Department News
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doctoral student Riley Barton has been selected as one of 87 outstanding graduate students in the United States by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (SCGSR).
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Humberto Terrones, Rayleigh Endowed Chair Professor in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, is as passionate about community outreach as he is about science.
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After serving as a professor of practice in chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for four years and offering outstanding contributions to his field, Peter J. Bonitatibus Jr. is now an associate professor.
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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Moussa N’Gom, assistant professor of physics, applied physics, and astronomy, has devised a method to make communications between satellites and the ground more effective no matter the weather. In research recently published, N’Gom and his team used ultrafast, femtosecond lasers to cut through the clouds and rain that commonly cause losses in free-space optical communication (FSO).
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The first doctoral degree in computer science ever earned at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was in 1969. The sixth was presented to Margaret Kahles Guyder in 1972, and it was also the first ever earned by a woman.
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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Deborah McGuinness has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) “for significant contributions to the semantic web, knowledge representation and reasoning environments, and deployed artificial intelligence applications.” AAAI is a nonprofit scientific society that promotes research in artificial intelligence and its responsible use. The AAAI fellows program recognizes people who have “made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.”
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Are there other Earth-like planets? Is there extraterrestrial life? In the quest to find planets that orbit stars other than the sun, “Earth 2.0” is the Holy Grail. Earth 2.0 is a planet similar enough to Earth to enable the existence of life as we know it. It would be the right temperature for liquid water, and it would orbit a star with a steady supply of light. Ideally, it would be close enough that we could imagine going there or at least sending a probe to explore it.
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