Rochester Review

January–February 2013, Volume 75, No. 3

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Adam Fenster, Melissa Greco Lopes, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Mark Michaud, Leslie Orr, Leonor Sierra, Helene Snihur, 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.

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2013 University of Rochester

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Online Education

By Joel Seligman

In mid-November the University announced that it had joined Semester Online, a consortium of universities created to explore the implementation of for-credit undergraduate online education. The Semester Online consortium includes the University of Rochester, Brandeis University, Duke University, Emory University, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Notre Dame, Vanderbilt University, Wake Forest University, and Washington University in St. Louis.

We have entered into this exploratory partnership so that we are better prepared to address potential opportunities to create quality online instruction. Joining this consortium gives the University an opportunity to participate in conversations about the future of online education with peer institutions that see the same value in the residential experience as we do at the University of Rochester.

The University’s participation in Semester Online is one of many approaches under consideration. Interim Senior Vice President for Research and Hajim School Dean Rob Clark is leading a University-wide task force assessing the current and future use of technology and digital media in the classroom. This task force is undertaking a thoughtful review of the options before us. Whatever avenues we pursue, we are committed to providing academic quality on a par with the Rochester classroom experience and to doing so within a sustainable financial model, always coordinating with the schools and their faculties.

The success of the School of Nursing’s online hybrid courses and degree programs is one example of how the University is employing technology to offer quality, flexible, in-demand courses. The school began developing hybrid online courses, which offer a combination of classroom content and online format, in 2000. Rochester nursing students, many who are employed full time and would otherwise be unable to pursue educational and career advancement opportunities, are able to complete degrees in two of the school’s programs. Forty-four other hybrid online courses are offered, and the school plans to launch two new hybrid online programs by 2015.

The School of Nursing’s hybrid courses and degree programs meet a need. Today approximately 41 percent of all nursing course credits are offered online. Just as importantly, the programs operate under a sustainable, financially successful business model. Twenty-six percent of nursing’s tuition revenue, or $3.9 million, is generated by online education.

As School of Nursing Dean Kathy Rideout explains, the challenge of sustaining and growing the current model is providing adequate support for online teaching and learning. Instructional design teams are needed to collaborate with faculty on development of courses. Faculty development programs are essential, and a team of technical specialists is critical.

Collaborations such as Semester Online are promising. With built-in technical and multimedia support, Semester Online has the potential to provide our undergraduate students with rigorous course offerings, taught by professors, and offered in small groups where students are surrounded by outstanding peers—much as they would be if they were on campus.

But there are challenges and much we do not know. In some instances, information technology has been oversold as the key to rapid cost reductions in higher education, without a serious analysis of quality trade-offs and focus on learning itself. Online education can be a complement to the core mission of universities such as ours if done in partnership with faculty and deans.

Key strategic questions for the University will include how online courses can enhance the educational experience and faculty roles, influence degree requirements, and affect University budgets.

Our primary objective is unequivocal: How can we provide the finest educational experience possible for our students and faculties? This will be the standard by which we make decisions about online education and other future academic endeavors.

Letters

lettersPHOTO SESSION: Ansel Adams was hired for a project to document life at the University before the merger of the men’s and women’s colleges. (Photo: Ansel Adams Collection/Department of Rare books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Remembering Frances Horler

The November-December issue contains an eloquent tribute to Dr. Frances Horler by Dr. Harold Munson (In Memoriam). I would like to add the comment that Dr. Horler was the kindest and most compassionate teacher I encountered during my college years. When I was dealing with financial difficulties and health crises in my family, she encouraged me to remain in the graduate program, visited my relative who was hospitalized at Strong, and treated my wife and me to dinner at the Faculty Club upon my graduation from Rochester.

In sum, Frances Horler was a marvelous role model and mentor for all the students she worked with in the College of Education. Her valuable contributions to students and to the college will not soon be forgotten.

Richard Kellogg ’70W (EdD)

Alfred, N.Y.

The writer is a professor emeritus of psychology at Alfred State College.

The Adams University

In the September-October issue, we included a 1952 photo taken by Ansel Adams that showed Ruth Adams, then an assistant professor, talking with a group of unidentified students (“An Adams of Adams,” Class Notes). Thanks to several alumni, four of the five students seem to have been identified. And two of those students agree that Adams was meeting them in her apartment, where she held a regular English seminar.

Regarding the names of the students: I am the student on the far left. The others are Don Lesh ’53, Joe Pagano ’53, and Frances Young ’53. I’m afraid I don’t know the name of the student sitting next to Dr. Adams.

Mary Ellen Russell Bowling ’53

Hoover, Ala.

The fellow in the center rear with pen poised is my brother, Dr. Joseph Pagano ’53. Joe is director emeritus of the Lineberger Cancer Center at UNC–Chapel Hill, N.C., where he resides with his wife, Jody. Joe is still very active in research.

Bob Pagano ’61

Duluth, Ga.

Joseph Pagano ’53

Chapel Hill, N.C.

Football at 45

I enjoyed your article on the 1987 football team and their reunion (“‘Proving What We Knew about Ourselves,’ ” September-October). I can relate to the stories, and perhaps you would share my thoughts on the 1968 football team which will be celebrating its 45th reunion in 2013.

Back in the 1960s, football was football, but without many of the things we take for granted today. The “Weight Room” only existed in my junior year and that was a limited amount of free weights that were placed under a stairwell at the Palestra. Information about our opponents consisted of newspaper clippings of the opposing starting lineup and their heights and weights. This was way before email and faxing. Xerox ruled. A “training table” for meals only began senior year.

The freshman team was a great group of guys mostly from upstate New York—Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse—with a few of us foreigners from Boston and Pittsburgh and as far away as Florida. A highlight was traveling to play RPI in two Volkswagen buses, a total of only 16 players, and beating them in a driving rain storm. The victory was inspired by our fiery coach Clarence Aikey.

By senior year we had an eclectic group of seniors led by Dave (Rags) Ragusa ’68, ’76W (Mas), cocaptain, Little All-American, and Hall of Famer; Wayne Erdelack ’68, cocaptain; Mike (Cincy) Cirrincione ’69, Hall of Famer; Guy Bailey ’68, Hall of Famer known as “Mr. Cling” by the Campus Times; and our quarterback Bob Young ’69, dubbed “Mr. Fling” by the Campus Times. We also had Dave Murante ’68 at tackle and today a leading defense attorney in Rochester; John Norris ’68, known as “Big Daddy” at guard; Gary Henehan ’69 at linebacker; John Dunnigan ’68 at fullback; Pete Taddie ’68 (“Gator”—who would have guessed he was from Florida?) and myself, “Kodiak,” at tackle.

Coach Don Smith was our head coach and led us along with his assistants—John Sullivan ’22, who played for the U of R against Hobart in 1919 (talk about bridging generations), and John Parrinello ’60, who played for the 1958 undefeated U of R team. Coach Sullivan told us to “hit, whack, and smash our opponents into submission,” and Coach Parrinello preached speed.

Senior year, we won four games and lost four games, the losses by a total of only 13 points. We beat Amherst, which was a highlight moment, and lost to Williams by one point, Denison by two points, and Alfred by three points on a field goal, which had not been kicked by an Alfred player in 20 years.

In our victory over RPI, Guy Bailey caught four touchdown passes, which is still a U of R record for a wide receiver. In our away game at St. Lawrence, I had signed up for the business boards to be taken Saturday morning on the St. Lawrence campus. Coach Smith allowed me to take a bus from our hotel Friday night so I could stay on campus. I still remember missing breakfast, taking the test, skipping lunch, and running from the test site to the locker room in a snowstorm to make the opening kickoff and grabbing one of the halftime oranges for a quick energy boost. We won the game!

These were fun times. It’s hard to believe that we are talking about football in 1968, but no different from Coach Sullivan retelling his 1919 stories to us in the ’60s.

Larry Brodney ’68

Lincoln, Mass.

Department of Corrections

In a description of the book, George Eastman: A Biography, by Elizabeth Brayer, in the November-December issue, we misstated the book’s publication dates. It was originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1996. A reprint edition was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2006 and a paperback reprint edition was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2011.

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.

STUDENT ENSEMBLES

Inaugural Performance

quartet (Photo: Adam Fenster)

PRESIDENTIAL PORTRAIT: Students from the Eastman School—graduate students Markiyan Melnychenko (violin) and Kelsey Farr (viola) and seniors Hyeok Kwon (cello) and Che Ho Lam (violin)—have been invited to perform as part of the ceremonies for President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in January. The students, shown here in a balcony adjacent to Kodak Hall, were selected after U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D–NY) asked the Eastman School to

CHEMISTRY

Helping Hydrogen

nanocrystals (Photo: Adam Fenster)

DOT PATTERN: Vials of colloidal cadmium selenide fluoresce under ultraviolet light as part of a project by chemistry graduate students Zhiji Han and Fen Qiu, who worked in collaboration with Richard Eisenberg, the Tracy H. Harris Professor of Chemistry, and chemistry professors Todd Krauss and Patrick Holland. The team, which reported results last fall in the journal Science, is exploring the use of nanocrystals—also known as quantum dots—to increase the output and lower the cost of current light-based systems used to produce hydrogen, an effort that could affect the cost and viability of using sunlight to provide clean, carbon-free energy. The particle sizes increase from green (about 2.5 nm in diameter) to red (about 6 nm). Photograph by Adam Fenster

YELLOWJACKETS

Game Faces

basketball (Photo: Adam Fenster)

THREE POINTS! Danielle McNabb ’14 and her teammates celebrate after the junior forward hit a game-winning three-point shot with 3.3 seconds left to lead the Yellowjackets to a 60–58 victory over SUNY Geneseo in the championship game of the Wendy’s College Classic at the Palestra in December. Earlier in the tournament, the women posted win No. 259 for coach Jim Scheible as a Yellowjacket, making him the winningest coach in the program’s history. The first-round victory also marked the 400th win of Scheible’s coaching career. The men also won the 2012 Wendy’s title as they jumped out to a 10–0 start as of the winter break. Photograph courtesy of the Department of Athletics and Recreation

TEACHING

Starting an Online Conversation

Rochester begins to map a course as the world of higher education adjusts to rapidly changing technology.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

online_edLOOKING AHEAD: Rob Clark is heading a University effort to explore the best options for deploying technology in the classroom and, potentially, online. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Last fall, the University announced that it planned to partner with nine peer institutions to explore an innovative initiative in online education. Rather than leap into the world of so-called “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, that have made recent headlines, Rochester and its peers— Brandeis, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, UNC–Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, and Washington University in St. Louis—hope to test a different model, one that remains true to the values of residential colleges. As part of the new initiative, the universities will be partners in a consortium to support an online course program called Semester Online. The consortium will work with the company 2U, which was created in 2008 to develop for-credit online courses.

Rob Clark, dean of the Hajim School and interim senior vice president for research, is leading Rochester’s participation in the new initiative as well as a University-wide task force to make sure that Rochester is a “part of the conversation” about fast- evolving developments in higher education.

Why are universities exploring online models of instruction?

It’s clear at this point that online education and technology are here to stay. Better online delivery platforms, social networks, the capacity to personalize instructional material—these are all making online education a more feasible option than it has ever been before. The technology is more readily available, and there’s a fair bit of momentum. Stanford and other universities, such as Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke, have joined Coursera, a company that offers more than 100 MOOCs that can draw millions of students from across the globe. Stanford announced in the fall that it has also established Class2Go, a new open-source platform for online education that already hosted two MOOCs. There’s no question that we’re at a moment of transition for higher education, as technology and online education create new options for instruction.

What has Rochester done to date?

Our faculty have been exploring the role of technology in education for some time. For example, in the late 1990s, faculty in the Department of Mathematics developed WeBWorK, a web-based interactive system to improve teaching and learning in math, that was later used by universities across the country. At the Eastman School, some faculty have used the web to provide supplemental instruction as well as web-based courses in theory and other areas. The School of Nursing has offered online courses since 2002. It’s a program they established to meet the needs of their students, whose work and family commitments created a need for them to have more flexible instruction. They offer 41 online courses or hybrid online programs, and 26 percent of their enrollment last year was in online programs. For the University as a whole, we want to find the right approach, the one that works best for who we are. There are a number of directions we could take, but we want to have an active dialogue with faculty and with students to explore what we think works best for us. A benefit of working with the peer institutions of Semester Online is that the consortium is made up of institutions that see the same value in the residential experience that we do—and they’re also interested in exploring the options that technology is creating.

What will be offered through Semester Online?

The idea is to offer academically qualified students an expanded selection of courses from some of the country’s best schools, giving them freedom to work, travel, and participate in off-campus research programs, or manage personal commitments as they pursue their academic goals. Unique offerings at one consortium school may become accessible to students at other consortium schools. Curricular options may be expanded for our students who want to study abroad. For students in areas such as engineering, where there are fairly rigid curricular requirements, that’s a very valuable benefit.

How is Rochester developing its plans?

Our faculty are engaged in active discussions about instruction and how we can improve our work as teachers. Part of that discussion, increasingly, involves technology and how—and when—to leverage it in ways that are appropriate to what we do. I’m currently working with a newly established, University-wide task force, the Committee on Online Learning, as well as other groups within academic divisions, to discuss possible online learning initiatives. We’re informally surveying faculty on how they’re already using technology, and the task force is working to identify technologies that could benefit broad groups of faculty and students.

What are the implications of online education for brick-and-mortar institutions?

I’m more interested in how we deploy technology on campus than what we do online. It’s possible that things that work well on campus could also work well online. But there’s no reason to see online education as an “either-or” proposition. I can’t imagine that institutions like Harvard and MIT—which are offering free online courses as part on an online learning project—are coming together to put themselves out of business. I think there’s something about the residential piece of education—bringing a community together, physically—that online education can’t duplicate. I’m confident that in 20 years, the residential experience will be thriving. We may be able to develop online courses that are as good—in some cases, perhaps, that are even better—than what’s offered in the classroom. But online education will never substitute for the residential experience.

What benefits do you see for Rochester? What risks?

I’d rather that we be part of the conversation on online education than sit on the sidelines and see what other universities are doing. Projects like Semester Online are an opportunity to explore things that work and don’t work. A large benefit of the project is that it puts us in conversation with like-minded universities to see if we can shape online education. And we’re really at no risk, because if the institutions find that we should go in a different direction, it would be in the best interest of both the consortium and 2U to terminate the initiative. Beyond that, it’s a matter of our doing very small experiments in a number of areas involving technology and instruction to see what works best for the students and faculty at Rochester. From humanities to medicine, music to engineering, and beyond, we have different audiences, and how technology is deployed to enhance learning will have to be worked out differently for all those groups.

From a Violent Collision Comes Celestial Beauty

discoverPRETTY PALLASITES: Rochester geophysicists have found that the unusual materials in a rare form of meteorite likely come from a collision between an asteroid and a planet-like body smaller than Earth. (Photo: National Geographic Stock)

Beautiful “space gems”—a rare form of meteorite called pallasites—have fascinated scientists since they were first identified as originating from outer space more than 200 years ago.

Now new research by a team led by geophysicist John Tarduno indicates that the origins of pallasites are more dramatic and violent than first thought.

In a study published in Science, the geophysicists report that pallasites were likely formed when a smaller asteroid crashed into a planet-like body about 30 times smaller than Earth, resulting in the distinctive mix of materials—olive-green crystals embedded in an iron-nickel matrix—that make up the meteorites.

Forged from iron-nickel and the translucent, gem-like mineral olivine, pallasites were thought by many scientists to have formed where those two materials typically come together: at the boundary of the iron core and rocky mantle in an asteroid or other planetary body. Tarduno discovered that tiny metal grains in the olivine were magnetized in a common direction, a revelation that led the researchers to conclude that the pallasites must have been created much farther from the core.

The research also helps to answer affirmatively questions about whether small celestial bodies can have “dynamo action”—a rotating, liquid iron core that can create a magnetic field.

Neuroticism Can Be Good for Your Health

It may be time to stop worrying about a little anxiety: under certain circumstances, neuroticism can be good for your health, according to a Medical Center study showing that some self-described neurotics also tended to have the lowest levels of interleukin 6, a biomarker for inflammation and chronic disease.

Researchers made the preliminary discovery while conducting research into how psychosocial factors such as personality traits influence underlying biology to predict harmful conditions such as inflammation.

Considered by psychologists to be one of the five basic dimensions of personality—along with openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—neuroticism is usually marked by moodiness, nervousness, and worry and is linked to hostility, depression, and excessive drinking and smoking.

Nicholas Turiano, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry, wondered about the gray area of people with average-to-high levels of neuroticism who are also conscientious. Exhibiting higher levels of conscientiousness as well as neuroticism points to people who tend to be high-functioning in society, very organized, and goal-oriented planners. They’re also more likely to be reflective.

“These people are likely to weigh the consequences of their actions, and therefore their level of neuroticism coupled with conscientiousness probably stops them from engaging in risky behaviors,” says Turiano, whose study is published online by the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

A Life Underground—But Cancer-Free

discoverSWEPT CLEAN: Blind mole rats have a unique biological mechanism that sweeps abnormal cells and nearby cells from their bodies. (Photo: Corbis)

Just a few years after pinpointing a cancer-fighting mechanism in one species of mole rats, biologists have discovered a different anticancer mechanism in another.

Blind mole rats and naked mole rats are the only mammals never known to develop cancer. Three years ago, Vera Gorbunova, professor of biology, and Andrei Seluanov, assistant professor of biology, determined the anticancer mechanism in the naked mole rat. Their research found that a specific gene—P16—makes the cancerous cells in naked mole rats hypersensitive to overcrowding, and stops them from proliferating when too many crowd together.

They expected blind mole rats to have the same mechanism—but found instead that they have developed one of their own. The precancerous cells in blind mole rats died by a mechanism that kills both abnormal cells and their neighbors, resulting in a “clean sweep.” The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While people don’t have the same mechanism, researchers hope it may be possible to simulate a similar clean-sweep reaction in cancerous human cells.

Language Shaped By Brain’s Desire for Clarity, Ease

For linguistic purists terrified of the corruption of their mother tongue, cognitive scientists have good news.

A team of researchers from Rochester and Georgetown University has found that many changes to language are simply the brain’s way of ensuring that communication is as precise and concise as possible. The study—by lead author Maryia Fedzechkina, a doctoral candidate, and coauthors T. Florian Jaeger, the Wilmot Assistant Professor of the Sciences, and Elissa Newport, the former George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences—was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team used an artificial language in a carefully controlled laboratory experiment to observe the language acquisition process. When faced with sentence constructions that could be confusing or ambiguous, the language learners chose to alter the rules of the language they were taught in order to make their meaning clearer.

The brain’s tendency toward efficient communication may also be an underlying reason that many human languages are structurally similar. Linguists have long identified nearly identical grammatical conventions in seemingly unrelated languages scattered across the globe, but wondered whether these recurrent structures are artifacts of distant common origins, random accidents, or reflections of fundamental aspects of human cognition. This research supports the latter, say investigators.

—Susan Hagen

CLINICAL CARE

Good Medicine Is Personal

learn (Photo: Corbis)

Geneticist Chin-To Fong, associate professor of pediatrics, has received the 2012 Arnold P. Gold Humanism in Medicine Award. He was nominated by Rochester medical students who consider him a caring and compassionate mentor who doesn’t just teach them to be caring physicians, but also exemplifies one.

How did you realize the importance of human connection?

The patients teach you that. Every person you meet.

Maybe it’s because I’m in genetics—most of the time, we make diagnoses we can’t fix. My job is really to understand where people come from, to get a sense of how to change their perspective so that they still can have a very high quality of life and a very positive outlook, despite the seeming odds against them.

How do you teach students to connect with patients?

In medical schools, we are very good at teaching science and technology—and I suppose a lot of the intellectual challenges lie in those arenas. But the medical science textbook doesn’t teach you that you’re working with real people.

For first-year medical students, I bring patients into the classroom, and I don’t do it in the traditional grand rounds sort of way. I usually have patients talk about their lives. So these sessions are not so much clinical-diagnosis-and-management-driven but life-perspective-driven.

Has it become harder for doctors and patients to connect?

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the latest gadgets and latest nuance about science and technology that we forget the underlying human essence really hasn’t changed. A good example is the new push toward “personalized medicine”—the idea is that you can genetically determine each person’s vulnerabilities and give appropriate lifestyle changes or preventive management. But the term is actually very misleading in suggesting that being “personal” is something new. Good medicine has always been personal. You’ve just got to deal with each person, each patient, as an individual. You try to know what they do, how they were raised, what interests them, what is important to them—and when they get sick, what do they lose that matters to them? If it’s somebody who likes to read and they can’t read anymore, that’s a huge suffering.

Do you rely on patients to tell you about themselves to get a sense of who they are?

You have to be observant. There’s no magic. You’ve got to care to observe. And you’ve got to think to assess what the patient is thinking, what he or she really needs or wants, what he or she is missing. It sounds a little clichéd, but caring goes first. If you don’t care enough to look, you won’t find.

Knowing what to look for, of course, that takes some training. But people who never really care, they will never see.

Sometimes the word “caring” is limited to physical acts: you care for patients, meaning that you do things for them, but it really starts from the precept that you connect. You care in that sense.

MUSIC THEORY

Pitch Perfect?

Elizabeth West Marvin ’81E (MA), ’89E (PhD) was first appointed at the Eastman School to lead its aural skills program— teaching students to sing by sight, to hear music in their heads, and to write music in dictation. A professor of music theory and of brain and cognitive sciences, she has directed some of her research toward perfect pitch and how best to teach students who have it. This fall, she received the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Music Theory Teaching and Scholarship for outstanding pedagogical contributions in the discipline.

What is perfect pitch?

In music-cognitive literature, it’s known as absolute pitch. When you ask someone with absolute pitch to sing a G-sharp, they can. Or if you play a note, they can say, “That’s B-flat,” without any external reference note. Most people use relative pitch, hearing a pitch in relation to other pitches. But people with absolute pitch have associated in long-term memory the names of notes, just the way most of us have names for colors. When you say something is blue, you don’t have to think about it; you don’t have to dredge it up from your memory. It’s just immediately available. That’s how pitch is for people with absolute pitch.

Does everyone process pitches through absolute pitch or relative pitch?

There is a tiny minority of people, probably similar in size to the absolute pitch group, who have amusia, or tone deafness. People with amusia have difficulty discriminating small pitch changes, and so they never create a mental tonal hierarchy for the structure of scales and chords. For some of the people who have it, they can’t even discriminate between musical timbres—the sound of one instrument as compared to another. For them, music can sound like noise, like crashing pots and pans.

What is it like to teach students with absolute pitch?

At Eastman, about 12 percent of our entering undergraduate class in any year has absolute pitch, which is much higher than the published norm—something like one in 10,000 people. It’s because, as a music school, we have a biased sample: we only see the highest-caliber musicians, who have years of specialized training.

It’s a challenge to have a mixed class of some students with absolute pitch and some without. If you treat them all the same, the students with absolute pitch won’t be challenged. But it you try to challenge them too much, they’ll feel persecuted, imagining that you’re intentionally putting barriers in the way of something that’s normally simple for them.

Do people with absolute pitch have an advantage as music students?

That’s a controversial topic. Certainly a person with absolute pitch has an advantage in playing atonal music, where there’s no tonal center to use as a convenient reference point. But absolute pitch doesn’t confer superior musicianship. Just because you can label a note doesn’t mean you can play that note more beautifully or with more meaning.

—Kathleen McGarvey

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

How Do You Make a Decision?

Benjamin Hayden, assistant professor of cognitive sciences, is helping unravel the mysteries of how we make decisions. Selected as a 2012 Sloan research fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Hayden, who specializes in the new field of neuroeconomics, studies self-control and decision making from a range of perspectives, including psychology, animal behavior, philosophy, and popular culture.

When I’m making a decision, am I rationally weighing choices?

If you’re like most people, you think of your decision making as being like a scale. We believe that we think about the good things, the bad things, and we see where the balance is. And that’s not at all the way it works. We really have a lot of mental shortcuts, rules of thumb—we call them heuristics—hundreds of them. They compete against each other, and that’s what produces our choices. It’s messy and complicated.

How do we create those shortcuts—and why?

From the moment you’re born, you start coming up with these rules of thumb. Some of them might even be hardwired in your brain. These are things that we develop, learn about, and then are constantly cultivating, pruning, and improving.

Part of what we’re doing as a research team is trying to disentangle those, at least in some very simple cases, to see what those shortcuts and processes would be.

What’s the effect of heuristics?

The brain is designed to be as efficient as possible, using as few calories as it can. But it’s not as rational a process as we think it is. We’re very easily swayed by things that should be completely irrelevant. Advertisers use this against us all the time. The take-home message is not to be so trusting of our gut feelings. We should educate ourselves on all kinds of biases, as a corrective to the heuristic. We want to keep a skeptical position, and if we reflect on the sorts of decisions we’ve made, fairly openly and honestly, that helps cultivate new rules that we can use as we make decisions.

What’s going on in the brain when we make a decision?

We now know that about seven or eight of the roughly 150 areas of the brain are really important to decision making, and we’re starting to understand what they do.

The brain areas that seem to be the key areas for economic decisions are the same areas that are targeted by drugs of abuse and that are disregulated by mood disorders and depression. At the very basic level—the level of neurons—that my team is working at, drug addiction and mood disorders look very similar, so what we do is basic research that we hope will have implications for mental health and drug addiction.

—Kathleen McGarvey

EASTMAN WIND ENSEMBLE

A 60th Celebration

A groundbreaking ensemble celebrates six decades of setting a musical standard.

By Robin L. Flanigan

eweSOUND DIRECTION: Since debuting in 1953 under Frederick Fennell (above), the Eastman Wind Ensemble has been directed by (below, from left) Fennell, who died in 2004, Donald Hunsberger, Mark Davis Scatterday, and Clyde Roller, who gathered at the ensemble’s 50th anniversary. (Photo: Eastman School)

Lean and adventurous, the internationally acclaimed Eastman Wind Ensemble helped popularize symphonic wind music, choosing innovative compositional techniques over the conservative constraints typically associated with the classical orchestra.

“It is the Eastman School of Music’s crown jewel,” says Mark Davis Scatterday ’89E (DMA), professor of conducting and chair of the Eastman School’s Department of Conducting and Ensembles. “It created a standard in the wind world that put the Eastman Wind Ensemble on a par with the best ensembles in the world, including professional orchestras. In fact, many people think the Eastman Wind Ensemble is a professional group.”

The group will mark 60 years of pioneering its own symphonic sound with a four-day celebration from February 6 to 9. Events include programs and performances as well as the release of a new CD that pays tribute to an Eastman visit by composer Igor Stravinsky.

Founded in 1952 by legendary conductor Frederick Fennell ’37E, ’39E (MS), ’88E (Honorary), the ensemble includes undergraduate and graduate students of the Eastman School, where Fennell was a faculty member. The group earned a Grammy nomination in 1987 and has had a global impact on the way composers view wind and percussion players.

ewe (Photo: Eastman School)

“It’s just phenomenal to see what kind of influence it has,” says Donald Hunsberger ’54E, ’59E (MM), ’63E (DMA), who conducted the ensemble from 1965 to 2002 and was a professor of conducting at the Eastman School. “People are constantly writing works, hoping to have us play them.”

Over the past six decades, the ensemble has premiered more than 150 pieces of music from composers around the world. Many of the pieces “were really ahead of the curve from legitimate composers” who deserved to be heard but struggled to find an appreciative audience, says Hunsberger. “Unless you’re doing something people are comfortable with at that moment, it sits on a shelf.”

While the ensemble has transformed the fields of music education and performance and spawned similar groups, Scatterday notes that none other can quite match the original. He points out its hometown advantages: the Eastman School’s faculty, the distinctive Kodak Hall and Kilbourn Hall venues, and the ensemble’s former conductors and composers who have written works for the group with whom they share a deep connection.

eweSINGING STRAVINSKY: A collaboration with the Eastman Virtuosi, the Eastman Wind Ensemble’s new recording marks a visit to the school by composer Igor Stravinsky. (Photo: Eastman School)

With a history of performing in Asia, the musicians will embark on their first European tour within the next few years. The ensemble also continues to develop new repertoire, and plans to record the music of Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra Principal Pops Conductor Jeff Tyzik ’73E, ’77E (Mas), contemporary classical music composer Roberto Sierra, and classical composer and conductor Karel Husa.

The anniversary’s highlight will be a concert on February 8 at Kodak Hall, featuring music by Mozart and Stravinsky (both were performed at the premiere concert in 1953), as well as two new works recently commissioned by the ensemble from Sierra and from Douglas Lowry, the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School of Music. The concert takes place 60 years to the day after the Eastman Wind Ensemble debuted—with Hunsberger, an undergraduate at the time, playing trombone and euphonium. (Before Fennell died in 2004, he sent Hunsberger, with whom he became a friend and collaborator, a birthday card every year on February 8.)

Timed for the event, the Eastman Wind Ensemble will release a new CD, Stravinsky at Eastman: Octet and L’histoire du Soldat (Avie Records), featuring the ensemble and the Eastman Virtuosi together for the first time. The release date is February 12.

Guest artists and scholars, master classes with young conductors, and additional music round out the celebration.

Says Scatterday: “This all represents the core of the Eastman Wind Ensemble philosophy—the greatest and most challenging music, important scholarly research and discovery, and real-world professional experience.”

Robin L. Flanigan is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

Q&A

Opening Doors and Expanding Imaginations

A century on, the Memorial Art Gallery stays true to its original goals of drawing the community in and helping people to look outward beyond the familiar.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

inrev_holcombFAMILY MAN: Director Grant Holcomb says the gallery’s success is the result of a family of staff, volunteers, artists, and community members who have rallied around it for 100 years. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Grant Holcomb was first introduced to “the gallery family” nearly three decades ago, in 1985. The Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the Memorial Art Gallery, Holcomb credits that web of engaged artists, patrons, board members, and volunteers as a fundamental reason for the gallery’s success during its first 100 years.

“I now know fully what the phrase means,” Holcomb says. “Which is that different entities of the city come together to have, not only an art museum, but a nationally acclaimed art museum.”

The level of community interest and commitment is unusual for a major art museum, Holcomb says. And such support is key to guiding the gallery as it prepares to celebrate its centennial in fall 2013.

“That was in place from the beginning, and it has grown,” he says. “If I could bequeath anything to the next director, or the next generation, it would be working with boards and staffs that I’ve worked with for over a quarter of a century.”

What are the constants, the signatures, of the gallery’s first 100 years?

From the beginning, the commitment to community—fundamental to the founding of the gallery—is something we take pride in today. At the same time, a consistent initiative has been to establish and develop and enhance a collection of world art, oftentimes major examples of art by major European and American artists. I’ve often referred to “pilgrimage paintings” in our collection, like Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, and by that I mean, these are not only great paintings but they’re by major American artists. If I pulled out a book surveying American art, I could show you artists who are really well represented: they’re not B paintings, they’re not C paintings, they’re A paintings by recognized masters in American art. On a per capita basis, our memberships, with 5,000, and our annual attendance, with more than 240,000 visitors, are among the highest of any art museum in the country. With more than 1,100 volunteers, we have more volunteers than any other art museum in the Northeast, and numerically, we’re number three or four in the country. It’s a shared commitment throughout our staff, our board, and our volunteers.

How has the gallery shifted and evolved over the years?

What we’ve changed is the scope and the quality of the collection—you hope that you do that, just professionally. But the other is to open the doors to the diversity that is Rochester, and I think it’s fair to say that in the past quarter century and earlier, this museum has been committed to opening those doors. Symbolically, we did it 25 years ago. When I first came here, the entrance was on the north side, and people didn’t know how to get in. If you came down University Avenue, there was no entrance—and there was a big fence. Twenty-eight years later, the entrance is on University, where most people drive by, and the fence is down. Those two acts symbolize what the gallery has always been about: becoming more accessible, physically, architecturally, programmatically, to a broader community.

What are some of the challenges facing art museums?

For my 28 years here, the financial challenge—it’s always been so. That’s why you want a community engaged. How do you keep a not-for-profit going when government funds have been cut back? This place survives on its individual members. They call it “time, talent, and treasure,” and we get all of that from a broad swath of the community. That’s always a constant, and I don’t think it goes away. I think another challenge is new technology. We’ve developed the first app for a museum in the city of Rochester. It will change a visit to an art museum. Over the years, surveys have indicated that the time spent by an average visitor in front of a work of art can be as little as 10 seconds and no more than 35 seconds. So it’s like walking through the airport. “There’s Gate number 12: Rembrandt.” What the app can do is let visitors go back, to know more about the artist, in depth. So you’re with a resident scholar in your pocket, in that sense. Museums have been, are, and will be affected by developments in this new age of electronics. Another challenge is, how do you make an art museum a cloister for contemplation and insight and beauty, and at the same time impact lives that are so diverse? How do you make the gallery accessible? To move into other lives, other cultures—that’s what an art museum can do.

How does the new Centennial Sculpture Park fit into that vision?

The sculpture park reflects our commitment to community by opening up the grounds, taking down the fence, creating a park that you can walk through or sit in, read a book, play a guitar, have a wedding. At the same time, it honors not only nationally and internationally recognized artists but also those artists who work in this area who are also of that stature. So again it reflects Rochester, quality of art, and the significance of the artistic experience—inside and out now.

What about plans with the University?

The gallery will be much more integrated in programs at the University, as well as programs at other Rochester schools. There’s an interest on all sides in finding good, creative, supportive ways that are good for students and good for the art museum. There’s a wealth of talent at the University, and we have a wonderful collection here. There’s material culture here that is at their disposal for study. So I see a new movement for the gallery, not away from the community, but in a richer way integrated with the academic mission of the University.

How do you balance being a place of memory, engaging with a changing community, and adapting to new technologies?

It’s a great challenge. There was a school group here once, and because of the weather, they had their lunch in the ballroom. And there was this little fellow, probably in first grade, looking around. He’d never been here before, and was just looking around, at the architecture, the space, the scale. And he said, “Is this where the king lives?” Art museums offer an expansion of the imagination, of what’s possible, and where people are at this particular time. You honor that sense of history and memory, hoping both together stimulate the imagination and take, in this case, this young fellow, into new areas of life. At the same time, you’re looking for technologies that help you do that. So you don’t want to destroy one in order to have the other. You want to take the best of both and integrate them when appropriate.

To learn more about the gallery’s centennial and the events it has planned, visit http://mag.rochester.edu/centennial/.

Notable Organ Has Debut

inbriefNEW ADDITION: A restored 19th-century organ originally built by a premier American organ company has joined Eastman’s collection. (Photo: Eastman School)

Rochester’s collection of notable organs has expanded by one, with the addition of a restored 1893 organ. Originally made by Hook and Hastings, one of the premier American organ builders of the 19th century, the instrument has a new home in Christ Church on the city’s historic East Avenue.

Acquired by the Eastman School as part of its Eastman-Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI), the instrument will be used for teaching, practice, and public recitals and concerts by Eastman students and faculty and other guest musicians, as well as for services at the church. For more than a decade, EROI has worked to make Rochester a center for organ research and performance.

The organ had its inaugural concert at the end of November.

Library Leader Installed as Dean

inbriefNEILLY DEAN: Mary Ann Mavrinac is the new dean of River Campus Libraries. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Mary Ann Mavrinac, an internationally recognized library leader, was formally installed as the new Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries during a December ceremony. A

n expert in the creation of learning spaces and the development of digital services, Mavrinac served for a decade as chief librarian at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, part of the University of Toronto Libraries. Appointed to the position last June, Mavrinac is the third recipient of the library deanship, one of the few endowed library directorships in the nation. The deanship was established in 2000 through a gift from Andrew Neilly ’47 and his wife, Janet Dayton Neilly. The former president, CEO, and vice chairman of the board of John Wiley & Sons, Andrew Neilly is a life trustee of the University.

Bridging Stem Cell Therapy and Research

The Medical Center in December opened the doors of a new facility expected to bridge stem cell research and therapies.

The Upstate Stem Cell cGMP Facility—which will be used by academic and private-sector scientists from across the state—was created with $3.5 million in support from the Empire State Stem Cell Board.

“One of the critical barriers to moving cell-based therapies into clinical trials is the requirement that these cells be manufactured in a facility that meets strict federal requirements,” says Steve Dewhurt, chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and principal investigator for the state grant. “Without this resource, much of this science remains stuck in the lab.”

The “cGMP” in the facility’s name stands for “current good manufacturing practice,” a term that means that the facility, its operation, and the people who work in it meet federal manufacturing guidelines to ensure that biological materials produced at the center are suitable for human clinical trials.

There are more than 40 labs at the Medical Center that are working with stem cells.

The new, 3,600-square-foot facility, located in the Ernest J. Del Monte Neuromedicine Institute, consists of three separate labs that can each support different cell production projects.

inbriefFIRST COUPLE: President Joel Seligman and Delores Conway, professor of real estate economics and statistics, were married in the fall. Conway is also associate dean for master’s degree programs at the Simon School. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

New University Counsel Appointed

inbriefLEGAL COUNSEL: Gail Norris has been named University vice president and general counsel. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Gail Norris became vice president and general counsel for the University on January 1, succeeding Sue Stewart after a national search. Since joining the University in 2005, Norris has served as senior legal counsel for all aspects of operations. In 2007, she became director of the College Office of Technology Transfer, and in 2009, was named vice provost of technology transfer, responsible for the development of University-wide policies in that area, as well as procedures for review of invention disclosures, patenting, and licensing.

Popular Music Institute Founded

Scholars of popular music have a new academic resource at Rochester. A new Institute for Popular Music, directed by John Covach, chair of the College Department of Music and a professor of music theory at the Eastman School, was formally established late last year.

Dedicated to promoting the scholarly study of popular music among students and professional scholars, the institute will also work to support research in fields touched by popular music, including musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, and performance.

Jocelyn Neal ’02E (PhD), associate professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, will deliver the institute’s Inaugural Lecture on January 23. For details, visit www.rochester.edu/popmusic.

MSNBC Host and Scholar to Deliver 2013 MLK Address

inbriefGUEST SPEAKER: Melissa Harris-Perry will deliver the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address. (Photo: Courtesy of MSNBC)

Melissa Harris-Perry, a noted scholar and host of her own MSNBC current affairs program, will deliver the University’s 2013 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address on January 17. As a political analyst and professor of political science at Tulane, Harris-Perry will focus her address on racial issues, religious questions, and gender concerns related to American politics.

In her book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (Yale, 2011), Harris-Perry argues that persistent, harmful stereotypes can limit black women’s ability to participate in the political process. Her first book, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, 2004) won the 2005 W. E. B. Du Bois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2005 Best Book Award from the Race and Ethnic Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Free and open to the public, the address kicks off the University’s Black History Month Celebration.

SWIMMING

League of Winners

Swimming and diving continue their run of league championships.

By Scott Sabocheck

swimmingMAJOR LEAGUE : At this winter’s Liberty League championships, diver Sara Spielman ’12 (above) qualified for the three-meter regional NCAA championships, while Brian Wong ’15 (below) was named Swimmer of the Year. (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

During his six-and-a-half seasons leading the swimming and diving programs, coach Pete Thompson has stuck by his plan to build his teams so they can compete with some of the best schools in the nation.

Over the past few seasons, the Yellowjackets have demonstrated that they are on the right track with a string of impressive Liberty League performances. Claiming both the men’s and women’s league titles in December, the men have won back-to-back championships and three of the last four, while the women have won four consecutive league titles.

The Yellowjackets have been ranked in the College Swimming Coaches Association of America’s top 20 in each of the last two years. At the end of December, the women were ranked No. 13 in the poll.

During Thompson’s time, the team has set 49 new school records and has 37 Liberty League event champions.

“We have been noticeably improving as a team since my freshman year, and now as a senior, I can tell that we are ready to take a big step forward,” says Adam Bossert ’12, who was 2011–12 Liberty League Male Swimmer of the Year.

swimming (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

Karen Meess ’12 says the success of the past few years adds to the team’s confidence going into each new challenge in the pool.

“It is a well-known fact on this team that you are to leave it better than you found it by swimming your fastest and recruiting swimmers faster and more intelligent than you,” she says. “We’re a strong team in ability and spirit, and with this attitude more is yet to come.”

For Thompson’s part, he prides himself on getting athletes with three key characteristics: being a student first, having a passion for the sport, and contributing to a positive team atmosphere. “[Recruits] see how our program works and realize that this is something they want to be a part of.”

Rochester’s reputation also works in the team’s favor, he says. “The University of Rochester sells itself with its name recognition and research opportunities, along with the great history and tradition of the entire university, including athletics.” He credits former coach Bill Boomer, who in the 1980s put a stamp on Yellowjacket swimming and diving as a nationally recognized program.

As Thompson looks to the rest of the winter season, including the UAA championships in February, and beyond, the outlook is bright.

“I want this team to get better over the course of the rest of the season, and the results will take care of themselves,” he says. “We not only want to make it to nationals, we want to make an impact there.”

Scott Sabocheck is assistant director of Athletics Communications.

Field Hockey History

field_hockeyGOAL ORIENTED: Michelle Relin ’16 earned Liberty League Rookie of the Year honors after setting Yellowjacket records for goals and points. (Photo: Athletics & Recreation)

The Yellowjacket field hockey team advanced to the round of eight during the first NCAA tournament appearance in the program’s history. The tournament run capped a season that included the most wins in a single season with 18 and the most goals for a season with 84. “It was a really special season, the work ethic, desire, and determination of the team was unmatched,” says coach Wendy Andreatta. Following their banner year, the Yellowjackets raked in several accolades, including honors for five All-Region and seven All–Liberty League players.

Madison Wagner ’14 and Katie Flaschner ’14 earned National Field Hockey Coaches Association All-America honors. Freshman Michelle Relin ’16 was Liberty League Rookie of the Year after setting school records for points (47) and goals (19). Shelby Hall ’13 earned a spot at the Division III Senior All-Star game at the Field Hockey Final Four.

Andreatta was named 2012 North Atlantic Region Coach of the Year, a month after she was Liberty League Coach of the Year.

—Scott Sabocheck

HIGHLIGHTS

Cross Country Leads Strong Fall Showing

Women’s and men’s cross country teams, men’s soccer, and field hockey earn NCAA bids.

Lauren Norton ’13 made her final season a memorable one for the women’s cross country team, winning the New York State Collegiate Track Conference individual championship, earning first team All–UAA and All-Region honors, and earning All-America honors at the NCAA Division III national championship meet in Terre Haute, Ind.

Norton is the first women’s cross country All-American since 1988 and the latest Rochester woman to win the New York State individual crown. Josefa Benzoni ’88 pulled off the same double in 1988. Norton was third at the UAA championships and second at the NCAA Atlantic regional, both hosted by Rochester.

As a team, the women finished sixth at the UAA championships and fourth at the state meet.

Fall

Men’s soccer: Rochester received an at-large bid to the NCAA Division III playoffs, marking the team’s seventh invitation in the last eight years. In the first round, Rochester defeated Misericordia University in a shootout after a 1–1 tie, thanks to a dramatic tying goal by Alex Swanger ’15 in the 86th minute to force overtime. The Yellowjackets lost in the second round to 15th-ranked Susquehanna University, 1–0. Seven players earned All–UAA honors, including Max Eberhardt ’13 as a first team selection. Eberhardt and Jakob Seidlitz ’13 earned first team All-Region honors from the NSCAA. Rochester finished with a 10–4–4 record, 3–1–3 in the UAA, a conference that had five teams invited to the NCAAs. The team was ranked 20th in the final NSCAA poll.

Women’s soccer: Bridget Lang ’13 was a runaway choice as the UAA first-team goalkeeper. She posted a 1.37 goals-against average and played in 15 one-goal decisions. She was named second team All-Region by the NSCAA. Rochester was 3–13–1 against the third-toughest schedule in Division III.

Football: Quarterback Dean Kennedy ’14 passed for a single-season record 2,028 yards and completed 15 TD passes in a 4–5 season. Rochester finished 3–4 in the Liberty League with wins over St. Lawrence, Merchant Marine, and WPI. Six players were named All-Liberty League: defensive back Kobie Hamm ’13, tight end Ken Apostolakos ’14, and linebacker Tony Ortega ’14 were first team honorees.

Men’s cross country: The Yellowjackets broke into the Division III poll early and finished the season with an at-large invitation to the NCAA championships as a team, finishing 21st out of 32 teams. The team was fourth at the NCAA Atlantic Regional, sixth at UAAs, and won the New York State conference championship. Three men finished in the top 10 at states: John Bernstein ’14 (fourth), Adam Pacheck ’14 (seventh), and Dan Hamilton ’13 (eighth).

Women’s volleyball: With a 22–12 record, Rochester posted its most successful season since the 2006 campaign (23–13). The Yellowjackets finished sixth at the UAA championships. Three players earned All–UAA honors: Alma Guevara ’13 on the second team, while Kelly Mulrey ’13 and Savannah Benton ’14 were honorable mention.

Winter

Men’s basketball: As the end of the year approached, Rochester sported a 10–0 record and was ranked eighth nationally. The Yellowjackets won three tournaments in the Palestra, including the Wendy’s Classic. Rochester defeated Hobart for the Wendy’s title, then beat the Statesmen again a week later in a regular season game.

Women’s basketball: Coach Jim Scheible became the winningest coach in the program’s history, posting his 259th win early in the Wendy’s Classic, which the Yellowjackets won for the eighth straight year (see page 10). Squash: The Yellowjackets repeated as Liberty League champions and was ranked fifth nationally. At the semester break, the team’s record was 5–2.

Men’s and women’s indoor track: Three Yellowjackets and a relay team qualified for March’s ECAC championships: Emily VanDenburgh ’16 in the long jump, Carina Luck ’13 in the triple jump, Yuji Wakimoto ’14 in the 3,000-meter run, and the 4-by-200-meter team of Gene O’Hanlon ’14, Jonathan Kuberka ’16, Jeffrey Hrebenach ’16, and Boubacar Diallo ’16.

Is There an App for That?

Rochester faculty put new technology at your fingertips.

By Kathleen McGarvey

appsVIEWPORT: Lauren Blair ’13 displays a route through downtown Rochester mapped with an app developed by Leila Nadir, lecturer in sustainability studies, and Cary Peppermint, assistant professor of art, that’s designed to encourage people to engage with the environment. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The innovative work of some Rochester researchers is only as far away as your fingertips. Faculty in several disciplines are creating mobile applications for smartphones and tablets as a way to explore important aspects of the digital age—as well as to address social, medical, and clinical issues and demonstrate the artistic potential of the technology.

Here are a few recent examples:

‘Human Cloud’: VizWiz

First developed by Jeffrey Bigham, assistant professor of computer science, and colleagues in 2010, the iPhone application aims to help people who are visually impaired to recruit sighted volunteers to aid them with visual problems—such as identifying text labels, icons, and colors—in nearly real-time. VizWiz users take a picture with their phone, speak a question, and then receive multiple spoken answers. Bigham calls the app a “tool to explore human-backed access technology—the idea that access technology would be more reliable and useful if humans could back up fragile (but fast and cheap) automatic approaches.”

The environment we live in usually assumes our ability to see, and tasks that are simple for the sighted—being sure clothing matches before a job interview, finding an empty picnic table at the park—become cumbersome when a person can’t take in information at a glance. That’s where digital culture can step in, says Bigham. “With social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and everyone connected at all times on their mobile devices, the human cloud is ready and waiting. We just need to figure out how to harness it to do useful work.” VizWiz, he hopes, is one step in that direction.

Since it was first released in May 2011, more than 5,000 users have asked over 50,000 questions through the system. They received an answer in less than a minute, on average.

‘Mining Patterns’: Germ Tracker

Understanding how diseases spread is an ongoing, urgent pursuit for public health—but traditional data collection is slow and limited. That’s where an innovation like Adam Sadilek’s Germ Tracker can step in. Sadilek, a postdoctoral fellow in computer science, and collaborators released the app this fall. Germ Tracker follows tweets to identify locations where people are sick. The results of the data analysis show up on a national map, with each tweet marked in colors from red to green, denoting the spectrum from sick to healthy.

“We have an automated model that goes through the tweets, ‘reads’ them and decides if the person is sick. It looks at the tweet in the entire context of the sentence, not keywords. It has about 2 million features it considers for any given sentence. Based on the evaluation of this giant checklist, it decides what is the probability of sickness,” Sadilek says of the app, which is in test-release.

When used on a mobile device, Germ Tracker uses GPS to indicate where a user is located when tweeting. “People struggle with modeling how epidemics grow, and how people infect each other. And there’s not enough data with this kind of granularity,” says Sadilek. “When a person comes to the hospital, you don’t know who he’s met, what bus he has ridden. This kind of app fills in some of the blanks, so you can begin to reason about the spread of epidemics. It builds on a giant iceberg of research that we’ve done before on mining patterns in social media.”

Twitter users stand in as representatives of the general population. Already, the app has begun to show that users riding the subway are more likely to get sick than those who don’t. Eating at restaurants seems to be another factor for transmission.

The model is about 90 percent accurate—and because the algorithm gains more information as it is used, the database will become more accurate as it is accessed more often.

‘Field Notes’: Indeterminate Hikes+

Developed by Leila Nadir, lecturer in sustainability studies, and Cary Peppermint, assistant professor of art, Indeterminate Hikes+ guides users on walks through any landscape using Google Maps, with prompts and activities along the way that encourage participants to engage with their environments and see wilderness within urban spaces. The app is available for download on iPhones and Android phones.

Using the app involves entering a start- and endpoint for a hike, much like obtaining Internet directions. But instead of selecting a direct route, Indeterminate Hikes+ generates a random path with various stops and specific actions during the course of a hike. While following a route through the heart of a city, a suburb, or the countryside, users may be asked to take photographs at designated points, write “field notes” on their phones, send a text message to someone, or perform a particular task—all in response to the surroundings. By prompting participants to slow down, observe, and interact with nature, Nadir and Peppermint intend for the app to stimulate thoughts about how nature is defined, how humans affect ecosystems, and how media can mediate and improve the relationship of people to the natural world.

“Everyone speeds through cities so fast,” Peppermint says. “We want to rethink that, and use technology”—which usually speeds us up—“to slow us down.” You don’t need to “unplug,” he adds, to connect with nature; mobile technologies can actually be used to reconnect with place.

After users complete their hikes, they can upload them to ecoarttech.org—Nadir and Peppermint’s website—so that others can view their route, photos, and notes. Indeterminate Hikes+ can be downloaded for free at ecoarttech.org.

Seizing the App-ortunities

Apps are also playing a role in how people interact with the University. Some examples:

MAGart

A free app for smartphones and iPads, MAGart features works from the Memorial Art Gallery’s Ancient World, Asia, and Medieval and Renaissance Europe collections. Users can explore artworks, follow a tour, and choose works by culture, date, or even title. Grant Holcomb, director of the gallery, also discusses his favorite pieces in the collection as part of the app. App-guided tours are available by subject matter, time period, and time available for touring. A version for Android platforms is planned for 2013.

UR Mobile

Designed for the University, UR Mobile is a free suite of apps and sites that give access to the latest information about Rochester. The app includes directory information, campus building locations, updates from Yellowjacket athletics, and other information.

URMC MDtips

A new app created by Yousaf Ali, chief documentation officer for the Medical Center, aims to demystify medical documentation. The tool—which doctors can easily carry in their pockets—supplies quick tips to help heath care providers paint a more precise picture of the condition of the patients they treat, and the quality of care they extend. The app is an extension of a series of booklets on the topic that Ali, associate professor of medicine, earlier published to aid better documentation.

News

Rochester Review is available as an iPad app now, and Eastman Notes will follow in 2013. Futurity, a University-based site that features research news from top universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, is available as an iPhone app.

—Kathleen McGarvey

It Takes a City

As the nation confronts an epidemic of childhood obesity, the University and community partners are working together to turn the tide.

By Kathleen McGarvey | Photographs by Adam Fenster

obesitySLIDING SCALE: Experts say societal changes—such as ensuring all children, like Rochester preschooler Caedon Coons, have opportunities to exercise and safe places to play—are key to addressing obesity. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

When Paula Edwards, a mother of three sons who lives in Rochester, took her 12-year-old to the pediatrician for a check up, she learned something she hadn’t foreseen: her middle son was obese.

He would look at himself in pictures and remark that he was big, his mother recalls, but neither she nor he realized his weight had entered the realm of obesity. He was, in other words, part of a national epidemic, one that the University—with a range of community partners and a combination of outreach, clinical, and academic efforts—is working to address.

Edwards and her children—including an 18-year-old son and another son, just 3—snapped into action. She enrolled the family in the Healthy Hero Outreach Program, a project promoting healthy eating and active play that’s run by the University’s Center for Community Health. Since completing the program in August, Edwards’s son has lost 11 pounds, a loss she credits to the whole family making healthier choices—and to the planning that makes healthy choices viable when convenience beckons.

As a single mother with a full-time job as a social worker, a full course load as a student at Keuka College, and an active role in her community, Edwards found her time stretched thin.

“My kids ate a lot of fast food. I thought as long as they ate, we were doing okay. But then I saw the effects in my 12-year-old.”

obesityCHECKING IN: Pediatrician Stephen Cook checks the weight of 12-year-old Tyshawn Jones of Rochester. “Too often, obesity is presented as a health condition of choice,” Cook says. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Now the family cooks together, incorporating more fruits and vegetables into their diet, making trade-offs for treats, and choosing simple dinners some nights to give them time to go to the gym. When exercise has to be squeezed in, Edwards jumps rope while waiting for the bus with her son—something she says he views with a little chagrin. “It’s not always easy,” Edwards allows. But her motivation is strong. “I want to see changes in me—but I really want to see changes in my kids.”

“You see it. You know it,” she says of her son’s gradual weight gain. “But you don’t think it’s a real problem.”

She knows now that it is.

Though tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death nationwide, obesity is gaining ground and may eventually overtake it. In September, the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation issued a report predicting that, if current trends continue, by 2030 all 50 states will have adult obesity rates above 44 percent, and 13 states will have adult obesity rates above 60 percent.

Tomorrow’s adults, of course, are today’s children, and the statistics are already alarming. Twelve and a half million children in the United States—about 17 percent of those aged 2 to 19—are considered obese, triple the number of a generation ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In Rochester’s Monroe County, the figure is just slightly lower, at 15 percent. Include those who are overweight, between the ages of two and 10, and the number of those affected rises to a third. And for the first time ever, the rising generation of Americans faces the prospect of a shorter life span than that of their parents.

“It’s arguably our most important health problem,” says Jeffrey Kaczorowski ’91M (MD), associate professor of pediatrics and president and chief children’s advocate at the Children’s Agenda, an independent nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to improving the health and education of children in the Rochester community.

And while parents like Paula Edwards see the threat of obesity playing out within their own families, the roots of the problem spread deeply and broadly, say experts.

obesityREAL FOOD: Jamal Jennings chooses an apple for his three-year-old daughter, Tanya, at Rochester’s Freedom Market, a source for healthy food in the city’s Beechwood neighborhood. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“This isn’t about the kids or their parents,” says Kaczorowski. “It’s about the community and how the environment has changed since the 1970s. People talk about weight being a matter of personal responsibility and blame kids and families. And that’s not right.”

Philip Nader ’62M (MD), ’63M (Res), a noted authority on childhood obesity prevention and a professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California at San Diego, agrees. “It’s taken complex changes to the environment to bring this epidemic about.” In December, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a study indicating that some cities and states are beginning to see small declines in their childhood obesity rates. It’s happening in places with focused strategies for addressing obesity, says Stephen Cook ’07M (MPH), associate professor of pediatrics. Rochester is in the process of collecting its own most recent statistics but has developed such strategies o

ver the last five years, mobilizing a grassroots campaign to change its environment and improve the health of its residents. The Greater Rochester Health Foundation (GRHF)—an independent community foundation established in 2006 to improve community health by providing funding to local organizations using the best evidence-based practices in community health—serves as the hub of a wheel made up of an array of community partners, including the University, the YMCA, the Rochester City School District, and the Finger Lakes Health Systems Agency. Edwards, too, has taken up the community effort, working with the GRHF to establish a healthy-weight program for children at her church.

In 2011, the CDC awarded the Medical Center, the Monroe County Department of Public Health, and a wide range of community partners a five-year, $3.6 million Community Transformation Grant. The funding is being used to develop Health Engagement and Action for Rochester’s Transformation (HEART), a comprehensive initiative to improve the health of county residents by creating an environment that supports healthy behaviors. Rochester is one of just 15 communities nationally to have received such a grant.

The funding came through the Affordable Health Care Act, as has another grant for the Greater Rochester Obesity Collaborative, which has been selected to serve as a national model for obesity prevention and treatment.

“One of the wonderful things about Rochester is the level to which people are willing to partner and collaborate around pressing health problems,” says Kaczorowski. There are relatively few communities, he says—among them, the city of Chicago and the state of Maine—that have tried to combine a community and clinical approach, as Rochester has.

obesityON THE MOVE: Eyshawn Mason of Rochester takes part in an autumn Cyclopedia ride. Pediatric residents started the program, using bicycling as a way to help keep kids healthy and connect them with their community. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Doctors are critical in preventing and treating obesity, he says, “but we won’t turn the tide without a strong level of community advocacy, policy, and programs.”

It’s an approach that has a strong history not only in Rochester but also in the foundation of pediatrics itself. In the late 19th century, Abraham Jacobi, regarded as the founder of American pediatrics and a tireless champion of public health, addressed the climbing mortality of New York City children due to tainted milk not simply by treating the children as they became ill but by working to protect them from infection in the first place. Through his “Safe Milk” campaign, he urged parents to boil milk until bubbling and worked with philanthropist Nathan Straus to provide milk sterilization stations throughout the city.

“That’s getting to the heart of what pediatrics is all about as a profession,” says Andrew Aligne ’01M (MPH), assistant clinical professor of pediatrics. With Kaczorowski, he codirects Pediatric Links with the Community, a program that teaches medical residents how to operate effectively beyond the examination room—as advocates in the community for their patients’ health. It’s an outgrowth of the biopsychosocial model of medicine developed at Rochester.

“Doctors work at the individual level. But if you want to move the needle on big public health problems, you need to act at the community level,” Aligne says.

The first step is for communities to do what they can to stop children from being overweight and obese, says Nana Bennett, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Community Health. “Childhood obesity is a classic prevention issue, because really the way to address it is to keep kids from putting on excess weight from day one.”

And prevention takes vigilance, says Nader. Parents looking at children often don’t see them as overweight. In a three-year-old girl, it takes only four to six extra pounds for her to be considered overweight, he says.

The road to weight problems can begin even before birth. Babies gain significant body weight in the final trimester in utero, and when that weight gain is too much—known as fetal overnutrition—the child can be set up for excess weight through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and on. Nader calls it a “snowball effect.”

“Once weight is put on, the body hangs on to it tenaciously. It’s a lifelong battle,” he says.

Researchers point to measures, such as breastfeeding, that can make a difference right from the beginning.

obesity (Chart: Steve Boerner)

“It’s very hard to overfeed a breastfed baby,” says renowned breastfeeding medicine expert Ruth Lawrence ’49M (MD), professor of pediatrics and neonatology. Research suggests that breastfeeding is in some way protective against excess weight gain, though scientists don’t yet know why. Lawrence and colleague Cynthia Howard ’97M (MPH), associate professor of pediatrics, say it may be related to the fact that babies learn more about satiety from breastfeeding than they do from bottlefeeding.

Between ages three and five years, the body is adding new fat cells—and does again in adolescence as well as, for women, during pregnancy—and those cells “just provide one more cellular home for weight later on,” Nader says. In other words, preschool “puppy fat” isn’t something just to be grown out of: it’s actively priming the body for later weight problems.

At the level of biology and socialization, a child’s early years set a path for future health. “Day-to-day behavior has a lot to do with what we did in our early lives,” says Kaczorowski.

Cook, who leads the Greater Rochester Obesity Collaborative, says a multitude of factors converge to make us, and our children, heavier. “We move less. We have more opportunities to eat. What we eat is bigger, tastes better, and has more calories. It’s even more dense—an ounce of bagel 40 years ago actually had fewer calories than an ounce today.” Coauthor of the first national paper to document metabolic syndrome—a clustering of risk factors that puts people on the path toward heart disease and diabetes—in youth, he last year was named Science Advocate of the Year by the American Heart Association for his work engaging lawmakers in issues related to heart disease and strokes.

“Too often, obesity is presented as a health condition of choice. And that’s not true,” he says.

Bonnie DeVinney, vice president and chief program officer of the GRHF, can outline some of the factors working against children’s maintaining a healthy weight: “The intense marketing of unhealthy foods. The growing tendency to eat more and more—and not just ‘supersized’ portions. The ‘normal’ size is bigger than what we had growing up.”

Children also spend less time playing outdoors than they used to. Part of the reason is the allure of television and computers—devices that lead kids to be sedentary. But while that hazard is obvious, another is even more dangerous, says Cook. Screen time exposes children to avalanches of advertising for cheap, calorie-laden junk foods, teaching them to ignore the dictates of hunger and eat as a form of recreation. Advertisers target young children. According to the New York Times, cereal companies alone spent $264 million in 2011 to advertise cereals targeted at children.

Part of the answer is education, as parents like Edwards have found. Adrian Elim ’13, a film and media studies major from Rochester, is a member of a summer street team organized by the GRFH and staffed by fellow Rochester students. They attend community festivals and other events to talk with parents about ways to eat healthily and stay active. In September, they invited parents from the neighborhood to Douglass House to share healthy food and recipes. These are “baby steps,” Elim says, but they have an impact. A sugar chart, showing the number of teaspoons of sugar in popular sweetened drinks, is something “that really shocks parents.”

But education can go only so far.

“We don’t have an obesity problem because people think ice cream is good for you,” Aligne says.

Wade Norwood ’85, director of community engagement for the Finger Lakes Health Systems Agency, says, “Society has changed. Opportunities not to be active have proliferated. We’ve developed incredible reliance on convenience foods. Our food supply system makes unhealthy foods more accessible, and healthy ones less. We need to make it easy and more natural to do the healthy thing.”

And because those trends have been created at the societal level, policy change is an important part of the equation in curbing problems of weight. Norwood helps to direct the agency’s Healthi Kids Initiative, a community-based coalition advocating for policy and practice changes to help kids maintain a healthy weight. Among its goals are establishing better standards for food at schools and childcare centers, policies to support breastfeeding, safer and more accessible play areas, and at least 45 minutes of in-school activity.

“For students in the city school district, in particular, elementary school recess had been eroded because of pressures for students to maximize the time they spend preparing for standardized exams,” says Norwood. “Only one elementary school in three was allowing for daily recess.”

Armed with research demonstrating the importance to children’s health of school time for physical activity—and its academic benefits in enhancing children’s ability to concentrate in the classroom—coalition members convinced parents, teachers, and school leaders to restore daily recess last spring in a group of city elementary schools. The recess requirement was adopted district-wide last year.

And in response to findings that play happens not just in parks and playgrounds, but also in spaces all over neighborhoods, the city government created a program, Rec on the Move, to fund and staff a van that travels through city neighborhoods to teach children fun ways to be physically active and provide play equipment. The program was so well received that the GRHF has funded a second van to help promote more outdoor play.

“It’s multimodal,” says DeVinney. “We’ve got to come at it in schools, in childcare centers, and in the community, with policies and practices that create healthy options as the default.”

While the problem of obesity is affecting all sectors of American society, the numbers are worst where incomes are lowest. “It’s not about your genetic code—it’s about your zip code,” says Cook.

That’s for a host of reasons. The cheapest food is often the least healthy and nutritious. Unsafe streets make it hard for children to walk to school or to play outside. And stress—from lack of time, economic worries, and more—lures people to the security of comfort foods or time in front of the television.

The two most pressing challenges to adopting healthier behaviors are time and money, says Norwood.

In Rochester’s Beechwood neighborhood, though, community members are taking control to improve their health. Grocery stores are a cab or bus ride away from the neighborhood, and residents have been largely reliant on the snack foods available at the ubiquitous corner stores that fill urban neighborhoods.

“It’s not so much that we have a food desert—we have a food swamp,” says George Moses, director of the community group North East Area Development (NEAD). “There’s plenty of food, but it’s not real food.”

So last November, NEAD bought one of the stores with funding from the GRHF, turning it into the Freedom Market, a headquarters for healthy food and a safe neighborhood gathering place.

Salty, fatty snack foods are being phased out, replaced with nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables.

Joanne Larson, the Michael W. Scandling Professor of Education at the Warner School, says, “The residents wanted to have the ingredients that would go into a traditional Sunday dinner in the African-American community, so we’re offering fresh greens of all kinds, potatoes, onions, corn, grapes, plums, squashes, lettuce, and so on. And on Saturdays in the summer we have a farm stand right outside the store, which almost sells out every Saturday.” Along with colleague Joyce Duckles, clinical assistant professor in the Warner School, and several graduate students, Larson has been working with NEAD to perform a qualitative assessment of the project, helping to track the changes and interviewing residents, customers, and store employees—called the “Food Corps,” they’re all neighborhood residents with children up to 10 years old.

The Freedom Market is a success, with plans afoot to begin offering healthy prepared meals. “We’re finding that it’s not necessarily a matter of education about obesity or healthy food—it’s access,” Larson says. “People come in six or eight times a day. They use it like their fridge, so what’s offered in the stores is going to matter a lot, in terms of addressing the obesity problem.”

Moses says the store is an example of “holistic community development. Nothing is by itself—and no one thing is going to take care of everything.” But he, like Larson, sees cause for pride and optimism in what has happened already at the store.

“The community is in collaboration with the University in solving the problem together. We’re constantly collecting data, and using it,” says Moses, who sits on the committees of both HEART and Healthi Kids. The groups work together, sharing data and strategies. Ultimately, NEAD hopes to expand its effort to include other corner stores across the city and develop a model that could be adopted in other urban areas.

People involved in combating obesity often compare it to the fight against tobacco that began to be waged a generation ago. It’s different in some ways—“No one has to smoke, but we all have to eat,” DeVinney observes—but similar in others.

“What worked for tobacco were taxes, laws restricting the environment where it was OK to smoke—especially to protect children. And the public messaging wasn’t just informational. It was counter advertising” that doesn’t just explain to people the hazards of smoking but hits them at an emotional level, says Aligne.

To turn the tide on obesity, as with smoking, “it’s going to take a social movement. And persistence,” Cook says.

“This didn’t happen overnight, and it’s not going to be solved overnight,” says Bennett of an effort that she and others predict will span decades. “There’s no quick fix for this.”

For Cook, it comes down to a matter of social responsibility.

“Children have zero voting power. We have to do what’s right for them.”

Advanced Education

Nearly 50 years after its founding, the Warner School of Education has a home to call its own.

By Scott Hauser

lechaseLIGHTING LECHASE: A dramatic atrium named for key supporters and Rochester parents Robin and Timothy Wentworth connects the second, third, and fourth floors of LeChase Hall, offering a three-story view of the Wilson Quadrangle. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

For the past five decades, the Warner School of Education has been an academic program on the move.

Physically, the University’s graduate programs in teaching and curriculum, counseling, school leadership, higher education, educational policy, human development, and health professions education have had a peripatetic life on campus. There were the early days in Taylor Hall, followed by a span in Lattimore, and for more than a decade, the nearly three dozen Warner faculty have crowded into Dewey Hall on the Eastman Quadrangle.

Since 2000, the school has grown faster than any other academic division within the University, more than doubling in student enrollment and tripling in its support from state and federal grants. At the same time, the school has added several programs aimed at supporting schools in the Rochester area and launched new initiatives to research educational practices to advance K-12 education and policy across the country.

lechaseRaymond F. LeChase (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“We were bursting at the seams,” says Raffaella Borasi, who was named dean of the Warner School in 2000. “Every single closet was used as an office, we had no storage space; people were sharing offices. At the same time, we were borrowing classrooms from everywhere else in the University.

“And as we looked at our strategic plan, we realized that we still had significant capacity for growth.”

Borasi, a nationally recognized mathematics educator, and her colleagues in Warner and across the University hope to capitalize on that momentum in January, when the doors open on Raymond F. LeChase Hall.

The first building on the Wilson Quadrangle in 30 years, the new hall will also be the first dedicated home for the Warner School. Named in memory of the late Raymond F. LeChase—the founder of the Rochester firm LeChase Construction Services, a noted philanthropist, and dedicated supporter of education—the building provides space for all of Warner’s faculty and students.

LeChase Hall also features sorely needed facilities such as a “methods” classroom where instructional approaches can be demonstrated to prospective teachers; a technology center available to students 24 hours a day, seven days a week; community spaces for school and campus events; and designated work space for the school’s more than 600 full- and part-time graduate students.

lechaseROOM TO GROW: Dean Raffaella Borasi says spaces like a study for doctoral students (opposite) provide much-needed facilities for the Warner School’s graduate students, while a children’s book reading room (above) offers K-8 students a space of their own. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A cornerstone of Warner’s strategic plan since fall 2005, the project got under way in spring 2011, thanks to a $3.5 million commitment from R. Wayne LeChase—a University trustee, chairman of LeChase Construction, and Raymond LeChase’s son—and his wife, Beverly.

In announcing the new building, President Joel Seligman thanked the LeChase family for their support and for their commitment to education.

“Raymond F. LeChase Hall will commemorate the many years of generosity and service which the LeChases have given to the University. Their leadership is pivotal to creating a new facility that supports the University’s commitment to improving K-12 education—one of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st century.”

By the Numbers

When LeChase Hall opens in January it will be the first standalone home for the Warner School of Education and the first building to open on the Wilson Quadrangle in 30 years. Here are some other facts and figures about the new building:

3,000

Number of students expected to enter LeChase Hall each day for roughly 100 classes

17

Number of classrooms, 14 of which will be shared with the College on the first level of the building

34

Number of wireless base stations to support Wi-Fi connections throughout the building

32

Number of academic and meeting rooms equipped with display technology

12,000

Estimated square feet of Virginia black slate used on the sloped roof

170,000

Number of bricks used in construction

3,500

Estimated cubic yards of concrete used for footings, foundation walls, slabs, and retaining walls

1,500

Number of pieces of precast concrete, weighing 1 million pounds altogether

207,470

Number of square feet of drywall

420

Number of tons of structural steel

460

Estimated number of construction jobs, resulting in $17.3 million in labor income and almost $1.25 million in sales tax and income tax revenue, according to the Center for Governmental Research

Source: LeChase Hall: 100 Days Countdown

Designed by the architectural firm Bergmann Associates of Rochester in collaboration with SHW Group, a Michigan firm with extensive background in designing creative learning environments, the building is designed to meet LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) silver standards.

The four-story building is unified by a three-story atrium named in honor of Robin and Timothy Wentworth, parents of a graduate and a current freshman at the University. On the first floor, a suite of 14 classrooms will be used by both the College and Warner. The upper floors will house Warner School programs, including additional specialized classrooms, offices, and spaces specifically designed to support the preparation and development of educators and to conduct educational research and reform work.

While the building will be formally dedicated in May, the additional space will be immediately noticed on campus as students dive into the spring 2013 semester. The first floor classrooms will be used by classes in the College during the day; in the evenings and weekends, Warner School classes take over. Altogether, about 3,000 students taking roughly 100 courses will use the classrooms every day. The move also frees up space in Dewey for College classes and programs.

Since its founding, Warner has had close ties to Rochester’s educational community, administering several educational projects and providing professional development to teachers in the area. Most recently, the school launched the Horizons Summer Program in 2010 to help Rochester children improve their academic performance, raise their personal aspirations, and discover a love of learning.

With the spaces provided by the new building, the program will be able to expand to include kindergarten through eighth grade. Eventually, the program is expected to serve nearly 150 students each summer, bringing them to campus for educational programs and activities.

“We took a leap of faith when we started the program because we didn’t have the building,” Borasi says. “We were at the point where we couldn’t offer it if we didn’t have LeChase Hall.”

But beyond such practicalities, the building represents an important step toward building the school’s identity and visibility, says Borasi, who holds the Frederica Warner Professorship, a faculty position named in recognition of a 1909 alumna and relative of the school’s namesake, the late Margaret Warner Scandling ’44.

“The symbolic aspect is very important,” she says. “It’s having something that our students, faculty, and staff can identify with, and that the rest of the University and the rest of the community can point to and have a reference for.

“But what is most exciting to me are the different things that this new space will allow us to do—which is developing a greater sense of community and encouraging more collaboration among faculty, staff and students, having specialized facilities that will allow us to better prepare teachers and counselors, and making it possible to expand in some new exciting directions identified as promising in our strategic plan.”

Transformative Support

lechase_sideA portrait of Margaret Warner Scandling will be displayed in the new building. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In thanking R. Wayne and Beverly LeChase for their support for a new building for the Warner School of Education, Dean Raffaella Borasi noted that their commitment to education joined a history of transformative gifts for the school. Here are a few of the notable names in that recent history:

Warner School of Education

William Scandling made a multimillion dollar naming gift to the school in 1993 in memory of his late wife, Margaret Warner Scandling ’44, a former trustee who had been a leading supporter of the school and its programs. In the new building, a suite of offices that brings together student-related services—admissions, career services, finances, and others—has been named the Margaret Warner and William Scandling Center for Student Support in recognition of the Scandlings’ commitment to the school. William Scandling also established the Michael W. Scandling Professorship in Education, currently held by Joanne Larson, chair of the teaching and curriculum program, to honor his son.

Raymond F. LeChase Hall

Raymond F. LeChase, founder of LeChase Construction Services, was a pioneer in the Rochester construction community, a noted philanthropist, and dedicated supporter of education. A University trustee, R. Wayne LeChase, and his wife, Beverly, made a $3.5 million commitment to the University in recognition of the important role education plays in improving lives and strengthening the community.

Wentworth Atrium

Robin and Timothy Wentworth are the parents of a Rochester graduate who is now a teacher and of a current student who is a member of the Class of 2016. In recognition of their $1 million gift to the school, the dramatic three-story atrium is named in their honor.

Genrich-Rusling Room

Ellen Rusling ’66W, ’79W (MA) and her husband, Thomas, provided support for a multipurpose room for events, meetings, and study. The space is named in memory of Ellen Rusling’s father, Willard A. Genrich Sr., who was a former chancellor of the New York Board of Regents.

Palladoro Methods Classroom

Vivian Palladoro ’76W (MS), ’97W (EdD) provided support for a specialized classroom designed to demonstrate the use of innovative instructional approaches, technology, and materials that can be used to enhance student learning of specific subject matter.

Miller Technology and Research Lab

Named in recognition of Herb Miller ’62, ’64W (MA), a long-time Warner School supporter, advisor, and volunteer, the lab features 10 computer work stations that will be open to Warner students at all times, providing access to the latest technology for social science research and for multimedia editing and production.

Dust Cloud Memories

Artist Eric LoPresti ’93 explores the physical and psychological impact of the Cold War.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

loprestiDETAIL: From Dust Cloud mock-up. Dust clouds are “a way of talking about a dramatic, traumatic event,” says LoPresti. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Standing against a wall of his 350-square-foot Brooklyn studio, artist Eric LoPresti ’93 feels the pressure of an approaching deadline.

“February may seem like a long way away,” he says, with a nervous laugh.

It’s mid-November, and in early February, his solo exhibition, No Blue Skies, will open at the Kunsthalle Galapagos Gallery in the emerging arts neighborhood of Dumbo. This won’t be LoPresti’s first solo exhibition—it will be his ninth since graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002—but in some ways, it will be a departure.

The showcase painting will extend 15 feet across the gallery’s 25-foot wall. At this point, the piece exists only as a sketchy mock-up on three four-by-three-foot canvas panels. He’s never worked this large before.

“I want this show to have a lot of energy,” he says. Besides, he adds, Dumbo is just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. “People who are going to make the trip over the bridge—although it’s short—I want to show them something.”

LoPresti has been able to make a solid impact with his customary 40-by-30-inch canvases. “He’s a phenomenal painter,” says Marisa Sage, an art dealer who’s been showing LoPresti’s work in her Like the Spice Gallery, since 2006. She’s watched his reputation grow. “He’s got very active collectors. They’ve all followed his career extensively.”

From the start of his career, LoPresti’s work has been rooted in conflict and disruption. “I really enjoyed big, cinematic scenes of aerial views of war zones or environmental conflict,” he says. At first, he didn’t give the reasons for his choices a lot of thought. But “it only took a year or two before I started thinking, ‘Well, wait, where did this come from?’ And then I realized there’s a big elephant in the room, and it’s called home.’”

Home for LoPresti was the vast, desert-like terrain of eastern Washington state. The economic base of his hometown of Richland was the Hanford Site, a plutonium production facility established in 1945 as part of the Manhattan Project.

“It was a secret city back in the day, on par with Los Alamos,” says LoPresti of the Hanford Site. The plutonium for “Fat Man,” the atomic bomb that exploded on Nagasaki in August 1945, killing more than 80,000 people, was manufactured there. Although the site had long ceased to be secret by the time the LoPrestis moved to Richland in 1980, “people didn’t talk a lot about Hanford’s main mission,” he says.

“Everyone’s parents worked on the site,” LoPresti recalls. His father was a statistician. “He never did weapons work. But he certainly had a lot of projects that he couldn’t talk about. There was this culture of ‘You don’t talk about what happens at work.’ ”

LoPresti also imbibed the power of the natural landscape. “My aesthetics were really formed when I was living in the desert,” he says, referring to the treeless stretches of dry land on the Columbia River Plateau, where Richland lies. He says the land can seem desolate—“blank,” even—to people unfamiliar with the region. But LoPresti sees color everywhere. Not bright color, but dramatic, striking color nonetheless.

loprestiAT WORK: LoPresti, working off a letter-sized watercolor to produce a canvas mock-up of Dust Cloud, estimates it will take him “about a month-and-a-half” of daily work to complete the painting that will extend 15 feet across. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“The color’s very subtle, and you have to kind of be tuned in to the misty sort of pinks, browns, and yellows,” he says. In one series of paintings, he depicts aerial views of the Hanford site, at different points throughout its history, with those misty desert hues superimposed.

In 2010, LoPresti returned to Washington for the opening of a solo show called Afterglow. A dual-venue exhibit, it took place at both Washington State University Tri-Cities and the Richland Public Library. Joining him at the opening was Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and in 2010, The Twilight of the Bombs. In a joint lecture, the two discussed the impact of the Hanford Site on the physical and moral landscape of the region.

“Richard’s participation in Afterglow meant an enormous amount to me,” LoPresti says. “He takes on the darkest subjects, but with the empathy of a novelist. As we spoke, I realized that it wasn’t outrageous for me to connect my own small story to the enormous subject of thermonuclear war. It was, in fact, essential to who I was trying to become as an artist. “We still live in the aftermath of near global annihilation. My hometown happens to be one of those places where you can see that brush with apocalypse written directly on the desert landscape.”

In another series of works, which will be shown later in 2013 at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, LoPresti depicts aerial views of the Nevada test site, the crater-laden expanse whose visual scars are reminders of its role as the nation’s primary nuclear test site throughout the Cold War.

At the Kunsthalle Galapagos, the centerpiece painting will be called Dust Cloud, named for the theme that will unite the works in the exhibit.

“This is the source image,” he says, approaching a small photograph tacked to the wall opposite where the mock-up now hangs. A still photograph from a video taken by a soldier in Iraq, it’s situated in a row of images, paper sketches, and notes. LoPresti explains that this particular dust cloud was produced by a helicopter landing. But that’s incidental. What he really wants to explore is the cloud itself.

“It’s a little more abstract than my previous work,” he says. “It’s not really clear that it’s in Iraq, it’s not really clear what made the dust cloud. It could represent a lot more things. And for me that's what the dust metaphor starts to be. It's a way of talking about a dramatic, traumatic event.”

Coincidentally, on the previous evening, LoPresti had watched the first segment of Ken Burns’s documentary, The Dust Bowl, which aired over two evenings last fall on PBS.

“It’s just apropos,” LoPresti says of the documentary. He notes that there have been several iconic dust clouds in modern memory in the United State alone. Following the disastrous dust storms of the 1930s was what LoPresti calls “the biggest of them all,” the mushroom cloud of Alamagordo. On September 11, 2001, there was the roaring, black cloud that rolled up Broadway as the Twin Towers fell. And LoPresti points to another iconic dust cloud, which he says looms largest in his own memory: the cloud produced by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986, which sent brilliant white streams spewing across a blue sky like fireworks. “I think if I showed you a little image of that cloud, you would recognize it immediately,” he says.

A collaborative team of artists and curators decides on exhibits at the Kunsthalle Galapagos. Julie McKim, the gallery’s director, who has also worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Kitchen, says the team was united in its enthusiasm for LoPresti’s work. “Eric has something we like, which is that he’s conceptually strong and technically strong as well.”

LoPresti says his technical skills came first, while his conceptual framework developed slowly, both during and after graduate school. “I wasn’t raised an artist,” he says, though he credits his mother, who attended art school briefly, as his first teacher. “I was a science kid.”

LoPresti’s high school chemistry teacher, Leo Faddis, nominated him for Rochester’s Bausch & Lomb scholarship. LoPresti didn’t even know it; and then he won. He remains grateful to this day for the one-handed teacher (“he’d blown his hand off in a chemistry experiment,” LoPresti explains, with some fascination) who had acted on his behalf.

“I had a really great experience at Rochester,” he says. “It really changed my life.” While majoring in brain and cognitive sciences, the student who’d always drawn and painted as a hobby ventured into the studio arts department seeking electives. He met Allen Topolski, the sculptor who’s long served as the chair of Rochester’s studio arts department and its principal undergraduate advisor. Topolski became a mentor, and LoPresti credits Topolski with helping him gain admittance to graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art—despite lacking the academic grounding in art, not to mention the extensive portfolio typical of most of those who are admitted to the institute’s master of fine arts program.

LoPresti never lost his love of science, and often reflects on his dual interests. “I wanted to be a scientist, but I also wanted to do both,” he says. After a couple of years of steady, secure work at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, “I decided I was going to throw myself into the thing that I knew less about.”

It was a risky move. It frightened and thrilled him at the same time. And it befits the man now standing before the Dust Cloud mock-up.

LoPresti says he wants his work to evoke a certain kind of feeling. “Maybe an example would be, if you were at the edge of a diving board and looked down. And maybe on the high dive it’s a little higher perhaps than you expected to go. It’s sort of excitement and fear at the same time. I like that feeling. And I want my paintings to have something about that in them.”

Sweet Victory

“It feels like the world has not stopped moving,” says Mark Ferrandino ’99, ’00 (MS), Colorado’s newly elected speaker of the House.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

ferrandinoDOUBLE VICTORY: Ferrandino’s election as Colorado’s first openly gay speaker of the House is a victory for him as well as a milestone for Colorado legislative politics. (Photo: AP Images)

Mark Ferrandino ’99, ’00 (MS) calls his election to become speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives “overwhelming and humbling.”

His rise to the speakership has made national news. Come January, he’ll become the first openly gay House speaker in a state that 20 years ago legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Just last May, Ferrandino, a Democrat who has represented south-central Denver since 2007, championed a bill in the House making it legal in the state for same sex couples to form civil unions. Under the leadership of then speaker Frank McNulty, who represents the Republican stronghold of Douglas County in a state with a solid base of religious conservatives, the bill—which had passed the Senate, had the strong backing of Gov. John Hickenlooper, and enough committed Republican votes in the House to pass—never reached the floor for that final vote.

“After what we went through last year people were eager and excited to work on campaigns to change our direction,” says Ferrandino, who framed the failure of the civil unions bill to become law as an issue of subverted democracy as much as an issue of equal justice for gays and lesbians. The Democrats took over the majority on Election Day, and named Ferrandino, who had been the Democratic leader since November 2011, speaker of the House two days later.

A native of Nyack, N.Y., Ferrandino arrived in Colorado only in 2004. After completing a double major in economics and political science and a master’s degree in public policy analysis, Ferrandino moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked in the White House in the Office of Management and Budget. He began dating Greg Wertsch, a federal law enforcement officer with the Department of Homeland Security. When Wertsch was offered a job in Colorado, Ferrandino went with him.

Ferrandino moved quickly up the state party ranks. In 2005, he became treasurer of the Colorado Democratic Party and in 2006, landed a position at the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing as a senior budget analyst. In 2007, he was named Colorado Young Democrat of the Year and in 2010, when he’d become the ranking Democrat on the Colorado legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, the party named him a Rising Star.

Wertsch, still his partner—the two are also the new parents of a baby girl—has been a steady source of support. “He knew when we met that I wanted to run for office. He’s been very supportive—though not always supportive of the pay cut I took when I ran for the legislature,” Ferrandino says dryly.

“I’m a numbers guy,” he says, referring to his passion for budgetary issues, which will be a priority in January.

Not surprisingly, another key issue will be civil unions. He plans to reintroduce the bill on day one of the new session.r

Creating a Buzz in Nashville

aliasHOT IN TENNESSEE: Nashville’s Alias Chamber Ensemble, which includes four Eastman alumni, has won accolades for its innovative repertoire as well as for its service to the community. (Photo: Courtesy of Alias Chamber Ensemble)

“The initial idea was that we would play music with our close friends and give back to the community,” says Zeneba Bowers ’94E, ’96E (MM), artistic director of Nashville’s Alias Chamber Ensemble.

Eleven concert seasons later, that’s still the idea. But the ensemble’s impact has been more substantial than that modest goal might suggest.

The 12-member ensemble includes four alumni from the Eastman School—violinist Bowers, harpist Licia Jaskunas ’91E (MM), and the husband-and-wife team of percussionist Chris Norton ’83E, ’86E (MA) and horn player Leslie Boggs Norton ’84E.

Their first recording, Hilos (Naxos, 2010), was nominated for a Grammy Award, and, coinciding with the release of their second CD, Boiling Point (Delos Records), Nashville Mayor Karl Dean declared last September 25 as “Alias Chamber Ensemble Day.”

In a press release, Mayor Dean lauded the ensemble as “one of the nation’s only all-volunteer ensembles of accomplished professional musicians which donates 100 percent of its concert proceeds to community nonprofits with ‘no strings attached.’”

Indeed, “No Strings Attached” is how Alias has described its benefit concerts, in which the ensemble performs and the intermission features the nonprofit director on the stage addressing the gathering. All ensemble members play a role in selecting nonprofits to sponsor, and the group performs three concerts a season.

“It’s challenging for musicians, with our unpredictable schedules, to volunteer the way most nonprofits want,” says Bowers. “The ensemble allows us to do something we love artistically, but also to contribute to the community.”

Bowers, Jaskunas, and Leslie Norton all have “day jobs” in the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Bowers says, while Chris Norton serves on the music faculty of nearby Belmont University.

She notes that the group has retained all but one member since it began in 2002. “That’s pretty awesome for a group of musicians who are performing three concerts a year for free,” says Bowers. She adds that one reason for the members’ loyalty to the group is their shared sense of ownership. The musicians not only choose the non- profits, but also the group’s repertoire—something orchestral musicians don’t ordinarily have the opportunity to do.

The process—in which all members’ preferences are taken into account—can result in some eclectic shows. But Bowers says that’s not a problem.

“I guess the general theme for our concerts is, ‘Our musicians love this music!’” she says. And that works well with American audiences. “We’re used to having Italian for lunch and, say, Peruvian for dinner. We’re used to that kind of diversity.”

—Karen McCally

What’s Alien About Science Fiction?

Less than many people think, says movie critic Dan Kimmel ’77.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

kimmelGENRE BENDER? The German expressionist classic Metropolis is a sci-fi masterpiece, says Kimmel. (Photo: Corbis)

Movie critic Dan Kimmel ’77 has got a yellow jacket in his bonnet. The former president of the Boston Society of Film Critics, cochair of the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and media professor at Suffolk University says there’s one movie genre that’s never gotten its due: science fiction.

In 2011, he made his case in a polemic, Jar Jar Binks Must Die . . . and other Observations about Science Fiction Movies (Fantastic Books). It was nominated for a 2012 Hugo Award, among the most prestigious honors in science fiction writing.

The one-time Logos humor columnist returns to Rochester every five years to speak at the Class of 1977 dinner. His first novel, Shh! It’s a Secret: A Novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender’s Guide (Fantastic Books), is set to come out early in 2013.

kimmelCRITIC: Sci-fi addresses serious themes, says Kimmel. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Why do science fiction films need an advocate?

Whenever there is a serious television show or movie with science fiction elements, you will inevitably read a review with a director or one of the stars or the writer, “It’s not really science fiction. Yes, we use time travel and spaceships and killer robots. But it’s not really science fiction. It’s really about people.” Oh really? One of my favorite films of the last 15 years is Gattaca. It’s set in a near-future society, where basically all babies are born with designer genes. The protagonist was born the old-fashioned way. There’s a chilling scene: He’s born and they draw his blood. They say he’s going to have bad vision and he might have a heart defect. His whole life is written for him, just from his DNA. And we’re so much more than our DNA. I show that movie to my students and they love it. I had one come up to me and say, “I never thought I would cry at a science fiction movie.”

You’ve had a lot to say, in this same vein, about Metropolis.

Yes. When Metropolis, by the great Fritz Lang, generally acknowledged to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, was restored to its original length about three years ago, one of the German film archivists who was working on restoring the film gave an interview to the New York Times and he said, “Well, now that we can see the complete film, we can see that the science fiction trappings are really very thin.” This is a movie with a mad scientist, a killer robot, and a dystopian future! A more recent example is The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s a romantic film and it’s also science fiction. You can read the interviews—“Oh no, it’s not really science fiction. It’s really about the relationship between the characters.” That would be like Clint Eastwood saying, “Unforgiven isn’t really a western, it’s about the characters.”

Kimmel’s ‘Baker’s Dozen’

So what are the must-see science fiction films? Kimmel provides a “baker’s dozen.” One note: “Where there are multiple versions, I go with the earlier one. Except for The Fly,” Kimmel says. “In that case, I favor the 1986 remake.”

Metropolis (1927)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Things to Come (1936)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Thing (1951)

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

Sleeper (1973)

Blade Runner (1982)

The Fly (1986 remake of the 1958 original)

Gattaca (1997)

So why the dismissive appraisals?

Even in fandom, somebody famously noted that the golden age of science fiction is when you’re 12. Which is true, because that’s when a lot of us get into it. But science fiction is really by adults, a lot of it is written for adults, and when it comes to junky sci-fi movies, I point to a quote by the great science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. An interviewer said to him, “Isn’t it true that 90 percent of science fiction is just crud?” And Sturgeon said, “Yes. Ninety percent of anything is crud.”

Why does it matter what genre critics and others assign—or don’t—to a film?

First, let’s talk about what genre does. Genre offers a set of tools to tell stories about us and our lives. It allows us to talk about things in code. And so for westerns, that means that High Noon could talk about the Hollywood blacklist without ever mentioning communism. And for science fiction, Invasion of the Body Snatchers could do the same thing. So you see a movie like that—a critic now might say, “Oh it’s about pods from space”—but I’m sitting there saying, “Wow, this is about some really interesting ideas that they really couldn’t talk about directly in 1956 because somebody would have yelled, ‘Commie!’” There would have been pickets in front of the theater. But it’s pod people, so we can get away with it.

You just completed a science fiction novel—Shh! It’s a Secret: A Novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender’s Guide?

It’s due out in January. The premise is first contact between Earth and this other planet. And now it’s a year later. They’ve been exchanging scientists, exchanging ambassadors. And the son of an alien ambassador comes out to Hollywood and wants to be in the movies. It’s about the friendship between the movie executive and the alien as they’re working on what turns out to be a top secret movie project. So, yes, it’s about people. But it’s also science fiction.

Varied Sentences

In the courtroom of Georgia Superior Court Judge Asha Jackson ’97, sentences can range from life terms to book reports.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

jacksonRISING STAR: At Rochester, Jackson was chief justice of the All-Campus Judicial Council. In February 2012, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal appointed her a superior court judge in populous DeKalb Co. (Photo: John Disney/Daily Report)

For several years now, Asha Jackson ’97 has been gaining recognition as a civic leader in Atlanta, where she grew up. After graduating from Rochester and spending three years in New Orleans earning her law degree at Tulane, she returned to her hometown to clerk for DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Michael Hancock. She made partner at one Atlanta firm and was swiftly recruited by another. All the while, she pursued multiple other projects in the community, including founding the Atlanta Urban League Young Professionals and serving on multiple boards.

After Judge Hancock retired in January 2012, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal appointed Jackson as his successor.

“This is my dream career,” she says. “I always wanted to be a judge.”

Appointed at age 36, Jackson is among the state’s younger superior court judges. In Georgia, the superior courts are the highest trial courts and the only ones with general jurisdiction. And DeKalb County is a populous and fast-growing area that encompasses East Atlanta as well as Decatur.

Jackson spends most of her time working with a civil, criminal, and domestic caseload of about 1,500 cases pending at any moment. Reflecting a microcosm of the community, the cases can be small or quite large.

“On the civil side, they can involve very large amounts of money and property. On the criminal side, felonies,” she says. “You have to know how to move cases.”

She points to her litigation experience, which she says “allows me to run a very efficient courtroom.”

Her colleague, Judge Cynthia Becker, agrees. Becker also came to the bench from a private firm. “Asha and I have had a lot of conversations about how we can improve the process, not just for us, but for everyone,” she says. A senior colleague who recalls Jackson’s days as a young law clerk for Hancock, Becker adds, “I’ve always been impressed by Asha’s intellect, energy, and personality. It sounds funny to say personality. But Asha has one of those personalities where you know she’s going to be a leader.”

The maximum penalty in Georgia is death, and Jackson says the toughest sentence she’s handed down is life plus 115 years. “A man robbed, raped, and assaulted a minister on church grounds when she opened the sanctuary door to hand him some resource materials,” says Jackson.

She works with many less serious offenders, and in this area, has already made a distinctive contribution to the bench. She’s created the Pinnacle Project for first-time, nonviolent offenders between the ages of 17 and 25.

“I decided there needed to be another level of intervention. So I took it upon myself to provide that,” she says. Project participants still meet with a probation officer and still serve out their sentences, she notes, but adds, “they also meet with me.”

Jackson arranges presentations for the group, but also assigns the probationers reading and book reports. “Right now, they’re reading Cooked,” she says, referring to Cooked: My Journey from the Streets to the Stove (William Morrow, 2008), by Jeff Henderson, a one-time San Diego cocaine dealer who’s now a successful Las Vegas chef. When the group meets in her chamber, as it does every three months, they’ll present their book reports and receive their next reading assignment.

“A lot of offenders I work with want to be what they see in the media,” she says. Not that that’s always a bad thing. Last fall, Jackson went on The Mills Connection, a popular Atlanta television talk show, and admitted to something she said “might sound corny.” She decided she wanted to be a judge in elementary school, after watching People’s Court.

“I wanted to be Judge Wapner,” she told host Carla Mills. “I sat and I watched his technique and I thought, ‘I can do this.’ ” At the Southwest Atlanta YMCA afterschool program, a young Asha Jackson and her playmates played court. “Every time someone said, ‘let's play court,’ I had to be the judge.”

“I knew I couldn’t just jump into that position,” she says. “I set out on a path.”

Her appointment came after a grueling selection process in which she was chosen among 35 other contenders. A committee of lawyers and judges screening nominees came up with a short list of four. Each of the four finalists met with the governor and his team of lawyers. Governor Deal made the final choice.

In 2014, she’ll face another hoop: an election.

Says Becker: “She will do very well there, too.”

In the News

Eastman Alumni Nominated for 55th Annual Grammy Awards

Four alumni of the Eastman School are among the nominees for the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, to be held in February at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

Recording engineer Robert (Bob) Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM) received two nominations in the category of Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical: one for Ryan Adams’s Ashes & Fire and another for Jason Mraz’s Love is a Four Letter Word. Ludwig was also mastering engineer for two albums nominated for Album of the Year: Mumford & Sons’ Babel and Jack White’s Blunderbuss.

Soprano Renée Fleming ’83E (MM) was nominated for Best Classical Vocal Solo for Poèmes, her recording of songs by Ravel, Messiaen, and Dutilleux.

Composer and pianist Bill Cunliffe ’81E (MM) was nominated for Best Instrumental Composition for his Overture, Waltz and Rondo.

Librettist Gene Scheer ’81E (MM), ’82E (MM) was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for the concert drama August 4, 1964, which he wrote with composer Steven Stucky.

Alumna Named U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce President

Irene Berkowitz Stillings ’61 has been named president of the U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce. The chamber, established in San Diego in 2011, is a nationwide network of businesses and community organizations. For the past 10 years, Stillings has been the executive director of the California Center for Sustainable Energy, an organization she’ll continue to serve as director emerita.

Wharton School Recognizes David Nash ’81M (MD)

David Nash ’81M (MD), the founding dean of the Jefferson School of Population Health, has been awarded the 2012 Joseph Wharton Social Impact Award from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Nash, who earned an MBA from the Wharton School after graduating from the School of Medicine and Dentistry, was cited for helping to shape the medical industry through his dedication to medical education and health care.

ALUMNI RELATIONS

Where’s Rocky?

rockyBette Jane Sumner, whose son, Michael, is member of the Class of 2015, and Bette Jane’s brother, Dan Bayerl, enjoy Tapas Night at the Memorial Art Gallery during Meliora Weekend 2012. (Photo: )

rockyKirk Moldoff ’76, ’79M (MS) submitted a photo taken by his son, Andrew, who took Rocky on a language camp trip to China in summer 2012. (Photo: )

rockyRocky joined a group of former basketball players at their annual golf outing in Nashville. From left: Jack Herlan ’77, Mike Ryan ’81 ’84S (MBA), Dave Bence ’81, John Mattioli ’79, Mike O’Brien ’78, Bill Beckley ’78, and Tom DiChristina ’82. (Photo: )

rockyBrian Goldhagen ’05 and Renata Schloss ’04, ’05 (T5) celebrated their second wedding anniversary with Rocky in Cozumel, Mexico. (Photo: )

rockyBrittney Bunkis ’15 took Rocky to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, where he was placed by the name of victim Brendan Dolan ’86. (Photo: )

This fall, Rocky, the University’s mascot, continued a whirlwind journey to places near and far.

Rocky began his travels last June, when the Office of Alumni Relations announced on its Facebook page an initiative called “Where’s Rocky?”

Since then, members of the University community—alumni, students, parents, and staff—have taken Rocky with them from places as wide-ranging as favorite campus destinations to the farthest reaches of the globe.

To view Rocky’s complete travel gallery, visit www.facebook.com/URAlumniRelations. To participate, download and print the Rocky cutout from the page, and then post your photo on Facebook for the entire community to see.

TRIBUTE

Eugene Genovese: Standing the Test of Time

genovese‘LIKE HORATIUS AT THE BRIDGE’: Despite his own firm ideological and later, religious, commitments, Genovese defended historical scholarship from “capture by ideologues,” writes Paquette. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

During the mid-1970s, I entered the graduate program in history at Rochester to obtain a PhD under the supervision of Eugene Genovese. Gene would become one of the most influential—and controversial—historians of his generation. No scholar studied more deeply the history of the master-slave relation in the antebellum South. His masterpiece, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, which in 1975 received the Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious prize in the field of American history, will stand the test of time.

At Rochester, where he taught from 1969 to 1986, he and I entered into a friendship that remained unbroken until his death last September at age 82. Over the years, a number of persons have asked me, “What was it like to work with Gene Genovese? Boy,” they say, “I hear he was one tough SOB.”

Truth be told, many graduate students started dissertations under Gene’s supervision; I dare say only about five of us ever finished. One story will have to do. My introduction to Gene the teacher was a seminar on the Old South. I forget at what point in the semester he returned our first graded papers. On mine, he had splashed so much red—his favorite color at the time—I thought he had opened an artery over it. On the very first page above the title he had written in bold red: “Too pedantic, too polemical, too passive.” That was his only line of praise. Yes, indeed, Gene set the bar high, and he never apologized for doing so.

During the later stage of his career, he publicly renounced his Marxist atheism and returned to the Roman Catholic Church that had nurtured him in his youth. No one who knew Gene at whatever stop on his intellectual odyssey could ever accuse him of proselytizing in the classroom. He had unyielding respect for history as a profession, and defended it, like Horatius at the bridge, from capture by ideologues pretending to be scholars. Whether you shared Gene’s politics or not, whether he liked you or not, success in his classroom meant that you had to labor tirelessly to meet exacting demands.

Gene’s greatness as a historian derived in large part from his great respect for tradition as deeply buried deposits of wisdom that must be endlessly rediscovered. His scholarship was intended not to separate us from our obligations to the living, but rather to inform them. If, in the beginning, Gene bowed to no God but truth, he ended his life bowing to both.

—Robert Paquette ’82 (PhD)

Paquette is a professor of history at Hamilton College. This essay was adapted and reprinted, with permission from the author and publisher, from the November 2012 issue of The New Criterion. The entire essay may be accessed, under some restrictions, at www.newcriterion.com.

TRIBUTE

Peter Lyman ’47: A ‘Humble’ Rochester Legend

lymanCHAMPION: A tennis and squash coach at Rochester for more than 40 years, Lyman (center) stands with players Alex Gaeta ’83, ’91 (PhD) (left) and Bob Swartout ’83, ’92S (MBA). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Somewhere amongst my disorganized papers exists an old color photograph taken in 1984 in a gymnasium that I think was in Tennessee. The photo shows me as a college sophomore, standing with my tennis coach, Peter Lyman, in an otherwise empty gym. We were on spring break with the tennis team, taking a southern swing in a van, and on this day our match had been rained out, so I’d walked into the gym to hit tennis balls against the wall. I’m wearing my Rochester tennis sweats, hands on my hips and weight on one leg. Peter is holding my tennis racquet outstretched, demonstrating to me a contact point.

That photograph has been a prized possession ever since. Peter, who died in September at the age of 87, coached the Rochester men’s tennis team and the squash team for more than 40 years. Every kid who grew up playing tennis in Rochester, as had I, knew the legend of Peter Lyman. Our greatest aspiration (outside of Wimbledon, of course), was to win “Districts,” the city-wide summer tournament played on the 22 clay courts at the Tennis Club of Rochester. Peter had won the District singles title 16 years in a row. The plaque that hangs on the wall at the Tennis Club of Rochester looks simply ridiculous with Peter’s name written on it so many times, and with no other names in between his.

Only a debilitating case of rheumatoid arthritis could stop Peter from winning the title many more times. By the time I was 14 and playing tennis year-round, Peter had long since been stricken, resulting in a premature limp, hobbled curvature and gnarled hands. The rheumatoid arthritis had made him look older than he truly was.

But it never caused him to miss a day of work. Under his guidance, the tennis and squash teams excelled, and he coached numerous All-Americans in both sports. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for intercollegiate squash in 1999 and national coach of the year for Division III men’s tennis. Both of Rochester’s recently built tennis and squash facilities bear his name.

Peter gave everything he had to his teams. But he did not give psychological pre-match speeches or put his ego in the way. I never heard Peter brag or draw attention to himself. He never needed the story to be about him. Instead, he let the story be about all of us. This gave us room to make mistakes and to grow. Above all else he was a perfectly humble man.

—John Illig ’86

Illig is the men’s and women’s squash coach at Middlebury College and the former president of the Women’s College Squash Association.

Books & Recordings

Books

8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance

By Robert Scaer ’59, ’63M (MD)

W. W. Norton & Co., 2012

Scaer, a neurologist who served for 20 years as medical director of rehabilitation services at the Mapleton Center in Boulder, Colo., offers an accessible explanation of the connection between our brains and the rest of our bodies and the reasons for the physical and emotional symptoms of stress and trauma. Intended for trauma patients, the book draws on Scaer’s 40 years of clinical experience.

Changing Students, Changing Suburbs: Helping School Leaders Face the Challenges

By Laura Bigaouette ’82 et al

Corwin Press, 2012

Bigaouette, assistant dean at Manhattanville College’s school of education, explores ways in which suburban schools can better meet the needs of a more ethnically and culturally diverse student body.

Successful Tails: The Wonders of Therapy Dogs

By Patricia Wheeler ’62, ’65W (Mas)

Authorhouse, 2012

Wheeler, a therapy dog handler in Northern California, provides a collection of stories, testimonials, and poems from more than 250 people who have benefited from the work of therapy dogs in nursing homes, children’s camps, and other settings.

Mental Status Examination Demystified: A Psychopathology Mini-Book

By Jeffrey Lyness ’83, ’86M (MD)

Jeffrey Lyness, 2012

Lyness, professor of psychiatry and senior associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, provides an overview for medical students, residents, and other clinical trainees in the health professions of the components of a mental status examination. Self-published, the book is available for the iPad through the Apple iBooks store.

Freedom of Speech and Society: A Social Approach to Freedom of Expression

By Harry Melkonian ’71

Cambria Press, 2012

Inspired by the social theories of Emile Durkheim and Jurgen Habermas, Melkonian, an honorary associate at Macquarie University Law School in Sydney, Australia, departs from the traditional justification of freedom of speech as an individual right, offering instead a justification based on the role of speech in modern, highly differentiated societies.

Principles of Social Change

By Leonard Jason ’76 (PhD)

Oxford University Press, 2013

Jason, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Community Research at DePaul University, offers practical suggestions for the ways in which social activists and mental health professionals driven by a concern for social justice can form coalitions to bring about community-based change.

The Power of Patient Stories: Learning Moments in Medicine

By Paul Griner ’59M (MD), ’65M (Res)

Self-published, 2012

Griner, professor emeritus of medicine at Rochester and a University trustee, presents a collection of 50 patient stories compiled over his 60-year career in medicine. Each of the stories, told in Griner’s words and intended for medical students as well as for a general audience, represent lessons learned and an opportunity to reflect on “the importance of ethics, professionalism, and good bedside diagnostic skills.”

The Lyrical Resonance Between Chinese Poets and Painters: The Tradition and Poetics of Tihuashi

By Daan Pan ’91 (PhD)

Cambria Press, 2011

Pan, professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, examines traditional Chinese tihuashi as a particular type of poetic genre.

A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language

Edited by Jeremy Gill ’96E

University of Rochester Press, 2012

Gill edits and introduces the book by his mentor, composer George Rochberg. Sharing insights into more than three centuries of Western music, Rochberg “describes how the asymmetrical tonal language of the late 18th century . . . evolved through the gradual incursion of symmetry into a system based on the juxtaposition of tonal and atonal, asymmetrical and symmetrical.”

Term Limits and Their Consequences: The Aftermath of Legislative Reform

By Stanley Caress and Todd Kunioka ’96 (PhD)

SUNY Press, 2012

Kunioka, assistant professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles, and a statistical analyst for Los Angeles County, and Caress, professor of political science at West Georgia University, examine the grassroots movement for legislative term limits, with a focus on California.

Ajanta’s Ledge: Poems

By Sascha Feinstein ’85

Sheep Meadows Press, 2012

Feinstein, professor of English at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pa., presents a collection of poems exploring family, travel, and jazz.

A Pen Named Man: Our Essence

By John Newton ’72

Resource Publications, 2012

Newton, a retired Kodak patent specialist, offers philosophical and spiritual reflections.

Aesthetics Beyond the Arts: New and Recent Essays

By Arnold Berleant ’53E, ’55E (MA)

Ashgate Publishing, 2012

Berleant, professor emeritus of philosophy at Long Island University, presents a collection of essays written over the past 10 years exploring aesthetic experiences in the arts as well as in both natural and built environments.

Common Sense Conservative Prescriptions: Solutions for What Ails Us

By Ada Fisher ’79M (Res)

Ada Fisher, 2012

Fisher, a family physician and North Carolina Republican National Committeewoman, analyzes public policy problems facing the United States.

Partner in Survival: A Novel

By John Perry ’72 (PhD)

Lulu, 2012

In a science-inspired thriller that questions the nature of reality, astrophysicist Perry tells the story of siblings facing the reappearance of their deceased mother.

Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology

Edited by Julie Taddeo ’87, ’96 (PhD) and Cynthia Miller

Scarecrow Press, 2012

The historian Taddeo coedits a collection of essays on the popular subgenre of fantasy and science fiction that melds art, music, film, television, new media, and material culture. Taddeo contributes an essay, “Corsets of Steel: Steampunk’s Reimagining of Victorian Femininity.”

Prayers for Women Who Can’t Pray

By Melanie Craig-Hansford and Katharine Smithrim ’93E (PhD)

Wintergreen Studios Press, 2012

Smithrim, professor of education at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and Craig- Hansford present non- sectarian reflections for women who, in the face of either tragedy or the sublime, feel the urge to pray, but no longer find meaning in a personal God.

Piano Music for Little Fingers

By Ann Patrick Green ’57E, ’59E (MM)

Dover Publications, 2012

Green, a concert pianist and principal of Patrick’s Music School in Fullerton, Calif., offers an introductory volume for piano students from ages four to nine.

Recordings

Unsound

By Mission of Burma

Fire Records, 2012

The four-person post-punk band that includes Clint Conley ’77 on bass and lead vocals presents its fourth CD since reuniting in 2001.

Boiling Point: Music of Kenji Bunch

By Alias Chamber Ensemble

Delos Records, 2012

The Nashville-based ensemble that includes violinist, founder, and artistic director Zeneba Bowers ’94E, ’96E (MM), harpist Licia Jaskunas ’91E (MM), horn player Leslie Boggs Norton ’84E, and percussionist Chris Norton ’83E, ’86E (MA), performs the composer Bunch’s mix of roots music, modern rock, and jazz.

Ritzville

By Allen Vizzutti ’74E, ’76E (MM)

Village Place Music, 2012

Trumpeter Vizzutti performs eclectic selections with bassist Stanley Clarke and pianist Chick Corea.

The Music of Greg Danner, Vol. 1: Walls of Zion

By Greg Danner ’80E (MM)

Mark Masters, 2012

Danner, professor of theory and composition at Tennessee Technological University, presents a volume of music for winds, including performances by the Rutgers Wind Ensemble, the Drake University Wind Symphony, the U.S. Air Force Band of Mid-America, and the Tennessee Tech Symphony Band.

Black Tie Optional

By the Bowties

Bowties, 2012

The Bowties, a Rochester a cappella group that includes Alan Wertheimer ’68, ’74 (PhD) and John Langfitt, associate professor at the Strong Epilepsy Center, perform 15 songs, including a live rendition of the Queen classic “Bohemian Rhapsody” at Kodak Hall in 2011.

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.

Leaving on a Jet Plane?

Travel writer, editor, and blogger Ed Wetschler ’68 has some advice.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

masterclass (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

As a travel writer and blogger, in any typical month, I’m like a centipede trying to walk in 50 different directions. I travel at least once a month, and when I’m home, I’m working on four or five stories at once. I’m also doing a lot of social media. Tripatini.com, of which I’m a co-owner, is a social network for travelers.

The people we’re writing about fund the travel in most cases. From a realistic point of view, that doesn’t give you a lot of faith in what you’re reading, nor should it. That’s why you read so much praise. That’s why people get mad at me when I come home from a trip and say, “I’m not writing about this.” I believe I’m under an obligation not to write about a place if I don’t like it. Unless it’s really high visibility, and then I should because people think it’s great.

In the Caribbean, there’s some great history, and people want to get away from the stereotype that it’s only a place to sun yourself on the beach. There are millions of tourists who will go to the Caribbean to an all-inclusive, stay within their hotel gates, and drink all day. But there’s also a growing demographic who are saying, “I want to get off campus.” And the prime minister of Grenada was saying just the other day, “People want to see more of us and know more about us.”

Ed Wetschler ’68

New York City

Executive Editor, Tripatini.com

Caribbean Editor, Recommend magazine

Most offbeat travel experience: “In 1973, I went to Mykonos and I ran into an acquaintance—a bumbling guy who never seemed to have a date. He’d built a bamboo hut on a beach and he was spending the summer there with two stunning young women. Who knew?”

On St. Kitts, in the West Indies, they’ve just installed a historic train ride, a rare thing in the Caribbean. And for our 25th anniversary, my wife and I are going to Puerto Rico, to San Juan. We like the history there. There are these great fortress walls, and within the inner part of the city, this centuries-old colonial town. You see the kind of buildings that you can’t see north of the Rio Grande.

I think Baltimore is spectacularly underrated as a tourist destination. The fabled waterfront restoration and development, which began around 20 years ago at the time the Camden Yards stadium was built, just keeps getting better and bigger and more beautiful. They just put up a Four Seasons Hotel that’s fabulous, as is the food there. Elsewhere in the city, the American Visionary Art Museum is one of the most interesting museums you’ll ever see, because the artists are these crazy people who didn’t know they were artists and made extraordinary things. The Baltimore Museum of Art—it’s amazing for a museum of this caliber to charge no admission. They have the world’s largest Matisse collection, and that’s counting a little country called France. The Pinball Museum really is a hoot, because you get to play. In 2014, it’ll be the bicentennial of Francis Scott Key’s penning of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Fort McHenry. It’s just amazing how well-preserved the fort is and how wonderful it is. And I happen to love the American Museum of Dentistry. It’s crazy. Who would have thought?

In some ways, the recession has helped tourists. Airlines cut back on flights. The result is that hotels in Mexico, the Caribbean, and other destinations that rely on American business are offering deep discounts. I’d recommend to any traveler a subscription to a newsletter like cheapcaribbean.com.r

STUDENT LIFE

White House Serenade

backcover (Photo: Brendan Hoffman/AP Images for Rochester Review)

VOCAL GROUP: Members of the College a cappella group Vocal Point pose for a photo after a two-hour performance in the White House, where they took a turn serenading visitors in December. One of several ensembles chosen nationwide for the opportunity, the all-female group sang Christmas carols and Hanukkah songs to help provide holiday cheer for tourists and other guests.