University News

Robotics teams from across “the galaxy� will be ready as FIRST Robotics opens its 2020 season with a kickoff event at 10 a.m. Jan. 4. More than 600 students, teachers and mentors will gather to participate in morning workshops and then view the kickoff telecast revealing the details of this year’s game. 

RIT has financed $346.2 million in bonds, allowing the university to save money by refinancing two prior bond issues at lower interest rates, as well as fund work on several campus priority projects.

Saunders College of Business will welcome more than 600 local high school students to the RIT campus for the New York State Region 10 DECA competition on Dec. 19. Students will present business plans to local business leaders who will serve as the competition’s judges.

Four multidisciplinary student teams got the opportunity to pitch their business ideas to potential investors at the RIT Student Accelerator Investor Demo Night earlier this month, each one hoping to jumpstart its ventures and transform its commercial concepts into real companies.

Students from RIT Esports bested more than 300 teams from across North America to win the 2019 Hearthstone Collegiate Championship Fall Finals on Dec. 14. The RIT student team took home the top trophy and $6,000 in scholarships for playing the digital card game Hearthstone.

Ridding waterways of microplastics, delivering water to remote villages experiencing drought, and better ways to remove salt from water were just a few of the clean-water research projects recently presented by undergraduate students as part of RIT’s Grand Challenge Scholars program.

A program called “momentum� designed for students at RIT to develop their leadership skills while actively working to address community challenges has gained momentum, in part, due to a $250,000 donation to expand the program next semester.

A team from RIT and the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía (IAR) upgraded two radio telescopes in Argentina that lay dormant for 15 years in order to study pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense magnetic fields that emit notably in radio wavelengths. The project is outlined in a new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.