President’s Message

Dear Fellow Engineers,

You may have noticed that we have now started to create mini-stories from the articles within the main RES magazine. Both the magazine and mini-stories are easily shared on social media sites (Facebook, Linkedin, etc.). Last month I did a social media experiment with the RES Board of Directors and asked them to randomly share the stories and magazine on their social media accounts. While I expected our readership to rise, I was flabbergasted to see that the number of reads nearly doubled last month! If you are reading this message, please help us spread the word and share a story on your social media account. Our events and those of our affiliates bring enormous value to the community! Help us spread the word!

This is an incredibly exciting month for the RES. We have released the names of 18 scholarship recipients (pg 8) managed by the Rochester Engineering Society, CHA, SWE, IEEE, MPES, and NYSATE. These awards recognize some the top young engineers, and prospective engineers within our community. Stay tuned as we release photos of the recipients in the next issue of the Rochester Engineer. We will also celebrate the recipients at the RES Annual meeting in May. I would like to thank the RES Scholarship Selection Committee for all of their help in identifying these remarkable recipients.

In addition, the RES is developing a Virtual Engineering Symposium to provide up to 18 PDHs. The symposium will be carried out over six sessions including three in May (18-20) and three in June (8-10). You will be able to earn 3PDHs per day at each of these sessions. All of these sessions can be attended remotely, in the comfort of your office or home! Registration for the sessions will be open in March. Please check our website for registration information!

There are a number of great articles in the Rochester Engineer this month! The cover story, Bricks and Mortar Retail: New Demands on Engineers and Designers by Tom Bailey and Sean Phelan (pg 14) provides a nice overview of how local retailers are fighting back to retain their customers in the backdrop of rising internet competition. This is placing new and greater challenges on the engineers that develop those spaces. Don’t miss this great article by the folks at Hunt-EAS.

If you are also wondering who is behind a lot of the creative designs driving the resurgence of Downtown Rochester – check out the article on pg 20 by an engineering group at Bergmann. The latest renovation is the Parcel 2 Building at 260 East Broad Street, on the corner of South Clinton Avenue and East Broad Street. Check out this article! I completely agree, the completion of the Parcel 2 Building is a clearly a point of pride for all of those involved! Congratulations!

Last but certainly not least are two fantastic Campus Feature Articles from RIT PhD students and their mentors (pg 28-30). Each of these articles will give you an overview of some of the work being done in phonon transport, and optical-signal processing.

Greg Gdowski, PhD

President, RES

P.S. Don’t forget – the first person to email the page number of the 1920s artwork will receive a gift from the RES. This 1920s artwork is a cartoon depicting a meeting with outgoing RES President, Henry Howe Jr. and the incoming RES President, Harold Stewart. You may recall that Harold Stewart was my neighbor’s grandfather!