Colorectal surgery is a hands-on activity, but in recent years the effectiveness of traditional assessment methods in evaluating surgeons’ technical skills has been called into question. A team of collaborators with ties to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is responding by pioneering the use of virtual reality technologies to train and objectively evaluate colorectal surgeons without putting any patients at risk.

On the second floor of the J. Erik Jonsson Engineering Center in the heart of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus, a room has been created that – not unlike Hogwarts’ Room of Requirement – has the potential to be almost anything. Students who enter could find themselves standing on the wing of an airplane, managing a failing nuclear reactor, or designing the crystalline structure of a molecule.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Board of Trustees member Jeffrey L. Kodosky, a member of the Rensselaer Class of 1970, has been named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF). The announcement was made Jan. 8 at the CES 2019 annual conference in Las Vegas.

Professor John T. Wen has been named the Russell Sage Professor and head of the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He will begin his new roles on Jan. 1, 2019.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has elected Peter Fox, data scientist and professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as a Fellow of the society, in recognition of his “distinguished, innovative, and sustained fundamental contributions in Earth and space science informatics and data science research, education, and service.”

Four researchers affiliated with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have been named in the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers list, which recognizes influential scientific researchers and their institutions across the globe.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ranks sixth nationally in its overall engineering program, according to rankings published by College Factual, a source of data analytics and insights on college outcomes.

James Hendler, the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web, and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been selected by the National Academy of Public Administration for inclusion in its 2018 Class of Academy Fellows.

The use of pressure to alter semiconductor properties is showing increasing promise in applications such as high-performance infrared sensors and energy conversion devices.

A paper published in Nature Communications by Sufei Shi, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, increases our understanding of how light interacts with atomically thin semiconductors and creates unique excitonic complex particles, multiple electrons, and holes strongly bound together. These particles possess a new quantum degree of freedom, called “valley spin.” The “valley spin” is similar to the spin of electrons, which has been extensively used in information storage such as hard drives and is also a promising candidate for quantum computing.