News

This past summer, a team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students, with the guidance of a faculty mentor, pitched a winning design for a wearable, medical-grade device that monitors for atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation, or A-fib, is a potentially life-threatening heart condition that will affect an estimated 12 million people in the U.S. by 2030, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

What if microgravity holds the key to preventing the overheating of advanced electronics? That’s one idea behind an International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory-sponsored investigation that recently launched to station on Northrop Grumman’s 19th Commercial Resupply Services mission (NG-19). This week, the ISS crew is working on the experiment, which aims to improve the efficiency of heat transfer devices used in various technologies, from laptops to NASA’s Hubble Telescope.

Jie Lian, Ph.D., has been named the William Weightman Walker Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). An endowed chaired professorship is among the highest honors bestowed on a Rensselaer faculty member.  

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will announce the appointment of Kristie Bowers, Ph.D., as its new associate vice president and director of athletics at a press conference at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 at the East Campus Athletic Village’s main arena. Bowers comes from Boston University, where she has served as senior associate athletic director and senior woman administrator since 2019. She is succeeding Dr. Lee McElroy, who retired at the beginning of the summer after eight years with RPI. Bowers will be the first woman appointed to the role.

— The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced $26 million in funding geographically and institutionally diverse awardees, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), who will engage with additional partners and communities to further the conversation around consolidated interim storage of spent nuclear fuel.

Two RPI faculty emeriti will be prominently featured during the first half-day of a major international conference later this month. The 20th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-20), to be held Aug. 20-25 in Washington, D.C., is the premier gathering for experts in nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics and related topical areas. This meeting is held every two years.

In August, the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will kick off the first conference to explore the opportunities and challenges of 3D printing for the lighting industry. The conference will set the stage for discussions about the future of 3D printing for lighting components and systems through more than 30 research and state-of-the-technology presentations, as well as discussion and networking events.

Graduate students in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute enjoyed a unique opportunity to partner with the New York Mets for their capstone project.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Jian Shi, Ph.D., associate professor of materials science and engineering, as well as physics, applied physics, and astronomy, has won the prestigious 2023 IEEE Ferroelectrics Young Investigator Award. The award recognizes “the important contributions of young scientists/engineers in reference to their contributions to fundamental research, integration, application, or education.” Recognizing only one or two exceptional scientists in the relevant field each year, this highly competitive award serves as a prestigious accolade for independent scholars under or at the age of 40.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Steven Cramer, William Weightman Walker Professor of Polymer Engineering, and Todd Przybycien, professor of chemical and biological engineering, will contribute to a three-year research program led by faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that aims to design the world’s first fully integrated, continuous mRNA manufacturing platform. Both Cramer and Przybycien are members of Rensselaer’s Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies. The platform is part of an $82 million effort funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.