When Reid Wiseman ‘97 strapped into the Orion spacecraft in April for humanity's first lunar voyage in more than half a century, he carried with him not just the hopes of a new generation of space explorers, but the legacy of the nation's oldest technical school — one that has quietly shaped America's journey to the cosmos.

When Reid Wiseman '97 straps into the Orion capsule as commander of Artemis II, NASA's first crewed lunar mission in more than half a century, he won't be the only RPI alum with a stake in the flight.

A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) engineering professor, Shaowu Pan, Ph.D. and his team of students have integrated agentic AI into computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to optimize the aerospace design process and alleviate bottlenecks. 

Two RPI researchers, Ge Wang, Ph.D., Clark & Crossan Endowed Chair Professor and director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at RPI, and Fudong Han, Ph.D., associate professor and Priti & Mukesh Chatter '82 Career Development Chair, have earned a spot on Clarivate’s 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) mechanical engineering alumna Clare Severance ’18  has been honored with a place on the 2025 Society of Manufacturing Engineers 30 Under 30 list.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) officially cut the ribbon on its new Center for Smart Convergent Manufacturing Systems (CSCMS) during an all-day launch event on October 23, 2025.

As nations and private companies prepare to ramp up the number of missions to the Moon, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Texas A&M University have secured a $1 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to develop a system to track and monitor resident space objects — including spacecraft, satellites and debris — moving through the vast cislunar space between the Earth and the Moon. 

Shaowu Pan, Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), has recently received two prestigious awards recognizing his work to solve some of engineering’s most difficult challenges.

Nikhil Koratkar, Ph.D., the John A. Clark and Edward T. Crossan Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), one of the highest professional distinctions awarded by the world’s oldest chemical society.