Throughout the nearly 200-year history of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the university has prized flexibility and ingenuity in its delivery of higher education. This mindset has especially proven to be an asset during the COVID-19 pandemic, which required the entire campus to shift to remote instruction in the spring and summer of 2020, followed by a combination of in-person, online, and hybrid courses in subsequent semesters.

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named as the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Hans Christian Oersted Medal, presented by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).

Triage care on the battlefield requires split-second decision-making and proficiency in providing first aid. Correctly applying a tourniquet or inserting an intubation tube before a patient is evacuated to a hospital could save lives. To improve training for the field medics responsible for this level of care, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will team up with researchers from the United States Army Research Laboratory in Orlando, Florida, to better understand skill acquisition and to standardize the prolonged field care (PFC) certification process.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute community contributed more than $70,000 for the Rensselaer 2020 United Way campaign.

A new grant from the National Institute On Aging at the National Institutes of Health will support ongoing research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to address Alzheimer’s disease caused by gene mutations. According to Chunyu Wang, the principal investigator and an assistant professor of biological sciences at Rensselaer, the project seeks to understand and counter the mechanism that produces Amyloid-Beta 42 peptide in brain cells.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has inducted eight individuals into the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame. Conceived in 1995, the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame was created to honor the past while celebrating all generations of Rensselaer pioneers. “These distinguished Rensselaer graduates truly embody the growing legacy of innovation and change that Rensselaer alumni and alumnae have brought to the world for almost two centuries,” said Chuck Rancourt ’70, chair of the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame Selection Committee.

Warnings about misinformation are now regularly posted on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, but not all of these cautions are created equal. New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that artificial intelligence can help form accurate news assessments — but only when a news story is first emerging. 

Hudson Valley Community College has long been a pipeline for students to attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and now those interested in starting their engineering degree at the SUNY community college and transferring to the prestigious four-year university can follow a newly-updated transfer agreement between the neighboring Troy institutions.

Daniel Gall, a professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has received the 2021 Bill Sproul Award and Honorary International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films (ICMCTF) Lectureship Award from the American Vacuum Society (AVS).

The inaugural Vicarious Visions Pathfinder Award has been awarded to Jingyu Zhuang, a dual-major senior studying game development and computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for — among other accomplishments — a game he created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.