Wednesday, September 16 
Cecilia Puga / Cecilia Puga – Paula Velasco Arquitectura
Some Character in Search for an Author
Mosaic Associates Architects Lecture

Wednesday, October 07
Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto / RUR Architecture DPC
Anaesthetic Architecture
Frank Pitts ’75 Lecture

Wednesday, October 14
Mauricio Cortés Sierra / Basilica de la Sagrada Familia
Sagrada Família: The Dream of a Genius,
A Collective Endeavour Across Generations
Steven Ehrlich ’69 Architecture Lecture

Monday, October 19
Philip Beesley / Philip Beesley Studio / Philip Beesley Architect Inc. (PBAI)
Metastable Aether: Systems for Living Architecture
Lee Harris Pomeroy ’55 Lecture

Wednesday, October 28
Billie Tsien / Studio Tsien
Begin Again
Mike Wacholder Memorial Lecture

Monday, November 02
Bernard Tschumi / Bernard Tschumi Architects
Abstract
Kenneth L. Warriner Memorial Lecture

Note:

All lectures will be held at EMPAC Theater with the exception of Bernard Tschumi, which will be held at EMPAC Concert Hall.

All lectures will begin at 5 pm est. Design studios will end early to allow students and faculty to arrive on time.

Four-star admiral Karl Thomas ’86 leads the United States Fleet Forces Command, the Navy’s intelligence, information, and war planning hub. He will join President Martin Schmidt ’81, Ph.D. in a thoughtful discussion on the values, experiences, and responsibilities that shape impactful leadership in public service.
Immediately following, we will honor the bravery, service, and sacrifice of RPI veterans killed or wounded in the line of duty since World War II, with a brief, reflective tribute and memorial plaque unveiling.

President Martin A. Schmidt ’81, PhD will celebrate the past year’s accomplishments in teaching, research, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, and share plans for the future of RPI.

The Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has named Ajit Prabhu ’98, Co-Founder and CEO of Quest Global, as the 2026 recipient of the William F. Glaser '53 Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The honor recognizes Ajit's role in co-founding and leading Quest Global, a global engineering services company.

Established in 1990, the Entrepreneur of the Year award honors RPI graduates who have achieved success as entrepreneurs and now serve as role models for current students and aspiring entrepreneurs. The annual honorees bring the world of entrepreneurship into the classroom by sharing their career experiences with students.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place on October 21 at 1 p.m. in the EMPAC theater on RPI’s campus. In addition to the awards ceremony and a fireside chat with RPI President Marty Schmidt ’81, the event will include a startup pitch competition and poster presentations by RPI students and faculty. Pitch and poster topics include a wide range of products, from healthcare and e-commerce to energy and space technology.

“Ajit is an entrepreneur whose experience across diverse sectors reflects commitment to innovation and positive business impact,” said Eric Ledet, Director of RPI’s Severino Center. “We challenge our students to think big, and Ajit exemplifies this mindset with a passion for solving complex engineering problems.”

Ajit was a student at RPI when he and his partner started Quest Global in 1997. Under his leadership, the company has grown to global scale, operating in more than 20 countries with 104 delivery centers and more than 23000 employees.

Dedicated to the premise that culture is as impactful as business strategy, Ajit built Quest Global on the principles of aspiration, humility, and hunger. Quest is one of the world’s fastest-growing engineering services firms, providing innovative end-to-end solutions for customers in the aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, high-tech, medical device, rail, semiconductor, and communication industries.

"RPI is where my entrepreneurial journey began, and this recognition means a great deal to me," said Prabhu. "We started Quest Global with a simple but powerful belief: that engineering can address complex challenges. I hope our story shows the next generation of engineers and founders that thinking big, staying humble, and never giving up is the only way to build something that truly matters."

Full News Release

Can AI resurrect the past? Can it bring back people we have lost? How real or fake are the results—and the relationships that emerge when we try to connect with them?

Theater maker Haruna Lee and multimedia theater director and designer Jared Mezzocchi sit down with Anthem Award–winning AI strategy consultant Kento Morita for a conversation on the creative possibilities and pitfalls of working with chatbots, translators, and new prototypes to create human connection onstage. 

Together, they discuss AI’s capacity to process large data sets of archival material into interactive, improvisational exchanges that aim to feel like versions of a person, simulating personal relationships. 

As collaborators on DADBOT, a new theater project in development at EMPAC, the trio conjures Lee’s deceased father for an audience, using interactive media and live performance to stage irreverent conversations with the DADBOT. They discuss their prototyping process, design sprints, and how using AI for theater emphasizes urgent questions of reality, authenticity, and ethics.

Stay afterwards for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café. This event is part of Corpus Festival 2027.

Can a group of people occupy the same imagined world at the same time, in the same physical space? How can we share experience through mixed reality?

Multidisciplinary artist Lars Jan and Talis Reks, who is the lab manager of MIT.nano Immersion Lab and a CEO/founder of DreaMR Labs, discuss the possibilities of combining mixed reality, narrative, and live performance—at stadium-sized scale.

In their individual work, they each integrate physical and imagined worlds through emerging technologies. Currently, they are collaborating on ROAM, a large-scale, outdoor, immersive performance in development at EMPAC. Jan’s directing and writing builds narratives for live audiences actively moving through events rather than seated outside them. Improvisation and failure are part of the process for testing Reks’s XR system architecture: untethered headsets, networking, tracking, and synchronization for forty bodies in motion across a stadium field. ROAM’s combination of live performance and immersive virtual layers generates a unique metaphysical experience.

Stay afterward for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café.

What artistic and expressive possibilities emerge at the intersection of robotics and art making? How might technology augment the creative body?

Musician, composer, and instrument builder Qiujiang Levi Lu joins RPI’s Russell Sage Professor John Wen for a conversation on the relationships between bodies, machines, perception, and creative practice.

Together, they consider how advances in robotics can create new possibilities for artists and how artistic experimentation can pose new questions for robotics. What new system-theoretic tools are necessary for advances in robotics and their application to creative projects? How do these tools intersect with artistic practices and do-it-yourself approaches to developing new hardware?

Through examples from their work, Lu and Wen explore what happens when machines become more than tools: collaborators, instruments, extensions of the body, and platforms for experimentation.

Stay afterward for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café.

How does perception connect to bodily action? What happens when your perceptual system changes? How can art and science each help us make meaning from those shifts?

Choreographer Heidi Latsky and Brett Fajen, who is an associate dean at RPI and a professor in cognitive science, join for a conversation on movement science, the brain’s perceptual functions, and how the body adapts to change.

Fajen’s research on perception, action, visual control, and movement in complex environments opens questions on how learning takes place in the body and how the body adapts to changing situations and perceptual systems. Alongside a screening from her documentary film, Living in the Grey (2025), which shares dancers’ experiences of non-apparent neurological disabilities impacting information processing, movement control, and sensory input, Latsky discusses how perception functions in her creative process.

Together, they find the overlaps of their creative and research projects, and the possibilities for intuitive knowledge to influence how we understand the brain and body.

Stay afterwards for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café.

What can sound mean for humans and the environment? And how can immersive audio environments clarify—or create—these meanings?

Researcher and artist Felix Deufel, who is the director of ZiMMT (Center for Media Art, Music, and Technology) in Leipzig, joins RPI composer and technologist Matthew Goodheart to talk about spatial sound, acoustics, composition, and their effects on human experience.

Their conversation considers sound not simply as something we hear, but as something that locates us in space and shapes our relationships to our surroundings. Through their respective artistic and technological practices, Deufel and Goodheart discuss how new tools for spatial audio can become instruments for composition, perception, and experimentation.

Deufel also facilitates a workshop on his audio software Grapes 3D on Friday, October 9. 
An installation of his work can be heard on the 39-speaker ambisonic system of EMPAC Studio 1 on Saturday, October 10.

Stay afterward for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café. 

How might quantum physics help us think about living with uncertainty?

For the first Interface talk of the year, artist and composer Rucyl Mills joins physicist and computing pioneer Chris Lirakis for a conversation on how artists and scientists approach things they cannot fully see, predict, or understand.

Together, they explore how we grapple with phenomena that exceed ordinary perception: states of possibility, emergence, vibration, and the unseen forces that shape our world. Interface invites us to consider what happens when research becomes creative practice and creativity becomes a form of investigation.

Stay afterwards for refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café.