App blends history, technology, and student talent in new tourism initiative

Carlos Lousto, Distinguished Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, is a recipient of the 2024 RAICES Award, granted by the Secretariat of Innovation, Science, and Technology (SICyT) of the Argentine government. The RAICES award, or Redes de Argentinos Investigadores, Cientificos y Tecnologos en el Exterior, recognizes distinguished Argentine scientists living abroad who make notable scientific contributions in strengthening science and technology capabilities in their home country. “Thank you to RIT for all the support to perform top research during my already 18 years working here!,” said Lousto. “This award encourages me further to keep working hard.” Lousto was officially recognized with the award at the Consulate General of Argentina in New York in early July alongside fellow honoree Viviana Zelizer of Princeton University. “This recognition is a significant testament not only to Dr. Lousto’s outstanding career and continued global influence, but also to the remarkable depth of faculty talent we have at RIT,” said College of Science Dean Andre Hudson. “It underscores the vital role that international scholarship and collaboration play in advancing the frontiers of science and education.” RAICES awardees are selected by a jury composed of authorities from SICyT, CONICET, and prominent academics. Lousto is a co-director of RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and has been involved in groundbreaking research on gravitational waves, black holes, and pulsars. He was awarded membership in the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1993, the American Physical Association (APS) in 2012, and received the Bouchet Prize in 2019. He was also recognized with the Breakthrough Special Prize in 2016 for his work leading to the first detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes. He was officially nominated by the US Congress for his research work in 2006 and 2016. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of La Plata and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Buenos Aries. He designed the Funes, Newhorizons, and BlueSky supercomputer clusters that perform binary black hole simulations and has authored or co-authored approximately 300 scientific articles in international journals.

RIT has appointed three new members to its Board of Trustees. ‌ Jane Elliott ’88 (accounting) is executive vice president and chief human resources officer at NCR Voyix, with decades of experience in accounting, finance, investor relations, and strategy. In her role, Elliott creates and executes the company’s people strategy to support growth objectives. She has also served in the top human resources role at three publicly listed companies. She has served on the RIT President’s Roundtable since 2019 and the Saunders College of Business National Council since its inception in 2022. In 2017, she created the Jane M. Wentworth ’88 Endowed Scholarship in Saunders College. In 2020, she contributed to the Saunders College expansion project. She has also served on the boards of Junior Achievement of Georgia, and Cool Girls, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the self-empowerment of girls living in Atlanta’s most vulnerable communities. ‌ Brenda Haynes, a retired oncologist and hematologist, trained at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and completed her residency, internship, and fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. While no longer actively practicing, she maintains affiliations with Harvard Medical School and Newton-Wellesley Hospital, and most recently served as an oncologist with New England Hematology and Oncology. She is the parent of a second-year civil engineering technology student at RIT and she serves as a volunteer on a number of nonprofit organizations. Dr. Haynes and her husband, Dr. Adam Koppel, are members of RIT’s Sentinel Society and have been active supporters of the College of Engineering Technology, College of Health Sciences and Technology, and several student project teams. ‌ Chance Wright ’18 (photographic and imaging arts) ’19 (MBA) is a serial entrepreneur having founded or co-founded several companies including Wright Productions and Entertainment; ATL/WYO Productions; Skull Diamond and Heart Capital; Chance Wright Photography; and The Shore Foundation, a Rochester-based nonprofit dedicated to improving the community through equal access to technology, while also impacting the environment by shifting the impact of used technology. He has served on the President’s Roundtable since 2020 and the College of Art and Design’s National Council since 2021. In 2019, Chance and his mother, Pamela Mars-Wright, made a significant gift to the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences. In 2021, Wright supported the Saunders College of Business renovation and expansion project. Elliott, Haynes, and Wright will each serve four-year terms on the board.

Caroline M. Solomon, dean of faculty at Gallaudet University, has been named president of Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf and vice president of RIT. She will begin her tenure at RIT/NTID on Aug. 18. View the announcement in ASL An ASL version of the announcement is available. “NTID has revolutionized education for nearly 60 years,” said RIT President Bill Sanders, who began leading the university July 1. “Dr. Solomon brings a deep understanding and appreciation for NTID’s distinctive culture. She has the vision to champion NTID’s legacy while moving it forward for the next generation of students. I look forward to partnering with Dr. Solomon as we continue to advance NTID’s mission and ensure that the college remains a leader for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, both nationally and globally.” Established by the U.S. Congress in 1965, NTID is the first and largest technological college in the world for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Solomon, who will become the first woman to lead the college in its nearly 60-year history, was raised in Delaware and is the daughter of a former professor at the University of Delaware. She earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and public policy from Harvard University and a master’s degree in biological oceanography from University of Washington’s School of Oceanography. She earned a doctorate in marine, environmental and estuarine sciences from University of Maryland. She joined the faculty of Gallaudet University as a biology instructor in 2000 and rose to the rank of professor in 2011. She received Gallaudet’s Distinguished Faculty Award in 2013 and was recognized by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography with their Ramon Margalef Award for Excellence in Education in 2017. She was appointed the dean of faculty in 2024. A renowned scientist and researcher, Solomon has devoted herself to encouraging and nurturing deaf and hard-of-hearing students in STEM fields, and has presented on her research at national and international conferences as well as to RIT/NTID students and faculty. She has developed a database of science-based technical signs in American Sign Language. Solomon, a past participant in the Deaflympics as a swimmer was inducted into the Deaflympics Hall of Fame in 2020. In her new role, Solomon will serve as chief executive of NTID, providing leadership in developing and executing the college’s vision and strategic plan, and is responsible for NTID’s financial operations and budget, enrollment management, academic programs, external and federal relations, and fundraising. “As a Deaf scientist, I’m deeply honored to join the vibrant NTID and RIT community—longstanding national leaders in advancing STEM education for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students,” Solomon said. “I look forward to working with President Sanders and collaborating with students, faculty, and staff to expand pathways in education, employment, and leadership. Together, we will ensure that every student has the opportunity to thrive, lead, and drive innovation across every sector of society.” RIT President Emeritus David Munson initiated the search before retiring June 30. “We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Caroline Solomon to the RIT community as the next leader of NTID,” said Munson. “Caroline brings an extraordinary blend of academic leadership, scientific and technical expertise, and a lifelong commitment to advancing access and equity in education. Her distinguished career at Gallaudet University and her well recognized work in STEM education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students make her superbly qualified to guide NTID into its next chapter.” Solomon succeeds Gerry Buckley, who has served as president of NTID and vice president and dean of RIT for 15 years and will retire Aug. 17. “Dr. Solomon brings with her an outstanding academic and STEM research record and wealth of higher education knowledge and experience,” added Buckley. “I’m so pleased that she will lead NTID into the future, and know NTID is in highly capable hands. I look forward to welcoming Dr. Solomon and her family to Rochester and the NTID community in the months ahead.” NTID offers associate degree programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing students and provides support and access services for deaf and hard-of-hearing students who study in the other eight colleges of RIT. NTID also offers certificates in healthcare interpretation and sign language specialties, bachelor’s degree programs in sign language interpreting and community development and inclusive leadership, as well as master’s degrees in secondary education for deaf and hard-of-hearing students and in healthcare interpretation.

After three decades of teaching, mentoring, and pioneering academic and research programs at RIT, Professor Stephen Jacobs is retiring. Jacobs worked as an adjunct faculty member in English and computing before becoming a full-time professor in 1995. As a video game expert, he taught courses in game programming and game design/narrative. Together with former faculty members Andy Phelps and Jeff Lasky, Jacobs wrote the proposal for RIT’s master’s degree in game design and development. Today, RIT’s games degrees are regularly ranked among the top 10 in the country. With RIT’s MAGIC Spell Studios, Jacobs served as one of the original associate directors—focusing on industry relations. He collaborated to produce MAGIC’s first game on the Nintendo Switch platform, called The Original Mobile Games—a partnership with The Strong National Museum of Play and Second Avenue Learning. Jacobs has also served as a steward for all things FOSS (free and open source software) at RIT. He helped create courses and programs on the subject and served as director of the Open@RIT research center. “I’m not a traditional academic,” said Jacobs. “It’s been a pleasure to spend the last 30 years as an RIT professor.” Below, Jacobs shares reflections from his time at RIT. What has your long-term partnership with The Strong National Museum of Play meant to you? I’ve been a Scholar-in-Residence since 2007. In that role, I’ve been able to serve as a member of exhibit design teams, co-create an online course in game design history that was nominated by students for an edX award as a best course, and help bring conferences to Rochester—like the upcoming 2025 Conference on BIPOC Games Studies. That kind of work, over the years, led to a Tourism Achievement Award from Visit Rochester. We also enjoy bringing classes to The Strong every year. This year the “final exam” for my History and Design of Pinball class was to demo their analog and digital games at The Strong as part of a museum-wide pinball day we co-organized. I’ve also been working with them around my research on the Jewish History of the Toy and Games Industries in Germany and the U.S, which we’re developing into an exhibit for 2026. Why do you champion open source for social good? I was attracted to this world through the One Laptop Per Child initiative. They were providing low-cost laptops to children in developing countries. In 2009, I created an honors seminar for our students to make educational games for the One Laptop Per Child community. Over 16 years that initial course grew into an immersion focusing on humanitarian open software development and an interdisciplinary minor—the only one of its kind in the world. It also led to our Open@RIT center to support faculty, staff, and students’ Open research and work. That center had us lead several workshops, join the Linux Foundation, and receive more than $1 million in awards to support its work over four years.  I received the Provost’s Excellence in Faculty Mentoring Award in 2019-2020 (in part for this work) and the PI Millionaire award in 2023 for grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. ‌ Alberto Bobadilla Jacobs enjoys joining students on the travel-enhanced courses. This year in Japan, students immersed themselves in the culture and visited a Japanese game studio. How have you encouraged students to make lifelong connections outside the classroom? Video games are an international industry, and it’s important to have international experiences on your résumé. I began teaching travel-enhanced courses—ones that meet on-campus for a semester with international travel before or after the on-campus work—in 2014.  These courses established a model of spending a week in one town (in Paderborn, Germany for this one), holding a game jam over the weekend with the German students (a weekend-long, video game creating marathon), and then traveling elsewhere in country for a week to visit cultural sites and game studios. I taught this again in 2017 and 2019. In 2018, I replicated the Germany model in Japan. We worked with Ritsumeikan University and the Kyoto Computer Gakuin, a long-time partner with RIT in international education. This year, in addition to the course’s regular visits to the CyberConnect2 video game studio and Hiroshima, we were able to attend World Expo in Osaka. As a result of this course, the vice president of CyberConnect2 and the global section chief of human resources for the company will be visiting RIT and The Strong to recruit our upcoming graduates to work in Japan and to explore the exhibits and research assets at The Strong.

Robots that can sense and act through touch? That is what Aayush Kulkarni, an undergraduate visiting student, taught a robot to do during his internship at RIT. Kulkarni is participating in the International Visiting Research Student Program through RIT Global, which offers students from around the world the opportunity to collaborate with distinguished faculty-researchers from RIT. The international experience is a way for Kulkarni to better understand Eastern and Western perspectives in building robotic technologies, an area he has been interested in since he started college. He also wanted to explore how robots are being used in healthcare. He began work in February with Yangming Lee, a robotics expert in RIT’s College of Engineering Technology who is developing surgical robotics technologies. The two worked to integrate the sense of touch into visual imaging and locational perception to add another feature to the evolving field of surgical robotics. “I found out that tactile sensing was something fairly new; it means giving human sense to robots to identify what it is holding,” said Kulkarni, who is a computer science, engineering, and business systems student at MIT-World Peace University in Puna, India. “This was a whole dream come true situation for me. This is something that every undergraduate student dreams-to build something innovative from scratch. Prof. Lee gave me the opportunity to do this.” Together they created tactile sensor technology that can distinguish between different types of surface environments and can be calibrated to determine appropriate pressure needed to pick up objects. Using an established open-source sensor, the platform they built could be an affordable option compared to larger, established systems. “Integrating haptic feedback allows surgical robots to sense and respond to forces during tissue interaction, such as detecting unexpected resistance or slip-enabling real-time motion adjustments that prevent damage to critical structures,” said Lee, who leads the Robotic Collaboration and Autonomy Lab . “This adaptiveness increases the safety and reliability of autonomous surgical actions, moving the field closer to enabling semi- or fully autonomous procedures in complex, variable clinical environments.” The heart of the project is the neural network and the tactile sensors, and both Lee and Kulkarni built, trained, and refined the system and tested its ability to accurately distinguish real and synthetic objects purely through touch. One of the quirkier tests was in comparing real and fake oranges. The skin of an orange is dimpled, pliant and has varied depth—variables generally found with human skin. A plastic replica orange had similar features but when compared to the real fruit, the sensor was able to distinguish one from the other because it was “taught” to recognize specific characteristics of each item. That ability to distinguish characteristics visually and tactilely could enable a robotics system such as this to distinguish human tissues, specifically those with diseases that are sometimes mistaken for one another and may require blood tests or other invasive methods to diagnose. Robotic diagnoses may be the future, Kulkarni said. “Because if we want more collaborative robots, with similar human qualities, in the future we have to do the steps now.” Before graduation, Kulkarni is required to complete a six-month internship, preferably in an international setting, and must complete or contribute to a capstone project, dissertation, or thesis project. He has written two books on cloud computing, one specifically emphasizing microservices architectures. The book on cloud computing is being used as one of the textbooks in his university. Kulkarni is also in the process of completing his third book, this one on quantum computing. He has a design patent on a quantum cloud gateway device. The six months went quickly for Kulkarni, and he’ll return to India at the end of July. After graduation Kulkarni wants to continue research in these important technological areas and start his own research lab, similar to Lee’s. “When I came here, I got the whole technological perspective because the U.S. is really developed in the technology areas of robotics and computing. I got an opportunity, and I grabbed it,” said Kulkarni. “Getting a diverse approach is always important for the field I am working in. This internship was very important to me.” To learn more Read more about the International Visiting Research Student Program through RIT Global.

RIT graduate Sammy Deol won a yearlong Fulbright Scholarship to attend graduate school in England. He will earn a master’s degree in public health in preparation for medical school.   Deol, who is from Ithaca, N.Y., graduated from RIT this year with a BS degree in biomedical sciences. He plans to become a medical doctor and welcomes the chance to conduct epidemiology and social science research in a foreign country. “Even though I want to practice medicine in the United States one day, I want to have exposure to that aspect of medicine and to have the perspective of a different healthcare system,” Deol said. He enrolled in the University of Birmingham for its proximity to one of the largest Sikh communities in England. Deol, who belongs to the Sikh tradition, is looking to contribute to research interventions addressing high rates of alcohol and drug use among the Sikh population in Birmingham. Deol became interested in the impact of addictive behaviors within a family on children’s emotional-social development and health from working in the research lab led by Stephanie Godleski, RIT associate professor of psychology. Godleski’s addiction research inspired the focus of his graduate work. “I also want to explore my culture more,” Deol said. “I am curious to see the differences between American and British Sikhism, and I think that would be a good opportunity do that, as well.” (While on the staff of the student-run Reporter Magazine, Deol wrote “A Sikh Society,” about the population in Rochester and the gurdwara, or temple, near RIT.) In addition to working with Godleski, Deol attributes his success to professors in the College of Health Sciences and Technology, and the RIT Honors Program for his personal growth and development. Deol took courses in parasitology and human immunology from Bolaji Thomas, professor of biomedical sciences. “He made sure that we strove for excellence and pushed us to go as hard as we could, which I really appreciate. He would remind us that it’s not going to be easy to get where we want to be.” Elizabeth Perry, a senior lecturer in biomedical sciences, stressed the human aspect of medicine in all of her courses, but especially in Biomedical Ethics.  “Dr. Perry would talk about the need for people who go into medicine and healthcare professions to have humility and to be able to understand patients’ problems and where they’re coming from , which I think is really important to consider,” Deol said. The RIT Honors program also shaped Deol’s time at RIT through advanced coursework, complementary learning experiences, travel money to present his research at a conference, and required service work. Volunteering at a local hospice home allowed him to see the patients as people facing their own mortality. “The Honors program encouraged me to pursue those types of opportunities and I think it made me someone who will be a stronger practitioner going into the future.”