Researchers value the promptings of curiosity. Often, the best way to make sense of unexpected observations and anomalies comes from another discipline. In Smarter Faster Better, author Charles Duhigg cites the power of innovation brokers. These are people who bring the models, processes, and knowledge from one discipline into a different one. For two centuries, Rensselaer has approached exploration, including efforts in research and development, with who we are as individuals and who we are in community. Both tool-making and the pursuit of knowledge are fully human endeavors.
The result: Something new and valuable.
How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe — dark matter.
Electrical and systems engineers from Rensselaer will develop simulation models to help researchers at the University of Illinois develop an all-electric aircraft, a project that recently received a $6 million grant from NASA.
On the second floor of the J. Erik Jonsson Engineering Center in the heart of the Rensselaer campus, a room has been created that has the potential to be almost anything. Students who enter could find themselves standing on the wing of an airplane, managing a failing nuclear reactor, or designing the crystalline structure of a molecule.
A wide-eyed, soft-spoken robot named Pepper motors around the Intelligent Systems Lab at Rensselaer. One of the researchers tests Pepper, making various gestures as the robot accurately describes what he’s doing.
