Research Resources and Centers

Click on a link to be taken to the entry below.

• Center for Architecture Science and Ecology
• Center for Automation Technologies and Systems
• Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies
• Center for Computational Innovations
• Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine
• Center for Future Energy Systems
• Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems
• Center for Modeling, Simulation and Imaging in Medicine
• Cognitive and Immersive Systems Laboratory
• Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center
• Darrin Fresh Water Institute Center
• Fashion Innovation Center
• Network Science and Technology Center
• Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications
• Scientific Computation Research Center

Research plays an integral role in Rensselaer’s vision of the technological university. The discovery and application of new scientific concepts and technologies, especially in emerging interdisciplinary fields, are core goals for faculty, staff, and students. Rensselaer’s research programs reach across the campus, linking departments, schools, interdisciplinary centers, and unique platforms such as the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, the Computational Center for Innovations, and the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies. This fertile research environment creates opportunities for the integration of research and education, the development of entrepreneurship, and experiences with collaborators from a broad range of academic, private, national, and international institutions.

The Office of the Vice President for Research works closely with faculty to foster high-impact research to address today’s and tomorrow’s challenges in science, engineering, technology, and society. The Office oversees a “research ecosystem” that supports faculty and student innovation, facilitates interdisciplinary synergistic work in Rensselaer centers, and coordinates major research themes and programs.

Notice Regarding Intellectual Property  All members of the Rensselaer community, including, but not limited to, graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, administration, visiting scholars and scientists, and guests, are bound by the Rensselaer intellectual property policy. Go to: http://rpitechnology.com/files/ip_policy.pdf.  For additional information about intellectual property at Rensselaer, go to http://www.eship.rpi.edu/intellectual_property.php.

Directors: Dennis Shelden, Ph.D.,

Associate Director: Alexandros Tsamis, Ph.D.,

Website: www.case.rpi.edu

At the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), we design, research, develop, and translate next-generation technology for a resilient and socially sustainable built environment. As an Institute-wide center, our mission is to collaboratively create, facilitate, and grow large-scale, cross-disciplinary research and development projects across all disciplinary corners of RPI, accelerating innovation for the built environment.  Our research at CASE explores the interplay between natural and built ecologies, integrating material, energy, and information systems. We combine building science, system engineering, and integrated design to develop transformative solutions for building and urban systems, aiming to reduce humanity’s impact on the planet. CASE is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, with additional offices and laboratories at Rensselaer’s campus in Troy. Rensselaer’s School of Architecture frames its advanced degree programs in Built Ecologies, Design Technology, Geofutures, and the culmination of its professional architecture degree around CASE — fostering the next generation of researchers practitioners and entrepreneurs capable to address the biggest challenges that the built environment faces and provide data and performance-driven building technologies in support of clean, self-sustaining and resilient built environments.

Affiliated Faculty: D. Shelden, A. Tsamis, J. Draper, F. Hower, A. Yazdanseta, D. Papanikolaou, T. Atak, E. Pekdemir, C. Perry, C. Dwyer, C. Portelli, C. Bennet

Director: Daniel Walczyk, Professor, MANE

Director for Business Development: Brian Apkarian
 

Website: www.cats.rpi.edu

The Center for Automation Technologies and Systems (CATS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute serves as a focal point for a broad range of industrially relevant research and development in practical and theoretical aspects of advanced manufacturing, automation and robotics.  Advanced manufacturing is a critical component of the U.S. economy as it helps sustain our global competitiveness across a wide range of industries, from biomedical and renewable energy to aerospace. Automation (processes and devices that improve efficiency, increase productivity, or enhance functionality) and industrial robotics (programmable machines capable of automatically carrying out complex series of actions) are key enabling technologies for advanced manufacturing.  Nearly 40 faculty members from multiple departments throughout Rensselaer participate in the research and educational programs of the Center.  With annual base funding from the State of New York as a NYSTAR-designated Center for Advanced Technology, the CATS pursues a mission of research excellence and service to industry, and focuses on bridging the “laboratory-to-market” chasm across a broad range of domains and high-impact applications.  The CATS leverages RPI’s rich ecosystem and domain expertise to help its industrial partner companies pursue both detail- and systems-level approaches to solving real-world problems, advancing model-based methods and applying them to design, optimization, control, and monitoring of industrial processes and systems.  Current research thrust areas include: Industrial Automation and Control, Advanced Robotics and Control Systems, Continuous Processing and Control, Additive and Bioadditive Manufacturing, Smart Manufacturing, Metal and Ceramics Processing, Micromanufacturing, and Advanced Composites and Biocomposites Manufacturing.

Affiliated Faculty:  J. Agung, C. Bae, W. Bequette, T. Blanchet, T. Borca-Tasciuc, C. Carothers, V. Chakrapani, A. Chung, D. Corr, M. Diagne, F. Gandhi, J. Hahn, M. Hardwick, M. Hella, R. Hull, Q. Ji, A. Julius, P. Karande, N. Koratkar, E. Ledet, D. Lewis, C. Malmborg,  A. Maniatty, S. Mishra, S. Narayanan, A. Oberai, R. Ozisik, L. Parsa, J. Plawsky, R. Radke, T. Ravichandran, C. Ryu, O. Sahni, J. Samuel, M. Shepherd, J. Tichy, J. Trinkle, D. Walczyk, J. Wen, W. Wu, W. Xie

Staff: K. Myer, S. Rock, G. Saunders, J. Lawler, W. Lawler, D. Ruiz, L. McGill 

Director: Deepak Vashishth, Ph.D.

Director of Operations & Business Development: Max U. Morton – ‘04, MBA

Director of Research Cores: Marimar Lopez, Ph.D.

Website: www.biotech.rpi.edu/

The Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) is a 218,000-square-foot facility on the Rensselaer campus. With its high-tech laboratories, it provides a platform for collaboration among many diverse academic and research disciplines to enhance discovery and encourage innovation. Research and office space is available for approximately 500 faculty, staff, and students, and the Bruggeman Conference Center and Auditorium host world-class programs and symposia.

CBIS facilitates groundbreaking discoveries by Rensselaer faculty at the intersection of the basic life sciences, physical and computational sciences, humanities and social sciences, architecture, and engineering sciences, which leads to new biotechnology breakthroughs. By maximizing core strengths and collaborations, CBIS ensures the impact of Rensselaer’s financial, organizational, and intellectual investment to society.

Center faculty and researchers are engaged in interdisciplinary research, focused on the application of engineering and the physical and information sciences to the life sciences.  Residents include members of several academic departments including Biological Sciences; Biomedical Engineering; Chemical and Biological Engineering; Chemistry and Chemical Biology; Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering.

The Center is home to ten state-of-the-art Research Core facilities, which permit investigators to address fundamental research questions from the atomic and molecular level through cellular and advanced tissue systems, and finally in live animal platforms. The Research Cores include Proteomics, Microbiology and Fermentation, Analytical Biochemistry and Nanotechnology, BioResearch, Cell and Molecular Biology, Flow Cytometry, Microscopy and Cellular Imaging, BioImaging, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), and Stem Cell Research.

Rensselaer has supported the creation of four research Constellation areas in CBIS that build on existing Rensselaer research strengths: Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering; Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine; Systems Biology and Microbiomics; and Biocomputation and Bioinformatics. Each Constellation contains a mix of senior and junior faculty, and students and postdoctoral scientists from multiple backgrounds and departments. 

Biotechnology is an inherently multidisciplinary pursuit. Students interested in studying Biotechnology at Rensselaer may apply for degrees through several existing departments and programs and create a truly interdisciplinary program with consultation and approval from faculty advisers who represent at least 12 different university departments.

Affiliated Faculty: B. Barquera, G. Belfort, K. Bennett, M. Bentley, B. Bequette, E. Blaber, C. Breneman, C. Bystroff, W. Colon, D. Corr, S. Cramer, J. Dordick, S. Forth, S. Garde, V. Ghosal, R. Gilbert, S. Gilbert, R. Gross, J. Hahn, M. Hahn, J. Hendler, K. High, M. Holmes, R. Hull, J. Hurley, P. Karande, C. Kilduff, M. Koffas, J. Kuruzovich, K. Lakshmi, E. Ledet, L. Ligon, R. Linhardt, E. Liu, G. Makhatadze, L. Mc Gown, D. McGuinness, K. Mills, G. Montelione, M. N’ Gom, S. Nierzwicki-Bauer, M. Nyman, G. O’Connor, T. Przybycien, G. Ramanath, R. Relyea, C. Royer, R. Siegel, M. Simoni, C. Stewart, D. Swank, D. Thompson, P. Underhill, L. Wan, C. Wang, G. Wang, I. Wilke, X. Xu, P. Yan, M. Zaki, R. Zha, F. Zhang

Staff: A. Albanese, G. Felch, A. Gordon, W. Keenum, A. Killam, R. LaPietra, R. Matthews, S. McCallum, A. McKenna, J. Morgan, K. Narayana, N. Ohlrich, S. Pryshchep, C. St. Andrew, K. Xia, J. Zhao

Director: Christopher D. Carothers

Associate Director, Research Computing Operations: Jacqueline A. Stampalia 

Associate Director of Research: Mark S. Shephard

Website: http://cci.rpi.edu

The Center for Computational Innovations (CCI) is housed in a 22,000-square-foot facility at the Rensselaer Technology Park. It includes a 4,500-square-foot machine room, offices, and space for industry visitors. The CCI operates heterogeneous supercomputing systems consisting of massively parallel IBM Blue Gene supercomputer and AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor-based clusters. The computational power of the current hardware configuration is rated at over 1 petaflop peak. The CCI system is supported by over a petabyte of disk storage. The CCI has dedicated high-speed connections to the main campus with up to 32 fiber lines available for growth as well as a direct connection to the NYSERNet optical infrastructure and Internet2 that provides access to the national and international high-speed networks.

The CCI Computational Facilities:

1. “AMOS” Blue Gene/Q: 5 racks (5K nodes, 80K cores) with 80 TB of RAM
   total and 160 I/O nodes.
2. Intel Xeon Cluster: 32, 8-way Xeon processors with 256 GB of RAM
   each.
3. Intel Xeon Cluster: 64, 16-way Xeon processors with 128 GB of RAM each.
4. Parallel Storage: 1.2 Petabytes disk storage over GPFS parallel
   file system.
5. Network: 324-port non-blocking 56Gbps/FDR Infiniband interconnect.

A key feature of our flagship Blue Gene/Q system (named “AMOS”) is its balance of compute with I/O capabilities. In particular, this Blue Gene/Q system has four times the I/O capacity on a per-rack basis than any other Blue Gene/Q system currently fielded. Thus, we have the capability to provide a 1.28 TB RAM cache pool by leveraging the 160 I/O nodes. For many data intensive jobs, their datasets can fit within that cache structure. For larger dataset jobs, we will offer an 8TB RAM Storage Accelerator (RSA) cluster that can pre-stage data prior to the start of the job on AMOS. Data can be moved between AMOS and the RSA at a rate of 50 GB/sec.  This RSA cluster is created by an in memory parallel filesystem that runs across our existing Intel Xeon cluster.

Currently, the center provides computational resource to external funded research activities in excess of $42M.  These research activities cut across a number of massively parallel and data analytic topics. Examples include: protein folding, micro-structure materials modeling, fundamental properties of graphene, co-design of future exascale supercomputers, massively parallel adaptive methods for multi-scale simulation, high-performance computing workflows for industrial applications, and advanced computational fluid dynamics, to name a few.

One of our central strengths is the flexibility in terms of how we engage with our industry partners. First, the CCI has the ability to work with software from third-party vendors like ANSYS, Polyflow, and CD-adapco, as well as leverage the center’s own research software tools and other “open source” software systems. The CCI currently has active engagements with Boeing, Corning, GNS, IBM, Kitware, P&G, and Simmetrix, to name a few. Export controlled and corporate confidential software is able to execute at the CCI.

Affiliated Faculty: A. A. Abouzeid, S. Adali, F.D. Berman, C. Breneman, C. Bystrof, C.D. Carothers, Z. Chen, M.O. Coppens, S. Cramer, B.M. Cutler, Y. Danon, S. De, P.A. Fox, W.R. Franklin, D. Gall, S.S. Garde, J.T. Giedt, A. Gittens, W.D. Gray, W. Henshaw, M. Holmes, J. Hendler, L. Huang, X.R.M. Intes, D. Isaacson, P. J. Keblinksi, P.R. Kramer, D.J. Lewis, L. Liu, G. I. Makhatadze, A. Maniatty, L.L. Martin, R. Mayo, J. F. McDonald, V. Meunier, A.L. Milanova, S. Nayak, A.A. Oberai, C.R. Picu, M.D. Platt, M.Z. Podowski, G. Ramanath,  O. Sahni, D. Schwendeman, M.S. Shephard, Y. Shi, K.L. Simons, G. Slota, R. Sundararaman, B. Syzmanski, P.T. Underhill, W.W. von Maltzahn, C. Wang, B.E. Watson, J. Wei, J. Wen, N. Xiang, G. Xu, B. Yener, M.J. Zaki, L.T. Zhang, S. Zhang, T. Zhang

Staff: D. LaBrie-Belser,  J McGlothlin

Technical Staff: A Damian, D. Fox, C.W. Smith

Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM)

Directors: Deepak Vashishth, Ph.D. (RPI), Priti Balchandani, Ph.D. (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)

Website: https://biotech.rpi.edu/partners/icahn-school-medicine-mount-sinai/institute-engineering-and-precision-medicine-iepm

The Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM), one of the first centers in the nation to bridge engineering and engineering science with medicine, is a collaboration between Rensselaer and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Based in New York City with research also occurring at RPI’s Troy campus, CEPM drives advances in the field of precision medicine – a personalized approach to disease treatment and prevention based on individuals’ biological, environmental, and lifestyle differences – which is transforming medical practices in areas such as cancer immunology, neuroinflammation and disease, health, and regenerative and reparative medicine. CEPM accelerates this transformation and develops new technologies that will revolutionize the way patient care is delivered. Research is also aimed at point-of-care and point-of-use devices and diagnostics; microphysiological platforms for discovery and diagnosis; robotic surgery; biomedical imaging; therapeutics biomanufacturing; and artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to biomedical data. These engineering advances will improve quality of life by synergizing state-of-the-art expertise in research and education at the nexus of engineering and medicine, by focusing on three critical research areas: 1) Neuro-engineering, 2) Immuno-engineering, and 3) Regenerative and reparative medicine. CEPM is also developing new academic programs to help students earn joint, dual, or individual doctorates from RPI and Mount Sinai. The programs will be reinforced by biotechnology and life science research and education already taking place on the RPI campus.

CBIS, VPR, Schools, Provost, and OSAT are working together to support CEPM in becoming a leader in commercial/clinical translation that drives significant increases in federal, foundation, and industry funding with large-scale partnerships, development of new ventures in medicine and healthcare through RPIVentures.

Affiliated Faculty: D. Vashishth, B. Barquera, G. Belfort, W. Bequette, E. Blaber, C. Breneman, D. Corr, S. Cramer, J. Dordick, S. Garde, R. Gilbert, S. Gilbert, R. Gross, J. Hahn, J. Hurley, P. Karande, M. Koffas, L. Ligon, G. Makhatadze, E. Palermo, J. Plawsky, T. Przybycien, C. Royer, D. Swank, D. Thompson, P. Underhill, L. Wan, C. Wang, G. Wang, P. Yan.

Director: Jian Sun, Professor, ECSE

Director of Business Development:  Brian Apkarian, MBA

Website: www.rpi.edu/cfes/

The Center for Future Energy Systems (CFES) is one of the 15 New York State-designated Centers for Advanced Technology (CAT) funded by Empire State Development through its Division for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR). The center’s mission is to connect novel energy materials, devices, systems research, knowledge, and technology in academia with the needs of industry to solve practical problems and spur economic development.

Energy is one of the most pressing issues facing society. Achieving energy security, combating climate change, and developing a green energy economy will require harvesting more energy from renewable sources such as solar and wind, as well as using energy more efficiently across different sectors of the industry and in all aspects of daily life. CFES addresses these challenges through cutting-edge research and industry collaboration in a wide range of areas including advanced materials for hydrogen and fuel cell, batteries, and thermal energy conversion; solid-state lighting and energy-efficient building systems; wide bandgap power electronics; conversion, control and grid integration of wind and solar energy; high-voltage dc transmission and advanced grid infrastructure; as well as power system modeling, monitoring and control.

Core Affiliated Faculty: M. Amitay, C. Bae, B. W. Bequette, I. Bhat, D. Borca-Tasciuc, T. Borca-Tasciuc, C. Carothers, J. Chow, P. Chow,  F. Han, L. Huang, K. Kar, R. Karlicek, M. Koffas, N. Koratkar, J. Lian, S. Lin, E. Liu, L.Liu, T. Lu, N. Narendran, S. Patterson, J. Plawsky, G. Ramanath, J. Shi, A. Tajer, M. Tomozawa, L. Vanfretti, M. Wang

Staff:  L. McGill,  P. Luker

Director: Robert Hull

Website: cmdis.rpi.edu

The Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems, or cMDIS, provides the platform for researchers in diverse disciplines across the physical and chemical sciences and engineering to establish cross-disciplinary collaborations and develop teams to tackle some of the most pressing challenges that face our society in the 21st century. The cMDIS leads strategic research efforts in advanced materials and devices, and the integration of these technologies into complex systems. This is achieved by fostering interdisciplinary research that employs advanced computational tools, testbeds, and fabrication and characterization facilities. 

Located primarily on the Rensselaer campus, the center’s activities range from basic and applied research, to the exploration of new technologies through partnerships with industry. Major activities include pioneering research into materials discovery, advanced electronic interconnect structures, heterogeneous integration and advanced packaging, wideband gap semiconductors and devices, carbon-based materials and devices, power electronic devices and systems, new nanostructured materials architectures, harnessing of spectral control and sensing of light, development of new materials and systems for renewable energy, advanced composite materials and devices, solutions for the built environment, and new manufacturing methods.

The center operates several experimental facilities: the Microscale and Nanoscale Cleanroom (MNCR), the Nanoscale Characterization Core (NCC) and Polymer Processing and Characterization Core (PPCC). The MNCR at Rensselaer is a multi-user campus-wide core facility which provides critical support for a wide range of research and education in microelectronics, nanotechnology, advanced materials systems, energy, biotechnology, information technology, and other areas. The MNCR provides tools, infrastructure, and expertise for device design, end-to-end device fabrication, characterization, and testing of a wide range of sample sizes and material systems, such as silicon, compound semiconductors, and novel materials. The capabilities of the MNCR include the equipment, expertise, and staff to provide micro- and nano-fabrication modules of surface preparation, lithography, etching, metallization, dielectrics deposition, thin film characterization, metrology, and device probing. The NCC offers a powerful suite for imaging, spectrometry, and diffraction. At the NCC, the researchers interrogate structure and chemistry at the atomic to micro scales. The addition of the TEM/STEM in this project is a critical addition to this capability. The PPCC is a dedicated facility for characterization of polymer, composite materials, and soft materials. The instruments in this facility are used to characterize the structure, chemistry and mechanical properties of polymer materials.

The cMDIS is the organizational home for the New York Focus Center for Interconnects for Gigascale Integration and for multiple other research programs. The cMDIS also interacts closely with and serves as a comprehensive research platform for other Rensselaer centers, including the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), Center for Automation Technologies and Systems (CATS), Center for Future Energy Systems (CFES), National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center on Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA), and the Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC More broadly, CMDIS serves as the coordinating center for the broad microelectronics initiatives at RPI.

Affiliated Faculty: Around 110 RPI faculty are currently members of the center, including representation from four schools and about a dozen departments.

Administrative Staff:  Michael Burnett

Technical Staff: Xiaohong An, Pascal Bassene, John Barthel, Katharine Dovidenko, (Director of NCC) David Frey, Deniz Rende, Kent Way (Interim Director of MNCR)

Director: David Corr

Co-Director: Xavier Intes

Website: cemsim.rpi.edu

The goal of the Center for Modeling, Simulation and Imaging in Medicine (CeMSIM) is to actively develop new healthcare technologies through close interdisciplinary collaborations towards clinical translation. Research within CeMSIM is aimed at technological innovations that push biomedical knowledge boundaries, improve biomedical system developments and clinical utility, and enhance healthcare practice.

Situated at the intersection of medicine and engineering, CeMSIM engages in fundamental and applied research in the fields of biomedical imaging; computational methods; Artificial Intelligence; biological systems modeling, manufacturing, and assessment; neuroengineering; and precision medicine in oncology. CeMSIM culture leverages grass-root multidisciplinary, diverse, and inclusive collaborations within RPI schools as well as local healthcare institutions. CeMSIM provides an integrated environment with clustered expertise in computational biomedical imaging, neuroimaging and nerurmodulation, bioprinting/biofabrication, and modeling of biological tissues and systems. CeMSIM nurtures close relationships with leading national/international research institutions and research leaders, from basic science & engineering fields to clinical practice.

Affiliated Faculty:, D. Corr, X. Intes, U. Kruger, M. N’Gom, S. Radev, Rahul, L. Wan, L. Zhang
Software Engineer: Vacant
Senior Research Scientist: Suvranu De (FSU)
Research Scientist:  Jean-Paul Ainam,
Research Associate:  Cuong Nguyen
Lecturer:  Kartik Josyula
Postdoctoral Research Associates: Subrato Sarkar, Vikas Pandey, Pascal Bassene

Director: Hui Su

Director of Operations: Jonas Braasch

Website: https://cisl.rpi.edu/

Cognitive and Immersive Systems Laboratory at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, aka CISL@EMPAC, is a collaboration between IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to pioneer new frontiers in immersive cognitive systems as an aid to group problem-solving and decision-making.  

The core platform of CISL is an immersive, interactive, reconfigurable physical environment that enhances group cognition. The physical environment automatically responds to its occupants by listening to and watching them, engages multiple users working in small groups at the same time on different aspects of a larger project, explores interactions and visualizations that would be impossible with a few people looking at a single monitor, learns from and reasons with the input captured from multi-people discussions, contributes relevant human-scale context to facilitate the discussion, create multimodal narratives and present to the people in the discussions.

CISL’s mission is to create scientific breakthroughs and technical innovation that can be used to enable Cognitive Immersive Situations Rooms in various use cases, including Cognitive Boardrooms for strategic business decision making, Cognitive Design Studio for the creation of advanced marketing materials and the design and development of complex systems, etc., Cognitive Diagnosis Room for the doctors to diagnose complex diseases, Cognitive Immersive Class Room for more effective and efficient education, etc. These Cognitive Immersive Rooms and Environments are going to use the cloud-based core Cognitive Computing algorithms.  
 
The Situations Room will be enabled with the scientific breakthroughs and technical innovations in the following areas:  

Area 1:

The Situations Room will be able to transcribe the multi-person multimodal natural interactions (including language, speech, gestures etc.) into logs of the discussion and have long-term dialog with a group of people. The following technologies will be enabled:

Area 2:

The Situations Room will be able to contribute human-scale context into the discussions and facilitate them:  

Area 3:

The Situations Room will be able to present multimodal narratives and tell a story:

Area 4:

Systems technologies:

CISL also hosts the Center for Cognition, Communication, and Culture, which focuses on the intersection and interdependency of cognition, communication, and culture in the context of creative machines and processes, functional perceptual models, and assistive technologies – using complex natural and computer-generated environments as test beds. The CCC operates the Collaborative-Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment Laboratory (CRAIVE-Lab), is a leading partner for the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) project and hosts the annual International Symposium on Adaptive Technology in Music and Art (ISATMA).

Affiliated Faculty: J. Braasch, C. Bahn, S. Bringsjord, B. Chang, R. Eglash, J. Goebel, T. Hahn, J. Hendler, H. Ji, Q. Ji, T. Krueger, J. Kuruzovich, S. Lawson, C. Leitao, M. McShane, M. Oatman, C. Perry, T. Ravichandran, R. Radke, R. Relyea, R. Russo, P. Search, M. Si, R. Sun, M. Simoni, W. Wallace, N. Xiang, B. Yener, H. Zhou

Staff: D. Allen, J. Drozdal, G. Das

Acting Director: Jonas Braasch

Manager, Administrative Operations: Kimberly Gardner

Website: http://empac.rpi.edu

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) is an exceptional confluence of architecture, art, science, research, and technology. The 220,000-square-foot facility holds four large venues, which can serve as venues for public events and as studios and laboratories for research and production, accommodating up to 1200 persons in one venue.

EMPAC is a laboratory that enables artists and scientists to advance research and development independently and collaboratively.

An expansive platform for interdisciplinary thoughts and projects, the center creates and presents contemporary artistic works of all genres; hosts a great variety of campus events; and supports extended residencies for research and development, experimentation, and production for artists and researchers alike.

EMPAC is ideal for any research that uses media technology, sensor instrumentation, robotic devices, large immersive projections, or human interaction of larger groups than supported in most virtual environments. Augmented and virtual reality, scientific visualization and sonifications, and large-scale multimodal environments can be developed in technologically fully integrated spaces, which are designed specifically to support the full bandwidth of the senses at human scale.

Staff: , C. Abbott, K. Adams, D. Bebb, P. Bellamy, J. Braasch, S. Briggs, E. Brucker, , S. Chabot, G. Clement, J. Cook, D. Davila, D. DelaRosa, , S. Feagan, K. Gardner, , M. Hanrahan, R. Jenkins, S. Johnson, M. Lake, R. Massey, S. McLaughlin, A. Mosely, K. Muste,C. Nelson, M. Noel, S. O’Connor, S. Pohl, A. Regucera, K. Strosahl, J. Svatek, K. TeBordo, M. Valiquette, S. VanSandt, T. Vos

Director: Dr. Kevin Rose

Website: http://www.rpi.edu/dept/DFWI/

The Margaret A. and David M. Darrin ‘40 Freshwater Institute is a Center at Rensselaer that includes a field station on Lake George, an aquatic laboratory facility at the Rensselaer Technology Park, and numerous investigators from across campus. The mission of the Center is to take a science-driven, integrated approach using cutting-edge technology to help inform solutions on global issues related to ecology and the environment. Focal research has historically focused on aquatic ecology but integrated many diverse fields.

Researchers participating in the Center work on a variety of topics from multiple perspectives including ecology, evolution, ecotoxicology, limnology, geology, paleobiology, engineering, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, cyberinfrastructure, and computer modeling. A major current research effort is The Jefferson Project at Lake George, which is a collaboration with IBM and the FUND for Lake George. The goal of the Jefferson Project is to understand how lakes function and how humans influence the past, present, and future of aquatic ecosystems. In line with the mission of the Center, the Jefferson Project uses state-of-the-art ecological research, data science, and technologies to generate new insights into the most pressing issues facing water quality. Researchers combine lake monitoring, experiments, and modeling to understand the interactions of the regional weather, watershed runoff, lake circulation, and the food web. Several other large projects also are based at DFWI, including research for the Froehlich Foundation and SCALE, a Survey of Climate Change and Adirondack Lake Ecosystems.

The Lake George field station, located in Bolton Landing, NY, includes a renovated, year-round Educational Center (including lodging), several small cottages, a boathouse, a 7,500-square-foot laboratory facility for research and teaching, and the Helen-Jo and John E. Kelly III ‘78 Data Visualization Laboratory. Facilities at the Rensselaer Technology Park include lab and field facilities to conduct experiments. On campus laboratories contain numerous instruments for many types of analyses.

Affiliated Faculty and Lecturers: J. Braasch, B. Castelloe-Kuehn,  J. Dordick, J. Farrell, J. Hendler, K. High, J. Hurley, A. Kinchy, D. McGuinness, T. Morgan, S. Nierzwicki-Bauer, R. Relyea, K. Rogers, K. Rose, K. Ruiz, S. Sawyer, M. Schaller, J. Shelley, M. Si, J. Stetler, S. Wagner, J. Wen

Research and Technical Staff: L. Ahrens, M. Blonski, J. Borrelli, M. Castro Berman, A. Hrycik, M. Lucius, B. Mattes, M. Pelusi, A. Ross, G. Saunders, J. Schwitzgebel, M. Swinton, D. Winkler

Fashion Innovation Center (FIC)

Director: Kenneth L. Simons

Associate Directors: Daniel Walczyk, Helen Zha

The Fashion Innovation Center (FIC) is a consortium to nurture a New York State sustainable fashion industry.  The core focus is to advance both natural textile products including bast fibers (notably hemp) and wool, and new-technology sustainable fibers and materials, so that they are manufactured in New York State from raw materials to final fashion products.  The FIC was created in September 2023 with funding activated in May 2024.  The FIC innovates sustainable fashion technologies, accelerates sustainable fashion business innovations, engages through meetings and activities, nurtures to spread knowledge and target supply chain gaps, and markets New York State’s sustainable fashion industry.

The FIC has several main components.  Meetings and conferences bring together expertise to identify and seek to address technical challenges, supply chain gaps, and means for New York State sustainable fashion industry growth.  Lab and pilot equipment facilities establish hubs to help anchor and expand the sustainable textile industry.  A Marketing Director and a Farm to Market Business Development Director introduce designers, brands, and retailers to relevant businesses to fill demands, and spread knowledge of the Center and the New York State sustainable fashion industry.  An Economic and industry Analyst works to identify policies and opportunities for New York State sustainable fashion industry.  An innovation accelerator provides small financial awards, training, technical mentoring, and networking to companies’ innovative projects in sustainable textiles in four main areas: agricultural processing, new materials and their manufacturing innovation, textile technology, and fashion use of sustainable materials.

Consortium members are: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (lead organization), Fashion Institute of Technology, The Field to Fiber Company, Hudson Valley Textile Project, Made X Hudson, and SUNY Morrisville.

Affiliated Faculty at RPI: K.L. Simons, D. Walczyk, H. Zha, J. Samuel

Staff at RPI:

Program Manager: Peter Ohlrich

Laboratory Manager: Clyde Carpenter

Business Manager: Tanya S. Rautine

Accelerator Coach: Vacant (as of June 2024)

Economic & Industry Analyst: Vacant (as of June 2024)

Marketing Director: Vacant (as of June 2024)

Additional staff, mentors, and participants are at other consortium organizations.

Director: Boleslaw K. Szymanski

Website: http://scnarc.rpi.edu/

The Network Science and Technology (NEST) Center conducts the fundamental science and engineering research on natural and technological networks, ranging from social and cognitive networks to computer networks. The growing understanding of network structures and dynamic processes arising in them combined with the novel designs of protocols for communication and algorithms for applications enable experts in the fields ranging from sociology to biology, medicine, physics, computer science, and engineering to apply the results of the center’s research in their specific disciplines.

NEST researchers study fundamental properties of networks, the processes underlying their evolution, and the paradigms for network engineering to enhance their desirable properties such as efficiency, reliability, and robustness. Research on natural networks focuses on cognitive models of net-centric interactions, on models for community creation and evolution, on the impact of mobility on network formation, on discovering dependencies between social, information, and communication networks, and on understanding the spread of opinions and ideologies among network nodes. Research on technological networks, such as computer, transportation and energy distribution networks, focuses on their optimal design from the point of view of flow maximization, fault tolerance, graceful degradation in case of partial damage, etc. In communication networks, NEST develops and studies network protocols and algorithms, especially for wireless and sensor networks, and studies interoperability of communication networks and computer systems. NEST actively transitions the developed protocols and algorithms to industrial practice and commercialization.

NEST partners with universities, national laboratories, and industry in large scientific programs targeting interdisciplinary research. NEST is the primary member of the Social Cognitive Network Academic Research Center (SCNARC), a part of the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), funded by collaborative agreements with ARL. Other supporters include NSF, DARPA, DTRA, ARO, ONR, and DHS.

Affiliated Faculty: S. Adali, J. Gao, J. Hendler, B. Holzbauer, H. Ji, K. Kar, G. Korniss, K. Kuzmin, C. Lim, M. Magdon-Ismail, T. Sharkey, F. Spear, B. Szymanski, W. Wallace, L. Xia

Postdoctoral Associate: D. Fregolent, 

Director: James Hendler

Website: http://idea.rpi.edu

The vision of The New Polytechnic is supported by The Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications or IDEA. This breakthrough initiative brings together key research areas and advanced technologies to revolutionize the way we use data in science, engineering, and virtually every other research and educational discipline. By bridging the gaps between analytics, modeling and simulation we continue the Rensselaer tradition as a leader in applying critical technologies to improving everyday life and meeting the challenges of the future. The Rensselaer IDEA enables research across the campus to access such technologies via the development of critical computational methodologies including data-intensive supercomputing, large-scale agent-based simulation, and cognitive computing technologies.

Sub-thrusts:

Data-Driven Medical and Health-Care Applications: Research explores areas including personalized and mobile medical care, improved health-care analytics, and new data-based approaches to driving down the cost of medical care.

Business Analytics: Critical infrastructure challenges arise in areas such as supply-chain network analysis and predictive analytics for modeling markets and other dynamic systems.

Built and Natural Environments/Smart Cities: Increasing capabilities for monitoring both natural and built ecologies can lead to significant environmental advances for society. Projects scale in range from studying the molecular “biomes” that arise in urban environments to modeling large-scale environments and ecological climate effects.

Agents in Virtual and Augmented Reality: New computational technologies are needed not just for modeling built and natural systems, but also the social systems that result from how people live and work in both the cyber and physical worlds. Additionally the visualization and analysis of very large datasets requires new approaches to multi-user, multimodal data interaction technologies. New and scalable agent-based technologies using both cognitive and supercomputing techniques are also a focus of this research.

Data-Centric Engineering: Engineering design is based on the modeling of processes, devices, and systems.  Increasingly, large-scale data analysis and predictive data technologies are being used to inform the engineering models.  Bridging the gap between analytics and modeling is thus a crucial capability to the future of rapidly developing and improving engineered systems.

Cybersecurity and Network Analysis: Increasingly threats to society are growing where the networked systems of modern cyberspace come into contact with physical control systems and the social systems of people.

Data-Driven Basic Science: The use of data-driven techniques for helping scientists with their basic research has grown to the point where some now refer to this as the “Fourth Paradigm” of science. The growing area of “Semantic eScience” is another key area of research.

Policy, Ethics, and Open Data: The big-data and supercomputing revolution has the power to change the world for the better. However, it also comes with a dark side. This sub-thrust focuses on how the benefits are achieved while controlling for the threats posed by ill-informed policy creation, unethical collection and use of data, and the tension between open data and privacy protections.

Affiliated Faculty: S. Adali, E. Ameres, J. Bailey, K. Bennett, , J. Braasch, C. Breneman, S. Bringsjord, C. Carothers, T. Chen, J. Dordick, S. Dunn, K. Fraser,  S. Garde, V. Ghosal, J. Hahn, J. Hendler, J. Holguin-Veras, R. Hull, J. Hurley, R. Ivanov, J. Kuruzovich, J. Lin, L. Liu, M. Magdon-Ismail, L. Manikonda, D. McGuinness, M. McShane, D. Nevo, S. Pan, S. Paternain, J. Pazour, T. Ravichandran, R. Relyea, T. Rhone, K. Rogers, J. Samuel, D. Schwendeman, P. Search, O. Seneviratne, M. Si, S. Smith, B. Szymanski, T. Strzalkowski, D. Vashishth, W. Wallace, Y. Wang, L. Xia, B. Yener, M. Zaki

Director: Mark S. Shephard

Website: http://www.scorec.rpi.edu 

The Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC) is focused on the development and deployment of reliable simulation technologies for engineers, scientists, medical professionals, and other practitioners. These advancements enable experts to tackle real-world problems in their fields and to appraise and evaluate the behavior of physical, chemical, and biological systems of interest.

SCOREC research is focused on the development of the technologies necessary to enable simulation-based engineering on high-performance computing platforms. Simulation-based engineering enables inquiry about the interaction of behaviors across spatiotemporal scales that are important to predicting the behavior of materials, devices and systems, and in the design of optimized products and processes. SCOREC research includes the development of adaptive methods for reliable simulations involving complex geometry and unstructured meshes, methods to do all computation on massively parallel and heterogeneously accelerated computers, scientific machine learning to accelerate simulation workflows, coupled multiscale and multiphysics computational methods, interoperable technologies that speed up simulation system development, and the integration of quantum computing into scientific computation. The developed parallel unstructured mesh technologies are used by DOE physics simulation codes executing on the world’s largest supercomputers. Application areas for simulation technologies being developed include fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, plasma physics, climate science, electromagnetics, nanomaterials, and nanoelectronics. As part of this research SCOREC partners with universities, national laboratories, and industry on the construction of simulation systems. SCOREC actively transitions the simulation technologies developed to industrial practice and commercialization by software companies.

Core Faculty: J.W. Banks, H. Belanger, C.D. Carothers, J.E. Hicken, A.M. Maniatty, J.S. Merson, C.R. Picu, O. Sahni, M.S. Shephard, G.M. Slota, O. Tumuklu

Affiliated Faculty: M. Amitay, K.S. Anderson, D.J. Lewis, F. Li, R. Ozisik, M. Zeghal, L. Zhang

Research Staff: M.A. Bloomfield, J. Carter, A. Castillo-Crooke, S. Kaur, O.S. Raisuddin, S.E. Seol, C.W. Smith, P. Trivedi

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