It is a scary fact that one in two women and one in three men in the United States will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime. One of the hallmarks of many cancers is the occurrence of errors during the cell division process called mitosis. Therefore, critical to enhancing treatments or perhaps even finding a cure for cancer and other diseases, is developing a better understanding of how mitosis works in both healthy and diseased cells.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Christopher Cioffi, Ph.D., Thomas and Constance D’Ambra Professor in Organic Chemistry, has received a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, along with Konstantin Petrukhin of Columbia University and Gennadiy Moiseyev of Wake Forest University. The grant will enable the team to design a drug to treat Stargardt disease, a rare retinal disorder.

A team of researchers led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Trevor David Rhone, assistant professor in the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, has identified novel van der Waals (vdW) magnets using cutting-edge tools in artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, the team identified transition metal halide vdW materials with large magnetic moments that are predicted to be chemically stable using semi-supervised learning. These two-dimensional (2D) vdW magnets have potential applications in data storage, spintronics, and even quantum computing.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doctoral student Riley Barton has been selected as one of 87 outstanding graduate students in the United States by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR).

Recently, more than 30 undergraduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute gathered at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies to share their findings with the community.

“One side can start the polarization and keep it going forever, but it takes two sides to stop it. That’s why it easily arises, but it’s so difficult to end,” Boleslaw Szymanski said. Szymanski is the Claire & Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and director of the Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Moussa N’Gom, assistant professor of physics, applied physics, and astronomy, has devised a method to make communications between satellites and the ground more effective no matter the weather. In research recently published, N’Gom and his team used ultrafast, femtosecond lasers to cut through the clouds and rain that commonly cause losses in free-space optical communication (FSO).

Mohammed Zaki, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor and head of the Department of Computer Science, has been named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow. AAAS fellows are elected annually to recognize their extraordinary achievements in research, teaching, and technology, as well as in communicating science to the public. Election as an AAAS fellow is considered a lifetime honor. Past Fellows have included luminaries like Thomas Edison, W.E.B Dubois, Grace Hopper, Ellen Ochoa, Herbert Simon, and Steven Chu. 

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Deborah McGuinness has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) “for significant contributions to the semantic web, knowledge representation and reasoning environments, and deployed artificial intelligence applications.” AAAI is a nonprofit scientific society that promotes research in artificial intelligence and its responsible use. The AAAI fellows program recognizes people who have “made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.”

Are there other Earth-like planets? Is there extraterrestrial life? In the quest to find planets that orbit stars other than the sun, “Earth 2.0” is the Holy Grail. Earth 2.0 is a planet similar enough to Earth to enable the existence of life as we know it. It would be the right temperature for liquid water, and it would orbit a star with a steady supply of light. Ideally, it would be close enough that we could imagine going there or at least sending a probe to explore it.