are already in high demand, and that demand will  continue to rise in the future, said Juergen Hahn, Ph.D., head of the Biomedical Engineering Department.

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

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.

A light and sound installation led by Yael Erel, assistant professor of architecture, has brought home top honors from the [d]arc awards - Art (low budget category). The [d]arc awards utilize arc and darc magazines’ reputation as being the most widely read and respected lighting design publications in the world.

Jayashree Balaraman, a sophomore computational biology student, has been named a Goldwater Scholar for 2024. Balaraman hails from East Brunswick, New Jersey.Named for the late U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, the Goldwater is considered among the most prestigious awards available to sophomores and juniors from U.S. colleges and universities who show exceptional promise in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering and who intend to intend to pursue research careers in these fields.  

The Office of Graduate Education, in cooperation with the schools of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Architecture, have presented the 2024-25 Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Architecture Fellowship to the following students: