News

On Saturday, October 5, more than 500 members of the Rensselaer community celebrated  individuals and organizations supporting student scholarship and education at the 2019 Coast to Coast East: Scholarship Dinner and Signature Performance by Josh Groban. The event took place during a weekend of festivities that began on October 3 celebrating the Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D., 18th President of Rensselaer, who achieved 20 years of leadership this month.

In research recently published in Nano Letters, a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute demonstrated a new way to manipulate tungsten diselenide (WSe2) — a promising two-dimensional material — to further improve its computing and information storage potential.

Heart disease and lung cancer are serious and potentially deadly health conditions that share many of the same risk factors and are often found in the same people. If doctors could screen for both conditions at the same time, using the same imaging technology, diagnosis could happen sooner and lives could be saved. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working on a project, supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to combine screening for both cardiovascular disease and lung cancer into one low-dose CT scan.

Xavier Intes, professor of biomedical engineering and co-director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been elected a fellow of The Optical Society (OSA), an international society for optics and photonics.

Advanced robotics manufacturing has the potential to vastly improve, speed up, and create safer manufacturing processes to design and create the things we interact with each day, while saving money. It combines cutting-edge robotics, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is leading a number of projects aimed at improving next-generation manufacturing. 

Raquel Velho, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will deliver a talk titled “Monuments of Care: A Discussion About Infrastructures and Maintenance,” on October 10 at 6:30 at the Opalka Gallery at Russell Sage College. The gallery’s latest installation, “In-Faux-Structure,” addresses the power dynamics and disparities inherent in global and local infrastructures.

TROY, N.Y. — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers antibiotic resistance one of the most urgent public health threats, one that affects communities worldwide. The ramifications of bacteria’s ability to become resistant to antibiotics can be seen in hospitals, public places, our food supply, and our water.

TROY, N.Y. — At the cellular level, cancer can be viewed as a mechanical engineering challenge. The disease alters the structure and function of cells and tissues, which are meant to perform very specific tasks. Through better understanding of the mechanical processes at work in tumors, Kristen Mills, an assistant professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, hopes to support the development of more effective treatments.

TROY, N.Y. — In a fraction of a second, a colorful digital block shaped like the letter “L” falls from the top of the computer screen. In even less time, fingers float across a controller, striking the arrow keys in rapid succession to rotate the figure so it falls in line with a computerized stack of shapes. Form after form falls, faster and faster. The decades-old puzzle game Tetris and the people who play it competitively have become a testbed for cognitive scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who want to know how humans learn and gain expertise.

“Tonight, we are honoring a pioneer, an entrepreneur, and a sensitive visionary,” said Arthur F. Golden ’66, the chair of the board of trustees of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, on Thursday night as he welcomed the audience to a special tribute event celebrating 20 years of transformative leadership by President Shirley Ann Jackson.