Troy, N.Y. – The Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program has named Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on its recent classification of colleges based on “value-added” measures.

The rankings consider how well colleges’ alumni performed on three economic measures: midcareer earnings, student-loan repayment, and occupational earnings power, the average salary within the occupations of alumni of a given college or university.

Professor X. George Xu, the Edward E. Hood Endowed Chair of Engineering, was awarded with the Randall S. Caswell Award for Distinguished Achievements in the Field of Ionizing Radiation Measurements and Standards by the Council on Ionizing Radiation Measurements and Standards (CIRMS) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) . This award is named after Dr. Randy Caswell, who as the Chief of the Ionizing Radiation Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology was instrumental in the formation of CIRMS.

Troy, N.Y. – Five Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduate students have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships, and six more have been recognized with honorable mention. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees.

Extraordinary achievements in student innovation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute were recognized recently with several hallmark entrepreneurship awards—the 10 winning ideas for spring 2015 and the overall “Best of the Best” in the Change the World Challenge, and the Rensselaer Class of 1951 Student Entrepreneurship Award.

The Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host the 41st Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC) April 17-19. The conference will include plenary speakers, session keynotes, contributed papers and posters, and networking sessions and panel discussions, as well as an undergraduate senior design competition. NEBEC is an annual regional conference with an attendance of 400 to 500 people.

AT&T, in partnership with the University at Albany, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, TechConnex (an affiliate for Center for Economic Growth), Tech Valley Center of Gravity, Saratoga TechOUT, Hudson Valley Tech Meetup, New York BizLab,

Troy, N.Y. — Master’s degree students studying business at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are taking their academic knowledge to the next level by learning to identify commercialization pathways for lab research discoveries and inventions through the Masters’ Scholars Research Program (MSRP).

Troy, N.Y. —The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year $650,000 grant to two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors to develop Geo Explorer, a game that will allow engineering students to inspect, design, and test flood protection systems virtually.

Troy, N.Y. – Materials interface expert Pawel Keblinski has been named head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Keblinski, a professor of materials science and engineering, was recently named a fellow of the American Physical Society for “significant contributions to fundamental understanding of interfacial heat flow using computational materials science tools.”

Troy, N.Y. — With a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a team of researchers – including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Juergen Hahn – will investigate the potential of using transplanted regulatory T cells (Tregs) to reduce inflammation in diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, which currently has no known viable treatment options.