Stony Brook University SUNY Korea

The paper titled "Trust in Humanoid Robots in Footwear Stores: A Crisp-Set QCA Model" suggests a human perception and acceptance network model when humans are exposed to robots in retail stores. And it is aimed to enhance the trust between human and intelligent robots through the quantitative analysis for consumers' satisfaction, reliability, and sales. This HRI model can be used at the retail clothes or footwear stores to enhance on/off-line sales and marketing. It is a very practical attempt and will have great potential for in-field applications. - Professor of Mechanical Engineering Department, Bruce Jo.     Prof. Bruce Jo received the Paper of Distinction on Merchandising/Retailing part from ITAA (International Textile and Apparel Association) with his collaborator Prof. Christina Song, Illinois State University and Prof. Youn-Kyung Kim, University of Tennessee.

In 2009, published genome-wide DNA data was not available for a single ancient human individual. Today, there is genome-wide data available for more than 6,000 ancient humans. This rapid expansion of ancient DNA (aDNA) research enables scientists to uncover more information than ever on past human populations, including their genetic adaptations, patterns of migration and mixing, and even clues about our species’ deep past. But this wide availability of aDNA brings ethical questions on how the data is gathered and used to the forefront. Now a team of more than 60 scholars from 31 countries has articulated a set of ethical guidelines regarding aDNA as a way to govern such research globally. Their guidelines are published in Nature.     The authors — which include Elizabeth Sawchuk, a research assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, and a research associate of the Turkana Basin Institute — contend that the ethics of aDNA research has a particular urgency because of the rapid growth of the field, the societal and political impacts of studying ancestry, and the fact that aDNA work analyzes once living people who must be respected.     Any research that pursues questions about the past by generating genetic data from archaeologically derived human tissues, such as skeletal remains, constitutes aDNA research. Such work has revealed new information about individuals and events anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years old.     Sawchuk believes that establishing a globally applicable set of guidelines is a turning point in the field of aDNA research.     Sawchuckpic Elizabeth Sawchuk in the Turkana Basin in Kenya collecting a sample for ancient DNA analysis. “Since the first fully sequenced ancient human genome was published in 2010, we have been operating in what some have characterized as a rather chaotic ancient DNA revolution,” says Sawchuk. “After years of public outcry to establish clear universal guidelines for ethical research in this field, our paper attempts to do just that. The work represents the largest effort to date to create global guidelines for aDNA research developed by a team of diverse archeologists, curators, geneticists and other stakeholders. I think our guidelines will fundamentally shift the way the field operates and will have a long-lasting impact.”     The authors point out that much of the literature thus far on the ethics of aDNA research has centered around North America. Their research presents global case studies that illustrate the breadth of issues surrounding the identification of community and Indigenous groups, and stress that researchers need to recognize that there are global differences in the meaning of Indigeneity.     The team together assessed a range of issues related to carrying out research on ancient human remains, with a specific focus on different research contexts and diverse perspectives held by those conducting research as well as other stakeholders — which may include Indigenous peoples, descendants and/or guardian communities, museum curators, and others with a connection to the ancient individuals sampled.     Using this approach, the international team of scholars developed what they believe is a strong and universally applicable set of ethical guidelines summarized by five points:     Researchers must ensure that all regulations are followed in the places where they work, including all local regulations. Prepare a detailed plan prior to beginning any study. Minimize damage to human remains. Ensure that data are made available following publication to allow critical reexamination of the scientific findings. Engage with other stakeholders from the beginning of a study to ensure respect and sensitivity to stakeholder perspectives. Key to ensuring ethical practices and sensitivity when conducting aDNA research, say the authors, is to identify and consult with the stakeholders and communities appropriate to specific research contexts and questions. This should occur from the very beginning of a study, alongside the creation of a detailed plan for how research will be conducted, and results shared.     Another key guideline involves making aDNA data available to other scientists for the purpose of replication once research is complete, so scientific results can be independently confirmed without the need for additional destructive sampling. Researchers should also engage with how their findings are communicated and understood, and correct misrepresentations when appropriate.     As an anthropologist who studies ancient human remains, Sawchuk particularly supports the guideline aimed at minimizing damage to remains.     “As our only direct link to people who experienced life in the past, human remains must be respected and carefully conserved. We must balance the potential benefits of aDNA research with the impacts on skeletal collections, and always remember that we are studying other human beings,” she stressed.

As a child growing up in a small town in India with little access to electronics or technology, Anurag Purwar never had a chance to experience anything related to robotics.     “Looking back, I’m sure it would have had a major impact on me,” said Purwar, now an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University.     And while a second chance at childhood is the stuff Hollywood screenplays are made of, Purwar is not only getting an opportunity to experience the dreams he missed, he’s working with a greater goal of making a transformational robotics experience possible for today’s children all around the world.     Boosting his noble cause, Purwar’s research group, in collaboration with Stony Brook University startup Mechanismic Inc., recently received a $1 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their proposal, “A Design-Driven Educational Robotics Framework.” The award comes from NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR), an approximately $180 million seed funding program designed to help commercialize high-risk technological innovations via research and development grants to small businesses and startups.     Assisting Purwar with their own unique expertise are Stony Brook colleagues Keith Sheppard from the Institute of STEM Education, Erik Flynn, clinical lecturer from the School of Health Technology and Management, Kedar Kirane, assistant professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Jeff Ge, professor and chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering.     The award follows Phase I funding Purwar received from the NSF in 2019, which led to the development of SnappyXO Design, a platform that was conceived and developed in Purwar’s research lab, Computer-Aided Design and Innovation. Prior to receiving NSF funding, Purwar received funding from the NSF’s I-Corps (Innovation-Corps) program, which helped him with customer discovery. Building upon his entrepreneurial experiences, Purwar is the current PI and the site director of the NSF I-Corps program at Stony Brook.     Mechanismic Inc. is the licensing partner and is working to bring the technology to market. The company, for which Purwar serves as CEO, has received several startup awards and grants from the SUNY Research Foundation, Fuzehub, SPIR, SensorCAT, and MTRC (Manufacturing & Technology Resource Consortium at Stony Brook programs. In addition, Purwar and his team have received significant commercialization support from SUNY Research Foundation as a SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF) awardee and SUNY Startup Summer School Class of 2020 graduate and TAF Catalyst Investment winner.     “SnappyXO was originally created to address a fundamental need to teach freshman college students authentic engineering design in the context of robotics,” he said.     Snappy xo ms A middle school student wiring a SnappyXO robot. Purwar is currently working to develop a Design-Driven Educational Robotics Framework, a unified and holistic platform which teaches students engineering design, practical electronics, and computer programming under one umbrella, and brings a new approach to STEM and robotics education. In this model, students engage in the entire design innovation cycle from conceptualization to programmed robots.     Purwar said that this multi-disciplinary approach provides multiple entry points for students to be engaged in different STEM disciplines, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science, rather than just focusing on coding.     “This approach has been shown to be especially effective for engaging young women and encouraging them to pursue STEM education and careers,” he said. “Given that both minorities and women are highly underrepresented across STEM education and careers, adoption of this teaching style presents an opportunity to increase engagement among these groups.”     Purwar’s robotics education program is unique in that it enables students to not only build robots but to design and prototype their own robot kits. The incorporated hardware has varied levels of sophistication suitable for individual students’ level of knowledge.     “This technology can not only transform STEM and robotics education in schools and colleges, it could also lead to design tools used by automation and robotic industries,” he said.     “Professor Purwar and his SnappyXO robot kit have been featured in the summer MTRC Robotics Camp since 2018, in which high school students team up to learn and design robots for prescribed tasks,” said Imin Kao, executive director of MTRC. “This robotics learning program is a workforce development event for MTRC because these students will join the manufacturing workforce in just a few years.”     Anurag purwar 1 2 Anurag Purwar A key component of SnappyXO Design is a state-of-the-art robot motion design software, which builds on years of Purwar’s NSF-funded research in solving an age-old problem of kinematic design of machines and robots.     “As part of this project, our research is going to bring together rigid body kinematics and machine learning to develop a suite of methods and algorithms for an AI-driven mechanism design architecture,” he said. “This software will democratize design innovation and invention and put the power of creativity in the hands of every student and engineer. SnappyXO Design also comes with a patented hardware and standards-aligned curriculum for K-12 and college students.”     Purwar said this award will enable his research team to develop the next generation of hardware for robot design, software for building invention design capacity, and a standards-aligned curriculum for K-12 and college students.     “Creating this robotics education product is my way of reliving my childhood playing, tinkering, and learning with robots and machines that I wish I had,” he said. “I expect that the scalability and affordability of this product would allow millions of children all over the world to experience authentic robotics education.”     — Robert Emproto

Stony Brook President Maurie McInnis announced sweeping investments in research at the Campus Conversation on Accelerating Research, held online on Friday, October 15.     “Today is a start of a new and exciting chapter in Stony Brook history, because we’re going to be talking about making investments, hiring, looking ahead, and planning what comes next for this great institution,” said McInnis. “When I first came here, one of the things I was committed to was expanding our research. Today we’re going to talk about some of the work that we’re doing to enhance our research portfolio. As I speak with people in the Stony Brook community, I sense a greater degree of optimism of hope and a sense that exciting things are coming.”     Joining McInnis in the webinar were Paul Goldbart, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost, Richard Reeder, vice president for research, and Alfredo Fontanini, professor of neurobiology and behavior, who was recently appointed as Stony Brook’s first vice provost for research and infrastructure.     McInnis began by clarifying the initiative, providing a bigger picture of what this investment means.     “We’re talking about all disciplines, including the humanities, the social sciences and the creative arts,” she said. “We’re talking about the English professor who’s writing a book on Indian captivity narratives; the historian who is writing about race and race relations between India and Africa; the soprano who is preparing for performance with one of the world’s great opera companies; and the economist who is working on the effects of COVID-19 through network simulation and big data.”     Goldbart echoed the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration.     “Having this full spectrum of research is one of the things that makes Stony Brook incredibly exciting,” he said. “We have ethicists and philosophers, microbiologists and ecologists, anthropologists, chemists, linguists, neuroscientists humanists and physician scientists all striving to understand the world more deeply and elevate the human spirit. It’s remarkable. We’ve had inspiring conversations with people in music and people in history and other disciplines, learning from each other about what draws them to their scholarship and research. It’s an example of our deep commitment to the full spectrum of research.”     Accelerating research title     Goldbart also announced that Stony Brook is moving ahead with faculty hiring, with a goal to hire more than 50 tenure and tenure track faculty this year and next year, hopefully by September 2022.     “As we engaged with faculty across the spectrum, we saw that there are critical roles to be played by people in the arts, people in the humanities, and people in social sciences as well as people in STEM fields,” Goldbart said. “This diversity is the heart of the Stony Brook future.”     Reeder discussed two important current pieces of legislation in Congress, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the reconciliation bill. “This legislation has provisions for tens of billions of dollars for new research and development,” he said, noting that agencies including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Department of Defense would all see significant budget increases. “Some of the priority topics that have been highlighted, like climate and clean energy, quantum information, and health-related topics, are very important to us.”     Reeder also said the U.S. Innovation in Competition Act (USICA) has broad bipartisan support, and identifies 10 focus areas that need to have additional funding. “These 10 focus areas are what we really use to define our focus teams,” he said. “There is a pilot project sponsored by both the Provost’s Office and my office with the goal of constructing teams of subject matter experts that would be nimble and able to respond to funding opportunities as early as possible.“     Fontanini discussed the work of the Strategic Research Council, a committee he created that advocates for researchers. “It expresses the needs of the faculty and the research active faculty,” he said. “One of these needs was for a standing committee on campus that would advocate for research and research support in administration and identify challenges and opportunities and provide actionable advice.”     To this end, Fontanini, Goldbart and Reeder meet on a monthly basis.     “The overarching goal is to support research here at Stony Brook,” Fontanini said. “The more practical goal and ambition of ours is to increase health and research investment. But we need to connect our researchers and administration. We need to facilitate communication and putting a clear governance in place via the Strategic Resource Council will make everyone’s life much easier. We’re working hard on these challenges.”     McInnis pointed to the interdisciplinary nature of Stony Brook’s research and the need to bring disciplines together to tackle immediate real-world challenges like climate science, healthcare disparity, and injustice.     “These are vitally important conversations for us to be having right now,” she said. “What we’re talking about when we say we’re accelerating research is supporting our faculty across all of our disciplines to work together in tackling these far-reaching challenges.”     — Robert Emproto

The impact of climate change on Long Island is visible almost anywhere you look. A new WSHU podcast, Higher Ground, produced with help from faculty and students at Stony Brook’s School of Communication and Journalism, was recently featured on the nationally syndicated National Public Radio show “Science Friday.”     Higher Ground graphicProduced by J.D. Allen, WSHU assistant news director and journalism instructor, the podcast takes an in-depth look at the effects of our changing climate on Long Island’s culture and history, economy, and power distribution systems. It also explores regional pollution and the social costs of climate change on low-income and other disadvantaged communities.      “We are so excited to share Higher Ground with the WSHU listening audience and the broader community around the country,” said Rima Dael, WSHU general manager. “When we surveyed our listeners recently about what kind of stories and news they wanted, 80 percent of them said they wanted environmental stories. We’re so happy to respond with this podcast. These episodes are not just stories; they share solutions to climate issues that are impacting our communities locally, and that are representative of national and international climate issues we all face.”     The podcast also featured researchers from the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) and was created with help from Stony Brook students.      “We wanted not just to report on the effects of climate change, but to look at possible solutions,” said Terry Sheridan, WSHU news director and another journalism instructor at Stony Brook. “This is something that we have to deal with sooner rather than later.”     The eight-episode series encompasses almost all of Long Island’s Suffolk County, from North Shore’s Setauket to the Hamptons on the South Shore. It ventures into Nassau County as well, to explore endangered birds at Lido Beach and the historic bay homes of Hempstead.     “Climate change is inescapable on Long Island; many of us have seen sea levels rise, and we all bear memories of the increasingly frequent ‘storms of the century,’” said Laura Lindenfeld, dean of the School of Communication and Journalism and executive director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. “Though we all live with climate change everyday, we will continue to struggle with how to adapt to it without help from in-depth conversations and stories like those featured on Higher Ground.”     Donovan Finn and Lesley Thorne, both assistant professors at SoMAS, were featured in episodes, along with Kimberly Lato, one of Thorne’s PhD students.     “Higher Ground tackles the complexities of climate change in a very personal way,” said Donovan, who also directs the environmental design, policy and planning program at SoMAS. “It’s an incredibly timely and important topic because climate change is going to fundamentally alter the lives of every Long Islander in the future, and Higher Ground confronts the implications of these hard choices in a really compassionate way by giving voice to the real people who will be most affected. It’s a moving and effective piece of journalism.”     Kelly Hills-Muckey, a genetics PhD student who is also earning an advanced graduate certificate in communicating science, and journalism major Sara Ruberg worked as associate producers of the podcast, helping with research and fact checking. Joshua Joseph, another journalism student, produced the graphics.     “I contributed research I’ve done in the past on these topics and then helped to coordinate each episode’s theme and sources and how different climate topics are impacting Long Island,” said Ruberg, a senior from Cincinnati. “Climate change reporting and environmental reporting is something I’m passionate about. I learned a lot about climate science, and I love going deep into ongoing issues and getting the context and the full story.”     The podcast was supported by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and the Kavli Foundation.      Subscribe to Higher Ground on Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher.

Bill Siemering, a pioneer in radio broadcasting, will deliver a virtual lecture on Wednesday, October 20, about his storied career and the ongoing power of public radio. Hosted by the Stony Brook University School of Communication and Journalism, the event is part of the School’s My Life As Speaker Series.      A central figure in the creation of National Public Radio (NPR), Siemering is the author of its original mission statement. He served as a member of the organization’s founding board of directors.      He was then hired as NPR’s first director of programming, and developed the popular program “All Things Considered,” as well as other NPR original programs including “Fresh Air” and “Soundprint.” While manager of WHYY in Philadelphia, he collaborated with station staff to develop “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” from a local to a national program.     “Bill Siemering is a trailblazer in radio,” said Laura Lindenfeld, dean of the School of Communication and Journalism. “Many of our students have developed passions for audio journalism through our partnership with NPR member station WSHU, and we are excited they’ll have the opportunity to hear and learn from such an influential figure in the world of radio.”      Siemering began his career in radio and worked his way through the University of Wisconsin at the university station and state-wide FM Network. There, he learned the basics of broadcasting, from engineering to on-air work. He went on to manage public radio stations WBFO, SUNY Buffalo, and KCCM in Moorhead, Minnesota.      In 2004, he started Developing Radio Partners to enrich the programming of community radio stations in Africa.      Siemering is currently a senior fellow at the Wyncote Foundation in Philadelphia.     The lecture and a question-and-answer session will stream live beginning at 7 pm to the School of Communication and Journalism’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The closing reception for Stony Brook University Art Professor Nobuho Nagasawa’s installation, “Drawn to the Light,” will be held on Saturday, October 16, from 2 pm to 6 pm at the Westwood Gallery in New York City. Her solo exhibition has been on display since August 19, where visitors have been sharing their stories of the loss of loved ones due to COVID-19.     Nagasawa exhibit Throughout the exhibit, Nagasawa stenciled hundreds of luna moths on one of the gallery walls, marking a visual memory that connects to emotional memory. As part of the closing reception, starting at 2 pm, Nagasawa will begin to erase the moth drawings created together with the community as a symbolic act of release for all we have lost during COVID-19.      Then at 4 pm, Stony Brook University Theatre Arts Professor Izumi Ashizawa will perform, “And, Into Thin Air,” which is a movement performance of art in dialogue with Nagasawa’s installation. Through her concentrated movements, Ashizawa will guide the audience to release their memories of loved ones.

Zhenhua Liu, from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS), has received the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER Research Award. He will receive a total of $533,000 to develop his project, “An adaptive framework to accelerate real-time workloads in heterogeneous and reconfigurable environments.”     Artificial intelligence and machine learning are enabling real-time decisions based on live data for interactive scientific discovery and mission critical applications such as autonomous driving and smart grid. They are increasingly powered by heterogeneous and even reconfigurable accelerators. Today, managing heterogeneous and reconfigurable systems for diverse workloads with high resource utilization and performance guarantee is an extremely challenging task and can slow down scientific discovery and waste computing resources and energy.     Liu’s research aims to design an adaptive framework that automatically detects, profiles, and analyzes both workloads and accelerators on the fly. The developed framework will provide provable performance even with partial information in unknown environments, which is urgently needed due to the ever-increasing system complexity and volatility in workloads.     “This technology has the potential to improve the efficiency of costly computing systems, which saves energy, makes better use of existing investments, and leads to a net savings to taxpayers,” said Joe Mitchell, chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. “Zhenhua’s research will have broader impacts too, bringing educational innovations, outreach, and opportunities for both academic and industrial participants to train the next generation of researchers and practitioners for society as a whole.”     “The NSF CAREER award is one of the most prestigious honors for junior faculty members,” said Jon Longtin, interim dean, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Zhenhua’s well-deserved accomplishments fuel our research enterprise with scientific discoveries that address today’s biggest societal challenges while enhancing the opportunities we provide to our students. I wish to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Zhenhau and look forward to his future contributions to CEAS!”     Liu’s research interests include sustainable computing and networking systems, cloud platforms for big data applications and energy management, and renewable energy integration. He develops and applies techniques from distributed systems, nonlinear optimization, game theory, and online algorithms for these systems. In particular, his research combines rigorous analysis and system design, and goes from theory, to prototype, and eventually to industry to make real impacts. In addition to the CAREER award, Liu was recently awarded the IBM 2020 Global University Program Academic Award, ACM SIGMETRICS 2021 Rising Star Research Award, ACM SIGMETRICS 2021 Test-of-time Paper Award, and INFOCOM 2020 Best Paper Award.     The NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is a Foundation-wide program that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education. The awards, presented once each year, include a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years.

Susan Y. Lee, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine at Stony Brook’s Renaissance School of Medicine, is an inaugural winner of the INSPIRE Award from the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA). She received the award — along with her colleague Dr. Ankita Sagar from the Zucker School of Medicine Hofstra/Northwell Health — for starting a Women in Medicine Series for the New York Chapter of the American College of Physicians (ACP). Dr. Lee is also governor of the ACP New York Chapter.     The AMWA Leadership Council established the INSPIRE Awards to recognize women physicians who personally and/or professionally provide inspiration to other physicians or students through expert and compassionate patient-oriented medical care, or through mentorship, or service to the community. INSPIRE recipients were nominated by their peers, or their students, and selected by AMWA leaders. A total of eight accomplished women physicians who exemplify the highest values in vision, integrity, service, and collaboration in medicine received the award.     Dr. Lee is an internist and medical director of Stony Brook Primary Care, an accredited Patient Centered Medical Home. She received her MD from New York University School of Medicine and completed post-doctoral training at New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center.

C.J. Yeh, assistant chair of Illustration and Interactive Media, has been named Featured Artist of the Week by Taiwan Contemporary Art Archives, a database established by the Association of the Visual Art in Taiwan.     Screenshot of a figure facing a screen with thumbs-up symbols     Yeh’s featured work, an installation titled “LikeMe777,” is a satire on the narcissistic practice of using social networks for the purpose of self-promotion. This interactive software program tracks and “likes” every movement the viewer makes within the view of the camera. Once a random “magic number” of likes has been accumulated, a kitschy visual celebration explodes onto the screen commemorating this achievement and showering the viewer with blatant, artificial praise. This visual love-fest concludes with a shameless self-promotion of the artist’s own Facebook page (facebook.com/cyeh777), urging the viewers to return the favor and become his fan on the platform.

Title : Blessing Blossoms X Jeong-nam Seong Hat Exhibition Duration : October 2021 – The end of the semester Content : About 10 hats and headpieces designed for costumes displayed at the Blessing Blossom exhibition. It consists of elaborate headpieces produced by Jeong-nam Seong, using traditional hat materials and techniques such as feather, hair horse mesh, wool felt, and harmony.

Prof. Bruce Jo received a contract of $100,000 worth project “Magnetic and Inertial Sensing Fusion for the Space Localization and Navigation”.     Read more ➡️ http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=80349

Robert (Bob) Fisch, founder and former chairman and CEO of rue21, award-winning author of Fisch Tales: The Making of a Millennial Baby Boomer, and a member of the FIT Foundation board of directors, has launched the Bob Fisch Graduate Student Award Program.     The program, which includes a $300,000 gift and an intergenerational mentoring strategy, features an award for entrepreneurial excellence, thesis project grants, and graduate scholarships for students in FIT’s Fashion Design MFA and Global Fashion Management MPS programs. Fisch—widely recognized as a pioneering merchant for his bold and successful innovations in value-priced, fast fashion retailing—will mentor students for an extraordinary one-on-one experience.     “Thanks to Bob’s commitment to nurturing creativity in the next generation of industry leaders, FIT is the proud recipient of this $300,000 gift,” said FIT President Joyce F. Brown. “It will establish an unprecedented series of opportunities that will benefit students in our graduate Global Fashion Management and Fashion Design programs.”     “I am delighted to present this gift to FIT to help nurture the careers of future leaders in the retail space,” Fisch said. “As the leading college of its kind in America, FIT serves as a major talent pipeline, which I hope to help enrich through the establishment of this new program. I’m a firm believer in the benefits of intergenerational bonding and mutual mentoring as there is much I can learn from the students’ questions and curiosity, just as they can learn from my answers and experience. I teach them business—they teach me life.”     The program includes:     a $25,000 award for entrepreneurial excellence, given to one standout recipient for the best business plan and design presented during the graduate capstone ceremony 10 graduate scholarships for academic excellence, awarded to students in the Global Fashion Management and Fashion Design programs 33 thesis-project completion grants for students in the Global Fashion Management MPS and Fashion Design MFA programs In addition to establishing this awards program, Fisch is an active member of the FIT Foundation, guest lecturer, and mentor/advisor at FIT. Under Fisch’s leadership, rue21 was also the subject of FIT’s Fashion Merchandising Capstone Project in 2016.

Visitors to Bloomingdale’s 59th Street flagship have been enjoying a visual treat courtesy of FIT’s Illustration Department: chalk murals celebrating six Broadway shows playing now, including Dear Evan Hansen and The Lion King. FIT students and alumni conceived of and painted the murals (using a chalk suspension) to coincide with a September 9 shopping event promoting the reopening of Broadway.     Because the event took place two days before the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the artists included a mural recognizing that tragic event. In addition, they painted three panels depicting sushi-based flights of fancy to acknowledge a restaurant sponsor.     The project was similar to ChalkFIT, the college’s annual outdoor art display created by seniors studying Illustration. Dan Shefelman, chair of the Illustration and Interactive Media Department, chose these artists based on whose ChalkFIT murals had impressed him in recent years. Alumni mentored students to conceive of and execute each mural.     Mural of saxophone player, runner, and others     Bloomingdale’s not only paid the artists, they donated to the FIT Foundation. Shefelman hopes the project can be a model for future art installations, providing an income source for working artists.     “My goal is to offer murals as a business that produces projects all over and hires exclusively FIT students, alumni, and faculty,” he says.     Bloomingdale’s execs were thrilled with the results.     “We know they had a bump in sales that day,” Shefelman says. “A lot of credit goes to the Broadway stars at the store, but we were part of it, by engaging with the public and welcoming them inside.”

On Wednesday, September 22, the Couture Council of The Museum at FIT hosted its annual luncheon, honoring Wes Gordon, creative director of Carolina Herrera, with the 2021 Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion. This year’s celebration, sponsored by Nordstrom and held at Cipriani South Street,  was reimagined as a smaller, more intimate event and held in accordance with New York City vaccine guidelines. With approximately 240 people in attendance—nearly half the usual size—the event still raised nearly $700,000.     Wes Gordon and Carolina Herrera Carolina Herrera and Wes Gordon. Gordon eloquently shared his gratitude to Herrera, who was in attendance and won the prestigious award herself at the 2014 luncheon: “To the queen of New York, the empress of elegance, I dedicate this award to you. I have only been the caretaker of the magical house you have built.”     “I cannot think of anyone more suited for the occasion than Wes Gordon” said Dr. Joyce F. Brown, president of FIT, during her remarks. “Vibrant, bold and dramatic, the party dresses and dinner suits, the day dresses and red carpet gowns that make up his collections are themselves celebrations, filled with exuberance and joy.”     The award was presented to Wes Gordon by Shanina Shaik. Other attendees included Martha Stewart, Indre Rockefeller, Stacey Bendet Eisner, Nicole Miller, Julie Macklowe, Jean Shafiroff, Ramy Brook, Gillian Hearst, B. Michael, Alina Cho, Young Emperors, and Ramona Singer, Fern Mallis, and Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT.     FIT student John Paul Jang received The Museum at FIT Student Award, which recognizes outstanding initiative and great professional promise in the museum field. Jang is the second student to receive this notable recognition since the award was created in 2019.     Proceeds from the luncheon benefit The Museum at FIT, which is free and open to the public. The museum recently reopened with the exhibition Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion, which is on view through November 28.