Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has named medical chemist Christopher L. Cioffi as its Thomas and Constance D’Ambra Professor of Medicinal Organic Chemistry. As a doctoral student in the laboratory of Mark Wentland at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Cioffi, B.S. ’94 and Ph.D. ’00, witnessed the birth of Samidorphan, a compound that is now part of the FDA-approved schizophrenia treatment Lybalvi.

Astrophysicists for the first time have calculated the original mass and size of a dwarf galaxy that was shredded in a collision with the Milky Way billions of years ago.

Organic molecules found in a meteorite that hurtled to Earth from Mars were synthesized during interactions between water and rocks that occurred on the Red Planet about 4 billion years ago, according to an analysis to be published this week in Science.

Whether a transformer catches fire in a power grid, a species disappears from an ecosystem, or water floods a city street, many systems can absorb a certain amount of disruption. But how badly does a single failure weaken the network?

A predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, demonstrates that when an outside threat – like war or a pandemic – fails to unite the group, the divide may be irreversible through democratic means. 

Having challenged the idea that our environment cannot alter our genetically controlled 24-hour sleep-wake cycle, circadian rhythm researcher Jennifer Hurley has embarked on a new project tracing the mechanism between environmental signals and the circadian clock.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer scientist Chuck Stewart will join a newly created institute aimed at using images of living organisms to understand biological processes like species evolution, genetic inheritance patterns, and even behavior. Stewart, an expert in the ecological applications of artificial intelligence and computer vision, will join the new Imageomics Institute, which is supported by a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer scientist Chuck Stewart will join a newly created institute aimed at using images of living organisms to understand biological processes like species evolution, genetic inheritance patterns, and even behavior. Stewart, an expert in the ecological applications of artificial intelligence and computer vision, will join the new Imageomics Institute, which is supported by a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

With the recent award of a New York Life Science Entrepreneur Development grant from Empire State Development (ESD), the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will launch a life science entrepreneurship concentration within their Master of Business Administration (MBA) program.

With the support of a prestigious $542,813 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant, physicist Trevor David Rhone is turning to artificial intelligence to help determine which combination of elements might form new materials with interesting properties for advancing both scientific understanding and technological applications, such as data storage, spintronics, and quantum computing.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a new drug for treating schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder that includes samidorphan, a new chemical entity discovered at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.