News

STS PhD student Katie Sullivan has been selected for the highly competitive Graduate Research Fellowship. The National Science Foundation selected her for this three-year fellowship, stating, “Being offered an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is a significant national accomplishment that highlights your potential to make significant contributions to STEM and STEM education.”

STS grad students had an impressive showing in the 2026 McKinney Writing Contest! For the Graduate Academic Essay, Fahmi Fahroji won first place (for the second year in a row!), Cling Malaco won honorable mention, and Sophia Acquisto won honorable mention. In addition, Sophia Acquisto won first place in Graduate Poetry and first place in Graduate Language and Image.

As part of her senior thesis about Repair Cafes and the Right to Repair movement, Sophia Turnbow (STS+ITWS) worked with Vasudha: the Eco House to co-organize a repair café on the RPI campus. A repair café is a community-focused event where students and local volunteers come together to repair items like clothing, small electronics, bikes, and more. Instead of throwing things away, the goal is to fix them, learn new skills, and reduce waste. A WAMC reporter was there to document the event. You can read and listen to the story, which aired on Northeast Public Radio on April 6 on wamc.org.

DIS seniors presented their final projects at the DIS’s Senior Project Poster Session. Many students, professors, and friends turned out to interact with the students’ impressive designs and to learn about the research behind them.

Zoe Puno (DIS+MECL ’26) received the Tech Transfer Award at the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship Innovation Showcase for her project on 3D Printed Luminaires!

Matthew Wolf-Meyer, along with Eugene Raikhel and Junko Kitanaka, edited "Mapping Medical Anthropology for the 21st Century", which features contributions from a wide variety of medical anthropologists from around the world. It’s meant to both be an introduction to medical anthropology and provide specialists with a state of the art reference to where medical anthropology is and where it might be going.

Student environmental clubs and STS professors, along with Vasudha: the Eco House, collaborated to organize this special panel event featuring guest speakers Gavin McIntyre (Ecovative CEO) and Bobbi Wilding (Clean + Healthy Executive Director), who are both RPI alumni. They spoke about their innovative solutions to sustainability and interacted with students.

Adam Biggs gave the 2026 Anton and Rose Zverina Lecture for the Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University, titled “Reconstructing the Mission of Medicine: Racial Reform in the Medical Archive.” (3 March 2026)

Professor Lina Dib has artwork on exhibit now. On view until Jan 2027, she has a large-scale installation up at Art Club, POST HTX (Houston, Texas). Additionally, she has work in a show at San Jacinto College South Campus Gallery.

STS Assistant Professor Verónica Uribe del Águila received two prizes for her paper, “Making Innovation in the Mexican Silicon Valley: The Early Years of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (1981-2001). ”The Labor Tech Research Network recognized the work with the Graduate Student Paper Award, stating, “The paper is a must-read for anyone interested in rethinking the politics of innovation, labor, and development in the Global South.” The paper is also the winner of the 2026 Mahoney Prize, awarded by Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) for an outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology.

DIS majors displayed their work in an exhibit called the Museum of Unnatural History. The exhibit was composed of the final projects from students enrolled in Studio B: Designing the Future. Individually and collectively, the objects tell a future history of the next 100 years.

The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at RPI, in conjunction with Albany Symphony, New York State Canal Corporation, and New York Power Authority, presented Reflections on Waterways, a symposium that revisited the various celebratory performances done along the route of the Erie Canal commemorating the 200th anniversary of the waterway, with commentary from several guest speakers, including STS Senior Lecturer Christopher Tozzi.

Professor Edward Woodhouse has been awarded the title of Faculty Emeritus, joining Langdon Winner and Linnda Caporael in that distinction.

Dr. Verónica Uribe del Águila joins us as an assistant professor, with a focus on design and information studies. Dr. Sara Black begins a position as a lecturer, with a focus on sustainability, agriculture, and critical geography. Dr. Lina Dib, a new senior lecturer, is an anthropologist and artist whose work highlights how our relationships with technological and natural systems are intimately linked to our relationships with each other.

Nancy Campbell was awarded an H. B. DuPont Fellowship for research at the Hagley Library and Archives and was a 2025-2026 Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer edited an online collection of essays for Public Books on the topic of "no futures.”

Matthew Wolf-Meyer has a new edited volume called Proposals for a Caring Economy. Proposals for a Caring Economy articulates an economy that situates care at the forefront; sees the preservation of individual, community, and environmental wellbeing as the primary good; and focuses attention on building a sustainable economy of caring that will radically transform social connections and possibilities.

Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn's research team led PREFACE 2025, the "Rensselaer Summer Engineering Design Program. Building on research within PREFACE 2024, this year's two-week residential STEM-focused summer camp incorporated a new focus on "nuclear systems literacy," rooted in critical STS concepts and methodologies.

Jen Cardinal and Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, in collaboration with faculty from every school at RPI and numerous community partners, were awarded a $50,000 grant by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to support "Participatory Climate Justice & Resilience: Building Community Engaged Capacity."