News

Two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute faculty members will participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 27th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium. Jennifer Pazour, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, is a member of the event’s planning committee, co-organizing a session on resilience during pandemics in relation to data and digital infrastructure, and decision-making. Ravishankar Sundararaman, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, will be a participant of the symposium.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants throughout New York City and elsewhere use bespoke outdoor structures to offer safer dining experiences for their customers. However, many of these installations do not adequately protect servers, physically separate diners, provide thermal comfort, or easily disassemble if street maintenance is needed. 

More than two decades ago, Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson became the first African American woman to lead a top-ranked research university when she was named the 18th President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Today, President Jackson announced to the Rensselaer community that she intends to step down from her historic post in 2022.

A team including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researcher Gaetano Montelione has identified the design principles for creating large “ideal” proteins from scratch, paving the way for the design of proteins with new biochemical functions. The results were published today in Nature Communications.

Composer, improviser, and sound installation artist Matthew Goodheart, an assistant professor of music composition in the Department of Arts in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will release his latest album on Friday, June 25.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are revolutionizing the ways in which we live, work, and spend our free time, from the smart devices in our homes to the tasks our phones can carry out. This transformation is being made possible by a surge in data and computing power that can help machine learning algorithms not only perform device-specific tasks, but also help them gain intelligence or knowledge over time.

The Jefferson Project at Lake George — a groundbreaking collaboration between IBM Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and The FUND for Lake George — is expanding its statewide leadership role in the study of harmful algal blooms and other water-quality threats this summer with a new $1 million research project on Chautauqua Lake in Chautauqua County, made possible through funding from Chautauqua Institution and a county coalition. 

TROY, N.Y. — Optoelectronic materials that are capable of converting the energy of light into electricity, and electricity into light, have promising applications as light-emitting, energy-harvesting, and sensing technologies. However, devices made of these materials are often plagued by inefficiency, losing significant useful energy as heat. To break the current limits of efficiency, new principles of light-electricity conversion are needed.

Ge Wang, the Clark and Crossan Endowed Chair professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has received the 2021 EMBS Academic Career Achievement Award.

Carla Leitao, a lecturer in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been invited to present work at “CityX Venice,” the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion, curated by Tom Kovac from RMIT University in Australia and Alessandro Melis of the University of Portsmouth in England.