The Month in Photos: January 2020

This ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrated the opening of PracticePoint, a collaborative, membership-based development and testing facility that will lead to advances in healthcare and patient wellness technologies.

What’s cooler than the weather? Having the chance to take classes in flash fiction and sushi making to pitch crafting and personal finance—which is exactly what students, faculty, and staff did during this year’s WinterSession.

Biology and biotechnology professor Reeta Rao has been named associate dean of Graduate Studies. In taking on the role, her long-term goal is "to listen, learn, and support every graduate program at WPI so it can become as distinctive as it can be and provide our grad students with the best learning environment.”

New year, new…maps? Obviously.

What’s the ASL sign for breakthrough? Computer science professor Erin Solovey is part of a team researching the feasibility of interfaces that will allow deaf individuals to utilize technology completely in American Sign Language.

The men’s basketball team posted four straight wins on the road in mid-January and are regularly receiving votes in the D3hoops.com Top 25 poll.

Students have wasted no time getting back into the labs, using their talents and passions to create the next big thing in, well, everything.

As much as this may seem like a depiction of two consecutive days of New England weather, it’s actually the focus of new work by WPI researchers Shichao Liu, Steven Van Dessel, and Jacob Whitehill: developing technologies to control classroom temperature, ventilation, and lighting to boost student engagement.

Mathematical sciences, computer science, and data science professor Randy Paffenroth is using all three to help the U.S. Army create a sensor that can detect dangerous chemicals more quickly. Talk about the three musketeers!

The women’s swimming and diving team won two meets on January 22, defeating Hartwick and Norwich and paving the way for a second straight winning season.

This year’s President’s IQP Awards presentations were held Friday, January 31. The winning team was based right here in Worcester, and created an app offering resources for substance abuse recovery, housing, mental health support, and more.

The Vietnamese Student Association hosted a Lunar New Year celebration—complete with native cuisine, games, and live performances—in Alden Memorial.

We're excited to run further into 2020, and to see what the rest of the decade brings.