News

Troy, N.Y. — Linking the United States’ need to meet its energy demands to the emerging gap in the nation’s science and engineering workforce, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson today urged members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) to join in bringing national focus to this “quiet crisis,” which she asserts requires fostering a national plan and a national will to succeed.

Troy, N.Y. — The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been awarded a contract from the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), a division of the National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board (TRB), to redefine national roadway lighting guidelines. The three-year, $800,000 project is designed to improve the operational efficiency of roadway lighting and reduce automobile crashes.

Troy, N.Y. — A versatile technology that can spot cracks in space shuttle foam, while also offering the potential to see biological agents through a sealed envelope and detect tumors without harmful radiation, will be the focus of a full-day symposium at the 230th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. The session will be co-chaired by T-ray experts Xi-Cheng Zhang, a physicist and engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Charles Schmuttenmaer, a chemist at Yale University.

Troy, N.Y. — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has received $500,000 from New York state to partner with Polyset Company Inc. in the commercialization of patented polymer materials for use in nanotechnology imprinting. The materials would be used for new electronic packaging increasingly needed by the semiconductor industry for “very small” technologies.

Troy, N.Y. — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announced the appointment of Douglas Cumming, Ph.D., as director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at the Lally School of Management and Technology. A distinguished researcher in the area of venture capital, private equity, and IPOs, Cumming’s work focuses on the law and finance of entrepreneurship in the United States, Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Troy, N.Y. — Approximately 1,250 members of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s incoming Class of 2009 are arriving on campus this week. Nearly two-thirds of the students come from the top 10 percent of their high school classes, more than 300 members of the freshman class are Rensselaer Medalists, and the class’s average SAT score of 1320 includes 70 students with a perfect 800 score in either verbal or math.

TROY, N.Y. — Peter Kramer, assistant professor of mathematical sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Kramer will use the projected five-year, $412,138 grant to work on developing a new quantitative model to represent the interaction of water molecules and protein molecules with the aim of accelerating computational simulations, potentially leading to future medical applications.

TROY, N.Y. — Applying math and computers to the drug discovery process, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a method to predict protein separation behavior directly from protein structure. This new multi-scale protein modeling approach may reduce the time it takes to bring pharmaceuticals to market and may have significant implications for an array of biotechnology applications, including bioprocessing, drug discovery, and proteomics, the study of protein structure and function. 

Undergraduate Engineering Again Ranked Among the Top 20 Programs in the Country TROY, N.Y. — U.S. News & World Report has ranked Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 43rd among the nation’s top universities, up from 46th last year. The Institute also ranks 27th in the “Best Values” among national universities.

Troy, N.Y. — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute today announced that Jack McDonnell, Class of ’61, of Reston, Virginia, has made an unrestricted gift of $1 million to support Renaissance at Rensselaer: The Campaign for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.