News

Strategic alliances are used by firms to access capabilities developed by other firms. In the academic literature, the traditional assumption has been that firms form alliances when they lack their own resources to pursue market or technological opportunities. However, new research by Shyam Kumar, an associate professor in the Lally School of Management and director of the MBA program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, offers a different perspective.

The Princeton Review recently ranked Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as one of the top schools at which to pursue a graduate degree in game design.

TROY, N.Y. — Tens of thousands of reservoir and dam systems are being operated in communities across the United States, ensuring access to reliable sources of water. That access, however, isn’t a guarantee. Altered rainfall patterns driven by global warming, increased urbanization, and growing populations are setting up parallel increases in demand for water and energy.

In research recently published in Advanced Electronic Materials, a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute demonstrated a new technique for visualizing the behavior of needle-like nanotube structures within a ferroelectric material, known as ferroelectric domains.

TROY, N.Y. — Without ever leaving the room where they are studying, civil engineering students can now transport themselves into the field where they must take measurements, make observations, and understand the impact of the environment on their designs, and their designs on the environment.

TROY, N.Y. — Finding safe solutions for the millions of adults in the United States who are battling obesity could vastly improve human health. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity affected 39.8% of adults in the U.S. in 2015-2016.

If members of the Rensselaer community are considering getting a new car, an electric vehicle might be a good option. Community members interested in learning more can participate in a free webinaron March 12.

Ravishankar Sundararaman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, recently received the AIME Robert Lansing Hardy Award, in recognition of his career success and promise. Specifically, the award recognized "seminal contributions to transmute and harness quantum electronic structure calculations for computational materials design in diverse fields of materials research including electrochemistry and plasmonics."

Pawel Keblinski, the head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been elected a fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS). He receives this honor for his influential contributions to “the development of computational methods leading to fundamental understanding of thermal transport in materials on nanometer length scales.”

As a candidate for the qubits — the basic units of quantum information — in quantum computers, photons have one major advantage over the electrons used in all current devices. Unlike electrons, photons, the smallest possible quantity of light, do not easily interact with their surroundings. So, unlike its electron-based counterpart, a photonic quantum device would not need to be cooled to nearly absolute zero to limit unwanted interactions. But such a device does not exist — yet.