If members of the Rensselaer community are considering getting a new car, an electric vehicle (EV) might be a good option. They can get assistance from Drive Green with National Grid, which recently updated their program to make it easier to connect with a local dealership that just might have the perfect EV.

As part of the inaugural class participating in The Arch at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, senior Anthony Mannino ’20, a physics major with a minor in economics, secured a fall semester away research opportunity at Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE have announced that Francine Berman, the Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named the 2020 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award, which “recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of network-based information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.”

Studying the effectiveness of nuclear waste storage over time is an essential, but difficult, task. If it were to be done in real time, the research would take hundreds of thousands of years.  In an article published this week in Nature Materials, a multidisciplinary team that includes Jie Lian, a professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, described what researchers learned when they simulated nuclear waste storage conditions over long stretches of time. Using their findings, the researchers also suggested strategies for improving the U.S. storage plan.

Georges Belfort, an Institute Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Marlene Belfort, an adjunct professor of biology and chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer, recently received honorary doctorates from the University of Cape Town in South Africa — the latest in a long list of honors and accomplishments for the couple.

X. George Xu, the Edward E. Hood Endowed Chair Professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering, has been selected by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) to receive the Edith H. Quimby Award for Lifetime Achievement in Medical Physics.

Ge Wang, an endowed chair professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, recently published a first book on the foundation of deep neural networks and specific applications in tomographic imaging, in collaboration with his three co-authors.

As the year comes to a close, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute congratulates all of the members of the faculty and staff who retired this year and thanks them for all they did for the Rensselaer community!

The online master’s degree in mechanical engineering offered by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was recently ranked among the country’s best by Intelligent.com, an independent website specializing in higher education information.

In Nano Letters, researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently demonstrated how they could harness promising characteristics of one such material — vanadium dioxide (VO2) — in order to lay the groundwork for practical application in future technologies.