The baseball facility at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will be officially named in honor of longtime coach Karl Steffen at a ribbon cutting ceremony at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 28. The ceremony will take place at Robison Field, which will retain its name as part of the newly christened Karl Steffen Ballpark. Steffen recently retired after a distinguished 34-year career as the head coach of the baseball team at Rensselaer, which he led to unprecedented success, posting a career record of 852-470-3 over 1,325 games.

As part of the upcoming Reunion & Homecoming festivities at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, President Shirley Ann Jackson will lead a panel discussion celebrating the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing and contemplating the future of space exploration.

TROY, N.Y. — Communities throughout the world are being exposed to an ever-changing variety of natural and technological hazards. In 2012, for example, Superstorm Sandy produced unusually severe flash flooding in rural Vermont, exposed the vulnerabilities of barrier islands in New York to high-wind events, and led to renewed questions of society’s ability to prepare for and respond to emerging natural hazards.

José Holguín-Veras, the William H. Hart Professor of civil engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named a runner-up in the Pioneer Institute’s Annual Better Government Competition.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is welcoming 15 new professors to the faculty for the 2019-2020 academic year. Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson greeted returning and incoming faculty members during the annual Faculty Welcome Back reception, held this year at the President’s Residence on September 18.

The Center for Career and Professional Development at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been strategically building partnerships with companies throughout the United States and globally to create a wide array of opportunities for students to pursue as part of The Arch at Rensselaer.

TROY, N.Y. — If you’ve ever dropped your smartphone on a concrete floor, you know that dreaded feeling as you turn it over to see how badly the screen has cracked — but that stress may soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered a way to make glass less brittle and less likely to break. Their findings, led by Yunfeng Shi, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer, were recently published in Nano Lett.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor James Hendler has been named to the newly formed Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Technology Policy Council, intended to coordinate the agenda for the association’s policy activities around the globe.

Award-winning journalist Peter Nowak, author of Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species, will speak at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Monday, Sept. 23. The lecture is part of the 2019-2020 Community Read program at Rensselaer, a common reading experience that brings students, faculty, and staff of all disciplines together each year to discuss issues of global concern.

TROY, N.Y. — If researchers could observe drug delivery and its effect on cancer cells in real time, they would be able to tailor treatment options with unprecedented specificity. An academic-industrial partnership between engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, molecular and cellular biologists at Albany Medical College, and engineers at MARS Bioimaging Ltd aims to make this a reality for the treatment of breast cancer through the combination of highly innovative X-ray and optical imaging technologies.