Rochester Review

March–April 2011, Volume 73, No. 4

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Alan Blank, Sharon Dickman, Adam Fenster, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Tom Rickey, and Brandon Vick

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Published six times a year for alumni, students, their parents, and other friends of the University, Rochester Review is produced by University Communications.

Opinions expressed are those of the authors, the editors, or their subjects and do not necessarily represent official positions of the University of Rochester.

Copyright © 2011 University of Rochester

Credits

Alumni photographs, courtesy of the subjects. Unless otherwise credited, all others are Rochester Review photos.

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Giving the Future to Our Students

By Joel Seligman

president (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Support for scholarship aid is the gift of a student’s future. This point was eloquently made in January by Amy Roth, a senior from Savannah, Tenn., as she discussed what the Alan and Jane Handler Scholarship has meant to her.

“I really feel like it’s given me the time and the resources to explore my interests and gain confidence in what I’m passionate about,” explained Amy, a psychology major who is a member of the inaugural class of Handler Scholars. “Essentially, it’s given me my future.” Amy is one of 10 students in the College and at the Eastman School who have received Handler Scholarships since 2007. She and her brother, Aaron, were among the first group selected as Handler Scholars. Amy and Aaron and the other students in the inaugural group epitomize the goal of the scholarships’ benefactors, University trustee Rich Handler ’83 and his wife, Martha. The students represent an extraordinary group of young people who would otherwise have limited opportunities for a college education.

The opportunities for all Handler Scholars received a historic boost this winter, when Rich and Martha announced their intention to make a gift of $20 million. Their extraordinary generosity increases to $25 million the scholarship fund they established in 2007. The fund, named in recognition of Rich’s parents, Alan and Jane Handler, is the largest contribution to student scholarships in the University’s history.

We are profoundly grateful to Rich and Martha. Coming at a time when families are still feeling the effects of the longest post–World War II recession, this extraordinary augmentation of their original commitment is especially timely.

The Handlers’ generosity will make it possible for generations of deserving students like Amy and Aaron Roth to attend the University.

Almost all of those students have been the first in their families to attend college. All of them have enriched our campus with their talent, perspective, and initiative, improving the communities in which they are engaged.

That is the power of student scholarships: They not only transform the lives of the students who receive the scholarships, but they also enrich our University by ensuring that young people who have much to offer, but lack the means, will have the opportunity to succeed here.

Since 2005, our University has received $113 million in gift commitments from generous supporters and their families for undergraduate and graduate scholarships. Support for our students will be a fundamental priority of our capital campaign.

In making his announcement, Rich noted that there’s never a perfect time to make a gift. But he and Martha were prompted by the desire to help some deserving students before they go out to make the world a better place.

The Handlers are not alone in providing exceptional support to our students.

In February we celebrated the announcement of the Renée Fleming Endowed Scholarship Fund for Eastman opera and voice students. Renée Fleming returned to her alma mater for a benefit concert in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, where she thrilled a packed Kodak Hall audience with a bravura performance of arias, art songs, and contemporary music that demonstrated why she is considered the world’s greatest living soprano. As part of her visit, she made a point of having the opportunity to perform with students. She shared the stage with the Eastman Philharmonia, our top student orchestra that was founded in 1962 by Howard Hanson.

Because of Renée’s generosity and the generosity of other music supporters, we will be able to ensure that the Eastman School will continue to be seen as the setting for future generations of opera singers and other performers to establish themselves and to hone their talents as performers and artists.

When Ed Hajim ’58, our board chairman and the namesake for the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, announced his $30 million gift commitment, he insisted that a portion of his extraordinary commitment go to student scholarships in the Hajim School.

He was particularly pleased to help support “exceptionally talented students whose families simply do not have the financial resources to attend a world-class research university like Rochester. These are the students who will help ensure our nation’s continuing success in a world of ever greater competition.”

Support for scholarships recognizes that a core mission of our University is education. Our challenge in simple terms is to provide the most outstanding students the means of receiving the most exceptional education.

Letters

letters (Photo: Rochester Review)

Photographic Memories

As one of the few interdepartmental film studies majors in my graduating class at the University, my reaction to the University’s alliance with the George Eastman House (“Developing New Ties,” In Review, January-February) was, “What took so long?” A close collaboration between the two institutions has long seemed to me to be a no-brainer, and I can only assume that a combination of internal politics and budgetary considerations were what led to the long delay.

The presence of the George Eastman House in Rochester was one of the prime reasons I attended the University (I turned down both Cornell and Johns Hopkins to attend, much to my upwardly mobile parents’ chagrin), and I benefited mightily from the resources I was able to access at the Eastman House. Younger people forget how difficult it was to study film in those pre-VCR/DVD days. In my freshman preceptorial, for example, Professor Richard Gollin showed Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour to the class. In order to do this, he had to drag a bulky video camera and wide-tape reel-to-reel video recorder home, point the camera at the TV, and record from a PBS broadcast. Needless to say, the class was not able to appreciate his comments on the differences in film stock used in the various scenes.

In this virtually prehistoric environment, the George Eastman House provided a unique opportunity for those of us interested in film. The archivists Jim Card and Marshall Deutelbaum ’78 (PhD) who taught courses were able to access the full resources of the archive to highlight points they wanted to make in class. For example, when we studied Carl Dreyer, Card did not merely show a copy of The Passion of Joan of Arc; he also pulled a couple of earlier Dreyer silent films from the vaults (Leaves from Satan’s Book and Master of the House) to make a point. In our film history course, instead of showing John Ford’s Stagecoach, Deutelbaum substituted Ford’s recently rediscovered 1917 film Straight Shootin’ (with Czech inter-titles, if I remember correctly) and pointed out similarities between that film and Ford’s later classic The Searchers. (In order to encourage us not to miss classes, Deutelbaum also showed an episode of the 1940s B-serial King of the Rocketmen before each class; we eagerly looked forward to the resolution of each cliff-hanging ending to the episode at the next week’s class.)

But the highlight of my time at the U of R was getting permission to do an independent research course my senior year on American silent film, something an undergraduate probably would not have been able to do at any other university in the world. Each week, I would sit alone in the Dryden Theatre, seeing forgotten masterpieces of American cinema—films such as Karl Brown’s quasi documentary Stark Love, John Collins’s technically advanced melodrama Blue Jeans, Monta Bell’s Oedipal film Man, Woman and Sin (with Jeanne Eagels), Paul Fejos’s part-soundie Lonesome and Howard Hawks’s buddy movie A Girl in Every Port (in a nitrate print—the screen positively glowed when it was projected). I also got the opportunity to meet silent film actors such as Blanche Sweet (whose film career started with D. W. Griffith in 1909) and Viola Dana (a latecomer compared to Sweet, she apparently didn’t start making films until 1913). But the highlight of that course was when I showed up one afternoon and Deutelbaum told me there had been a change of plans because a visitor wanted to see a Louise Brooks sound film. He then proceeded to introduce me to author Christopher Isherwood, and Mr. Isherwood and I spent the afternoon together in the Dryden Theatre watching Brooks light up the screen in a virtually unknown French language film titled Prix de Beaute. (I still remember the song she sang in the film—“Ne Soit Pas Jaloux” or “Don’t Be Jealous.”)

Christopher Isherwood and Louise Brooks—pretty heady company for a 19- year-old undergraduate!

Brett Gold ’77

New York, N.Y.

I am pleased to see that the University is beginning to embrace photography and is developing an innovative partnership with the Eastman House. Some 60 years ago when the then curator of photography at the house, Beaumont Newhall, offered to teach a course in the history of fine art photography, he was turned down by the art department.

Richard Zakia ’70W (EdD)

Apex, N.C.

A Diversity Challenge

I have just finished reading President Joel Seligman’s article about Esther Conwell and her amazing life and career as a woman in the sciences (“Esther Conwell’s Inspiring Example,” President’s Page, January-February.) She is a true pioneer. It’s difficult to imagine the barriers she faced just 60 years ago.

As a parent of a U of R first-year student, I am gratified to see a genuine commitment to diversity, with meaningful numbers of women on the faculty and in leadership positions. However, I would challenge the University to define diversity to include employment of individuals with disabilities in meaningful numbers. I work daily with people with disabilities, many of whom leave college and graduate school with high honors and big dreams, only to face terrible discrimination and unemployment. It does require creativity and perhaps some technology to accommodate those with disabilities, but just as with women, the benefits are innumerable. When the number of individuals with disabilities at the University increases, students will see professors who happen to be blind, a wheelchair user, or an individual who is deaf or hard of hearing, as the norm. They will also expect to see them in the workplace after they graduate.

I wish the University well in its continued efforts toward diversity, and look forward to seeing more individuals with disabilities in the coming years.

Margo Druschel

Mankato, Minn.

The author is the parent of Henry Druschel ’14.

Cost of College?

Few people would dispute the overall value of a college education (“Education Pays,” President’s Page, November-December 2010). The real and more valid question we should be asking is whether it’s legitimate to saddle new graduates with years of debt in service of that education. Unfortunately, President Seligman’s numbers just don’t add up.

The College Board study, and the numbers that President Seligman cites from it, focus on medians—the statistical point that divides a population in half. According to the College Board’s Trends in College Pricing 2010 study, the tuition and fees at a private, four-year institution average $37,000, and for a public institution at in-state rates, the average is $16,000. While Rochester is a university significantly above the median in educational performance, it’s also clearly well above the median in tuition: $51,000 and rising. This places Rochester in the top four-tenths of 1 percent of all academic institutions with respect to tuition.

President Seligman depicts the average student (who makes $55,700 at age 25)paying off their loans by age 33. Unless we believe that salary point is much, much higher for Rochester graduates—for which President Seligman presents no evidence—I have a hard time believing that students will shed their debt burden that early, unless they are lucky enough to choose the one or two careers that are in vogue at that point in time.

Furthermore, we should not be patting ourselves on the back regarding the fact that our alumni spend the first decade or more of their working careers servicing their educational debt. This is a time at which most people are starting families and trying to establish their independent lives. We should be striving to ensure that Rochester educates the next generation of students to the highest of standards in a liberal arts environment, regardless of their degrees, and does not drive them to the poorhouse in the process.

Sean Colbath ’90

Winchester, Mass.

Love of Lizards

I never studied the evolution of Caribbean lizards (“Lizard Lessons,” In Review, January-February), but I did have considerable association with them in the 1960s and ’70s while visiting my in-laws in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Their porch was bounded by a low brick wall and a wrought-iron grill work.

On the porch in the morning I would read from Beat the Market, a popular investment book at the time. The first day a single lagartijo, as they were called in Spanish, appeared on the grill and watched me read. When I left the porch, he also left. The second day, two of these little guys showed up and repeated the process. Each day another lagartijo was added until I think there were five or six of them. Obviously these were the forerunners of the lizards of Wall Street.

In the evening I often watched a portable TV placed on the brick wall. A single lagartijo appeared on the wall beside me. When I pointed out a bug on the wall, he ran over and digested it. One night he decided to find out who all those people were in the TV picture, so he ambled over to the TV and explored it completely, trying to find out how to get to those people in the box.

Needless to say, I have been a fan of Caribbean lizards ever since. They seem to possess a connection with humans similar to that of dolphins, although the lizards avoid being touched.

Walton Howes ’48

Middleburg Heights, Ohio

Review welcomes letters and will print them as space permits. Letters may be edited for brevity and clarity. Unsigned letters cannot be used. Send letters to Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P.O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; rochrev@rochester.edu.

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Winning the Wolf Prize

Pioneering engineer Ching Tang earns international honor.

By Kathleen McGarvey

tangPROFESSOR OF INVENTION: Tang, who’s credited with developing a new form of light-emitting diode, talks with graduate students Hao Lin (left), Kevin Klubek, and Prashant Kumar Singh (right). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“The concept is, in principle, very simple—to create a layer of thin film and pass a current through it to emit light,” says Ching Tang, the Doris Johns Cherry Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Carrying out that concept—the organic light-emitting diode (OLED), which is now used to provide displays in cell phones, computers, and televisions that are clearer, thinner, and more energy efficient than liquid crystal displays (LCD)—hasn’t been so simple.

This winter, the Wolf Foundation recognized Tang’s contributions to the field of chemistry with the 2011 Wolf Prize, considered second in prestige only to the Nobel Prize. Tang shares the 2011 prize with Stuart Alan Rice of the University of Chicago and Krystof Matyjaszeski of Carnegie Mellon. The president of Israel and the Israeli Minister of Education will present them with the prize at a special ceremony at the Knesset on May 29.

The award also recognizes Tang for his seminal early work in photovoltaics, which could lead to major improvements in the ability to produce low-cost solar cells to capture energy from the sun. Tang is the second Rochester winner of the Wolf Prize since 2000, when physicist Masatoshi Koshiba

Tang, who came to the University in 2006, developed OLED technology while working at the Eastman Kodak Co. “I came up with the concept when I was at Kodak—and then stayed with it for 25 or 30 years, and tried to solve as many problems as I could along the way.”

He cites his development of sandwiching electrodes between two layers of organic film as key for the greater control over light emission it provides.

“In Chinese, two is always better than one,” he laughs. “We call it ‘double happiness.’ ”

MATHEMATICS

Irrational Exuberance

piday (Photo: Adam Fenster)

PI CHART: Lucia Petito ’12, a mathematics and applied music (violin performance) major, and Alicia Cornelia ’12, a mathematics major, hoist a banner in celebration of Pi Day on March 14. The Society of Undergraduate Mathematics Students (SUMS) plans a day of festivities—including a problem-solving contest for local high school students, a miniresearch conference, and a pie-throwing event—to salute the famed irrational number, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

BY THE NUMBERS

Scientific Impact

When Rochester researchers talk, people listen. That’s the finding of a recent report by Thomson Reuters, which shows that discoveries and insights by University researchers disproportionately shape the thinking of other scientists. The study places Rochester on a short list of influential U.S. research institutions whose scholarly publications were referred to most frequently by colleagues.

The report compiled the number of times an institution’s researchers were cited by other authors in peer-reviewed scientific journals over a five-year period from 2005 to 2009—taking into account the number of citations, the prominence of the journals in which they appear, and the fields in which institutions specialize.

$1.8 billion

External research funding received by the University, 2005–09

No. 17

Rochester’s national ranking in relative citation impact

30 years

Years over which Rochester’s score has increased, even as U.S. university performance has remained essentially flat

29%

Papers indexed by Thomson Reuters in the study with a U.S. author or coauthor

36%

Papers by a European author or coauthor

31%

Papers in 2009 by Asian researchers

2,000 articles

The minimum produced in the most recent year by the universities among which Rochester was ranked for citation impact

2.8%

Percentage of U.S. GDP devoted to scientific funding

—Kathleen McGarvey

SAVE THE DATE!

President Bill Clinton Headlines Meliora Weekend, Oct. 20–23

melioraKEYNOTE SPEAKER: The founder of the William J. Clinton Foundation, President Bill Clinton will be the keynote speaker at this fall’s Meliora Weekend. (Photo: Ralph Alswang/Clinton Foundation)

The 10th anniversary edition of Meliora Weekend, the annual on-campus celebration of Reunion, Family Weekend, and Homecoming, will feature a keynote address by President Bill Clinton, the founder of the William J. Clinton Foundation.

The 42nd president of the United States, he’s the latest prominent policymaker to deliver the keynote address. Previous speakers have included CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu ’70, ’98 (Honorary), journalist Anderson Cooper, and retired general and U.S. statesman Colin Powell. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered the keynote in 2002, when she was a U.S. senator.

More and than 6,000 alumni, students, faculty, family members, and guests typically attend the four days of lectures, performances, seminars, and social gatherings held on Rochester’s campuses each fall.

For more about Meliora Weekend 2011, visit www.rochester.edu/melioraweekend.

EASTMAN OPERA THEATRE

Backstage Scene

opera (Photo: Adam Fenster)

DESIGNING MOMENT: Natasha Drake ’10E gets some last-minute adjustments to her hat from costume designer Bekah Carey of Rochester before a dress rehearsal for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, an 18th-century opera based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Also getting ready are Eastman vocal performance graduate students Jeong Eun Joo ’08E (MM) (Euridice) and Erin Gonzalez (Orfeo), receiving a final check from makeup designer Anne Ford-Coates of New York City. The January production at Rochester’s Harro East Ballroom was a collaboration of Eastman Opera Theatre and two area performance companies, Geomantics Dance Theatre and the vocal chamber ensemble Madrigalia.

Q & A

Building Buzz

How do you get the word out about Rochester? You start by engaging the University community—alumni and parents, included—as important communicators, says Bill Murphy, Rochester’s first-ever vice president for communications.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

buzzBUZZWORTHY: Murphy talks about communications with intern Dale Levine ’11 (center), an English and history major, and student employee Joanna Balin ’11, an English and psychology major. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In 2006, Bill Murphy began his tenure in the newly created position of vice president for communications amidst widespread concern among alumni, trustees, and the new president of the University, Joel Seligman, that on a national scale, Rochester was both underrecognized and underrated in proportion to its accomplishments as a top-tier research university.

With nearly three decades of experience in public and media relations at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ohio State University, Murphy began coordinating an ambitious and long-term effort to raise the University’s national profile.

On the five-year anniversary of his appointment, Murphy talks about progress so far.

Raising the national profile of a university is a big and complex job. Where did you start?

Well, first, there really isn’t any substitute for quality. A communications office doesn’t actually do the public relations for a university. We facilitate it. It’s the faculty and students who are actually doing it. They do the noteworthy things that we help call attention to. Before Joel had even come in as president, he had asked Fred Volkmann, the vice chancellor for public affairs at Washington University, to take a look at our communications operation. Fred found it to be badly underresourced. And he was concerned about the amount and the quality of internal communications; that is, communication with our alumni and among our faculty, staff, students, and parents. I had one experience that was really telling. There was a ceremony in the library to introduce me. And everyone around the University who had anything to do with communications—60 to 80 people in all—had been invited to an informal reception afterward. And the striking thing for me was to see how many of them were introducing themselves to each other. I had heard that Rochester was siloed—really decentralized. Well, every place claims to be decentralized. And Chicago and Illinois certainly were. But, in my view, Rochester had gone about as far in that direction as it was possible to go. And that wasn’t helpful for communications. After that experience in the library, I called the same group of people together and asked for volunteers to serve on task forces to attack each of four areas—graphic identity, media relations, research, and the web. What we wanted to do very consciously was get people used to working together. And we have.

Why are communications within the University family so important to generating a higher profile externally?

One of the things that’s clear from research is that the general public really looks to word of mouth as the most credible source of information about universities. Where people turn to next is the web. But where they get the information they rely on is from people they know and trust. And those people get it from their personal experience. The U of R has had this classic, almost Midwestern modesty about the institution. There are certain universities in this country where the graduates wear the identity on their sleeves. And if something great’s happened there, whether it’s in sports or in science, you know about it. That’s not Rochester. That never will be Rochester, but we can do more to raise the University’s profile. Among all of us—faculty, staff, students, parents, and alumni—there are about 150,000 people. We can think of ourselves as simply first-line audiences. Or we can think of ourselves both as first-line audiences and also as fellow communicators—people who, if we knew more about what was going on at the University, might not only have more to share around the water cooler, at the tennis club, at church, or over the back fence, but also be more motivated to share it. It takes a combination of pride and information to make that dynamic work. I don’t think we in communications have to cheerlead to create the pride. I think all we have to do is communicate what really goes on here.

What results came from the work of the task forces?

First, we created a strong and unified graphic identity—a new logo for the entire University—using our in-house design team with substantial input and feedback from students, faculty, and alumni. [See “The New Face of Rochester,” Rochester Review, September-October 2007.] We also created vehicles that inform people about what goes on. We enhanced Currents and @Rochester, the faculty and staff print and online newsletters, and we created newsletters for undergraduates, for graduate students, for parents, and for alumni—Weekly Buzz, Grads@Rochester, Parents Buzz, and Rochester Buzz—as a way to inform the community, first of all, about news we can use: just basic information that helps us in our roles within the University family. Those vehicles also give all of us information about wonderful things that are going on here. And I think that naturally generates some pride in the place. We also have on our website, with a direct link from the homepage, a page that we call the Newsroom, which in turn has links to our Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter feeds. This is something that most major universities have developed in the last five years. It’s basically a daily multimedia newspaper about the university.

Tell us about your efforts to strengthen media relations for Arts, Sciences, and Engineering.

We brought in Larry Arbeiter from the University of Chicago as associate vice president for communications. He had run a very successful media relations operation at Chicago for about 20 years. He had shown a real capability at building staffs. And he’s come in here and built a strong group of press relations officers, with beats that they follow, to keep up with faculty in the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, engineering, and student life and teaching. Their jobs are to get to know what’s happening on campus, and what the newsworthy things are. They also get to know what journalists in their areas are interested in, and they match up those interests and pitch stories.

How is the University’s media relations team dealing with shrinking newsrooms and, in particular, shrinking coverage of discoveries in science?

One of our responses to the shrinking space and air time for coverage of research was to team up with Duke and Stanford universities as leaders in creating Futurity.org, an online news service that features articles about university-based research. Membership in Futurity is confined to members of the Association of American Universities and to the Russell Group in Britain—the best universities in the United States, Canada, and the UK. Futurity has developed partnerships with Alltop and other news providers that have multiplied its reach. It’s a real point of pride for us that Rochester is the linchpin for this effort. Each of the three universities plays an important role, but Rochester has played the lead role in editing and designing the site and in coming up with innovative ways to develop it.

Many colleges and universities are trying to define themselves through branding. How do you go about communicating the personality of the U of R?

The actual branding, as I think of it, is really articulating what’s already there; it’s not imposing something on a university. That’s why we went with traditional colors and symbols in our graphic identity, why we embrace the dandelion and Rocky—a weed and an insect—because they’re our heritage. And that’s why we have the motto, Meliora, “Ever Better.” We try to reflect the quality of the research that happens here, the wonderful academic experience the students have, the imagination that they bring to work and play. Branding Rochester means holding up a mirror to the terrific university that it is.

Tell us about Rochester’s homepage.

We’re very distinctive in higher education for the sense of fun you can feel on our homepage. I’ve tried to give talented people, like our web editor and designers, the freedom to be as creative as they are. I’ve learned that we can do wonderful things if I just say “yes,” and get out of the way. So they came to me with the idea for “Photo Fridays,” in which all members of the University community—students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents—are invited to submit photos for the homepage each Friday. And now, every Friday through Monday morning, our homepage looks different with photos, usually of the university, often of Rochester, that frankly are not ones that we necessarily would have thought of. And it’s exciting to see the same place from a very fresh perspective. They capture early morning light, late night views, they see things from corner windows, and capture student activities that just bring the place to life. The same creative group came to me with an idea to celebrate Mother’s Day by inviting students to greet their mothers on the web page. And lo and behold, we soon had a tradition of celebrating nearly every holiday. So you can visit the University’s homepage on any given holiday and there will be something special, and almost nobody else will be doing it. We have a friendly rivalry with Johns Hopkins, and they do things occasionally, and there are a few others, but very few, and we also have colleagues who’ve expressed real envy that they just don’t have the freedom that Joel has given us to express our creativity.

How can alumni and parents help to “build the buzz”?

Alumni and parents are a vital part of the communications effort of this university. Our goal in communications is to make sure that alumni, parents, and all members of the University community are informed about why Rochester is an extraordinary university so that we can all talk knowledgeably about the place with our friends, coworkers, and colleagues. In this issue of Rochester Review, we have provided one extra tool for visibility, a set of decals. We hope that every member of the community will choose a favorite and display it proudly in a car window.

HIV/AIDS

A New Front Opens

Discovery of how HIV gains a foothold in the body points to a fresh way forward in the effort to stop the virus.

By Kathleen McGarvey

hivHIDE & SEEK: With doctoral students Amanda Lucas, Edward Kennedy, and Laura Nguyen, Kim hopes to understand the molecular trickery that allows HIV to hide in cells that normally fight off invaders. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

For more than 15 years, Baek Kim, a professor of microbiology and immunology, has been fascinated by HIV’s ability to hide in the body. How can the virus take cover in a cell—the macrophage—whose very job it is to kill foreign cells?

New research by Kim and Raymond Schinazi, director of the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology at Emory University’s Center for AIDS Research, has uncovered HIV’s novel mechanism for survival in a class of cells that typically provide the first line of immunological defense. Their research, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, indicates that HIV is able to exploit the unusual molecular makeup of macrophages to gain an often-overlooked foothold in the immune system.

The breakthrough may open up a new front in the battle against HIV, which infects more than 30 million people worldwide.

Kim’s and Schinazi’s finding may provide the basis for an unexpected tactic for stopping the virus, perhaps before HIV infection can take hold.

“If we have a drug that blocks HIV replicating in the macrophage, then we can use it as a preventive medication,” says Kim.

When HIV first enters the body—at least in cases of sexual transmission—it infects macrophages, white blood cells that Kim calls the “first defenders of our system.”

Normally, HIV uses dNTP—deoxynucleoside triphosphate, the building blocks for making the viral genetic machinery—to replicate, but those molecules are scarce in macrophages.

Instead they contain high levels of the closely related molecule rNTP—and HIV adapts to exploit that resource within the defensive cells, Kim and Schinazi found.

“This is a surprise,” Kim says. “The virus just wants to finish replicating, and it will utilize any resource it can to do so.”

When the team blocked the ability of the virus to interact with rNTP, HIV’s ability to replicate in macrophages was slashed by more than 90 percent.

“HIV replicates in the macrophage for months, for years—and then evolves to move on to T cells,” another form of immune cell, Kim says.

The 20 drugs currently used to combat HIV go after the infection when it’s already in the T cells. These are drugs “made to help already sick people, not to prevent infection,” Kim says.

With this new information about how HIV operates, it may be possible to “create a microbicide to stop the virus or limit its activity much earlier.”

Kim and his colleagues are already pursuing that possibility. There are some plant species—such as some wild mushrooms—that possess chemical compounds that protect them from viral replication using rNTP. One such substance, cordycepin, is an experimental compound derived from wild mushrooms that’s being tested as anticancer drug. Kim’s team is working with a pharmaceutical company to develop similar compounds that may stop HIV.

So far, they’re “very primitive” chemical compounds, Kim says, but he’s hoping they’ll lead to others that are more effective and less toxic.

By looking to other species that have developed such protections, he adds, it may be possible for researchers to find a way “to defend against HIV.”

Additional reporting by Tom Rickey, associate director of research communications at the Medical Center.

CITATIONS

Research Roundup

Older Drivers Steer Scientists toward Answers

It can be difficult for older drivers to see other vehicles and pedestrians—not because they can’t perceive the moving objects but because they have a heightened awareness of the background against which they move. Duje Tadin, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and colleagues have isolated the cause of this phenomenon—a discovery that may not only help train elderly people to be better drivers, but may also help psychiatrists understand abnormal brain processes in conditions like depression and schizophrenia. In healthy young people, a brain region called the middle temporal visual area, or MT, actively suppresses often irrelevant background motion so they can concentrate on the more important motions of smaller objects in the foreground. Tadin and colleagues found—in research published in the Journal of Neuroscience—that an improperly functioning MT may be the cause behind heightened perception of background motion in older adults.

Researchers Pinpoint Deadly Brain Tumor’s Origin

Scientists have identified the type of cell that’s at the origin of brain tumors known as oligodendrogliomas, which are a type of glioma—a category that defines the most common type of malignant brain tumor. In a paper published in the journal Cancer Cell, investigators found that the tumor originates and spreads through cells known as glial progenitor cells—often referred to as “daughter” cells of stem cells. The work comes at a time when many researchers are investigating the role that stem cells gone awry play in causing cancer. For scientists trying to create new ways to treat brain tumors, knowing whether stems cells or progenitor cells are part of the process is crucial. Steven Goldman, a professor of neurology, was part of the study team.

Unzipping MRSA and Discovering a Vaccine Route

Orthopaedic scientists are a step closer to developing a vaccine to prevent life-threatening methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections following bone and joint surgery. Known as a “superbug” because of its antibiotic resistance, MRSA causes nearly half a million hospitalizations and 19,000 deaths a year in the United States. Most research has targeted the surface of the bacteria, but a team of Rochester scientists has discovered an antibody that reaches beyond the microbe’s surface and can stop the MRSA bacteria from growing, at least in mice and cell cultures. The team—led by Edward Schwarz, a professor of orthopaedics and associate director of the Center for Musculoskeletal Research—presented its findings at the annual meeting of the Orthopaedic Research Society.

First National Study Shows Helicopters Bring Benefits

Severely injured patients transported by helicopter from an accident scene are more likely to survive than those brought to trauma centers by ground ambulance, according to a new study published in The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection, and Critical Care. The study is the first to examine the role of helicopter transport on a national level and includes the largest number of helicopter-transport patients in a single analysis. Mark Gestring, an associate professor of acute care surgery and the director of the Kessler Trauma Center, is lead author of the study.

Tiny Particles, and the DNA Ties that Bind Them

A team of researchers at Rochester, Scripps Research Institute, and MIT have used DNA as a tool to guide the precise positioning of tiny particles just one-millionth of a centimeter across. The resulting structure—a diamond-like lattice composed of gold nanoparticles and viral particles, woven together and held in place by strands of DNA—marks a remarkable step in scientists’ ability to combine an assortment of materials to create infinitesimal devices. Sung Yong Park, a research assistant professor of biostatistics and computational biology, is coauthor of the study, which was published in Nature Materials.

LINGUISTICS

Everything for Sale

Linguist Gregory Carlson investigates how language influences consumer choices.

By Kathleen McGarvey

carlsonDECISIONS, DECISIONS: Linguists Gregory Carlson and Julie Sedivy ’97 (PhD) examine the ways we make decisions—and how advertisers exploit those processes—in their new book, Sold on Language. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Look out ahead of you. What do you see?

However expansive the scene you might describe, you only see with acuity that which is directly before you.

“If you hold your thumb out about arm’s length, that’s the size of the area where you’re getting most of your information,” says Gregory Carlson, a professor of linguistics, philosophy, and brain and cognitive sciences. “What is beyond that, which you feel like you’re seeing perfectly well, you’re not seeing perfectly well. You’re processing it in a slightly different way.”

And advertisers know how to appeal to both sorts of perception. In a new book to be published in April, Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says about You (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Carlson and fellow linguist Julie Sedivy ’97 (PhD), an adjunct professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Calgary, turn a spotlight on the cognitive processes that advertisers exploit to influence our choices in matters large and small.

More than a trillion dollars is spent on advertising worldwide every couple of years, with roughly 40 percent of that money expended in the United States.

“We’re exposed to thousands of commercial advertisements every day—most of which we don’t try to pay attention to,” Carlson says. In the face of this commercial clamor, and the general information glut of contemporary culture, we can give our steady attention to only some matters. We make many of our decisions, and take in much of our information, at the outer edges of our attentiveness—what Carlson and Sedivy call “peripheral processing.”

It operates at the level of “feelings and ideas that are fairly general, that you can’t articulate very clearly. Peripheral processing is often below our level of awareness,” Carlson says. “If you ask most people why they buy a brand of toothpaste, or a brand of car, they might give you a reason—but it probably won’t be the real reason. The real reason is they feel most comfortable with that brand of car, or that brand of toothpaste, and they don’t know exactly why they feel that way about it.”

In their research, the coauthors burrow beneath consumers’ reactions and advertisers’ methods to delineate the ways we respond—emotionally, neurologically, and more—to the dilemmas of ever-proliferating choices, especially as they are influenced by language.

“Scientific understanding of the processes that underlie persuasive language—while still primitive in many ways—does offer a starting point for awareness” of how our minds respond to advertising, Carlson and Sedivy write in their book, which is aimed at the general-interest reader. “In knowing our minds better, we just may put ourselves in a better position to choose how we choose.”

They’re not suggesting that every decision needs to be held up for reasoned examination. It’s simply not possible to operate with that level of attentiveness, and much decision making can be conducted effectively without it. “We judge and we evaluate, and we also act reflexively. Our brains are built to do both,” they write.

But as people process more and more information peripherally, advertisers and others in the business of persuading become more adept at appealing to the peripheries of our minds—and more insistent in influencing our thinking that way even on subjects where we’d prefer to keep our rationality in the driver’s seat.

Advertisers play on our insecurities and our sense of self. Carlson and Sedivy relate the story of a couple who decide that a Volkswagen Passat is the car that best suits their needs—but they buy a Subaru Outback instead, because they conclude they’re just not “Passat people.” Advertisers employ tools such as puzzles and incongruities that attract our attention, and they use artfully condensed language that speaks to our unconscious, playing on similar words, evocations of words, memories of how words have been used before, and even the sounds of which they’re made. The Edsel, that historic automotive failure named for Henry Ford’s own son, was doomed not just by its unattractive design, Carlson and Sedivy contend, but by its name. At the peak of popularity, the name “Edsel” was given to just 220 American baby boys, and the word reminded car buyers of terms like “pretzel, hard sell and dead cell.”

In the final chapter of the book, Carlson and Sedivy consider the implications of advertising for democracy. How do we reconcile participatory politics with the methods of subconscious manipulation that fill our public lives, and even our private sense of our own identity?

“So much of the political process is wrangling about the language we’re going to use,” Carlson says. Word choice and metaphors profoundly influence the way people view issues. Think, for example, about the very different connotations of “tax cut” and “tax relief,” or “estate tax” and “death tax.”

For the past decade, Carlson has taught an undergraduate course on advertising and language. He hopes that the course, like the book, helps people to become more aware of the factors that influence their choices and to exercise a greater measure of control over how they make decisions. The difficulty, he says, is that our unconscious responses—those through which we’re most effectively manipulated—are precisely those that are least visible to us.

“If something’s important to you,” he says, “try to think about what’s going on in the messages and in your motivations—to the level that’s accessible to you.”

ATHLETICS & RECREATION

Lacrosse Opens Season with New Coach

Former Division I coach and All-American Sue Behme leads the Yellowjackets.

By Ryan Whirty

lacrosseBALANCED BEHME: New lacrosse coach Sue Behme describes herself as “intense, passionate, a ton of energy,” and someone who strives for perfection. “But I like to have fun, too. It’s about finding a balance.” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

If you ask those around Sue Behme to describe Rochester’s new lacrosse coach, the word that comes up a lot is “intense.” Even Behme relies on it to explain her approach to coaching and to life.

“Intense, passionate, a ton of energy,” Behme says when describing her coaching style. “I strive for perfection, but I also know no one’s perfect. That’s OK. That’s what drives me. I stress mental toughness, and hopefully that will trickle down to the student-athletes.”

At that point Behme (pronounced “beam”) pauses and smiles.

“But I like to have fun, too. It’s about finding a balance.”

Behme’s mixture of discipline and exuberance could be just what the Rochester program needs. While the Yellowjackets have had some periods of success, the program has yet to truly take off.

Behme could be the key to changing that. She has found success over her entire athletic career, first as a two-sport star at Cortland State, then as a lacrosse coach for a slew of collegiate programs.

That includes a highly successful stint at crosstown rival Nazareth College, with whom Behme won four conference championships and earned bids to the NCAA Division III tournament six times.

Behme left Nazareth in 2008 to help launch a Division I program at Fresno State, but she decided to return to upstate New York to be closer to family in her hometown of Syracuse.

“Sue brings a depth of experience that makes her a tremendous addition to our staff,” says George VanderZwaag, director of the Department of Athletics and Recreation. “We are very fortunate that we were in a position to attract her to the University, particularly given the late timing of our search. I am very excited for the students on our women’s lacrosse team.”

Tourney Time!

In late February, the Yellowjacket squash team finished fourth at the national tournament; and in basketball, both the UAA champion men (20–5) and the women (20–5) were headed to their NCAA Division III national tournaments.

For updates, visit the website, www.rochester.edu/athletics.

Behme succeeds Elizabeth Monte, who coached the Yellowjackets for eight seasons, including leading the team to its first Liberty League playoff berth. The Yellowjackets open the 2011 season in March.

Arriving last October, Behme has been working to place her stamp on the program, encouraging the Yellowjackets to set their sights high.

“There’s always a transition period (between coaches), for me and for the student-athletes,” she says. “But I really feel they are seeing the benefits of everything we’ve done up to this point in time. It’s really building their confidence.”

Behme says she pushes her players to be the best on and off the field. That includes excelling in the classroom. At Fresno State, for example, the Bulldogs earned the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association team academic award in each of her first two seasons, and five players were named to the association’s Academic Honor Roll.

Behme also knows that success shouldn’t always be marked by winning percentages or championships. For her, intensity is something that can make a young woman successful in every facet of her life.

“I want our program to be extremely competitive,” she says, “but I don’t measure success by the number of wins and losses. I measure it by how well you set yourself up for the future. Winning is part of the equation, but it’s not what I’m focusing on.”

Ryan Whirty writes about sports for Rochester Review.

MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

Conserving University History

burbanks (Photo: Williamstown Art Conservation Center)

BURBANK STUDIOS: Portraits of 19th-century University benefactor and trustee Gideon Webster Burbank (1803–1873) and his wife, Mary Goodrich Burbank (1806–1888), are on exhibit at the Memorial Art Gallery. Thanks to a grant from the American Art Program at the Henry Luce Foundation, the oil paintings—donated to the University in 1973 by the Burbanks’ great-great-grandson—have been restored by the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. The exhibition of the paintings highlights the conservation process itself, with before-and-after images and explanations of the steps involved in restoration.

The 1863 paintings are by William Cogswell (1819–1903), best known for his portrait of Abraham Lincoln, a work that’s held in the White House art collection. A flour-milling magnate, Burbank gave the University $20,000 in 1854, the largest gift in the then four-year-old University’s history. Burbank also designed and operated a steamship on the Erie Canal, and he sent barrels of flour as Rochester’s contribution to the first World’s Fair, held in London in 1851.

The Burbanks, along with some of their 11 children, are buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery.

LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

Reading Abroad

Visiting Skalny Center poet Piotr Sommer suggests some not-to-be-missed modern Polish literature.

By Kathleen McGarvey

piotrsommer (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Polish poet Piotr Sommer—editor of the Warsaw-based international writing magazine Literatura na Świecie (World Literature)—has been guiding Rochester students on a tour through 20th-century poetry in translation this semester as the Skalny Visiting Professor in the English department, in a new course called Studies in International Literature. The author of a dozen volumes of poetry in Polish, Sommer has also published essays and interviews, translations, and literary anthologies. He returns to Poland in May.

His most recent work available in English is Continued, a book of poems published by Wesleyan Press.

Sommer recommends some of his favorite Polish literature available in translation:

Cinnamon Shops and Sanitarium under the Hour Glass by Bruno Schulz

“Perhaps the single best prose writer in Polish from the 20th century, Schulz was born in 1892 and killed in 1942 in the Drohobycz Ghetto. Translations of his work are from some 60 years ago. Because he’s such a great writer and stylist, it would be high time to have him translated again—and then again. Many American authors such as Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth were inspired by him, as were many writers in other languages. He’s sometimes compared to Franz Kafka, but that comparison may make little sense. Schulz’s writing is terrific prose that has a lot in common with poetry, in the way he treats language. Simply read anything you can put your hands on by Bruno Schulz.”

My Century and With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat by Aleksander Wat

“Wat is one of the three or four best Polish poets of the 20th century, and he seems to translate well. He was born in 1900 and died by suicide in 1967. He’s one of the few who’ve been able to connect the existential and the linguistic so phenomenally, and to preserve a light touch, too. Wat began as a Dadaist, and was able to preserve that spirit even in the poems he wrote in the Gulag, where he spent a few years. Poet and fellow Pole Czeslaw Milosz invited Wat to Berkeley in the early 1960s; Miłosz taped his conversations with Wat, a kind of intellectual odyssey, and years after Wat’s death published them as My Century. It’s a classic.”

Lodgings by Andrzej Sosnowski

“Sosnowki’s first book translated into English—a collection of 100 poems—will be published in March by Rochester’s own Open Letter press. Generally considered one of the best poets writing in Polish today, Sosnowski’s work is difficult and beautiful. Part of the beauty lies in the way the cryptic quality of the “message” combines with how the language works. He collaborated with his translator in producing this volume, so the result should be really interesting. He’s original himself, and yet, because he’s influential among the younger crowd, his work also shows something “typical” about where some of the new Polish writing is going.”

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Promoting Liber-Tee

tshirt (Photo: Adam Fenster)

FASHION BUSINESS: As an undergraduate economics major, Stephen Macaskill ’11 (KEY) was president of the Young Americans for Liberty group on campus. Now as a KEY student, he’s putting his interest in freedom to work with his Amagi Clothing company. Selling T-shirts that sport slogans such as “Laissez Faire” and “Stand Up for Liberty,” Macaskill hopes to promote liberty through his apparel, whose designs he commissions. He cites Zappos founder Tony Hsieh as a role model, and says, “I’m learning quickly and having a lot of fun doing it.”

Dazzling Diva

Sharing her talents with her alma mater, acclaimed soprano Renée Fleming ’83E (MM) helps set the stage for the next generation of opera singers.

By Scott Hauser

flemingBRAVA! Fleming acknowledges the audience at Kodak Hall with Neil Varon, director of the Eastman Philharmonia (third from left), and graduate student tenors Joshua Bouillon, Matthew Grills, and Eric Rieger. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

Renée Fleming ’83E (MM) is the first to admit that she likes to seek out new roles for herself in the operatic world where she has reigned as the “people’s diva” for more than two decades.

In just the past few months, the celebrated soprano and three-time Grammy Award winner has reprised the lead role of Rossini’s Armida—which she describes as “the Olympics of singing”—recorded an album of indie rock songs, and taken a largely backstage appointment as the first creative consultant of the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

“To be a really fine musician, to be a musician period, you have to, at the very least, appreciate music history. And you have to be intellectually curious,” the Eastman School graduate says. “I have very eclectic tastes. It’s what I enjoy.

“Growing up in Rochester had a lot to do with that because there was so much to appreciate, and being in a family that was all about the arts sort of set me up for this.”

“This” is stardom that’s almost operatic in its own right. Since winning the Metropolitan Opera auditions in 1988 and making her Met debut in 1991, Fleming has captivated the world’s most discerning listeners with a full lyric soprano voice that fans and critics alike describe as rich, creamy, and extraordinary.

“In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing,” the legendary conductor Sir George Solti famously told the New York Times about his first encounter with Fleming’s voice. “The other was Renata Tebaldi.”

In February, Fleming helped set the stage for the next generation of opera performers as she shared her talents with her alma mater for a concert to benefit the new Renée Fleming Endowed Scholarship Fund for Eastman voice and opera students.

The three-hour performance, which left a packed Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre clamoring for more, was a rare opportunity for students, faculty, and other members of the University and Rochester communities to get a glimpse of why Fleming is acclaimed for her voice as well as for transforming the popular image of opera stars. Performing with Eastman’s premier student orchestra, the Eastman Philharmonia, conducted by the Philharmonia’s music director Neil Varon and Eastman School Dean Douglas Lowry, she moved effortlessly from the arias and art songs of Strauss and Puccini to the contemporary songs of the alternative rock bands Muse and Death Cab for Cutie.

flemingGUEST OF HONOR: As part of her visit to the Eastman School, Fleming received an honorary degree from Douglas Lowry, dean of the school. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

“Renée Fleming’s career has served as an exemplar of refined musical expression, exquisite taste, and courageous adventure,” says Lowry. “Her preeminence in the operatic and recital world is unmatched, featuring a broad repertoire that melds traditional and unfamiliar.”

For Fleming, the benefit was a homecoming that “was a long time in the making”—“Nothing in my schedule is spontaneous,” she notes—and her first visit since the renovation of Kodak Hall and the opening of Eastman’s new East Wing. The native of the Rochester suburb of Churchville, N.Y., earned a master of music degree from Eastman, studying with legendary voice professors Jan DeGaetani and John Maloy.

“The most important thing, and the thing that separates Eastman from other conservatories, is that it’s an academically oriented school,” Fleming says. “I’m proud of that association because the musicology and theory and analysis classes that I took at Eastman set me on a path that’s a little bit different from other singers. It piqued my interest in composers and how they fit together and into their various schools of thought.”

The daughter of voice teacher Patricia Alexander, who has taught at the Eastman Community Music School for 14 years, Fleming grew up in a household of wide-ranging musical interests as well as opera and choral performances. She was already intrigued by song literature when she arrived at Eastman.

“That’s different from most singers who specialize in opera,” she says.

As the guest of the Eastman School, she made a point of ensuring that she would have time to perform with and meet with students. In addition to working with the Phiharmonia, during her encore, she waltzed with graduate student tenors Joshua Bouillon, Matthew Grills, and Eric Rieger.

She says students are often surprised at how difficult her climb to the heights of the operatic world were, a process that she recounts in her 2004 memoir, The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer.

“People have an expectation, I think, that you have this talent, and so you go to college for four years and you’re ready to go,” she says. “It was such a longer, more arduous road for me.

“I think kids generally imagine that they’re going to achieve everything,” she says. “And I think it’s only experience that begins to seize you and to teach you that maybe everything is not attainable. But I think it’s a mistake when you’re a kid to think, ‘Well, I’ll never make it.’ That’s precisely the time to think, ‘Well, of course, I’m going to be singing at the Met.’”

flemingINTERACTIVE SESSION: Following her rehearsal with the Eastman Philharmonia, Fleming talked with students about her career during a session in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

Her visit to Eastman coincided with the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Armida, the three-act Rossini opera known for the difficult coloratura that’s the signature of the lead character, an enchanting sorceress who seduces a Crusader who’s encamped near Jerusalem. It’s a role Fleming first tackled in 1993 at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy.

“It’s the Olympics for singers,” Fleming says of the role. “Anything that’s bel canto is the hardest, most virtuosic expression of what a singer does.”

As for the challenge of moving from the Met to Kodak Hall in almost back-to-back performances, “It’ll be easy,” she joked a few days before Armida’s opening night.

The day after Armida’s debut, she was on the stage at Kodak Hall, preparing for rehearsal.

“In case you’re wondering why I sound like a bass today,” she told the small group of students who had gathered to listen as she ran through the concert with the Philharmonia, “it’s because I normally take two days off.”

Finding the time to take those precious days off has become something of the holy grail for Fleming. After her Rochester performance, she returned to New York to finish Armida’s run. Later this spring, she takes the stage at the Met to headline Strauss’s diva showcase, Capriccio. Her 2010–11 season also included performances for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Last Night of the Proms as well as performances with the Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and National symphonies, recitals in St. Paul, Minn., Kansas City, Mo., Ann Arbor, Mich., Montreal, Washington, D.C., New York, San Juan, Berlin, Budapest, and Warsaw.

Musical Ambassador

One of the most acclaimed singers of the modern era, Fleming has been internationally celebrated by arts and cultural organizations. Among the honors she has received:

Sweden’s Polar Prize (2008);

Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the French government (2005);

Honorary membership in the Royal Academy of Music (2003);

Three Grammy Awards, including most recently the 2010 Best Classical Vocal Performance Grammy for Verismo, a collection of rarely heard Italian arias;

The 2009 Echo Award for Strauss’s Four Last Songs;

The first woman in the 125-year history of the Metropolitan Opera to solo headline an opening night gala.

She’s frequently called upon to help commemorate distinguished occasions, including the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama, and the 2009 anniversary of the Czech Republic’s “Velvet Revolution.”

She also is frequently asked to host television and radio broadcasts, including the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series for movie theaters and television, and Live From Lincoln Center on PBS.

“The biggest challenge I face is probably finding balance,” says the mother of two teen-aged daughters.

Whether she’s found the magic formula of professional and personal balance is a question, too, that’s frequently asked of Fleming. Her answer? “Less is more, but I never seem to achieve it.”

Fleming hopes to get a different perspective on the opera world in her new role as creative consultant to the Lyric Opera of Chicago. She’s the first person to serve in that position in the celebrated company’s history.

As part of the five-year appointment, Fleming will play an active leadership role in “creating new projects and initiatives designed to increase opera audiences and awareness of the art form, while sharing in the company’s artistic vision,” the Lyric Opera noted in making the announcement.

Among her charges are helping to foster a commitment to American music theater, beginning with a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in 2013, and curating a world premiere opera in the 2015–16 season.

“I love the idea that I can learn about some other part of what I do,” Fleming says of the Chicago appointment. “Be backstage and get some sense of how the business of music is run and get some sense of what the challenges are. “I’ve always been interested in outreach and marketing. And it’s going to be terrific to try to be involved in that.”

The move adds a new component to her already brimming program as an artist whose performances on stage and in the recording studio and whose commitment as a musical ambassador have come to define the modern notion of opera superstar.

That’s a role that may be timeless.

“I don’t know what the future is going to bring,” Fleming says. “I hope it’s a few years off.”

Found in Translation

Rochester brings a new focus to clinical and translational science, an approach that promises to bring practical health benefits to patients.

By Kathleen McGarvey

ctsbPAPER TRAIL: Arthur Moss ’62M (Res), a professor of medicine, and his clinical research teams have collected data from thousands of cardiology patients in a quest to develop improved therapies for heart disease. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

When Arthur Moss ’62M (Res), a professor of medicine at Rochester, arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital as an intern in the late 1950s, he found a teacher and mentor who gave him a model for his own life as a cardiologist. Paul Dudley White, the chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General and cardiologist to former president Dwight Eisenhower, founded the American Heart Association. He established Massachusetts General’s cardiac unit and through his clinical research, he improved the care of patients with heart disease.

Today, Moss credits White—who was Moss’s teaching attending physician through his six-week internship—with showing him how a physician could both care for individual patients and discover new ways of treating disease.

“I wanted to see patients in a clinical setting, and advance the science of cardiology,” Moss says of his aspirations for a career that, five decades on, has contributed to saving the lives of countless people.

Moss has done that by collaborating with other cardiologists, geneticists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and a host of others; he has involved thousands of patients who have volunteered to take part in his teams’ research—all in a quest to better understand heart disease and to develop more effective therapies for cardiac patients.

The world’s foremost expert on long QT syndrome—a condition that puts patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest—Moss was one of the researchers who discovered the genes responsible for the disorder. For more than 20 years, he has led a team of cardiologists in reducing potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias through advances in drug treatment, such as beta blockers, and through devices like implantable cardioverter defibrillators.

One concern unifies his years of research.

“All of our studies have related, in one way or another, to the question, ‘How can we improve treatment for patients with heart disease?’ ” Moss says.

The importance of harnessing science for practical solutions to health problems may seem obvious, but in recent decades some policymakers have argued that the nation’s biomedical focus has drifted away from research that’s directly applicable to patients and human disease. Congress and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are seeking to change that, and Rochester is helping to lead the way.

This spring, Rochester will dedicate the new Clinical and Translational Science Building (see page 28). Built with the help of a $50 million grant from the state of New York, it’s one of the first facilities in the country constructed specifically to serve as the academic home for clinical and translational science at an academic health center.

It’s also the physical manifestation of a renewed emphasis on clinical research at Rochester. In 2006, the School of Medicine and Dentistry was one of 12 top academic health centers to receive a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the NIH. The $40 million dollar grant, the largest NIH award in Rochester’s history, is helping the University and its partner institutions to bring together the people, technologies, and infrastructure needed to speed the pace at which advances in biomedical research make tangible improvements in people’s lives.

Together, institutions receiving the awards—there are currently about 55—form a national consortium on clinical and translational science. “The development of this consortium represents the first systematic change in our approach to clinical research in 50 years,” Elias Zerhouni, then director of the NIH, said when announcing the first awards in 2006. “Working together, these sites will serve as discovery engines that will improve medical care by applying new scientific advances to real world practice. We expect to see new approaches reach underserved populations, local community organizations, and health care providers to ensure that medical advances are reaching people who need them.”

Since World War II, the United States has given priority to funding basic science, and breakthroughs in molecular and structural biology, neuroscience, genetics, and bioengineering are rich with potential to transform the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. But that potential has been slow to be realized, in part because of the disconnect between basic science—which is concerned with components of organisms, such as cells and genes—and clinical science, which applies those findings to people.

The NIH award aims to reduce the time required for lab discoveries to produce patient treatments, to engage communities in the work of clinical research, and to train new generations of clinical and translational researchers.

“This isn’t about basic versus clinical research,” says Thomas Pearson, the senior associate dean for clinical research at the School of Medicine and Dentistry and principal investigator of the NIH grant. “The point is, the basic science program is a great pitcher; it’d be awfully nice to have an equally great catcher. You need both sides to play baseball.”

According to Bradford Berk ’81M (MD/PhD), CEO of the Medical Center and senior vice president for health sciences, Rochester has a strong tradition of both basic and clinical science. “This medical school is steeped in the legacy of founding dean George Whipple, himself an iconic translational scientist,” Berk says. “Our new Clinical and Translational Science Building is an integral element of the Medical Center’s strategic plan. It will serve as a conduit for rapidly bringing basic science discoveries to everyday patient care.” The new building—a four-story, 200,000-square-foot structure—provides an integrated academic home for clinical research at Rochester. It will bring together all of the disciplines needed to transform creative scientific insights into proven, effective therapies.

Now there will be a critical mass of clinical researchers under one roof: several hundred people who are involved in the enterprise of translational research, from biostatisticians and bioethicists to clinical trial researchers and researchers in specific areas such as cancer, neurology, cardiology, smoking cessation, and obesity prevention and management. The building has an open floor plan to encourage interaction, and also provides substantial space for community involvement. Participation by research volunteers is a key piece of clinical research.

“The building’s a structural icon, but what’s magic is that it’s allowed us to restructure and reorganize from the inside out: research-friendly and research-participant friendly,” says Karen Mustian, an assistant professor of radiation oncology who also holds an appointment in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine. Joining the Medical Center in 2003, she set up a lab to support her own research on the therapeutic benefits of exercise for cancer survivors and those undergoing cancer treatments.

With support from the institute, Mustian’s lab has evolved into the Physical Exercise and Activity Kinesiology Clinical Research Core Lab, a resource for other clinical researchers concerned with tracing connections between physical activity and disease mitigation or prevention.

“The inception of this lab as a core facility and the support we’ve received from the University really exemplifies the fact that this is what the University wants to see increased focus on—providing infrastructure for outstanding clinical science,” Mustian says.

The plan for a dedicated building designed specifically to support clinical research strengthened Rochester’s application for an award, says Pearson, coauthor of the application.

Rochester’s established history also helped. In addition to Whipple, the medical school’s founding dean who earned a Nobel Prize in 1934 for his research leading to the use of raw liver as a treatment for pernicious anemia, more recent researchers have contributed such pioneering advances as the use of lung surfactant to help premature infants survive and the development of the HiB vaccine, which has nearly wiped out childhood meningitis. Rochester scientists also contributed to the discovery of a method to prevent many instances of cervical cancer, the HPV vaccine.

Extending the Medical Center’s Clinical Research

The Upstate New York Translational Research Network, part of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, aims to increase the quality and quantity of translational research in the region. Participating institutions include:

University at Buffalo, State University of New York (SUNY)

Upstate Medical University in Syracuse

Trudeau Institute

Masonic Medical Research Laboratory

Rochester Institute of Technology Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health

Roswell Park Cancer Institute

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

SUNY Binghamton

Cornell University

Ordway Research Institute

Albany Medical College

Albany School of Pharmacy

Bassett Healthcare System in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Guthrie Healthcare System in Sayre, Pa.

A wide-reaching biomedical research consortium—the Upstate New York Translational Research Network—expands the Medical Center’s clinical research to encompass a region of about 6 million people. The demographically diverse area includes several understudied groups, such as rural communities, a substantial Native American population, and Rochester’s large deaf and hard of hearing community.

Mark Taubman, dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, says enhancing clinical and translational science is fundamental to delivering on the Medical Center’s promise.

“As an academic medical center, our number one goal is to make discoveries that will improve the health of our population—our region first, but also the world.”

One way that making a priority of translational science will benefit people’s health is by creating the infrastructure necessary to help turn discoveries made in the lab into clinical applications.

“Basic discoveries that can improve health often hit a roadblock in being translated to clinical use. That roadblock is expense, and academic medical centers didn’t have the infrastructure to do that,” Taubman says. “The NIH saw we’d have to develop infrastructure to help academic medical centers get discoveries to users, to take them ‘from bench to bedside.’ ”

Research on muscular dystrophy conducted by a team of physician-scientists led by Charles Thornton, a professor of neurology, illustrates the complexity of the process.

“I came to Rochester in 1989 to join a project on finding a treatment for muscular dystrophy. And I’ve never stopped working on this,” Thornton says. He and a team of fellow neurologists have been working to understand how a genetic flaw leads to myotonic dystrophy, the most common form of muscular dystrophy in adults—and they’ve found a way to treat it in mice. Their work has been necessarily incremental—but it has also advanced on multiple fronts, says Thornton, who both sees patients and works in the lab.

ctsbINCREMENTAL PROGRESS: Thurman Wheeler, an assistant professor of neurology, works with colleagues at the lab bench and in clinical research on patients to find a treatment for muscular dystrophy. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Thornton and his colleagues—Richard Moxley, the Helen Aresty Fine and Irving Fine Professor of Neurology, and Chad Heatwole and Thurman Wheeler, both assistant professors of neurology—have taken a two-pronged approach to their research. One prong has been patient-oriented, with clinical research to answer questions such as how the disease progresses in people, and how the disease’s progress and response to treatment can best be measured.

“The other prong is on the bench research side,” Thornton says, “to understand how an abnormal gene causes the symptoms of disease, to create animal models that recapitulate the disease process, and to devise targeted treatments to try to reverse symptoms. That’s the stage we’re up to now. We have things we think are working well in animal studies.

“What we’ve done simply is to follow the classical paradigm that people were hoping would work, in the sense that we’d take our new understanding of molecular genetics and use it to devise very targeted treatments of diseases that were incurable.”

It’s a “vertically integrated” approach, says Thornton, with basic science discoveries about the disease, developments of potential treatments, and clinical research on people with myotonic dystrophy all happening simultaneously.

“We’ve devoted years of effort, and so have hundreds of patients, to the enterprise of knowing in advance—when something’s ready to test—how to test it really efficiently,” he says.

That level of preparedness is key because the stages involved in bringing a treatment to fruition add up to many years of work.

Thornton and his team so far have results they are heartened by. They’ve achieved good effects in genetically engineered mice, involving the reversal of features of the disease. “If we can translate that into people it has a possibility of transforming the lives of people with the disease.”

Knowledge of the impact that their work can have drives team members to work nimbly and prudently, committed not to particular methods or schools of thought but only to a final result.

The research “started with, and has always been driven by, the desire to find a treatment that can really improve the lives of our patients using the fastest, cheapest, most effective path we could find,” Thornton says, “with no attachment to one theory ever allowed, always trying to keep ourselves attached to whatever could get us where we wanted to go in the shortest period of time.”

Such practicality is central to clinical and translational research, says Taubman, and it’s another way in which the enterprise can benefit health care.

“There are a lot of things out there on the prevention, diagnostic, and treatments sides that we don’t know how good they are,” he says. “There’s a whole area of research—it’s called comparative effectiveness research—that’s trying to understand, Are current treatments and diagnostic tools the best? What increases quality and decreases cost?”

ctsbCOMMUNITY TIES: Nana Bennett, the director of the Center for Community Health and a professor of medicine, says health care providers and communities must work together in solving health problems. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

They’re questions that occupy Nana Bennett, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Community Health. Focused on prevention, the center aims to make Rochester a healthier place.

“We’re really focused on what I call the end stage of translation,” says Bennett.

“Academic research centers have an obligation to be responsive to public health needs of their communities, and that hasn’t been traditionally the case. We need to nurture that.”

The World Health Organization ranks life expectancy in the United States—70 years—at 24th in the world. Less than 2 percent of the country’s health care spending goes toward prevention, and scientific advances are slow to make their way into people’s daily lives—not just new drugs, but ways chronic disease can be managed, and new insights into how people can take control of their own health.

Clinical trials can determine whether a given device or drug or behavior is effective, Bennett says, but there are more questions to be answered. How can new information best be disseminated to the medical community? How well do measures work when they move beyond the comparatively small groups participating in a clinical trial and into the general population? What are the most effective ways to educate the public?

If discoveries produced by basic science are going to improve the nation’s health, she says, researchers have to work with the community. The Healthy Living Research Center that Bennett oversees is an effort to do just that. She calls it a “unique marriage of clinical behavior change services and behavior research.”

Bennett cites a 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that 40 percent of instances of premature death in the United States can be attributed to behavior; social circumstances are at the root of another 15 percent.

“If you want to improve health, you need to go after these things.”

The Center for Community Health—which has run focus groups to learn more about demographic groups’ feelings about clinical research and participating in it—works with community organizations, individual community members, and medical practices to improve community health and to gather data that feeds further research.

“It’s the ultimate test of something’s implementability” to see what happens when it reaches patients in their doctors’ offices, says Pearson.

The path from the bench to the bedside and back again is one shaped by rousing ambitions and gritty practicalities. They’re inextricable, Moss suggests.

“What we’ve tried to transmit to our cardiology fellows is that with their specialized knowledge, they have a responsibility for applying that knowledge to patients—but also a responsibility to advance the fund of knowledge.”

Funding the Future

As trustee Rich Handler ’83 and his wife, Martha, increase to $25 million the largest contribution to student scholarships in the University’s history, meet a few of the students whose lives have been transformed by the Alan and Jane Handler Scholarship Fund.

Photographs by Adam Fenster

For Amy Roth ’11, being selected as one of the first recipients of a scholarship supported by the Alan and Jane Handler Scholarship Fund has meant more than simply paying for her education.

“The Alan and Jane Handler Scholarship has enabled me to focus on what most interests me,” says Roth, a psychology major who plans to attend nursing school and to pursue a career in mental health services. “I have had the freedom to find what I’m passionate about.”

University trustee Rich Handler ’83 and his wife, Martha, hope to ensure that deserving students continue to find that freedom at Rochester, thanks to their commitment of $20 million this winter. Their additional support raises to $25 million the scholarship fund they established in 2007.

The fund, named in recognition of Rich Handler’s parents, Alan and Jane Handler, is the largest contribution to student scholarships in the University’s history.

Since 2007, a total of 10 students in the College and the Eastman School have benefited from the scholarship, which covers all University expenses, including tuition and fees, room, board, and books. Handler Scholars receive awards annually throughout their undergraduate years, as long as they demonstrate adequate academic performance.

Recipients are selected on the basis of outstanding scholarly potential, financial need because of underprivileged backgrounds, and potential to be future leaders.

“These young men and women just need a little help before they set out to make the world a better place,” Rich Handler noted in announcing the new commitment. “Martha and I increased our scholarship program to $25 million because we were so pleased that the University did such an excellent job of selecting amazing students, who through no fault of their own are truly in need.”

Shay Behrens ’14

Michael Fuller ’13E

Jonathan Peralta ’13

Aaron Roth ’11

Amy Roth ’11

Alejandro López-Samamé ’12E

Shay Behrens ’14

handler-behrens (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Harlan, Iowa

“I grew up in such a small town that I could go to the closest city and still see people I know,” says Shay Behrens ’14 of her childhood and adolescence in an agricultural community in southwest Iowa.

Behrens, who graduated second in her high school class with a grade point average of over 4.0, says that although most of her classmates went on to college, she was one of only two who went out of state, and one of a very few who chose a school with more than a thousand students. “They go to schools with maybe a thousand kids—the smaller colleges,” says Behrens of the typical graduates of her area high school.

Her decision to travel so far is all the more remarkable because Behrens—whose mother, a waitress, raised her alone—is the first person in her family to attend college.

She says her first semester at Rochester was “a hard transition.” But, she adds, “You have to get out of your comfort zone in order to learn things in life.”

She first learned of Rochester during her junior year of high school, when her chemistry teacher nominated her for the Bausch & Lomb Honorary Science Award. The award recognizes high school juniors with outstanding achievement in the sciences and exemplary math scores on their PSAT exams. As a winner of the award, Behrens was permitted to apply to Rochester for free and, if admitted, to qualify for merit scholarships.

Among the factors that drew her to Rochester was her interest in the health sciences. A distinguished athlete and team leader in multiple sports in high school, Behrens says she’s interested in working with athletes professionally. She has yet to decide whether that means being a physician, an athletic trainer, or a physical therapist.

She says she was tempted to enroll in a university that, unlike Rochester, offered preprofessional majors in physiology and kinesiology. But although her road from college to a career may be less direct at Rochester, it’s one that offers her a variety of options and a chance to explore. She’s discovered two new interests—psychology and philosophy—and plans a minor in Spanish. In addition, she’s part of the community service club UR Rotaract, the Charles Drew Pre-Health Society, and the Minority Association of Premedical Students, or MAPS.

Still, she misses sports. “This next semester, I’m going to play intramural basketball, because I’m absolutely dying without basketball,” she says, adding, “I might try volleyball and squash, because I don’t even know what squash is. So it seems interesting.”

—Karen McCally

Back to Introduction

Michael Fuller ’13E

handler-fuller (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Philadelphia

If you traveled through the concourse of Suburban Station in Philadelphia’s Center City a few years ago, you may have seen and heard a young ensemble that went by the name MANA Quartet. The classical musicians weren’t the usual buskers—they were all still in high school—or the usual classical quartet, for that matter. In place of the typical cellist was Michael Fuller ’13E, a bass player who first picked up the instrument in middle school.

“Ever since elementary school, music has been part of my life,” Fuller says.

For the past year and a half Fuller has been honing his musical skills at the Eastman School as a Handler Scholar. In addition to his full load of courses, he tries to find the three to four hours a day—“that’s ideal”—to rehearse, both on his own and with the school’s ensembles. He’s performed with the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra and the Eastman Philharmonia, an opportunity usually reserved for upperclassmen.

The youngest of five who grew up in Philadelphia, Fuller says he’s not sure where his interest in music came from, but he’s never been very far from it. His mother played cello and violin as a young woman, but he’s the only member of his family to try to make a career of music. He began with the trombone in elementary school before switching to the bass.

He’s the first in his family to go to college, an achievement that, he says, “means a lot to my mom.” But he says she’s been careful to make sure he knows he’s under no pressure when it comes to higher education.

At the Eastman School, Fuller is studying closely with James VanDemark, a professor of double bass and cochair of Eastman’s strings, harp, and guitar department. “He’s an amazing teacher,” says Fuller of VanDemark. “He’s definitely done great things for my music.”

And where does he want to go with his music? For now, he hopes to be able to find opportunities to perform at venues in the United States and abroad. He’s finding that music can take him places far beyond Suburban Station.

“Music got me out of Philadelphia,” he says. “I knew I had to do something with it.”

—Scott Hauser

Back to Introduction

Jonathan Peralta ’13

handler-peralta (Photo: Adam Fenster)

New York, N.Y.

At Manhattan’s Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts—known as LaGuardia Arts—Jonathan Peralta ’13 followed an academic program that included advanced placement courses in biology, chemistry, and calculus, in addition to an intensive program in classical voice and opera. As both a serious musician and an aspiring scientist, he calls Rochester “a natural choice.”

If his circumstances were different, Peralta, who continues voice lessons at the Eastman School, admits he may have been tempted to pursue a career in music. “I honestly sing all the time. I can’t help it. I hum to myself. I sing to myself. It’s pretty constant,” he says.

But he says he can’t take that risk.

“I really have to guarantee that when I leave college, I’m going to be able to take care of myself. It’s not like, ‘Oh I’m going to go and live at home for a while,’” he explains. “There is, to be very frank, no home for me to go back to.”

Peralta’s father left the family before he and his twin sister were born. Their mother suffered from drug and alcohol addiction throughout their childhood, and the two children underwent multiple changes in custody. “We had moved maybe six or seven times,” he recalls. They went to a different school for each of their three years of middle school. Both their mother, and the grandmother who had done much to raise them, died when Peralta and his sister were in high school.

Fortunately, Peralta says, he had a stable support system at LaGuardia Arts. “I can’t express how much LaGuardia really shaped me and really helped me prosper,” he says. “It was the perfect environment for me, and I really made some connections to both faculty and students that I know I will keep forever.”

Now in his fourth semester at Rochester, Peralta says he’s found a home on campus as well. “After really investing some time here, I finally do feel very well connected. I really do have a strong support system here.”

Like many sophomores, he’s planning to pursue a different major from the one he initially intended. Once set on biology, he found himself more captivated by computer science. “I said, ‘Let me take the intro course,’ and I did, and it’s something I did well in,” he says of the make-or-break Computer Science 171 that’s the first step in determining who will make it through one of Rochester’s more challenging majors.

He says he’s sometimes surprised by how far he’s been able to come. He notes that his sister has similarly thrived. She’s a sophomore, also on a full scholarship, at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.

Peralta knows his story is inspiring. And, he says, “I’m inspired by my own story! It’s crazy to think, and it’s surreal to me still.”

“I feel like the little train that could—and will. And chug-a-chug-a-choo-choo,” he adds decisively. “I’m ready to go.”

—Karen McCally

Back to Introduction

Aaron Roth ’11

handler-aaronroth (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Savannah, Tenn.

Aaron Roth ’11 was 10 years old when his family moved from Dallas to rural Tennessee, in a setting so isolated that they lived with no electricity or running water.

“My father really liked the rustic lifestyle,” he says. “We lived in that setting for about six months, and then we moved a little closer to the nearby town and had more modern conveniences.”

Homeschooled for most of his youth, Roth was 15 years old before he entered a classroom full of students. Having been surrounded by books and possessing a healthy appetite for reading, he was excited for the new opportunity, which he shared with his older sister, Amy, then 16.

But they found that they were significantly behind the other students in math and science. Those subjects, Roth says, are “a hard thing for homeschooling parents to take care of because there are a lot of resources you need.”

He caught up fast. Roth is nearing completion of a major in brain and cognitive sciences.

His parents, he says, were initially surprised that he was even considering college. “I told them I was going to go to college, but I don’t know if they fully expected it until I got in and said, ‘I’m going, and I’ve got a scholarship.’” As it turned out, both Aaron and Amy would arrive at Rochester in the fall of 2007 as Handler Scholars.

Roth says he’s enjoyed being able to sample a variety of subjects—he’s taken courses in history, philosophy, math, and music—but brain and cognitive sciences is the area that captivated him. Last summer, Roth worked in a robotics lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He’s animated as he talks about his interest in the future of brain and machine interfacing, and the possibilities of such research.

“There’s already research being done with neural implants and using your thoughts to control computers,” he explains, citing cases in which electrodes placed on the motor cortexes of the brains of paraplegics can allow them to control cursors with their thoughts, opening e-mails, for example, and browsing the web.

Although Roth is a senior, it won’t be his last year at Rochester. He’s been admitted into the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Year, or KEY, program, which provides a tuition-free fifth year for students to pursue a project of their own design and take courses to support their entrepreneurial interests.

“I wanted to take some more computer science courses, and I was interested in web design,” he says. He and a classmate are designing and implementing what Roth calls a “buy-sell website,” just for the campus community, to help students buy, sell, or exchange used items without having to post flyers on already-crowded bulletin boards around campus. Meanwhile, he’s taking courses in computer science and business to support the project.

“We’re not sure yet when we’re going to launch it,” he says of the site. “Maybe this semester.”

—Karen McCally

Back to Introduction

Amy Roth ’11

handler-amyroth (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Savannah, Tenn.

“I’m fascinated by the way people think, and what influences factor into that,” says Amy Roth ’11.

That fascination fueled her decision to become a psychology major. She came to Rochester planning to pursue psychiatry but felt bolstered by the freedom the curriculum offered her to explore her options.

Roth found out she had received a Handler Scholarship when she was attending freshman orientation.

“It definitely eased my financial issues,” she says.

Until grade 10, Roth was homeschooled with her brother Aaron ’11 in Savannah, Tenn. They decided to attend a public high school to ready themselves for college. The second and third eldest of five children, Amy began high school at age 16; Aaron at 15.

“As awesome as parents might be, there’s no way they can be as skilled in every subject as someone who’s trained in it,” she says.

Their ambitions were realized when the siblings both enrolled at Rochester—and both received Handler Scholarships.

“It felt like I’d been given a new lease on life,” Roth says of her arrival at Rochester. “I could design what I wanted to do.”

“I’ve been given room to come into my own here,” she says. She’s been busy in the classroom and out, dancing with the Afro-Expressions performing arts group and serving as its business manager, as well as joining the Psychology Undergraduate Council.

In spring 2010, Roth studied in Vienna for a semester; in the summer, she took part in an internship in London at the Collingham Gardens Children and Family Unit, a psychiatric hospital for preteens. The experience had a profound impact on her own professional plans.

“I helped the nursing staff, and I saw how much hands-on patient experience you get as a nurse,” she says. “I don’t want to be in and out of patients’ lives. I want to create a more holistic health environment.” Roth hopes to begin nursing school in the fall.

Roth is thankful for the help she’s received in preparing herself for a life of helping others. “I can’t tell you how much of a relief the scholarship has been. And one thing Rich has stressed is the importance of giving back, or paying it forward.

“I’m so grateful for the help I’ve received, and the generosity.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

Back to Introduction

Alejandro López-Samamé ’12E

handler-lopez-samame (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Lima, Peru

When Alejandro López-Samamé ’12E first took up the trumpet at age seven, he found a kindred spirit of sorts.

“I’ve been trying all my life to be a leader in everything I do. That’s what the trumpet does in an orchestra—it leads other instruments in certain dynamics due to its tone.”

López-Samamé—the only musician in his family—may have taken naturally to his instrument, but his path to music school wasn’t so clear.

He was born and raised in Lima, Peru. “It’s a hard place to come from, when you’re talking about music,” he says, because there’s not a lot of support available for musical study or classical music instruction.

López-Samamé admired the work of James Thompson, a professor of trumpet at the Eastman School, and, eager to make his acquaintance, found his Skype address and made contact. Thompson was quickly impressed by the promise of the budding, largely self-taught performer, identifying him as an “amazing player who needs to be at Eastman.”

But it wouldn’t have been possible without the Handler Scholarship, says López-Samamé, now a trumpet performance major at Eastman.

In 2009, López-Samamé returned home for the summer as first trumpeter with the National Opera of Peru. Last summer, he took part in three important music festivals, including the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany, which included a tour of 25 countries.

“Eastman has opened so many doors for me,” he says.

And while he’s always aspired to stand out as his instrument does, he says that the Handler Scholarship has helped to give him the necessary quality to achieve that: “Confidence.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

Back to Introduction

‘The Luckiest Man in the World’

Remembering David Kearns ’52—former Xerox CEO, University trustee, and champion of diversity.

By Sharon Dickman

kearnsGOAL-ORIENTED: After graduating in 1952 and service in the Navy, Kearns, shown here in a 1989 photo, began his career with IBM. He later wrote that he left IBM to join Xerox, in part, with the goal of becoming the company’s president, which he did. (Photo: Getty/Time-Life)

David Kearns ’52, a Rochester native who led the Xerox Corp. to dramatic growth in the 1980s, chaired the University’s Board of Trustees, championed workplace diversity, and applied his business acumen to invigorating public education, died in February near his home in Stuart, Fla., following a long battle with cancer. He was 80.

Kearns arrived at Xerox in 1971 from IBM. By 1977, he had become president and chief operating officer, and in 1982, he became CEO, a position he held until 1990. “In a time of great need for Xerox, David shouldered the mantle of leadership and rallied the company to overcome a fierce competitive challenge,” says Xerox CEO and University trustee Ursula Burns. “All Xerox people who followed are in his debt.”

Kearns was also widely credited with helping make Xerox a recognized corporate leader in equal employment opportunities. His encouragement and development of minority and women business leaders became a national model.

“David was an incredible mentor to me and an inspiration to so many people of color,” says Francis Price ’74, ’75S (MBA), CEO of Interact Performance Systems and a University trustee. Price became the driving force behind the establishment of the David T. Kearns Center for Leadership and Diversity in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering in 2002.

Initially envisioned with the goal of expanding the number of students who pursue careers in science and engineering, the center later expanded its vision to include students in all disciplines.

Named a trustee in 1972, Kearns chaired the board from 1978 to 1985.

In 2008, he received the University’s Frederick Douglass Medal in recognition of his lifetime commitment to diversity.

Ed Hajim ’58, the current board chair, says Kearns was “a natural-born leader who faced every challenge with confidence and integrity.” President Joel Seligman called Kearns “as inspiring as any person I ever met, his attention always devoted to the dream that progress could be made.”

A member of the board into the 1990s, Kearns took a break only to serve as deputy secretary of education in the administration of former president George H. W. Bush.

Kearns’s travels and speeches built the case for improved public schools to help meet the needs of business and strengthen America’s global competitiveness.

He remained an outspoken advocate for innovation, school-based autonomy, competition and choice in education, founding the nonprofit New American Schools to promote reform.

From 1993 to 1995, he was a senior university fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Known for his exuberance and energy, Kearns also took time to reflect and document his ideas as an author or coauthor of Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive with Denis P. Doyle (1988); Prophets in the Dark: How Xerox Reinvented Itself and Beat Back the Japanese with David A. Nadler (1992); Legacy of Learning: Your Stake in Standards and New Kinds of Public Schools with James Harvey (2000); and Crossing the Bridge: Family, Business, Education, Cancer, and the Lessons Learned (2005).

After graduation, he became a U.S. Navy seaman, and in 1954 joined IBM, eventually becoming vice president of its data processing division. Years later, Kearns wrote in his memoirs that he left IBM, in part, because he wanted to become president of Xerox—which he did.

Kearns was married for 56 years to Shirley Cox Kearns. Together they raised six children—four daughters and two sons—and Kearns leaves behind 18 grandchildren.

In a statement, the family said:

“Among his prolific accomplishments in business, education, and public service, David found the most success and pleasure in his role as a loving husband, devoted father and grandfather, mentor, and friend.

“David demonstrated inspiring perseverance as he confronted the challenges of his ongoing health problems. One of his greatest legacies to all who came in contact with him was his interminably cheerful spirit and the grace and dignity with which he led his life.

“Despite his daily physical struggles, David was grateful for all the blessings in his life, and often referred to himself as ‘the luckiest man in the world.’ ”

Sharon Dickman is University spokeswoman.

Spice Guy

Peter Furth ’76 sees opportunities in a growing spice industry—for his company, your palate, and some of the world’s poorest countries.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

furthSAGE ADVICE: The spice industry has grown immensely over the past 40 years, says Furth. (Photo: Michael Furth for Rochester Review)

There’s an industry that has burgeoned in the last 40 years that has little to do with computer technology or finance, only a minor impact on health care, and is among the oldest industries in the world. It’s the spice industry, and according to Peter Furth ’76, who has spent his entire adult life in the business, it’s in a golden age that’s bringing benefits not only to American taste buds, but also to harvesters in poor rural regions around the globe.

Furth was still in high school when he began working summers at Louis Furth Inc., the spice import business founded by his uncle in New York City in 1941. Reflecting backward from his post today as CEO of the business—since renamed FFF Associates—Furth says the turning point was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when one of the largest markets in the world, the United States, experienced increased immigration, more eating out, and an expanding prepared foods industry.

“People started using what today seem like everyday spices like oregano, garlic, basil, more pepper, a little bit more chili powder, and absolutely more cinnamon,” says Furth.

Italian sauces, in an ever wider and spicier variety, lined American grocery shelves and kitchen cabinets. Then, by the 1980s, Mexican food became mainstream, spreading across the country from the American Southwest, deepening Americans’ taste for spicier cuisine.

According to data compiled by the Department of Agriculture, American consumption of herbs and spices, per capita, has grown from just over a pound in the mid-1960s to more than three-and-a-half pounds today.

But as demand grows in the world’s largest spice market, Furth has undertaken an expansion of his own—not necessarily of volume, but of his corporate mission.

After taking leave of the company in 1991 to become the executive vice president and CEO of the American Spice Trade Association, he returned to the family company in 1994, adding a consulting division. Today, he devotes much of his time working with government and nongovernmental organizations to facilitate the international spice trade in ways that benefit producers—many of them quite small and located in some of the world’s poorest countries—as well as consumers.

Many people don’t realize, Furth says, how many of our spices are harvested by small farmers around the globe. In Grenada, for example—among the major suppliers of nutmeg—nutmeg trees appear most often in small groves in family backyards. “They’re not massive groves like you think of for tree nuts in California,” says Furth. “And this is the case all over the world.”

For the past 10 years, Furth has been working with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Dutch international development organization, SNV, on joint projects in Albania, the source of 75 percent of the world’s sage, as well as a main source of medicinal and other herbs.

Sage is rarely cultivated, but instead grows in the wild. The harvesters are primarily villagers. “They get up very early in the morning and they walk up the mountain, often with a donkey,” says Furth. They pick the herbs which are then collected by aggregators back in the villages.

furth (Graphic: Steve Boerner for Rochester Review)

In the past, neither the gatherers, who are paid by the sack, nor the aggregators, who sell the raw, dirty sage to processors, made out well. “A lot of the Albanian sage was taken to Turkey where there were some very sophisticated cleaning operations. And the Albanians were losing any ability to capture the value-added,” Furth says.

In working with the organizations, Furth hopes to help Albanians, who are much poorer than their Turkish neighbors, keep as much income in Albania as possible, chiefly by developing their capacity to process spices.

“We’re helping with their post-harvesting handling—which is from the time it’s gathered in the mountains to the time it goes to the exporter. This includes making sure the goods are cleaned, handled, and dried properly, and kept free of contamination.”

It’s an especially important development initiative because, says Bernd Fischer, a professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, “agriculture is one of the only sustainable aspects of the Albanian economy.” Fischer, who specializes in the Balkans and advises a number of U.S. government agencies on Albanian affairs, says there are hundreds of projects like the one Furth is working on that contribute to the development of Albania’s predominantly rural population.

For consumers, the benefits are no less important. Spices that aren’t properly handled can contain dirt, twigs, dead insects, animal feces, salmonella or E. coli. Even though spices are used in small quantities and generally cooked at high temperatures, says Furth, when it comes to contamination, “you never want to take a chance.”

In the News

Heather Higginbottom ’94 NAMED TO White House Post

President Barack Obama has named Heather Higginbottom ’94 the deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Higginbottom, who served as Obama’s national policy advisor during his presidential campaign, was deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council from January 2009 until beginning her new post in January. A political science major at Rochester, Higginbottom began her career in national politics and policymaking as a legislative director to Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Rob Barrett ’88E: ‘America’s Next Cooking Celebrity’

Rob Barrett ’88E, host of the YouTube cooking show Cooking for Dads and author of a cookbook by the title, won the America’s Next Cooking Celebrity contest, sponsored by Better Homes and Gardens last October. The contest requires participants to upload a video of themselves preparing an original recipe. Barrett was one of two finalists invited for a cook-off in the magazine’s test kitchen in Des Moines, Iowa. He won for his red pepper and sausage pasta.

Robert Brent ’48, ’53M (MD), ’55M (PhD) Wins National Honor for Lifetime Achievement

Robert Brent ’48, ’53M (MD), ’55M (PhD), ’88 (Honorary) has been selected for the National Physician of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award by Castle-Connolly, the publisher of the America’s Top Doctors series. Brent heads the Clinical and Environmental Teratology Research Lab at the Alfred I. duPoint Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and is the Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics, Radiology, and Pathology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. A specialist in the environmental causes of birth defects, Brent has conducted research and counseled pregnant women for more than 50 years. Castle-Connolly’s physician-led research team received hundreds of nominations for the award from fellow physicians, selecting Brent as one of two winners for 2011.

Career Changer

A first-year resident in orthopaedics, Susan Gall Sims ’84E launches her third major career.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

simsENCORE: “I can’t imagine my life having gone any other way,” says Sims, who has been an engineer, a professional flutist, and is now an orthopaedist. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

To the perennial question—“what do you want to be when you grow up?”—Susan Gall Sims ’84E knows there doesn’t have to be just one answer.

She’s been a radar software engineer for the F-15 fighter jet, a professional flutist with her own chamber group, and now, after earning a medical degree from Northwestern University at age 48, she’s a first-year resident in orthopaedics at the University’s Strong Memorial Hospital.

“I can’t imagine my life having gone any other way,” she says on one of her rare days off, over a cup of coffee at Java’s—the Gibbs Street hangout she first frequented three decades ago as a flute performance major at the Eastman School. Then it was “a greasy spoon,” she notes, and half its current size.

When Sims left home in Long Beach, Calif., and moved into a dorm at Eastman in the fall of 1980, she was like many undergraduates at the University, harboring more than a single interest or talent. She took courses in math and science on the River Campus while working toward her bachelor of music degree in flute performance. After graduation, she moved back to Long Beach, where she earned a second bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and at 25, was comfortably situated in a job at Hughes Aircraft.

“It was nice to make a solid living, my colleagues were great, and the work was interesting,” Sims says. “But a few years into it I started realizing, well, if I spend my whole life doing this I will be able to say that I helped guide missiles to destroy stuff and kill people.”

She also missed her flute.

“I was older and wiser, and I was a little more assertive,” she says. Those traits propelled her to take a leap of faith and give up her comfortable job to pursue her initial dream of a career in music. She started practicing again, auditioned successfully for the master’s degree program in flute performance at Boston’s New England Conservatory, and approaching 30 years old, “sold my BMW, gave up my apartment by the beach, and moved into a dorm room.”

Sims eventually secured adjunct positions at multiple universities, including the Boston and Lowell branches of the University of Massachusetts and Brandeis University. Meanwhile, she started a chamber group that specialized in contemporary music and performed with orchestras throughout New England.

Of the 15 years she spent as a musician, she says, “I made a living, I bought a house before the prices went crazy, and it was a life that I really enjoyed.”

Nonetheless, she says, “I came to a point where I realized, ‘I’ve accomplished everything I kind of set out to do. I have this group, I’ve played all the standard repertoire, I’ve played nonstandard repertoire, I’ve taught these great students, I’ve done some freelancing in orchestras in the New England area. What do I do from here?’”

She had first thought of going to medical school while still at Eastman, but dismissed the idea. “The idea of being done with my degree when I was 30-plus years old seemed so ancient.”

At age 40, her perspective had changed. “When people say I’m too old for this or that, well, within reason, you’re not too old for just about anything,” she says. “Could I be an Olympic gymnast? No. But could I go to medical school? Yeah!”

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for people to begin medical school after working in other careers. According to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, since 2007 about 5 percent of applicants to member schools have been over 30.

In her first year at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, Sims gravitated easily toward orthopaedics. “I just really love the musculoskeletal system,” she says. “I found myself spending extra hours in the lab dissecting out the muscles, tendons, ligaments, just trying to figure it all out.”

She credits her husband, Christopher, a stagehand whom she met when she was performing with the Portland Symphony Orchestra in Maine, with making her medical career possible.

“I met him when I was just starting this journey. He says I told him I wanted to go to medical school on our first date, so he feels he was well-prepared.”

WORLD TRAVELERS

‘Forbidden’ View

travel (Photo: Alumni Relations)

SQUARED AWAY: A travel group featuring two dozen Rochester alumni poses outside the gate to the Forbidden City of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last fall during a stop of the Grand Journey: China tour, sponsored by Alumni Relations. Accompanying the group on the trip was Ellen Koskoff, a professor of musicology at the Eastman School who discussed China’s musical heritage. Alumni travelers included Robert ’69W (EdD) and Donna Carlson, Douglas Jones ’85M (Flw), Rosemary Utz ’79M (MD), David ’66 and Elaine Parker, Roger ’73 (Flw) and Patricia Mader, Claire Stukas ’58 (MS), and Richard and Susan Smith Westin ’67. Also joining the trip was Richard Moxley, a professor of neurology, and his wife, Joan. For more about Rochester’s travel programs, visit www.rochester.edu/college/alumni/travel.

TRIBUTE

Jeffrey Bordeaux ’12: Loving Friend

bordeauxIN MEMORIAM: Bordeaux, pictured with his mother, Delores Forest. (Photo: Courtesy of the Bordeaux Family)

I celebrated my 21st birthday on Wednesday, Feb. 2. To be honest, it was bittersweet for me because for the past two years I had grown accustomed to receiving either a Facebook message or a text message from Jeff that would say something hilarious, with the sole intention simply to make me laugh, to let me understand everything was all right. Anyone who knew Jeff has a similar story.

Jeff was a very kindhearted and loving individual, with a unique sense of style and an infectious smile to match. He enjoyed playing basketball, video games, and “tried” to rap. He was also a very hard worker. He excelled in his political science classes, worked on campus 20 hours per week, and ran on the track and field team. Before he died last Jan. 15, he was getting ready to leave for Shanghai, China, on a semester abroad.

But above all else, Jeff was a man of God who believed if he gave you his word, you could rest assured that he was going to come through for you. Out of the many attributes that made Jeff an amazing person to have known, the one thing that made him unique in my eyes was his ability to love. His arms could open up wide enough to hug 10 people at once, and Jeff was the type of person to try to see how many people he could hug at one time.

Despite his love for love, the thing that made Jeff’s love unique wasn’t the love he shared with the many friends he made here on campus, but with his family at home, primarily his mother and sister. He loved them to the point that after each visit to his house, I left with the sense that I had to do more to show my own mom and sister how much I appreciated them. Jeff worked every day to make himself a better person, and just by holding a conversation with him, he forced me to become a better person.

I miss my friend, but I know that my friend is looking down and still making sure that we all laugh and that we all understand everything is going to be all right. He will be missed dearly, but it’s important that the legacy of love that he left behind never be forgotten.

—Stephen Christopher Norwood ’12

Norwood was a friend, classmate, and the freshman roommate of Bordeaux.

University Reviews Policies Following Student Death

Sue Stewart, University general counsel and senior vice president, is leading a College-wide review of policies and procedures following the stabbing death of Jeffrey Bordeaux ’12, who died Jan. 15 from wounds he suffered during a fight on the Fraternity Quad.

Fellow student Daren Venable ’12 has been charged with second-degree murder in the case. In late February, Venable was released from the Monroe County Jail after posting $50,000 in bail. Neither student had a record of disciplinary issues at the University.

Noting that the incident appeared to be isolated, President Joel Seligman asked Stewart to undertake the internal review, asking her to make recommendations if policy changes are warranted.

Stewart is expected to complete her review later this spring.

Bordeaux, a political science major from the Rochester suburb of Brighton, was remembered at a January memorial service at Aenon Missionary Baptist Church in Rochester. A vigil for Bordeaux was held at the Interfaich Chapel the night of the stabbing, and a campuswide discussion of his death was scheduled for early March.

Venable was scheduled to return from his Brooklyn home in March for a court date.

For more about the incident, visit the website at www.rochester.edu/news/ bordeaux.

Books & Recordings

Books

Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

By Eleana J. Kim

Duke University Press, 2010

Kim, an assistant professor of anthropology at Rochester, examines the experiences of the more than 200,000 South Korean children adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia since the end of the Korean War.

Car Lover’s Guide to Southern Germany

By Ron Adams ’88

Via Corsa, 2010

Adams explores the automotive history and culture of southern Germany through interviews with top racers, information from automobile museums, a look at the legendary Nürburgring and Hockenheimring race tracks, and the car manufacturers of Munich, Stuttgart, and Ingolstadt.

Surgeon: The Man Behind the Mask

By Richard German ’67M (MD), ’69M (Res)

Dog Ear Publishing, 2010

German presents a memoir of his education and career, from prep school in Connecticut, to his experience as a surgeon in the Navy during the Vietnam War, to his 35 years of performing general, trauma, cancer, and vascular surgery in Southern California.

Topics in Physical Mathematics

By Kishore Marathe ’71 (PhD)

Springer, 2010

Marathe, a professor of mathematics and physics at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, examines the role of physical theories in mathematics.

Lessons from a Street-Wise Professor: What You Won’t Learn at Most Music Schools

By Ramon Ricker ’73E (DMA)

Soundown, 2011

Ricker, the senior associate dean for professional studies at the Eastman School, draws on his 40 years of straddling the Ivory Tower and the real world of the music business to offer advice to musicians just embarking on their careers.

Startup from the Ground Up

By Cynthia Kocialski ’82

CreateSpace, 2010

Kocialski, a former IBM systems engineer, design engineering manager and marketer, and a consultant to multiple start-ups, shares her observations about the elements of successful high-tech start-ups.

Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

By Parama Roy ’89 (PhD)

Duke University Press, 2010

Roy, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, explores colonialism and cuisine, as well as the roles of famine and fasting, in the political and cultural transformation of India after British rule.

Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack

By Carol Novack ’69

Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2010

Novack, a former attorney who publishes the online literary journal Mad Hatters’ Review, presents an illustrated collection of fiction and poetry.

The Physician Scientist’s Career Guide

By Mark J. Eisenberg ’85M (MD)

Springer, 2010

Eisenberg, a professor of medicine at McGill University and a staff cardiologist at the Jewish General Hospital in Mon- treal, offers a guide for medical students, fellows, and newly appointed faculty.

Hamlet

Edited by Robert S. Miola ’77 (PhD)

W. W. Norton, 2010

Miola, the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of English and lecturer in classics at Loyola University of Maryland, edits the Norton Critical Edition of the tragedy by William Shakespeare.

Adolescents, Families, and Social Development: How Teens Construct Their Worlds

By Judith G. Smetana

John Wiley & Sons, 2010

Drawing on interviews with members of more than 700 families, as well as her research in social domain theory, Smetana, a professor of psychology at Rochester, examines the social development of adolescents within the context of the family.

The Master Crafters of Oz

By Philip John Lewin ’71

Nikidik Press, 2009

In his second book of Oz-inspired fantasy, Lewin relays the adventures of Dorothy in the land of Oz, exploring the nature of Oz magic and the matriarchy that rules the fairyland.

Managing Everyday Stress: Practical Approaches for the Busy Person

By Mimi Johnson Breaux ’62N

Blurb.com, 2010

Breaux, a San Diego stress management consultant, shares practical tips, focused on mind-body and cognitive techniques, for managing some of the most common sources of stress, from getting caught in traffic to facing financial challenges.

Becoming an Outstanding Man: Marriage, Family and Relationships

By Larry Bobo ’98

CreateSpace, 2010

Self-help author and motivational speaker Bobo explores the issues and circumstances that lead to divorce in a book that’s part memoir and part self-help manual.

Cooking for Dads

By Rob Barrett ’88E

Self-published, 2010

Barrett, named America’s Next Cooking Celebrity by Better Homes and Gardens in 2010, publishes original recipes from the first 50 episodes of his YouTube show, Cooking for Dads.

Statistics for Nursing: A Practical Approach

By Elizabeth Heavey ’99N (MS)

Jones and Bartlett, 2010

Heavey, an assistant professor of nursing at the State University of New York at Brockport, provides an overview of statistics written for practicing and entry-level nurses.

The Physics and Technology of Radiation Therapy

By Colin Orton and Patrick McDermott ’85 (PhD)

Medical Physics Publishing, 2010

McDermott, who teaches in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Wayne State University’s medical school, coauthors an introduction to the physics and technology of radiation therapy based on a course in radiation oncology for medical residents.

Altissimo Studies for Alto Saxophone: Scales, Arpeggios, Trills, and Selected Passages from the Repertoire

By Todd Rewoldt ’01E (DMA)

RadnofskyCouper Editions, 2010

Rewoldt, an associate professor of saxophone at San Diego State University, instructs saxophonists on practical fingering patterns to increase speed and fluency in altissimo performance.

Recordings

Pure Imagination

By Keve Wilson ’91E

Composers Concordance Records, 2010

On her first solo CD, oboist Wilson performs selections composed for her in addition to covers from Henry Mancini’s Charade to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.

Windswept

By Brenda Lynne Leach ’89E (DMA)

Pro Organo, 2010

Leach, a conductor and organist who is director of orchestral activities at Towson University in Baltimore, performs music spanning four centuries, including J. S. Bach’s chorale fantasia Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns halt, discovered in 2008.

Share My Life

By Miles Brown ’00E

Brown Cats Productions, 2009

Bassist Brown joins his father, guitarist Steve Brown, and Eastman jazz professor Rich Thompson ’84E (MM) on a recording featuring standards as well as compositions by all three members of the trio.

Celebration: Songs from the Bible

By Rob Barrett ’88E

Third Street Music, 2009

Composer and Third Street Music producer Barrett presents arrangements of contemporary Christian pieces.

Taking the Scarlet

By Duo vio-LINK-oto

Centaur Records, 2010

The duo that includes violinist Pia Liptak ’92E (DMA) and Japanese koto player Ryuko Mizutani performs contemporary music written for and dedicated to the duo.

Swarmius II: Also Normal

By Swarmius

Aleppo Records, 2010

Swarmius, the trans-classical fusion group that includes Todd Rewoldt ’01E (DMA), an associate professor of saxophone at San Diego State University, offers instrumentalism in multiple genres.

Steppe Forward

By Ted Piltzecker ’72E

Corner Mushroom, 2010

Composer and vibraphonist Piltzecker and his sextet perform an upbeat collection embracing both jazz and world music.

All Corseted up for Christmas

By Lady Georgianna

Lady Georgianna, 2010

The “18th-century girl band” that includes Micaela Gutierrez Schmitz ’03E (DMA) flashes forward to the 19th-century, performing a mix of lesser known Victorian Music Hall selections and carols with long traditions. Schmitz is editor of Harpsichord and Fortepiano magazine and education officer of the Chipping Campden Music Festival.

Books & Recordings is a compilation of recent work by University alumni, faculty, and staff. For inclusion in an upcoming issue, send the work’s title, publisher information, author, and author’s class year, along with a brief description, to Books & Recordings, Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P. O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; or by e-mail to rochrev@rochester.edu.

Start Me Up

Cynthia Kocialski ’82 shares some lessons about what it takes to build a successful start-up.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

masterclass (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I started my career working for IBM. I was in the PC division developing digital video and graphics components. Then IBM decided it didn’t want to be in the business of developing its own components for its systems but instead wanted to buy them off-the-shelf from other companies. I was left with a choice to find another job or start something.

Like most first-time entrepreneurs, I had a naïve notion of start-ups. I really didn’t have much more of a plan other than to organize a group of people together and look for someone who would put us into the graphics and digital video component business. There were nine of us from IBM who went out looking for money to fund the development of this digital video and graphics component. Eventually, we were folded into Matrox Electronics. Honestly, we lucked out. We got it right—a hot emerging technology and a ready-made team. It wasn’t until the second start-up that I realized how lucky we were the first time.

The second start-up focused on network communications components. It actually didn’t work out. The reason was that Gigabit Ethernet was just being touted. We had gotten funding, developed the product, had early customers, but waited to get the next round of funding until we reached certain milestones. Gigabit Ethernet was in the hype stage and the market stalled. Our customers said, “We’re not interested in doing optical anymore because we want to see how this Gigabit Ethernet unfolds.” The lesson there was don’t wait to get the funding. In the end it worked out because the third start-up was a variant of the second.

Cynthia Kocialski ’82

Palo Alto, Calif.

Engineer, entrepreneur, and author of Startup from the Ground Up (CreateSpace, 2010)

Major: Mathematics

The product is the company. Start-ups don’t fail because they couldn’t develop a product. In fact, most investors only consider the product to be about 10 percent of the evaluation criteria for funding a start-up. What matters most to investors is the team. To an investor, the company itself is the product because they make their money when the company is sold.

The first step is to identify a problem. You don’t have to start with the product. A common mistake is to start with a technology and then look for a problem. Most of the time, the entrepreneur finds an application rather than a problem. For example, you can design a new type of machine to mow your lawn. You can say, “Well, we have this new technology, and you could use it to mow the lawn.” But it doesn’t mean anyone wants it.

You’re going to need mentors, advisors, and possible investors, all with a wealth of knowledge and contacts. In the end it comes down to people. People create the product, people use or benefit from the product, people make the purchasing decisions, and people invest in your company.

My best memory of Rochester is definitely the people. I remember staying at the University through Thanksgiving break one time. Most of the people went home, and I really missed them. I still have many friends from the U of R whom I keep in touch with, even though it’s been a lot of years and there are thousands of miles between us.

INTERNATIONAL THEATRE PROGRAM

Shakespeare in the Spring

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

STAGE SETTING: Jessica Chinelli ’12, Kelsey Burritt ’13, Mel Balzano ’12, Michael Mayor ’14, Priscilla Alabi ’12, Melissa Martin ’13, choreographer Jacqueline O’Donnell ’11, and Mohammad Seraji ’12 (left to right) rehearse a scene from the International Theatre Program’s spring production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Directed by the program’s artistic director, Nigel Maister, performances begin April 14. For more, visit www.rochester.edu/college/eng/theatre.