High school students participating in the STEAMM Inventor’s Studio at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developed a green roof to offset the effects of climate change, a cooling system for athletes, and lightweight leg supports that eliminate the need for a cane — all in just two weeks.

Dominick Prudente, a graduate student in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has received a scholarship award from The Deep Foundations Institute Educational Trust. The DFI Educational Trust Awards are given to students studying in the fields of geotechnical and foundation engineering, and are aimed at supporting and encouraging students to pursue a career in the deep foundations industry.

Thomas Zimmie, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will receive the 2019 William H. Wisely American Civil Engineer Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).   He is being recognized for “influencing generations of students as RPI’s ASCE Student Chapter Adviser for 39 years, and his ability to mesh his consulting experience with academic research, making his teaching especially relevant to his students.”   

Roussel Rahman, a doctoral student in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, received the Allen Newell Best Student-Led Paper Award at this year’s International Conference on Cognitive Modeling in Montreal.  Rahman earned this recognition for his paper, “Spotlight on dynamics of individual learning.” In it, he examines the question of how a person learns a complex task. 

A group of researchers, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute scientists Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer and Jeremy Farrell, is developing a computer model that uses data collected during boat inspections to predict whether an uninspected boat is likely to be harboring invasive species.

Suvranu De, the head of the department of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer, has been named the recipient of the 2019 U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics J. Tinsley Oden Medal. He receives this award for "pioneering contributions to meshfree methods, multiscale modeling and real time computing."    De was presented with the award at a ceremony during the 15th U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics in Austin, Texas.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $4 million to the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub, an organization dedicated to building partnerships to address societal challenges with data-driven solutions. The Hub is hosted by Columbia University’s Data Science Institute and is coordinated by several researchers, including James Hendler, director of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA).

Dorit Nevo, Ph.D., has been appointed the acting associate dean for academic affairs for the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer. Nevo has been a faculty member at Rensselaer since she joined the Lally School as an associate professor of management information systems in 2012. She received a Ph.D. in management information systems from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in economics from the Technion in Israel.

Juergen Hahn, head of the department of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer, has recently been named 2019-2021 Computing & Systems Technology Division Director for AIChE, a professional organization for chemical engineers.

Leo Wan, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer, collaborated on cardiac cell research recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.    The study, led by a developmental biologist at Albany Medical Center, investigated molecular mechanisms of cardiac cell orientation and the significance of that process in early heart development.