News

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Ge Wang, Ph.D. — Clark & Crossan Endowed Chair Professor, director of the Biomedical Imaging Center within the Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, and this year’s winner of the Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award — and Albany Medical College’s Joshua Goldwag ’20, a medical student and previously Ge Wang’s research student at Rensselaer, have jointly published an article in Nature Machine Intelligence on the DishBrain experiment and its applications. Last October, Cortical Labs revealed that they “taught” human and mouse cells in a dish to work together to play the Pong game by providing feedback to the cells. They called it DishBrain. It was the first time that scientists stimulated biological cells in a structured/feedback-driven way.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Christopher Cioffi, Ph.D., Thomas and Constance D’Ambra Professor in Organic Chemistry, has received a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, along with Konstantin Petrukhin of Columbia University and Gennadiy Moiseyev of Wake Forest University. The grant will enable the team to design a drug to treat Stargardt disease, a rare retinal disorder.

Rensselaer teams take first and third places in the MEGA-ACE Open Innovation Challenge

Thanks to the Troy Redevelopment Foundation, a variety of projects that benefit the community are underway or completed. Established in 1995, the Troy Redevelopment Foundation (TRF) is a voluntary consortium of not-for-profit institutions in the City of Troy, including Emma Willard, St. Peter’s Health Partners (SPHP), Russell Sage College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) team of Calvin Ang ’24,  Haoran Bao ’25, and Caleb Smith ’25 received a Finalist designation for their paper the Mathematical and Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling! This means that their paper was judged among the top 99 out of 2,557 teams competing on their problem. 

The iconic Brooklyn Bridge was opened to the public 140 years ago, on May 24, 1883. Since, millions of vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists have crossed the Brooklyn Bridge as they travel into Lower Manhattan.

Chunyu Wang, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has added to his body of research on Alzheimer’s disease with significant findings in Angewandte Chemie.

Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Albany Medical College were awarded a $3.3 million grant over five years by the National Cancer Institute to use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve targeted drug therapy in HER2-positive breast cancer treatment. HER2-positive breast cancer tends to grow and spread quickly, but targeted treatments improve outcomes.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Martin A. Schmidt ’81 presided over the 217th Commencement Ceremony, his first as president. During the ceremony, which was held at the East Campus Athletic Village, Rensselaer awarded a total of 1,988 degrees — 152 doctoral degrees, 390 master’s degrees, and 1,446 bachelor’s degrees — to 1,957 students, some of whom earned multiple degrees. Approximately 1,500 students attended the ceremony.

Thirty-five students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will soon graduate from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs and will be commissioned into our country’s armed forces.