News

When a pandemic and a natural disaster hit a community simultaneously, disease exposure and social distancing can limit the availability of critical personnel, leaving a community positioned for a lengthy recovery. With both types of events expected to occur with increasing frequency, a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been running simulations to better understand how communities can weather concurrent crises.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will receive a Grants for Arts Projects award this year to support the commissioning of new time-based art works at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). Grants for Arts Projects is the principal grants program of the National Endowment for the Arts, awarding a total of nearly $25 million to support 1,073 projects in the arts across America in this first round of fiscal year 2021. This award marks the fifth consecutive year that EMPAC has received funding from the Arts Endowment.

Jude Abu Zaineh, an electronic arts doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was offered a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship for her research project, “Home Is Where the Maqlouba Is: Understanding Palestinian diaspora through art, food, and technology.”

In research recently published in Nature Physics, a team led by Sufei Shi, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, demonstrated surprising and promising properties in heterobilayer transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD), created by stacking monolayer tungsten diselenide (WSe2) and tungsten disulfide (WS2) on top of one another, with precise control. TMD materials have been eyed for their atomically thin semiconductor properties.

Mars experts and researchers from the Rensselaer Astrobiology and Research Education (RARE) Center will host a virtual watch party of the NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landing.

Pingkun Yan, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is among 63 inventors named by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) to the 2021 class of NAI Senior Members.

An antioxidant found in green tea may increase levels of p53, a natural anti-cancer protein, known as the “guardian of the genome” for its ability to repair DNA damage or destroy cancerous cells.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host its 21st Black Families Technology Awareness Day on Saturday, February 20. For the first time, the event will be held entirely virtually and will be open to K-12 students around the globe.

TROY, N.Y. — Jonathan Dordick, the Howard P. Isermann ’42 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), for his “contributions to methods for rapidly screening drug efficacy and toxicity, and biocatalytic technologies for improving human health.”

More than a dozen faculty members in the School of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have received 2020 School of Engineering Faculty Awards. The awards recognize innovative pedagogy, high impact research, and teamwork by Rensselaer Engineering faculty who have continued to push the frontiers despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.