New Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation captures the startup spirit on campus

RIT Ph.D. candidate Sai Sri Nidhi Munaganuru wants everyone to know the hidden power of carbon composite 3D printing. Her talk, “Can carbon composite 3D printing technology revolutionize the world?” took first place and the People’s Choice award at the 3MT Three Minute Thesis competition hosted by the RIT Graduate School. Munaganuru won $1,500 at the Nov. 4 event held at the MAGIC Center’s Wegmans Theater. She will represent RIT in the spring at the regional competition sponsored by the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. Munaganuru, from Hyderabad, India, anticipates completing her Ph.D. this summer from RIT’s mechanical and industrial engineering program. Her work extends the capability of carbon fiber technology through a new manufacturing approach that could eliminate high production costs, waste, and dependence on skilled labor. Her research bypasses manufacturing obstacles through a series of innovations to produce woven carbon fiber materials. These lightweight carbon composite skins can add strength and durability to everything from airplane fuselages to automobiles to healthcare applications. Munaganuru arrived at RIT five years ago with degrees in aerospace engineering and a focus on the aerospace industry. The scope of her research at RIT’s AMPrint Center grew when she saw the potential impact 3D printed carbon composites could have across industries. “What keeps me motivated to do my research is its versatile nature,” Munaganuru said. “This composite material could be used to make many more products like customized prosthetics, UAV drones, and more. My faculty advisor, Dr. Denis Cormier, has been a great support throughout my time at RIT and has provided me with powerful insights that keep me engaged and motivated with my research.” Three components at the core of Munaganuru’s research include a five-axis 3D printer to improve rotational accessibility, software that analyzes non-planar or irregular surfaces and generates algorithms for the 3D printer, and a modified print head that can print and extrude finely sized carbon fibers. Her method eliminates post processing and enables customized production. Munaganuru presented her research last August at the International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium in Austin, Texas. The Three Minute Thesis competition helps Ph.D. students communicate their complex research in a succinct and accessible way. The University of Queensland in Australia established the competition in 2008. Today, more than 900 universities in 85 countries participate in the Three Minute Thesis. The full list of award winners and judges can be found on the RIT Graduate School website.

When walking into the workplace, one might assume that the staff would be as diverse as the local community it’s in. Chris Wairegi ’14 (cinematography and photography), a cinematographer based in Brooklyn, N.Y., found that this isn’t the case in the film industry. “I’ve worked jobs where there are at least 200 people on set and I’m the only Black woman. When I walk around New York City I pass every kind of person, so it’s surprising when that does not carry over into the workplace,” said Wairegi. “My dream of dreams is that the film and television industries reflect the world in which they operate.” Wairegi is the founder of 600 Black Women, a collective of motion picture filmmakers, still photographers, and publicists who are Black women, femmes, and gender expansive people in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 600 guild. When Wairegi was recruited for a job by a large television network, she was required to join the guild. After joining, another Black woman informed her that she was the fourth Black woman camera operator in the union. “I thought she was joking, but then I got onto set and every person I came across said that they’ve never seen a Black woman operator or had never seen Black women in the camera department at all,” she said. Wairegi explained that these comments weren’t meant to be negative, it was just a reflection of the industry. Of the over 10,000 current members of the union, only 108 of them are Black women, femmes, or nonbinary—and they are all members of 600 Black Women. Since its founding in 2022, the collective continues to grow and now hosts annual “camera cookouts,” where members meet for a series of workshops and networking on Juneteenth weekend. Wairegi said that professional networking is actually the least important opportunity that the group provides. She described the camaraderie between members as “part friendship, part mentorship, and part therapy.” “All of us at one time, in whatever industry you’re in, had someone who gave us an extra boost to help us achieve a goal. That’s what 600 Black Women is all about,” said Wairegi. “We benefit from each other by supporting each other. It’s a network of people who are dedicated to seeing you win.” When reflecting on the growth of 600 Black Women, Wairegi shared that she believes that everyone has the capability to make change happen and that it isn’t always as difficult as it may seem. “If there is something in your world that you’d like to change, you might be the person you’ve been waiting for,” she said.

RIT’s new real estate in hospitality minor gives students the opportunity to connect real estate knowledge with hospitality management practices. Launched in fall 2023, this minor at Saunders College of Business is designed to equip students with specialized skills for careers in both industries. Edwin Torres Areizaga, associate professor and chair of the Department of International Hospitality and Service Innovation, created the minor to offer students a unique career path focused on understanding commercial properties within hospitality. To learn more Saunders College of Business will host a real estate conference from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 21, at the Susan R. Holliday Center in Max Lowenthal Hall. Led by keynote speaker Mark Laport ’92 MS (hospitality tourism management), co-founder and CEO of Concord Business Enterprises, the conference offers a chance for students to interact with real estate executives and other industry professionals and gain a comprehensive understanding of the diverse pathways in real estate. “In recent years, the hotel industry has separated ownership, management, and branding, meaning the company that owns a hotel building is often not the same one that runs or brands it,” Torres Areizaga said. “Our new minor gives students a pathway to work in areas like hotel development, brokerage, and asset management—preparing them for roles beyond hotel operations and aligning with these industry shifts.” This minor is open to students within Saunders College and from other disciplines who are interested in real estate. Students will learn analytical thinking, marketing, and the key roles of ownership, management, and branding, as well as the value of networking and the power of negotiation. “We don’t just want to teach people how to work spreadsheets,” Torres Areizaga said. “We want them to know how to communicate with architects and engineers and understand how major hospitality investments like hotels, restaurants, or theme parks operate. That way, if a property is underperforming, they can look beyond the numbers to identify the root cause.” Courses in the minor build these essential skills. Debanjana Dey, an assistant professor who teaches Hospitality Real Estate Development and Hospitality Analytics, sees untapped potential for students in this field. “There’s a lot of interest in hospitality, but many people don’t realize the strong career and earning potential in hospitality real estate,” Dey said. “I cover both commercial and residential real estate, since both offer valuable insights. I find that most students have some exposure to real estate, like a family investment property or a construction background, but they don’t see it as a career option. My goal is to show them that this minor is more general than people realize; that it can open many professional paths they might not have considered.” Assistant Professor Soon Hyeok Choi brings an additional perspective with his Hospitality Asset Management and Investment course, integrating AI and machine learning to help students prepare for technology-driven changes in the industry. Choi also shares insights from his research on legislation, such as Hawaii Senate Bill 2919, to show how laws affect both residential and commercial sectors. “We’re not just learning how to pick a site and generate cash flow for the next nine years,” Choi said. “That’s a one-dimensional approach. We’re trying to understand the entire ecosystem of real estate—the local labor market, demographics, and housing market—so we can effectively tackle the commercial side. When you think about hotel resorts, who works in those spaces? The local workforce, tied to local residences. Understanding demographics and housing affordability directly impacts a property’s ability to operate successfully.” The hope is that students who graduate get a good return on investment from their education, transitioning into careers such as analysts, marketing specialists, commercial brokers, or those who want to build their own real estate portfolio as entrepreneurs. Looking ahead, Torres Areizaga hopes to expand the program by adding more introductory courses to draw non-majors and offering students the chance to study these principles internationally through existing hospitality global rotation programs at RIT Croatia, with an opportunity to add courses at RIT Dubai as well.

An online community for sonographers channels the professional excellence and passion that is a hallmark of RIT’s diagnostic medical sonography program. Hayley Bartkus ’17 (diagnostic medical sonography) and Christina Werth ’13 (diagnostic medical sonography) created EchoMentor as an educational platform for healthcare professionals working in sonography or ultrasound, a medical imaging method that uses sound waves to peer inside the body. EchoMentor is an evolving resource for continuing education, mentorship, professional development, and patient-focused case studies. It launched last spring with Bartkus teaching “Approaching Appendicitis.” New content this fall included her class on kidney transplants, and Werth’s session on fetal skeletal dysplasia. Colleague Samantha Grimsley ’15 (diagnostic medical sonography), a vascular sonographer at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, taught a third class on subclavian steal syndrome, a condition in which the subclavian artery narrows and causes blood flow reversal in the vertebral artery. Courses developed for EchoMentor are accredited by the American Society of Radiologic Technologists and satisfy continuing medical education requirements of the American Registry of Diagnostic Medical Sonographers and the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists. EchoMentor grew from the co-founders’ experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they worked together in high-risk maternal fetal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. They saw first-hand the need to promote the important—yet often overlooked—role sonography plays in healthcare, said Bartkus, director of the diagnostic medical sonography program at Johns Hopkins Schools of Medical Imaging and host of the ultrasound podcast 256 Shades of Gray. EchoMentor represents a grassroots effort to bring awareness and visibility to a profession that emerged alongside technological advances in the latter part of the 20th century. “One of the gaps we want to fill with EchoMentor is helping sonographers learn how they can further their careers without leaving the field,” said Werth, an echosonographer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Opportunities are unclear because those paths aren’t yet well forged.” As an online platform, EchoMentor can work toward establishing professional representation. To Bartkus, that means being part of the conversation around current issues facing the medical field, such as gender affirming care and the Black maternal health crisis. “EchoMentor is meant to empower other sonographers to get excited and motivated about these things, too,” Bartkus said. “It’s how they can make a change in the field and in the world because sonography is life-saving healthcare.” The name of their organization underscores the importance of mentorship in the niche ultrasound field, said Werth, who mentored both Bartkus and Grimsley. EchoMentor will expand to include a mentorship program with a lineage that traces back to Hamad Ghazle, director of RIT’s diagnostic medical sonography program and an influential figure in the field. In many ways, EchoMentor is a conduit for sharing Ghazle’s legacy in ultrasound education and imparting his high level of excellence and joy for sonography, Bartkus said. Graduates from the RIT program have a reputation for growing in their positions and embodying an inclusive, extra quality that lifts up the people around them. “They want to do more than the bare minimum of scanning patients,” Werth said. “They want to be involved in education and research, mentorship opportunities, patientcare improvement, and quality projects.” This is where EchoMentor comes in as a resource for lifelong learning that furthers the profession and helps patients. “We learned from our time at RIT that when you’re passionate about what you do, that passion trickles into all areas of your life and can make for a joyful career,” Werth said.

Arthur Deane ’08 (electrical engineering) broke into the cybersecurity industry and he hasn’t looked back. Now, he’s helping others unlock opportunities in cybersecurity, paving the way for a more diverse and inclusive tech industry. Deane has become a leader in the field and currently works in Washington, D.C., as Chief Information Security Officer at Amazon Health Services. On the same week that he started that CISO role, he also established an endowed scholarship fund to support African American, Latin American, and Native American students enrolled in cybersecurity at RIT. “I rarely had someone who looked like me and was doing things I aspired to do, someone whose shoes I could see myself in,” said Deane. “I want to give people what I wish I had, so they can thrive in this rigorous program. My scholarship recipients are also future mentees.” Growing up, Deane enjoyed exploring technology and breaking things—just to put them back together. He chose to attend RIT for the practical engineering experience and the co-op program. There was no cybersecurity degree at the time, but Deane saw electrical engineering as the ideal place to learn all things technology. “It was an eye-opener in terms of diversity—coming from the Bronx where all my peers were people of color, then going to a program that was not very diverse,” said Deane. “In some ways, it prepared me for corporate America, where I got used to being the only one in the room.” One year into his electrical engineering career, he noticed that government and industry were starting to take cybersecurity seriously. He was working on a small intelligence community program and he pivoted full force into the cyber world. “It piqued my intellectual curiosity because the field changes every day,” said Deane. “I tried a bunch of different cyber roles to learn all the different components of the industry, from penetration testing to doing digital forensics, and even less technical areas like risk management.” Deane’s many cybersecurity leadership roles at Amazon, Google, and Capital One have shaped his perspective on balancing the tensions between security, compliance, and innovation. He emphasizes the importance of meeting regulatory compliance while striving for top-tier security. Now, with Amazon Health, he’s driving innovative solutions that allow the healthcare business to advance securely. “I’m excited by the opportunity to transform an industry as critical as healthcare, with security and privacy driving much of the innovation,” said Deane. Deane’s commitment to opening the world of cybersecurity extends beyond his office job. He has written books on cybersecurity certifications, which are an important way for people to enter the cybersecurity industry and hone their skills. He is also an adjunct instructor at American University, a member of the Computer Science Advisory Board at Howard University, and a member of RIT’s Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences National Council. Deane enjoys international travel and learning about local cultures. He said that getting different viewpoints is important for cybersecurity, too. “Relying on a single perspective limits our ability to understand and address complex problems,” said Deane. “Building diverse organizations and encouraging broad viewpoints ensures that we can effectively tackle the large problems that we see every day in this industry.”

The brain is a great source of inspiration for Alexander Ororbia, an assistant professor of computer science and cognitive science at RIT. By mimicking how neurons in the brain learn, Ororbia is working to make artificial intelligence (AI) more powerful and energy efficient. His research was recently published in the journal Science Advances. ‌ RIT RIT Assistant Professor Alexander Ororbia The research article, “Contrastive signal–dependent plasticity: Self-supervised learning in spiking neural circuits,” introduces an AI network architecture that processes information through spikes, much like the electrical signals that brain cells use. This new learning method allows AI to do self-supervised learning, which is faster and more adaptable. Most of the deep neural networks that power modern day versions of generative AI and large language models use a learning approach called backpropagation of errors. This training method works well, but it often has to retrace a long communication pathway between inputs and outputs that is not time or energy efficient. “The brain isn’t designed to do learning this way,” said Ororbia. “Things are sparser in the brain—more localized. When you look at an MRI, there are very few neurons going off at one time. If your brain worked like modern AI, and all or most of your neurons fired at the same time, you would simply die.” Ororbia’s new method addresses inherent problems with back propagation. It lets the network learn without constant supervised feedback. The network improves its ability to classify and understand patterns by comparing fake data with real data. The method also works in parallel, meaning different parts of the network can learn at the same time without waiting for each other. Studies have shown that spiking neural networks can be several orders of magnitude more power efficient than modern-day deep neural networks. “The new method is like a prescription for how you specifically change the strengths—or plasticity—of the little synapses that connect spiking neurons in a structure,” said Ororbia. “It basically tells AI what to do when it has some data—increase the strength of synapses if you want a neuron to fire later or decrease it to be quiet.” Ororbia said this new technology will be useful for edge computing. For example, having more energy efficient AI would be critical for extending the battery life of autonomous electric vehicles and robotic controllers. Next, Ororbia is looking to show that his theories can be scaled and produce that energy efficiency in real life. He is working with Cory Merkel, assistant professor of computer engineering, to evaluate the method on powerful neuromorphic chips. Ororbia is also director of the Neural Adaptive Computing Laboratory (NAC Lab) in RIT’s Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, where he is working with researchers to develop more applications for brain-inspired computing.