Fall 2020

Letters

Letter from the President

The challenges of mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic on a thriving urban campus are immense, and the Illinois Institute of Technology community has responded with a level of commitment and grace befitting a world-class university. On September 8 we welcomed students for the fall 2020 semester, nearly six months after the pandemic shifted our courses online.

On Campus

Maneuvering the New Normal in the New Academic Year

“Party at Rosa’s” sounds like a fun Saturday night happening. But for an Illinois Institute of Technology student, or faculty or staff member in need of a COVID-19 face mask, that whimsical descriptive represents just one of 24 lively patterned fabrics that volunteer sewers fashioned into free masks, courtesy of...

On Campus

Illinois Tech Headliners

“We’re already used to being tracked online. Now it’s bleeding into the real world.” Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita Lori B. Andrews, in a column in the Los Angeles Times about the use of Clear Channel’s outdoor billboard surveillance technology

On Campus

New Meaning to Eating Out in Style

Diners at the Original Soul Vegetarian restaurant in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood enjoyed eating out in style and in socially distanced safety this summer in a prototype pavilion-style shelter built by College of Architecture Adjunct Professor Vladimir Radutny and his fourth-year students Daniel Allen and Jeisson Rodriguez-Arias. The trio took part in a city task force co-founded by College of Architecture Board of Advisors member Mark Sexton (ARCH ’80) that is working to provide new infrastructures and resources to West Side and South Side businesses impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides the restaurant shelter, smaller dining shelters called “Nests” were built and erected along the 75th Street business district. Sang-hyo Kim (ARCH ’19) and Boram Oh (ARCH ’20) of Krueck Sexton Partners both contributed to the Nest project.

On Campus

Maryam Saleh to Lead Kaplan Institute

Chicago-based computational neuroscientist and startup veteran Maryam Saleh is the new executive director of Illinois Institute of Technology’s Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship.

On Campus

Illinois Tech Welcomes New Faculty

New faculty joining Illinois Tech in 2020–21 include researchers and scholars in Armour College of Engineering, Chicago-Kent College of Law, the College of Computing, and Lewis College of Science and Letters.

Philanthropy News

The Collective Genius at Work

For Jim Albrecht (FE ’53, M.S. ’55), it all started with an article in Illinois Tech Magazine. In fact, Albrecht keeps a few copies of the winter 2012 issue on hand because the vertical-farming article “The Plant” proved to be so important to his support for Illinois Institute of Technology’s IPRO Scholarship Fund over the last eight years.

Athletics

Motivation in Motion

The Illinois Institute of Technology Department of Athletics has not been immune from the unprecedented level of change that 2020 has brought as the COVID-19 pandemic uprooted college athletics across the United States, canceling the spring and fall seasons for Scarlet Hawks athletes.

Research Briefs

Gamification at School or Work a Win-Win

Incorporating elements of gaming into learning environments and workplaces is proving not just trendy, but also effective in producing positive learning outcomes, according to new research from Assistant Professor of Psychology Kristina Bauer and industrial-organizational psychology Ph.D. students Danny Gandara and Caribay Garcia-Marquez.

Research Briefs

Move Aside, Bit. It’s Qubit’s Time to Shine

The qubit is rightfully claiming its stake in twenty-first century computing. Much like the bit that comprises the binary language of standard computers, the qubit is the basic unit of communication of quantum computers. John Zasadzinski, Paul and Suzi Schutt Endowed Chair and Illinois Institute of Technology professor of physics, and new faculty member Rakshya Khatiwada, assistant professor of physics, are representing the university in a partnership with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory on a $575 million multi-institution initiative to develop a quantum computer that is millions of times more powerful than today’s supercomputers.

Research Briefs

Seeing with the Brain

A groundbreaking artificial vision system that bypasses the optic nerve and instead, transmits image information to a special pair of eyeglasses via a camera and a wireless implant on the visual cortex of the brain, has advanced to the clinical trials stage this year. The National Institutes of Health awarded...

Features

Delivering on a Tasty Idea

One day, when he was a graduate student, Linxin Wen (M.P.A. ’15) started knocking on doors in Chicago’s Chinatown. All he had to sell was an idea, born of his own frustration that many of his favorite “mom and pop” restaurants weren’t listed on mobile food-delivery platforms. What was Wen’s idea? He would deliver the food himself.

Features

Breaking the Cycle

These are the issues that have been at the forefront of Sodiqa Williams’s mind for more than a decade, things that have intersected through her personal and professional lives: Mass incarceration. Race in the United States. Equity.

Features

How Does a Class Project Become a Startup?

The Pepper smart kitchen scale, the brainchild of brothers Andrei (M.Des.+ M.B.A. ’18) and Mihai Hogea (M.D.M. ’18), started with a simple sketch of a scale, a carrot, and the Amazon logo, which Andrei had drawn for a course at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design (ID) after he was assigned to come up with an idea for a Kickstarter campaign. A water sport accident that resulted in nerve damage to Andrei’s right leg also served as personal inspiration.

Features

Food Microbiologist at Work

They may be lurking in your vacuum cleaner bag, your child’s pet turtle droppings, or in the fresh onions you just sliced to garnish your cheeseburger. They might be in your burger, too. While they are naturally found in the intestinal tract of food livestock such as cows, pigs, or chickens, when they exhibit signs of being in your intestinal tract—you may find that for a few days your body feels as though it’s been taken over by an alien lifeform. They are Salmonella, rod-shaped, nearly always pathogenic bacteria that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, account for about 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations, and 420 deaths each year in the United States alone. Learn what one Illinois Institute of Technology alumnus is doing to decrease those numbers.

Features

Betting on a Targeted Therapy

This past summer, 39-year-old Susan Altschuller (Ph.D. BME ’07) joined Waltham, Massachusetts-based ImmunoGen as its chief financial officer. Altschuller is a member of a leadership team tasked with preparing the company to bring a drug to market for the first time: an ovarian cancer therapy called mirvetuximab soravtansine, or “Mirv” for short. “This company has been through a lot. And now it’s on the precipice of launching a product that makes a difference for cancer patients,” says Altschuller.