Rochester Review

November–December 2014, Volume 77, No. 2

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, David Barnstone, Adam Fenster, Peter Iglinski, Melissa Lang, Bob Marcotte, Melissa Mead, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Monique Patenaude, Scott Sabocheck, and Brandon Vick

Editorial Office

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E-mail: rochrev@rochester.edu

Design

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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 © 2014 University of Rochester

Credits

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

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Brad Berk and the Next Medical Revolution

By Joel Seligman

presidentMILESTONE: Berk served as Medical Center CEO for five years after a spinal cord injury. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

On September 17, Brad Berk ’81M (MD/PhD), the Medical Center’s chief executive officer, announced that he intends to complete his nearly eight-year term as CEO on January 1, 2015, and take up the reins of an exciting new project, the Rochester Neurorestorative Institute.

Brad’s leadership at the Medical Center has been of historical significance. During his time at the helm, Brad transformed clinical care into the coordinated UR Medicine system, added several hospitals and providers to this network, and emphasized patient- and family-centered care. Working closely with Strong Memorial Hospital and Highland Hospital CEO Steve Goldstein, Brad, for example, helped orchestrate the recent additions of F. F. Thompson and Strong West. In the last 18 months, Brad helped establish Accountable Health Partners, a network that now includes over 1,600 private and faculty physicians and six affiliated and collaborating hospitals.

Brad’s term has witnessed substantial facilities projects, including the expansion of Strong Memorial Hospital by 80 beds, the construction and subsequent expansion of the James P. Wilmot Cancer Institute, the Saunders Research Building, and the Golisano Children’s Hospital.

Brad’s leadership touched virtually every aspect of the Medical Center. During his time as CEO, Brad has led a comprehensive planning process that culminated in two rounds of strategic plans for the Medical Center and its health network during substantial financial challenges.

Our School of Medicine and Dentistry has consistently received strong sponsored research funding and has regularly ranked in the top 15 in NIH funding in orthopaedics, neurology, pediatrics, public health science, and family medicine. The School of Nursing is similarly highly ranked and has been a leader in educational innovation, including its increasing success in hybrid distance and in-class instruction. On Brad’s watch, the Eastman Institute for Oral Health was created to provide an integrated entity responsible for education, research, and clinical care in oral health. Brad has been a fervent supporter of the Medical Center’s growing commitment to community health and economic development.

Since his spinal cord injury in May 2009, he has shown unparalleled discipline and character, and he leaves at the top of his game. He has made his decision during a time of record financial success in our clinical system and when the Medical Center is responsible for nearly 75 percent of our University’s budget and employs about 72 percent of the University’s employees.

In 2013, six adult and one pediatric specialties were ranked in the Top 50 for the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospital lists—the Medical Center’s most impressive performance in history. The prior year, four other pediatric specialties were ranked among the nation’s best hospitals by U.S. News.

As a cardiac specialist, Brad witnessed a revolution in the treatment of cardiac care with improved survival because of a new generation of medical devices and techniques such as implantable defibrillators, programmable pacemakers, coronary stents, and angioplasty.

As Brad explains: “These innovations changed the game in cardiology.” Brad anticipates that a similar revolution will occur in neurologic rehabilitation as new technologies transform lives in equally dramatic ways. Brad explains: “I am watching with great interest the start of a revolution, as biomedical engineering breakthroughs such as robotics, exoskeletons, implantable nerve stimulators and real-time biometric feedback promise to improve the quality of life for people like me.”

Brad is energized to spearhead a marked expansion in neurorestorative medicine at our Medical Center. I am confident that the Rochester Neurorestorative Institute will evolve into a leading institution of its kind in this country for the treatment and associated research of conditions such as degenerative nervous system disorders, spine injuries, stroke, and traumatic brain injury.

The institute will unite scientists, researchers, doctors, and therapists in finding ways to restore nerve function to people with chronic conditions and injuries and offer expertise in areas such as the development of prosthetic limbs that respond to mental commands, research into how new neurological pathways that could replace damaged ones are formed, innovations in devices to control pain, and breakthroughs in stem cell research. New devices and therapies will help patients with neurological limitations to live fuller and more productive lives.

The rapid development of the Rochester Neurorestorative Institute will be a new University top priority, and will make Rochester a destination for neurological care.

Brad is a leader of the highest integrity and courage. I cannot imagine a more inspiring or effective leader for this new revolution in health care.

He made a difference in his career as Medical Center CEO. He will continue to make a difference as director of the Rochester Neurorestorative Institute.

Letters

Eyes on East

I would like to commend President Joel Seligman and the entire University community on the initiative to save East High School (President’s Message, September-October). As the president said, there is no more important challenge than that facing education in our country. As a graduate of both East (1969) and the University (1974), I have a personal interest in the success of this plan.

I believe there are many graduates like myself and the late Mitch Miller ’32E who attended both institutions. Such alumni have a desire to see this effort succeed. Please keep us updated on the progress.

Kurt Eyrich ’74

Augusta, Georgia

I found President Seligman’s message on East High School of personal interest since my father, Herbert Baird ’22, graduated from East High in January 1918. In the process of compiling a family history, I found the class yearbook online (www.libraryweb.org/~digitized/yearbooks/East/1918_Jan.pdf). The class history gave me a glimpse into his life at that time. The website has digitized copies of East High’s yearbooks from 1904 through 1930.

Included in that yearbook was an ad for J. W. Johnston’s Snow White products. As a student, Dad worked for Mr. Johnston who was the founder of what is now the Rochester Scottish Pipes & Drums.

Doug Baird ’50

Asheville, North Carolina

Situating South Sudan

Great article in the September-October 2014 issue on how the university has become the number one destination for students from the program on the continent of Africa ("A Great Gathering"). Great to see so many countries represented too.

Hopefully others have pointed out that the new country of South Sudan is missing on the map on page 37. South Sudan was formed in 2011 and my wife and I now know people with family there.

Mark Doehnert ’75

Falls Church, Virginia

ROC ’em, SOCKS ’em!

letters (Photo: Provided)

I was delighted to read the article about the SOCKS student group and their yarn bombing (“Knit, Purl . . . Boom,” September-October). I’m sending a photo of the ONE sock I knitted before my arrival at the U of R in the fall of 1960. I knitted my way through the U of R, keeping company with the bridge players. At least I had something to show for my time!

Yes, I’m coming to reunion weekend; and yes, I AM a grandmother, still knitting and crocheting very “in” cowls, socks, hats and sweaters. My sympathies to those who do not yet know how to knit or crochet.

Shall I bring my needles and crochet hook to reunion?

Phyllis Zych Budka ’64

Schenectady, New York

A Rainbow by Degrees

Observers of the glorious photograph on pages 14 and 15 of the September-October 2014 issue will note the secondary rainbow, fainter and with colors reversed, resulting from light which is reflected and further refracted in the raindrops. In the photo, it is approximately 9 centimeters above the primary. The separation to an observer “on the ground” is 9 degrees.

John Hitchcock ’62M (Res)

Pittsburgh

Olá, Portuguese

As a parent of a Portuguese-born daughter, Joana Coelho ’17, I was very surprised to find out about the Portuguese language being offered at your school (“Global Rochester,” September-October). My daughter is fluent (can speak, write and read it, plus knows Portuguese history) because she attended Portuguese classes at our community club where I have been a teacher for almost 20 years. While she has lived in the States since she was seven months old, we go back to Portugal every year to spend time with our families during our vacations at Christmas.

After looking at 14 or so colleges as soon as she saw U of R she would not think about any other. Joana loves being there and takes premed classes because she wants to be a pediatrician. We are so happy for her and are sure her future will be bright because of the choice she made.

Rosalina Coelho

Poughkeepsie, New York

letters (Photo: Provided)

Were There Fries with That?

With regards to your board plan picture (“Class Notes,” September-October), not only did I hold on to my card, but I also still have it 44 years later. The Boar’s Head Dinner, held every year in the Men’s Dining Center, was probably the most memorable event in that building.

David Brams ’72

Tamarac, Florida

letters (Rochester Review)

A Letter in Numbers: Class of 1938

I am a surviving member of the Blue Ribbon Class of 1938. We were named the Blue Ribbon Class because we were high achievers. During our freshman year, we were given a national achievement test and our class scored above Harvard’s class that year. I thought you might be interested in a profile of our class. I went through the Interpres of our class and here are some findings. I doubt that many of my class are still alive because I invited reactions to a letter some time ago and received no reply.

So for the record, here are some findings. Reactions welcomed.

William Form ’38, ’40 (MA)

Columbus, Ohio

The writer is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University and previously was on the faculty at Michigan State and the University of Illinois.

Department of Corrections

A story about the invention of the blue noise mask (“Image Inventors,” September-October) misstated the invention’s place in the University’s licensing history. The technology has returned the third most licensing and royalty revenue to the University. A Medical Center team’s work that helped lead to vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV), now marketed as Gardasil by pharmaceutical giant Merck and as Cervarix by GlaxoSmithKline, is the top licensing success, followed by work by Porter Anderson in David Smith’s lab that led to a vaccine against pneumococcal meningitis, sold as Prevnar by Wyeth (Pfizer).

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.

OPTICS

Have You Seen the Rochester Cloak?

cloaking (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It’s science! A portion of optics doctoral student Joseph Choi’s face is “cloaked” between a series of four standard, relatively inexpensive lenses. The first demonstration that achieves a seamless cloaking effect across a continuous range of viewing angles for visible light rays, the “Rochester Cloak” is based on a novel configuration of lenses that Choi developed this fall. The lenses focus light so that an object placed in a ring-shaped region between two of the lenses is not visible to a viewer. Unlike other cloaking technologies, the lenses do not distort the background—note that the grid lines behind Choi keep their alignment and magnification—an effect that Choi and his advisor, John Howell, professor of physics, say is a requirement for a “perfect cloak.”

STUDENT LIFE

A Center for Debate

debate (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Trophy Room: Members of the Debate Union—Syed Reefat Aziz ’16, Dan Lemire ’17, Emoni Tedder ’17, Salva Kuac ’18, Chris Perkins ’17, Miriam Kohn ’17, and Abdulwahab Alhaji ’17—pose in the Goergen Athletic Center with some of the trophies and awards that the program has won. In a move designed to bolster administrative support for debate, the program will be overseen by George Vanderzwaag, Rochester’s director of athletics and recreation, who became executive director of athletics, recreation, and academic teams this fall.﻿

MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

Light Box

infinity (Photo: Adam Fenster)

INFINITY AND BEYOND: Miriam Grigsby ’17 poses inside an “Infinity Box,” part of an exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery featuring the work of artist Matt Elson. Titled “Radiance” (Infinity Box #6, from the Awakened Vision Series, 2013), the work is one of nine pieces that use color, light, and mirrors to create optical illusions for viewers when they look in the boxes. The exhibition is on display through January 4, 2015.﻿

STUDENT LIFE

Checkmate

A student helps harness the power of the Internet to bring new players to an old pastime.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

chessMAKING HIS MOVE: Hinson says that chess is a game in which players improve through study, not just repeated play. His start-up, Chesscademy, which he founded with two other students, aims to make such instruction readily available and fun. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Computer science major Francis Hinson ’16 is spending this year in Silicon Valley, working on the start-up Chesscademy, which he helped found. The website is devoted to teaching anyone, from absolute beginners to seasoned players, the finer points of chess.

Why chess?

During my senior year of high school I rediscovered chess, one of my favorite games to play as a child. This time around, however, I ambitiously wanted to become an excellent player—I drew a lot of inspiration from my friends in the chess world and found myself watching Bobby Fischer documentaries late at night for fun. Unfortunately, the learning process was horrific: the dull chess books, the expensive tutoring rates, and the ’90s-style static web pages consisting entirely of plain text.

Truthfully, I was taken aback at how difficult it was to learn chess. After all, in this day and age, you can easily learn about a diverse range of topics through the Internet. After a year of failed learning attempts, I set out to solve this problem.

What are the challenges in learning chess?

Over 600 million people around the world play chess, but few realize that just playing will not improve your ability. There are many aspects of the game that need to be studied: openings, tactics, endgames, and calculation, to name a few. This is precisely the reason why there are many thick chess books and expensive private tutors: chess needs to be studied like a subject in school. For that reason, millions of people who don’t know how to play are intimidated by the game. And millions who do know and want to get better face the same challenges.

With a wide range of instructive courses, interactive exercises, and thousands of tactical puzzles, players of all levels can learn from Chesscademy’s personalized curriculum that’s tailored to their strengths and weaknesses. By earning points, badges, and maintaining a streak, users are motivated to keep learning in a fun way.

How did Chesscademy get started?

I reached out to Andrew Ng, a friend with whom I’ve worked on entrepreneurial projects in the past—in this case, his skill set aligned perfectly: he’s a seven-time national chess champion. We then brought on another old partner, Sabar Dasgupta, a precocious high school sophomore who had already trail-blazed through Princeton University’s computer science curriculum. And thus, Chesscademy was founded.

From June to August 2013, we put our skills together: Andrew developed comprehensive instructive courses, and Sabar and I developed the entire site’s architecture. I also entirely designed the Chesscademy interface. We worked remotely for two months, only video-calling at night to stay up to date with each other’s progress. August arrived, and we completed the beta version of Chesscademy. With a great deal of luck and some viral engineering, we managed to kickoff our launch with an immense amount of traffic—we made it to the front page of Reddit and to the top of Hacker News, a high-profile tech forum. We effectively discovered that my desire for an easy way to learn chess was something that thousands of people around the world also wanted.

How do you balance school and work on a start-up?

We returned to our respective schools and the weight of our responsibilities was simply too great to continue working on Chesscademy. Despite that, the site’s traffic continued to climb. By the start of the second semester, we collectively agreed that the opportunity to make Chesscademy something big wasn’t worth passing up. So Andrew and I took leaves of absences from Princeton and Rochester, and we moved to New York City to enter the entrepreneurial world. Through luck and connections, we managed to become affiliates to a prestigious technology start-up accelerator, Techstars. There we received mentorship and introductions to many prominent individuals in the New York tech scene. To keep ourselves financially afloat, we went to several competitions and earned over $10,000 in winnings. By mid-summer, Chesscademy had partnered with a prominent prep school on the Upper West Side and grown to 40,000 members.

Through some more luck and hard work, we got accepted to Imagine K12, arguably the top accelerator for education technology, received a $100,000 investment, and moved to Silicon Valley. Today, Chesscademy has over 250,000 members from over 190 countries and continues to grow 10 percent weekly.

Your company has been around for a year now. Where does it go from here?

Our primary focus is to keep growing the community—by January 2015 we expect to have over half a million users. We’re also interested in incorporating the platform into the classroom environment to make Chesscademy a part of every school in the country. Eventually, we’re going to implement our business model, but for now, Chesscademy is free for the world to use.

What is something most people don’t know about chess?

In Russia and many other countries, chess is considered a sport!

What’s it like to take a year off from your studies to work in a start-up?

Taking the leave to work on Chesscademy has been the best decision of my life. Start-ups are extremely difficult enterprises, and you learn so much from success and failure. I’ve also been lucky enough to meet several prominent New York and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, and these connections will go a long way in my life. As a computer science major, this experience has also been extremely educational, as I’ve had to teach myself a lot of cutting-edge technologies and practices in order to develop a product like Chesscademy. When I return to campus, I imagine I’ll be a much more mature student.

ASK THE ARCHIVIST

Was that Eleanor Roosevelt?

A question for Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian.

akaROCHESTER HOSTS: Joe Wilson ’31, and his wife, Marie (Peggy) Wilson (center), served as the hosts for Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited Rochester for a University conference and other presentations in 1950. (Photo: Rochester Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

I have a memory—very indistinct—that I saw Eleanor Roosevelt in Rochester when I was growing up there, most likely between 1947 and 1952 (for me, between seventh grade and the end of high school). My best recollection was that she was speaking, on stage, probably at the Eastman Theatre. I had many reasons to attend such an event: I was a standard bearer, had some teachers with an interest in the U.N. And it was probably before I was an undergraduate at the U of R or on the faculty in the early 1960s. I would greatly appreciate if you could identify this event (or even say it never happened).—Robert Maples ’56

Eleanor Roosevelt was indeed in Rochester, and spoke at Eastman Theatre on Saturday evening, February 11, 1950. It is likely you saw her there at an event sponsored by the City Club of Rochester, entitled “The Meaning of Lincoln.” Roosevelt was appointed by President Harry Truman as the first U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She shared the stage with Ralph Bunche, at the time serving as the United Nations mediator for Palestine.

But it was not the only opportunity to hear them speak that day. Roosevelt and Bunche were invited to participate in the first big event of the University’s centennial celebration: the two-day Students’ Conference on Human Rights.

The first day’s schedule featured speeches by Swami Nikhilananda (member from India in the East-West Philosophers’ Conference in Honolulu in 1949), Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith (U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1946–49), Edwin Nourse (former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers), and Paul Gore-Booth (head of British Information Services in the United States).

According to records for the conference, Roosevelt arrived in Rochester at 8 a.m. via the New York Central train, and was taken to the home of Joseph and Marie Wilson. Joe Wilson ’31 was at this time president of the Haloid Company (later Xerox Corporation), had recently joined the University’s Board of Trustees, and was hosting her in his capacity as president of the City Club. Following breakfast with the Wilsons, Roosevelt went to Strong Auditorium on the River Campus, where the theme of the morning session was “Social Rights and Obligations,” and she and Bunche spoke on their roles with the United Nations.

Skipping the conference luncheon in Todd Union, the two went to the Chamber of Commerce to another “Lincoln Day” event. (This was at a time when the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington were not celebrated jointly as “Presidents’ Day.”) A Democrat and Chronicle article reports that poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg addressed a capacity crowd on the topic “What Would Lincoln Do Today?” As part of the proceedings, the Rochester chapter of the NAACP honored Bunche—who later the same year would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—with the establishment of a scholarship in his name for African-American Rochester city high school students to attend the University. The Rochester NAACP chapter has had notable leadership from the University, including English professor John Rothwell Slater and history professor Richard Wade.

A special edition of the Campus-Times promoted the events of the conference—the issue was jointly produced by the College for Men and the College for Women, and the masthead presages the merger of the campuses and their newspapers (the Campus and the Tower Times) by five years.﻿﻿

IN MEMORIAM

Remembering Robert Sproull

President Emeritus championed undergraduate education, affordability, and Laser Lab.

By Sara Miller

sproullLASER LEGACY: A center at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics was named for Sproull, who helped lead the development of the lab at Rochester. (Photo: University Communications)

Robert Sproull, an internationally known physicist, arrived at Rochester as vice president and provost in the tumultuous year of 1968 and immediately helped to manage campus unrest resulting from the Vietnam War. He succeeded W. Allen Wallis as president in 1970 but continued to work hand-in-hand with Wallis, who became chancellor. In 1975, Sproull assumed full executive responsibility.

His presidency was distinguished by strong support for the humanities and the sciences, especially within undergraduate education, as well as a commitment to maintain the University’s affordability, resisting steep tuition increases. He led a capital campaign that ended in 1980 and exceeded the $102 million goal set in 1975.

Sproull died on October 9 at the age of 96. “The University of Rochester has lost a giant, one of its treasures,” says President Joel Seligman. “Bob Sproull was president of the University when the nation suffered double-digit inflation and recession. Such obstacles might have diverted less committed leaders, but not Bob Sproull. The University benefited from his wisdom and counsel.”

Born and raised in Illinois, Sproull attended Deep Springs College, a work-study junior college on a cattle ranch in California. He could not afford to accept a fellowship offered by Harvard. There was no physics instructor at Deep Springs, but he became intrigued by reading about the subject and transferred to Cornell after three years of part-time study. He received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1940, and a PhD in physics from Cornell in 1943.

As World War II approached, Sproull developed an experimental thesis at Cornell, which became classified because of its application to microwave magnetrons. He then went to RCA Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, to work on Navy radar. He worked at RCA during the day, and in the evenings taught physics to Navy and Marine students at Princeton and microwave theory and technique to Navy and industrial engineers at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1946, Sproull accepted an assistant professorship in physics at Cornell, where he advanced through the faculty ranks of its growing physics program. He organized and was the first director of both the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics and the Center for Materials Research at Cornell.

He was director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Virginia, from 1963 to 1965, reporting to the U.S. Secretary of Defense and supporting a range of programs from nuclear test detection to computer networking. He would also serve as chairman of the Defense Science Board from 1968 to 1970.

Sproull returned to Cornell in 1965, when he became the university’s vice president for academic affairs. Because of his defense experience and scientific expertise, he was picked the next year to lead a national committee evaluating the search for a missing U.S. hydrogen bomb after a B-52 and an Air Force tanker crashed off the coast of Spain. His committee rescued the unpromising mission and located the bomb, helping to avert negative consequences for international relations.

At Rochester, Sproull championed the creation of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, putting the University in the forefront of research on commercially feasible fusion technology in 1970. In 2005, the Center for Ultra High Intensity Laser Research there was named in his honor.

“Bob was essential to the development and survival of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics,” says Robert McCrory, University Professor, vice president and vice provost, and Laser Lab director and CEO. “Starting from his first year at Rochester, he expended extraordinary time and effort in support of the development of the laboratory.”

Retiring in 1984, Sproull became president emeritus, professor emeritus of physics, and life trustee. After retiring, he continued to lend his expertise to many corporate boards, chaired a committee of the National Academy of Sciences to reorganize the Institute of Medicine, performed advisory work for the departments of Energy and Defense, and served on missions to Kazakhstan and to the Republic of Georgia for the International Executive Service.

Sproull and his wife, Mary, were married for 70 years before she died in 2012 at age 93. She was a talented painter, and the couple supported arts and education, including the Memorial Art Gallery. In 1999 they endowed the position of dean of the faculty of Arts, Sciences & Engineering, now held by Provost Peter Lennie.

“It has been a tremendous honor to hold the deanship bearing the Sproull name,” says Lennie. “Both Bob and his wife, Mary, were visionary in providing support for academic leadership focused on strengthening the faculty.”

DISCOVER

Researchers Identify New Rare Neuromuscular Disease

An international team of scientists—co-led by researchers in the School of Medicine and Dentistry—has identified a new inherited neuromuscular disorder. The rare condition is the result of a genetic mutation that interferes with the communication between nerves and muscles, resulting in impaired muscle control.

The disease was diagnosed in two families—one in the United States and one in Great Britain—and affects multiple generations. The discovery was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The discovery provides new insight into the mechanisms of diseases caused by a breakdown in neuromuscular signal transmission, says David Herrmann, professor of neurology and a lead author of the study. “It is our hope that these findings will help identify new targets for therapies that can eventually be used to treat these diseases.”

The focus of the research is the neuromuscular junction, the point at which the axon fibers that extend from peripheral nerves meet the muscle cells. The chemical signals that pass across the junction are essential for motor function. While the families in the study had at one point been diagnosed with other neuromuscular conditions, the researchers identified them as unique due to their particular motor abnormalities and because the disease was passed from one generation to the next.

—Mark Michaud﻿

discoverSTOPPING BACTERIA: New Rochester research uses bacterial ribosomes to advance efforts to kill drug-resistant bacteria. (Photo: Laguna Design/Science Source)

Going After Harmful Bacteria

One challenge in killing off harmful bacteria is that many of them develop resistance to antibiotics. Now researchers are targeting the formation of the protein-making machinery, or ribosomes, in those cells as a possible way to stop the bacteria. Gloria Culver, professor of biology, has, for the first time, isolated the middle steps in the process that creates the ribosomes.

Published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Culver’s work—conducted with graduate student Neha Gupta—captures a piece of ribosomal RNA in one of the intermediate states of being pared down to fit with protein molecules. They did so by using genetic tags as markers inside E. coli cells. By attaching the tags to nonfunctional regions of the uncut RNA, they were able to isolate the immature RNA strands during the various stages of processing.

Targeting ribosomes to kill drug-resistant bacteria is nothing new, but in the past scientists focused on mature ribosomes. While a range of antibiotics was developed to attach the ribosomes, the microbes eventually became resistant to the drugs. While a great deal of work remains to be done, Culver’s research creates new possibilities for stopping super-bugs.

The team’s discoveries “suggest that there is at least one common step that could be exploited to one day help scientists prevent the ribosomes from developing, which would kill off the bacteria,” she says.

—Peter Iglinski﻿

Opening a Door to Speed-of-Light Computing?

A new combination of materials can efficiently guide electricity and light along the same tiny wire, a finding that could be a step toward building computer chips capable of transporting digital information at the speed of light.

In a report in the journal Optica, optical and material scientists at Rochester and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich describe a basic model circuit consisting of silver nanowire and a single-layer flake of molybdenum disulfide.

Using a laser to excite electromagnetic waves called plasmons at the surface of the wire, the researchers found that the flake at the end of the wire generated strong light emission. Going in the other direction, as the excited electrons relaxed, they were collected by the wire and converted back into plasmons, which emitted light of the same wavelength.

The “nanoscale light-matter interaction between plasmons and atomically thin material can be exploited for nanophotonic integrated circuits,” says Nick Vamivakas, assistant professor at the Institute of Optics and senior author of the paper.

Photonic devices can be much faster than electronic ones, but they’re bulkier because devices that focus light can’t be miniaturized nearly as well as electronic circuits. The new results hold promise for guiding the transmission of light and maintaining the intensity of the signal in very small dimensions.

Combining electronics and photonics on the same integrated circuits could drastically improve the performance and efficiency of mobile technology.

—David Barnstone﻿

Exploring the ‘Sublime’

discover (Photo: iStockphoto)

After traveling through Italy in 1699, English writer Joseph Addison noted how the “Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.”

His observations, along with those of other Englishmen who crossed the mountains on their continental Grand Tours, helped spark an intense interest in the “sublime” as an aesthetic concept—one distinct from “beauty” in its power simultaneously to overwhelm, elevate, and even terrify.

Robert Doran, associate professor of French and comparative literature, explores how and why the distinction became important in his forthcoming book, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

“The concept of the sublime allows us to conceive of a certain kind of experience that normally would only be accessible using theological concepts,” says Doran. “It’s a secularized version of religious experience. It’s the experience of transcendence, but transcendence in the arts or in the aesthetic appreciation of nature.”

Doran argues that the concept of the sublime allowed the middle class to experience a “nobility of mind.” “The ordinary individual can experience this kind of nobility of mind, as it were, this heroic feeling that seemed to be only possible for certain classes before,” he says.

The concept is still relevant today, he says—one that’s possible to experience standing before the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, for example—and he contends that the desire for transcendence is even a defining trait of humanity.

—Bob Marcotte﻿

LEARN

Putting Gas to a Noble Use

fracking-learnWELL WATER? A team from Rochester, Duke, and Ohio State developed a new approach to explore possible connections between hydraulic fracturing and methane in groundwater. (Photo: iStockphoto)

How safe is hydraulic fracturing—or “hydrofracking”—when it comes to drinking water? A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, draws on the expertise of Robert Poreda, professor of earth and environmental sciences, and colleagues at Duke and Ohio State who work with noble gas chemistry to find out.

How are noble gases—helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon—useful in studying the environment?

They’re a unique class of tracers, and as a geoscientist you need to use tracers to understand process. They’re inert and have a fixed and well-identified number of sources. You use them to understand geological processes because you don’t have a scope to go down and look at what’s occurring 100, 500, or 1,000 miles underground—so you have to infer the processes based on a chemical signature. You can use them as a fingerprint, for temperature history, for involvement of volcanism and magma. You can also use them to determine the age of groundwater and the path that the water follows as it flows.

What was different about this new study looking at gas contamination in drinking-water wells in Pennsylvania and Texas?

We took a new approach, using noble gases in conjunction with an array of geochemical tracers to trace how methane moves under the earth.

What did you find?

What we showed was that there are intermediate levels of gas between the surface and the target horizon—the horizontal area below ground where the oil or gas is—that the well itself aids in migration to the surface. We envisioned a number of different possibilities for why methane shows up in the water—one possibility was that hydraulic fracturing could be opening up fractures to allow deep brine to migrate to the surface, and that’s what gets the media’s attention. But our data suggest that the contamination is the result of poor casing and cementing in the hydraulic fracturing wells.

And how do you know when the methane is present because of fracturing?

In Pennsylvania, because there were no reliable existing gas data prior to drilling, the question was always, how do you know whether the methane was natural or the result of drilling? There are dozens of wells in Pennsylvania and southern New York that have elevated methane levels caused by a natural process where the groundwater aquifer taps a pre-existing—from 300 million years ago—shallow brine and gas pocket. All of these groundwaters have “normal” levels of argon and neon because only methane and helium has been added but no argon has been lost.

In the case of Pennsylvania, the Department of Environmental Protection and the courts have relied on the “pregnancy test” application of stable isotopes of carbon in methane. If the gas has the same isotopic composition as the target zone—the Marcellus—then the drilling company caused the problem. If the well water had methane that differs from the Marcellus, then it was natural. Of course, they completely ignore the fact, which has been known for many years in Canadian studies, that the well itself can conduct gas from intermediate levels into the shallow groundwater aquifer. If this “leak” is very slow—as may occur naturally or from an abandoned well—you can’t easily distinguish between a natural or human-influenced process. And we don’t try. Only when the leak is rapid and catastrophic, and causes argon loss, can the leak be identified. So the argon loss is the big fingerprint in the impacted wells.

The well owners also report that all of a sudden their well waters had become frothy with gas bubbles some time after drilling commenced. Although the homeowner report is anecdotal in nature, we can confirm that the water was filled with methane bubbles that only occur when methane exists at pressures well above one atmosphere. Thus, the very high methane coupled with the loss of the atmospheric gases can only be explained by a free gas phase bubbling through the groundwater aquifer.

The study suggests that water contamination problems from hydraulic fracturing may be fixable with better construction standards at the drilling sites. Do you expect this will have an impact on the public debate about “fracking”?

Yes, absolutely. That’s why we’re doing it. But there isn’t the same public health concern directed toward people drinking naturally contaminated water that there is about contamination related to hydraulic fracturing. In this political climate, you’re not seeing any compromise. There can’t be any nuanced positions.

—Kathleen McGarvey﻿

A Brief History of Salomé

salome1610: Salomé Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, Caravaggio. (Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY)

From origins as an unnamed Biblical figure to incarnations as an iconic seductress, the character of Salomé has captivated artists, playwrights, and poets for more than two millennia. A multidisciplinary project this fall brought together scholars and performers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the story. “The Veils of Salomé,” part of this year’s Humanities Project, was organized by Emil Homerin, professor of religion, and Matthew Brown, professor of music theory at the Eastman School.

Circa 20 to 30 CE

Jewish historian Josephus identifies Salomé as a daughter of Herod Antipas and his second wife, Herodias, but doesn’t indicate that she was complicit in John the Baptist’s execution.

Although she’s not mentioned by name in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Christian tradition identifies her as one of the women who danced for Herod and Herodias at a birthday celebration for Herod. When offered a prize for her dancing, the daughter asks that John the Baptist be executed. The New Testament stories imply that the girl’s mother suggested the execution because John had preached against Herod’s divorce from his first wife and his marriage to Herodias. Christian tradition would later identify Salomé as the dancer who asked for John the Baptist’s head.

Circa 1500

The story of Salomé takes on new life in the arts of the early Renaissance, where painters such as Titian, Caravaggio, Botticelli, and others depict her in scenes from Herod’s court. She comes to represent the world of the flesh while John the Baptist represents the life of the spirit.

1877

In his story “Herodias,” the French writer Gustave Flaubert depicts Herodias as the driver of the story of John the Baptist’s execution. The story becomes the basis for Jules Massenet’s 1881 opera, Hérodiade.

1896

Writing in French because British laws prohibited the depiction of Biblical figures, Oscar Wilde writes the play Salomé. Familiar with Flaubert’s story as well as earlier versions of the story by the writer Heinrich Heine, the painter Gustave Moreau, and other literary and visual artists, Wilde depicts Salomé as a seductive manipulator who steps out of the shadow of Herod and Herodias to become the protagonist of the Biblical story. Wilde introduces “The Dance of the Seven Veils” as the iconic erotic dance attributed to Salomé.

1905

Salomé, an opera by German composer Richard Strauss premieres. Based on the Wilde play, the opera shocked many early audiences with its climatic depiction of Salomé, who during “The Dance of the Seven Veils” declares her love for John the Baptist and—true to Wilde’s play—kisses his severed head.

1986

Drawing on both the Wilde play and the Strauss opera, noted graphic novelist P. Craig Russell writes “Salomé,” as part of his “Opera Variation, Vol. 3.”

2014

Table Top Opera, a chamber ensemble of Eastman School faculty, alumni, and friends, performs “Salomé,” an adaptation of Russell’s graphic novel with a reworked instrumental rendition of the Strauss opera. The production replaced singers and a symphony orchestra with a mixed ensemble of jazz and classical instruments and a newly choreographed version of “The Dance of the Seven Veils.”

—Kathleen McGarvey

IN BRIEF

Religion Scholar to Direct Anthony Institute

Nora Rubel, associate professor of religion, has been named director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies.

Named in honor of the 19th-century suffrage pioneer who helped women gain admission to the University, the institute was created to explore the role of women and gender throughout history and in contemporary society. The work is done through seminars, conferences, a public lecture series, an undergraduate major and minor in women’s studies, and a graduate certificate in gender and women’s studies.

In addition to strengthening signature programs like the institute’s “Two Icons” lecture on race and gender, and the “Rainbow” lecture on LGBTQI issues, Rubel is working to promote a research seminar where faculty can present work in progress.

The institute also supports ongoing research through grants in gender and women’s studies, graduate teaching fellowships, and awards.

Before joining the Rochester faculty, Rubel spent taught religion and Jewish studies at Connecticut College. Her first book, Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2010), explores gender in literature and film. She is also coeditor of Religion, Food and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press, 2014).﻿

inbriefRIVER VIEWS: The Brooks Crossing Apartments (at right) houses about 170 students. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

New Student Residence Opens

Students in the College moved into a new residence option this fall. The Brooks Crossing Apartments—a 12-story privately developed building, of which the University is the main tenant—opened near the corner of Brooks Avenue and Genesee Street in an area west of the Genesee River. Located just across the river from the River Campus, the building houses 170 students in 70 one-, two-, three-, and four-bedroom, furnished units. Each bedroom has a private bathroom. The building, developed by the Minneapolis-based Christenson Corporation, also features a 2,000 square-foot common area.

Neighborhood organizations—including the 19th Ward and Plymouth-Exchange neighborhood associations, along with the Sector 4 Community Development Corporation—have been involved with the development of the area for the past 25 years.﻿

inbriefSTORIED HISTORY: A new book, published this fall by the University of Rochester Press, tells the story of the University’s first 155 years. (Photo: University Communications)

New History Celebrates the University’s Century-and-a-Half Transformation

A new history traces the growth of the University from a small undergraduate program in 1850 to a leading research university and engine for economic growth in 2005.

Our Work Is But Begun: A History of the University of Rochester, 1850–2005 by Janice Bullard Pieterse was published this fall.

The book chronicles the University’s ties to its hometown and places its evolution in the broader context of American higher education over the past century and a half.

University President Joel Seligman contributed the foreword and Paul Burgett, University vice president and senior advisor to the president, the afterword.

The history is available from the University of Rochester Press at www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14651.

University of Rochester Press Marks 25 Years

Under the collaboration, the University makes editorial selections for new books, while Boydell & Brewer provides production, marketing, and worldwide distribution.

In its quarter century, the press (www.urpress.com) has published more than 600 books in an array of fields, with a focus on selected areas of scholarship, including musicology, African studies, medical history, and European and American history. More recently, the press has added series in ethnomusicology, gender and race, and medieval political thought.

In addition to its more academic titles, it has published well-reviewed biographies and memoirs of important cultural figures, while other titles have become classroom staples in their fields. The Meliora Press publishes books on University-related topics.﻿﻿

Wilmot Cancer Institute Chosen to Help Lead National Network

The Wilmot Cancer Institute will have a leadership role in a nationwide clinical research network to investigate cancer-related side effects as part of an $18.6 million, five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute.

With the new funding, principal investigator Gary Morrow, the Benefactor Distinguished Professor in the Department of Surgery, and his team will represent one of only two hubs for the National Cancer Institute’s Community Oncology Research Program, or NCORP.

The team will design and manage clinical studies that will be implemented nationwide. The work, which includes preparing manuscripts for publication in medical journals, revolves around supportive care for patients coping with side effects during and following cancer treatment. The award is among the top five largest grants received by a Medical Center researcher in the past 10 years. Previously,

Morrow built the University’s Cancer Control program through the NCI’s Community Clinical Oncology Program, which the

new initiative replaced. The new program also includes cancer-care delivery research, which encompasses how social factors, financial systems, and health technologies affect care.﻿

New Director Appointed for College’s Intercultural Center

Jessica Guzmán-Rea ’10W (PhD) is the new director of the College’s Intercultural Center. In that role, she promotes collaborative programming and initiatives that welcome students, faculty, and staff from diverse backgrounds.

Guzmán-Rea first joined the Office of Minority Student Affairs in 2006, where she served as an academic program coordinator and counselor, and assisted in recruiting for the Arthur O. Eve Higher Education Opportunity Program. Most recently, she was an academic advisor in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she also served as an adjunct faculty member in the social work department.

The center promotes cultural awareness and engagement, and educates on issues of diversity. An important function of the center, she says, is to provide opportunities for collaboration among faculty, staff, and students and to advance awareness about international human rights both in theory and practice from academic, activist, and artistic perspectives.﻿

FACULTY HONORS

Awarding Excellence in Teaching

Winners of the 2014 Goergen Awards are honored for their undergraduate teaching.

By Monique Patenaude

Three associate professors—Julie Bentley, Jonathan Pakianathan, and Jeffrey Tucker—are this year’s recipients of the College’s Goergen Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

The awards recognize the distinctive teaching accomplishments and skills of Arts, Sciences & Engineering faculty. They are named for and sponsored by University Trustee Robert Goergen ’60 and his wife, Pamela.

Julie Bentley ’90, ’96 (PhD)

Associate professor of optics

goergen (Photo: Brandon Vick)

Julie Bentley joined the faculty in 1998 as an adjunct professor and became a full-time professor in 2009. She helped launch the department’s bachelor’s degree in optical engineering, and she pursues research while maintaining strong leadership in the optics community. She is the incoming director of the International Society for Optics and Photonics. “Her expertise helps distinguish the Institute of Optics as the primary place in the United States to learn lens design,” wrote Xi-Cheng Zhang, director of the institute and the M. Parker Givens Professor of Optics, in nominating her for the award.

Wayne Knox, professor of optics, described Bentley in a nominating letter as “one of the best teachers the institute has ever had,” while PhD candidate Matthew Bergkoetter noted that “as a practicing lens designer and consultant with more than 20 years of experience, Professor Bentley brings into the classroom unparalleled insight into state-of-the-art tools and methods in the industry.”

Jonathan Pakianathan

Associate professor of mathematics

goergen (Photo: Brandon Vick)

In 14 years with the University, Jonathan Pakianathan has designed or revamped five courses for the math department, including a mathematical model course that is an integral part of the public health epidemiology major. He has served as advisor for more than 200 students, supervised numerous senior research projects, and served five years as the department’s chair of undergraduate studies.

The number of math majors has increased by 45 percent since Pakianathan joined the faculty, and department chair Thomas Tucker attributes “a big part of this remarkable increase” to him, calling Pakianathan a “stellar educator in every sense of the word.”

In nominating Pakianathan, former students recognized his ability to teach complex material clearly. Raechel Isales ’13 wrote that he had an uncanny way of knowing when he was teaching above her ability and yet always managed to make the material meaningful. “This is an absolutely priceless gift in mathematics that I have seen in no other professor,” she said, while Manuel Alves ’09 wrote that he “was continually impressed by the commitment and patience Pakianathan showed toward his students.”

Jeffrey Tucker

Associate professor of English

goergen (Photo: Brandon Vick)

A member of the English department for 15 years, Jeffrey Tucker is highly regarded by students and colleagues for his passion for teaching and for his intellectual and professional generosity. He is actively involved in the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies and with the Office of Minority Student Affairs. He is also a strong supporter of the International Theatre Program.

Letters in support of his nomination noted that Tucker sparks a love of learning in his students. As a mentor, he is credited with building confidence and skills in students and with helping them discover their own voices as scholars and writers. His nominators also lauded his knowledge of racial representations and cultural and identity politics in literature.

“Jeff’s contributions to undergraduate education and throughout the College deserve thunderous applause from all of us,” wrote Rosemary Kegl, English department chair. John Michael, professor of English, wrote that Tucker has the gift of “tact and courage” to teach courses dealing with difficult subjects, such as the history of race and racism in America. Former student and current teacher Andrea Ferrara Popp ’05 (T5) noted that “if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then my strongest praise for Dr. Tucker’s teaching can be seen in the way I teach my own English classes.”

GLOBAL ROCHESTER

Himalayas

A research project explores the risk of hepatitis B at the borders of Pakistan, India, and China.

globalHIGH POINT: Researchers from Rochester, Hawaii, and the Central Tibetan Administration are joined by members of the Changtang nomadic region for a photo taken at 15,000 feet above sea level in the Indian Himalayas. (Photo: Courtesy of Timothy Dye)

By the end of the year, Timothy Dye will have made three trips to the Ladakh district of India, a sparsely populated, but geographically and historically important, region of the northern Himalaya Mountains where the borders of Pakistan, India, and China converge. There, the professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Rochester has been working to help Tibetan authorities come up with a strategy to detect, treat, and prevent infections from hepatitis B among Tibetan refugees.

Connections

Several faculty members have connections to the region where Pakistan, India, and China converge. Examples include Carmala Garzione, professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, who conducts research on the geologic history of the Tibetan plateau;

Nancy Chin, associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences, who studies women’s health in Ladakh and Tibet; and

Ernestine McHugh, an associate professor of anthropology, who specializes in the religion and anthropology of Asia, and does field research in the Himalayas. Classroom

Dahpon Ho, an assistant professor of history who specializes in the history of East Asia, has introduced a new undergraduate course, Tibet: History and Myth. Exploration

Stewart Weaver, a professor of history who specializes in the history of British India, and Maurice Isserman ’79 (PhD), professor of history at Hamilton College, are the authors of Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2008).

It’s quite a house call, given that much of the region is situated on a plateau that is 10,000 feet above sea level and features inhabited areas as high as 15,000 feet. Traveling from Rochester involves a 17,000-mile round trip. And the administrative details are daunting: since 1950, when the People’s Republic of China annexed Tibet, the region has been governed as an autonomous region of China, sparking protests and skirmishes in the region and sending Tibetan refugees into India and Pakistan.

Dye, who is working with colleagues from the University of Hawaii and the Central Tibetan Administration’s health department with support from the Hershey Family Foundation, says a lot is at stake in the project. Many populations throughout Asia, in general, are known to be at a higher risk of hepatitis B, but assessing its impact among Tibetan refugees is especially important.

“Tibetans are scattered throughout the region in isolated camps that don’t have a lot of resources, in a very harsh environment to live,” says Dye. Those who have the disease are often unable to afford expensive antiviral medications and opt instead for more accessible Tibetan medicines that seem to help manage symptoms.

After gaining necessary governmental approvals during an initial trip in February and ethical approvals from the appropriate sources, Dye and his collaborators returned in May.

They conducted a qualitative community assessment, employing classical anthropological field methods to get a better idea of how Tibetans themselves perceive the disease, how they treat it, and how they respond to those who suffer from the disease. The findings will help their Tibetan colleagues craft a strategy that takes into account cultural beliefs and practices, making it more likely that the approach will be accepted.

Dye and his colleagues are careful to respect Tibetan culture and beliefs in their work.

“When you work with any population, just telling them to do this or that doesn’t change anything,“ Dye says. “Any change in beliefs and practices has to be done within a culture’s own world view, within the challenges and the resources they face.”

—Bob Marcotte﻿

HIGHLIGHTS

A Record-breaking Season

A junior field hockey player moves to the top of the record books, breaking a record that had stood for nearly three decades.

sportsRECORD PACE: Michelle Relin ’16 became the field hockey program’s all-time leading scorer this fall, breaking records set by the late Nancy Melvin Taylor ’86N (below) from 1982 to 1985. This fall, Taylor’s teammates marked the 30th anniversary of their team’s New York state and ECAC championships. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

sports (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Junior Michelle Relin moved to the top of the field hockey record books this fall, becoming the program’s all-time highest scorer and setting a record for most career goals.

But the milestones came with a poignant side. Relin, who as of late October had 128 career points (a measure of goals and assists), eclipsed records set by Nancy Melvin Taylor ’86N. Taylor, an Athletics Hall of Famer whose record stood for 28 years, died in 2003, two years after her husband, Lt. Col. Kip Taylor died when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks.

“It’s humbling,” Relin told local media before Meliora Weekend, when members of the 1984 field hockey team returned for a reunion. “I had no idea she had such a compelling story, and such a moving story. I wish I could have met her this weekend.”

Meliora Weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the field hockey team’s first state and ECAC championships. The team, led by Taylor, was recognized during the four days of activities.

Relin, an optical engineering major from Lititz, Pennsylvania, first broke the career points record with two goals and an assist in a 6–1 win over St. Lawrence University in September.

The nationally ranked Yellowjackets were headed to the league playoffs in late October.

Beginning the season with eleven straight wins, the Yellowjackets set a record for the program’s best start.

Also this fall:

Cross country: The men captured the title at the SUNY Oswego Invitational, with Jeremy Hassett ’16 taking fourth place overall. The teams placed highly in several meets, including at Oberlin and their home invitational. For the women also did well, with Catherine Knox ’17 placing second at Oswego and seventh at Oberlin. Both teams were heading into state, regional, and national tournaments at the end of October.

Football: With a homecoming win over RPI, the football team was 4–2 overall and 2–2 in the Liberty League. Matt Pisano ’17 returned a fumble 87 yards for the clinching TD against RPI to end a memorable Meliora Weekend game.

Men’s soccer: The Yellowjackets were 6–4–2 and 1–2 in the conference in late October. Leading scorers were Nick Pastore ’15, Jack Thesing ’15, and Ben Keeton ’15.

Women’s soccer: The team was 5–5–3, 1–2 in the UAA in late October. The team’s leading scorer was Laura Cowie-Haskell ’18.

Rowing: The Yellowjackets first varsity eight and novice eight captured bronze medals at the Head of the Genesee Regatta in October. The varsity eight fell to only top-ranked Williams and Division II’s Mercyhurst. Volleyball: The Yellowjackets defeated Brandeis to clinch the seventh seed for the UAA championships at Carnegie Mellon in early November. Rochester was 12–17 overall.

Squash: Returning first team All-Americans Neil Cordell ’16 and Mario Yanez Tapia ’17 captured the national championship at the U.S. Squash intercollegiate doubles championship with a four-game victory over Navy. The team season was just getting under way in late October.

—Scott Sabocheck﻿

YELLOWJACKETS

Alumni Join the Athletics Hall of Fame

sports_hof (Photo: Susan Kost)

PHOTO FAME: This fall’s inductees into the Athletics Hall of Fame were (front row, left to right) Robert Hartz ’90, ’98S (baseball, football); Pamela Delp Polashenski ’91, ’98M (MPH), ’02M (MD) (volleyball, track and field); Amy Beth Deep ’90 (field hockey); William Seeler ’53 (football); and David Cidale ’71 (football, track and field); (back row, left to right) Robert Kelly ’69 ’80S (MBA) (soccer); Kenneth Garnes ’74 (basketball); Christian Reed ’92, ’94 (MA) (cross country, track and field); Robert Cerfolio ’84, ’88M (MD) (baseball); and Steven Callihan ’75 (football).﻿

When the ‘New Normal’ Is Not Enough

Neurorestoration is an infant field, with life-changing potential for people like Bradford Berk ’81M (MD/PhD). Now he’s on a quest to make Rochester an early leader.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)
Photographs by Adam Fenster

Bradford Berk ’81M (MD/PhD) grew up immersed in science fiction. “I read science fiction as a kid, just endlessly,” he says sitting in his Medical Center office. “I loved the ability to imagine other ways of being and of thinking. I believe it expands your mind.”

Berk reaches for a glass of water sitting on the conference table next to him. He raises it to take a sip. It seems hard to imagine, but for the physician-scientist with more than 200 papers to his name, widely praised upon his appointment as Medical Center CEO in 2006 as one of the finest leaders in academic medicine, that simple motion was a daunting achievement.

In a split second during Memorial Day weekend in 2009, Berk, an avid cyclist, rounded a tight curve and encountered a car in his path. Skidding to avoid it, his tire popped and he flew over the handlebars. He heard a snap in his neck. Moments later, he began to lose feeling in his limbs. He struggled to breathe.

Berk was airlifted to the University’s Strong Memorial Hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery to stabilize his neck. Paralyzed from his neck down, he remained in intensive care for 12 days and then was transported to the Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey for 100 days of treatment.

His helmet did its job. He emerged from the accident with his mind unscathed, his intellectual faculties intact. He returned to his role as Medical Center CEO in February 2010, and has followed a rigorous course of physical therapy at Strong’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation ever since. Between his treatment in New Jersey and at Strong, he’s made great progress, regaining enough movement to feed himself, brush his own teeth, and navigate a host of digital devices such as tablets and smartphones. Yet he remains mostly paralyzed, a quadriplegic with limited sensation and movement in his legs, arms, and hands.

fea_berkREHAB: Berk undergoes physical therapy at the Medical Center’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He’s aided by physical therapist Tim O’Connor (left) and his personal assistant, Harley Bowman. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

No doubt, life in a wheelchair is not among the alternative ways of being that the sci-fi enthusiast imagined for himself as a youth growing up in the Rochester suburb of Brighton. But since this condition has been thrust upon him, it’s given him reason to think back to the realm of science fiction. Sometimes it really does foreshadow the future. Just this past summer, for example, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first wearable robotic exoskeleton, allowing people who’ve been paralyzed to stand, walk, and even climb stairs. As Berk sees it, developments like this one, combined with recent advances in pharmaceuticals and stem cell medicine, herald a revolution.

“I am watching with great interest the start of a revolution as new drugs, devices, and cellular therapies promise to improve the quality of life for people like me,” he said in a public announcement in September. “As a clinician, scientist, and patient, I want to be part of that.”

On January 1, Berk will officially step down from his role as Medical Center CEO. Then, after a six-month sabbatical of planning and writing, he’ll return to head a new institute dedicated to neurorestoration—the emerging science that promises to lead to treatments of spinal cord injuries and a host of nervous system disorders.

Broadly speaking, neurorestoration is a means to recover central and peripheral nervous system functions that have been lost as a result of injury or disease. It describes a process in which the brain rewires itself, to work around connections that have been damaged or severed. Neurorestorative interventions in the realm of physical therapies, pharmaceuticals, and stem cell transplants, now at varying levels of development and accessibility, all have the potential to improve the lives of people living with a wide array of conditions, including spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, cerebral palsy, and others.

But as of yet, neurorestoration remains more a goal than an established practice. We know that the brain can restore itself. We are only beginning to learn how, or to what extent, it can. At Rochester, one of the centers of that research is the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences on the River Campus. Greg DeAngelis, the George Eastman Professor and chair of the department, says that when it comes to clinical interventions in the brain, “I tell my students that it’s a little bit like you’re trying to fix an alien spacecraft that just landed. It has technologies in it that you don’t fully understand. That’s about where we’re at. But as we learn more our ability to help heal the brain will increase dramatically.”

Basic scientists now work directly, in some cases, with clinicians. And those are the types of relationships the institute is intended to foster. Brad Mahon is an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences with a secondary appointment in the Medical Center’s neurosurgery department. His work is in understanding how the brain’s networks function. He works with stroke patients, to understand how the brain recovers from a lesion, and with neurosurgeons to predict what functions could be compromised by surgery to remove tumors. After surgery, Mahon looks for patterns of damage and recovery. Although he’s already enmeshed in intra-university collaborations, he sees the institute as an opportunity to build on those connections.

The value of an institute, he says, is that it “provides an infrastructure that’s going to attract people from different fields who are interested in a common set of questions.”

With research and clinical care in neurorestoration scattered across so many disciplines and subspecialties, it’s not surprising that there are, at this point, few neurorestorative institutes as such. There are likely to be more in the future. But Rochester is making it a priority at an early stage, and a key reason Rochester can throw its hat into the ring is that neurorestoration draws on strengths the University already has.

Neuromedicine has been a strategic focus for several years, and in 2009, the late Ernest del Monte, then a life trustee, poured $10 million into the University’s effort, expanding research and clinical care, and drawing both under the umbrella of what’s now called the Ernest J. Del Monte Neuromedicine Institute. With a search under way for a new director, the institute will work closely, and share many resources, with Berk’s neurorestoration initiative.

fea_berkA WELL-EQUIPPED OFFICE: Berk stands for an hour a day in a standing frame, which he says aids his bone, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal health. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

From a clinical standpoint, the Medical Center has already overhauled inpatient treatment of brain and spinal cord injury patients from admission to rehabilitation. The Kessler Trauma Center, serving Rochester, the Finger Lakes region, and western New York, received a Level One designation from the American College of Surgeons last spring, making it one of only two such trauma centers in the state.

Last summer, the Medical Center opened a brand new Neuromedicine Intensive Care Unit—long a goal of Webster Pilcher, the Ernest and Thelma Del Monte Distinguished Professor in Neuromedicine and chair of the neurosurgery department, and Robert Holloway, the Edward A. and Alma Vollertsen Rykenboer Chair in the Department of Neurology. They recruited two new directors to lead a specialized clinical team that operates 24/7. The unit is part of the Medical Center’s Comprehensive Stroke Center, one of only three in the state. According to Berk, the unit, filled to capacity, is one of the Medical Center’s major draws from regional hospitals. The unit will aid considerably in one of the most important aspects of treating traumatic injuries to the nervous system: working immediately to limit the damage of the injury.

On the research side, Rochester is a home to scientists of international distinction in stem cell biology, among the most promising avenues for treating brain and spinal cord injuries, as well as strokes, Parkinson’s disease, and other nervous system conditions. They include Steven Goldman, the Dean Zutes Chair in Biology of the Aging Brain, and Maiken Nedergaard, the Frank P. Smith Professor of Neurological Surgery, both of whom hold joint appointments in the neurology and neurosurgery departments, and codirect Rochester’s Center for Translational Neuromedicine; and Mark Noble, the Martha M. Freeman, M.D. Professor in Biomedical Genetics, and Margot Mayer-Proschel, and Christoph Proschel, also faculty members in the biomedical genetics department.

In short, distinguished clinical and research centers are rarely built from scratch. And with what’s already been accomplished, the notion that Rochester can make a mark in the field of neurorestoration is well founded. T

hat’s even if the leader of the Rochester Neurorestorative Institute weren’t a patient himself.

Riding in his motorized wheelchair, Berk is a regular presence in the corridors and atriums of the University’s labyrinthine medical complex. With his personal assistant, Harley Bowman, always at his side, he works a busy schedule.

Berk is more visible, friends and colleagues say, than before his accident. There are reasons for that. Getting out and about, greeting staff and visitors as he makes his way through his workdays, is all the more important to him now.

“A lot of people who have these problems,” Berk says, alluding to traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries, or even partial paralysis from stroke, “disappear from view. The saddest thing about the community I’m part of is that people tend to be homebound.”

Yet they’re a sizable group. An estimated 15,000 people sustain a spinal cord injury in the United States and Canada each year, and at any given time, hundreds of thousands of spinal cord patients live with considerable handicaps. There are nearly 800,000 strokes in the United States a year, according to the latest statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and strokes are an even larger source of long-term disability.

Berk sees a parallel with the time, back in the 1970s, when he entered the field of cardiology. “When I was a student, somebody would come in with a major heart attack, and we would give them some oxygen, some diuretics, and some morphine for the pain, and then they either lived through it or died,” he says. “A lot of them died.”

Of those who lived, many would never regain enough strength to go back to work. And then, in the early 1980s, came angioplasty, followed by stents. And then implantable defibrillators and pacemakers. “These devices transformed cardiology,” says Berk. “It was just this sudden wave over about a decade or two that totally changed the practice.”

Today, the state of treatment for people with diagnoses like his is similarly rudimentary. Often patients are prescribed a course of physical and occupational therapy and told that after six months to a year, whatever state they are in is where they’ll likely remain.

They’re told that’s the “new normal.” And Berk, speaking from personal experience, calls the new normal “unacceptable.”

Aside from Berk, few people know this better than Nancy Lieberman ’77. Lieberman is not a scientist, but an attorney. She’s known Berk since 1998, the year he came to Rochester to lead the Medical Center’s Cardiovascular Research Institute. As a trustee, she served on the board’s health affairs committee. Possessed of the same driven personality as Berk, Lieberman entered the University at age 16, and graduated first in her class, in three years. By age 22, she had earned a JD degree, and in 1987, at age 30, she became the youngest partner ever—of either gender—at the prestigious New York City law firm Skadden Arps.

In December 2007, on a ski trip with her husband and son, Lieberman, an experienced skier, slipped and lost control of her skis. She careened into a grove of trees, and heard a snap in her neck.

fea_berkA POWERFUL ADVOCATE: Lieberman, a University trustee and senior partner at the New York City law firm Skadden Arps, was a leader in the effort to restore state funding for spinal cord injury research. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“I had this horrible accident and, sadly, a year and a half later, he had his accident,” she says of Berk. “I visited him in the hospital. I told him the world doesn’t come to an end.”

Lieberman had been a patient at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Although she was at a top facility, her progress had been slow and difficult. In five months, she’d gained only limited movement in her upper arms. Her doctors told her that she was unlikely to make much more progress.

Through her connections to Rochester, Lieberman was introduced to Mark Noble. Noble enjoyed a close collaboration with colleagues at the Burke Medical Research Institute in White Plains. For five years, he and the Burke Institute’s director, Rajiv Ratan, were the codirectors of the New York State Center for Research Excellence on Spinal Cord Injuries—a communications and research hub for scientists from more than a dozen laboratories.

Burke researchers were recruiting spinal cord injury candidates for an experimental treatment in what’s called mass practice therapy. With researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Burke scientists had developed a series of robots—armbots, handbots, wristbots, and anklebots—that guide stroke and spinal cord injury patients through thousands of repetitions. The aim of the therapy was to re-educate the brain, to restore function to limbs that were themselves undamaged, but that the brain had forgotten how to use.

With Noble’s help, Lieberman enrolled in Burke’s experimental program. The results were significant.

“My arms are 60 to 80 percent back,” Lieberman says. “This all has to do with the robots.”

Among the first priorities of the Rochester Neurorestorative Institute is the replication of Burke’s program, now fully operational in its new Restorative Neurology Clinic. Rochester’s goal is to offer patients in the region access to this state-of-the-art rehabilitative therapy, which is itself a prerequisite for making use of any significant advances in research. For even if stem cell therapy could fully repair the spinal cord—the holy grail of research—the connections between the brain and the limbs would still have to be reestablished through extensive physical rehabilitation therapy. Which explains in part why Noble, a research scientist, has worked hard for the purchase of physical therapy equipment.

The initial goal of obtaining the robots is now within reach. But it was no easy process getting there. The challenges to improving the lives of patients like Berk and Lieberman aren’t only scientific and technological, but also political and financial.

The main source of funding for medical research in the United States has been the National Institutes of Health. After rising steadily for several years, NIH funding began to decline, adjusted for inflation within the biomedical sector, precipitously so since the financial crisis of 2007.

In 2013, President Barack Obama announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN, initiative. NIH recently awarded $46 million in grants as part of the initiative, a relatively small amount for a major initiative in biomedical research. However, funding for the initiative is spread across multiple federal agencies, and Berk has his eye in particular on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, part of the Department of Defense that has funded research leading to some of the most consequential technological innovations of our time, including the Internet.

fea_berkSTATE-OF-THE-ART: Amrendra Singh Miranpuri, surgical codirector of the new Neuromedicine Intensive Care Unit, gives a tour of the unit to (left to right) Berk, John Markman, associate professor of neurosurgery and of neurology, David Carmel, cofounder of New Yorkers to Cure Paralysis, and Lieberman. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

With the decline in federal support, states and foundations have started playing more prominent roles in funding medical research. The result has been competition among states for top research talent and facilities.

For several years, spinal cord injury research in New York was funded to the degree that it helped scientists in the state to remain competitive, and attracted new ones as well. The money came from traffic tickets. Because motor vehicle accidents are the largest single cause of spinal cord injuries, in 1998, the New York state legislature established the Spinal Cord Injury Research Trust Fund, in which up to $8.5 million per year, collected from ticket surcharges, was to be deposited.

Those funds supported groundbreaking discoveries by researchers across the state, especially concentrated at the Burke Institute and at Rochester. In 2004, it helped support a groundbreaking study by Nedergaard. While many researchers were attempting to regenerate injured spinal cords, she took an alternate path, discovering how it might be possible to interrupt a series of molecular events that cause considerable damage in the immediate aftermath of an injury.

Mayer-Proschel used the funds to build on nearly 10 years of research she’d conducted in stem cells with partners Noble and Proschel. At the University of Utah, where she, her husband, Proschel, and Noble worked together before coming to Rochester, she discovered a new central nervous system precursor cell—that is, a cell that lies on the path of embryonic development between undifferentiated stem cells and fully developed spinal cells. She began to cultivate the precursor cell population in vitro, turning the cells into a very specific kind of astrocyte—the major support cells of the brain and spinal cord that perform many functions, among them, tissue repair. In 2011, she, Proschel, and Noble completed a study in which the cultivated astrocytes were implanted into injured spinal cords of adult rats. Their results showed significant healing in those rats, compared with the control.

The Spinal Cord Injury Research Trust Fund dispersed approximately $70 million. But in 2010, the research funds were diverted when the state faced a $7.5 billion budget gap. Among those who mobilized to restore the funding was Lieberman. She cofounded New Yorkers to Cure Paralysis, a lobbying coalition bringing together most of the state’s centers for medical research, as well as several foundations, and at least one pharmaceutical company.

fea_berkNEW LEADER: Taubman, who led the Medical Center during Berk’s recovery in 2009 and early 2010, will become Medical Center CEO in January. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

Dean Mark Taubman to Lead Medical Center

Mark Taubman, who has served as dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry since 2010, will become senior vice president for health sciences and CEO of the Medical Center, beginning January 1, 2015.

Taubman will succeed Bradford Berk when Berk transitions from those roles at the end of the year to launch the new Rochester Neurorestorative Institute at the Medical Center.

In announcing the appointment, President Joel Seligman praised Taubman as an “unflappable straight shooter” and “a man of unquestioned honesty and integrity.”

“In his recent five-year review, Mark was praised for his strategic ability with the School of Medicine and Dentistry, his hiring and promotion of outstanding leaders, his implementation of operational plans, his integrity, and his ability to engage Medical Center leaders during the post–2008 recession period of financial challenges,” Seligman said.

A highly respected leader at the Medical Center, Taubman was appointed dean following a nine-month stint as acting CEO while Berk recovered from his 2009 spinal injury.

A board-certified cardiologist, Taubman came to the Medical Center as chief of the Cardiology Unit and Paul N. Yu Professor of Medicine in 2003. He became chair of the Department of Medicine and the Charles E. Dewey Professor of Medicine in 2007 and served in that role until being named as dean.

Before joining the Medical Center, he was director of cardiovascular research at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.﻿

Last May, Berk, Lieberman, her cofounder, New York investor David Carmel, and Noble traveled to Albany to press their cause. “They had a pretty hard time saying no,” Berk says. The funding was restored at $7 million. When the board doled out multiple grants in the aftermath of the new budget, Rochester’s Medical Center received the state’s largest, at more than $1 million. An equipment grant, it will go toward the purchase of multiple tools for research and treatment, including the robotics rehabilitation devices pioneered at Burke.

Noble sees it as a good omen. And in August came further good news, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the release of $14 million to support stem cell research.

New York still has a way to go. California is the national leader in state funding on stem cell research, including research on brain and spinal cord injuries. Scientists under pressure to find grant money to support themselves, their labs, and the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows on which research relies tend to go where the funds are.

Noble, a member of the team that reviews stem cell grants for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, says New York will have to continue its leadership, lest it end up becoming “a farm team.”

Philanthropy will also play a role.

And Berk’s leadership will be key.

“There’s an aspect to Brad that I can point out, but Brad wouldn’t,” says Noble. “This field needs articulate advocates. And there are far too few of them.”

Lieberman, who has also become an articulate advocate, agrees. “Most people with these injuries aren’t the head of a major medical center, or like me, a senior partner in a law firm. They can’t go to Albany and talk the talk.” Spinal patients are often young—the victims of car crashes, sporting accidents, gunshots, and increasingly, blasts from military combat. The late actor Christopher Reeve, who was paralyzed in a horseback riding accident in 1995, raised the profile of spinal cord injury patients considerably. But although the Christopher Reeve Foundation remains an important force for publicity and fundraising for research, since Reeve’s death in 2004, there have been few compelling spokespeople.

Berk is not a movie actor. But he’s a distinguished medical leader, clinician, and scientist. Personable, photogenic, and at home before an audience, he’s ready to write, speak, and travel to educate the public and raise money—for the Rochester Neurorestorative Institute, and for the cause of patients more broadly.

Lieberman will continue to be an important partner. “I have felt for myself—and I think Brad probably feels this way—that’s it’s incumbent on us. Incumbent on the people who have had accidents later in their lives to do for all the others who can’t do for themselves.”

To her, it really is a matter of saving lives. “We warehouse—and I use that word deliberately—warehouse human beings in nursing homes and institutions.” But even small advances can make a big difference to people like her. Her goal is to walk again. Nearly six-and-a-half years after she was expected to make no progress, she continues to work on her arms. Whether you consider her progress modest or significant can depend on what chair you’re sitting in.

“Every notch that you’re able to get back makes a huge difference,” she says. “If I were simply a paraplegic, meaning I couldn’t walk, but I had my arms, that would be transformative for me.”

Models of History

How is digital technology helping scholars interested in cultural history understand the past? And will you one day ‘visit’ long-lost places?

By Scott Hauser

How do you bring the past to life?

For historians and other scholars who analyze cultural, architectural, and physical history, the answer may be as close as the latest software update.

Faculty at Rochester are turning to increasingly available imaging, 3-D visualization, and immersive world technology to imagine virtual spaces—projects designed to use the facts and details of history to inform new ways of understanding and analyzing the past.

The projects range from an exploration of ancient Roman monuments to a 400-year history of Bermuda, as Rochester scholars turn to technology—and to one another—to think of new ways to share their scholarship.

“The opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations in this field are phenomenal,” says Renato Perucchio, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the College’s Program in Archaeology, Technology, and Historical Structures who has been using computer technology to analyze ancient structures over the last 10 years. “By their very nature, these are multidisciplinary projects.”

And while the final piece of scholarship may live online, the academic work undergirding them does not change, says Joan Saab, an associate professor of art and art history who is helping to lead a project to build a 3-D model of an architecturally significant train station in Rochester that was torn down in the 1960s.

“For me, this is a chance to do the work and model a type of rigorous, scholarly practice,” she says. “We want it to have the scholarly rigor that an article or a book would have.”

Such technologically rich projects are designed to provide visual, interactive ways to better engage and inform students, other scholars, and the public. They also allow researchers to simulate experiences and conduct experiments that would not otherwise be possible, and may offer insights into ways to preserve ancient objects and structures.

Michael Jarvis, associate professor of history who has been working to create a virtual version of Bermuda, says the technology has opened new doors to re-imagine the past.

“The act of reconstructing—either restoring modern places to historical appearances or reconstructing lost buildings—forces you to think in a level of detail that you normally wouldn’t,” he says. “We know what happened but we don’t ‘get it’ in the way that visualization brings to bear.”

Here are a few examples of projects currently under way.

fea_historyISLAND VIEWS: Using software that captures and collates geographic and spatial data, Jarvis and his team are recreating a multi-layer map of Bermuda (above) while students are using common 3-D visualization software to model historically correct houses and other buildings (below), based on property records and other information. (Photo: Courtesy of Michael Jarvis)

fea_history (Photo: Courtesy of Michael Jarvis)

Virtual St. George’s

Imagine yourself on the shore of 17th-century Bermuda. Your ship has anchored just beyond the reef, and from the railing you can see a few small, timber houses that make up the settlement of St. George’s. Beyond those few buildings, the 20 square miles of the island are dense with lush, green wilderness. Beyond that is 600 miles of open Atlantic ocean and the New World with its lonely outpost of struggling Jamestown, Virginia.

Fast forward to 2014 and St. George’s is a vacation island destination. While the footprints of those first few buildings remain, the history of Bermuda has gone on unabated as generations of settlers, sailors, shipbuilders, and slaves made their homes on the tiny archipelago.

What if you could “see” that history as it unfolded? Better yet, what if you could put yourself on the streets of the original capital of St. George’s, interacting with fellow Bermudians in day-to-day life and commerce?

While Michael Jarvis, associate professor of history, can’t travel with students back in time, he’s envisioning the next best thing to a time machine. Using digital technology, he’s working on a virtual version of Bermuda that will allow students and others to explore, experience, and understand the 400-year history of the longest permanently inhabited settlement in English America.

“I want to let people stand there and walk the streets and look at the buildings as they stood in 1620, in 1680, in 1750, and probably 1775 at the start of the American Revolution,” says Jarvis, who has been studying the history of Bermuda for more than a quarter century.

As part of his research, he has collected nearly four centuries of detailed data, a trove of information captured in deeds, wills, baptismal records, tax rolls, and the other facts that power the bureaucratic life of every society. Jarvis can follow the ownership of a particular piece of property over lifetimes, much like a storyteller following a multigenerational epic.

By matching that information with building records and analyzing it with imaging, mapping, and 3-D visualization software, Jarvis is slowly recreating a Bermuda that has disappeared from view. He envisions taking that recreated island one step further, using some of the common software behind video games to make an immersive world where Bermudian society comes to life.

“We can put historically accurate people in historically accurate contexts,” Jarvis says. “For example, almost like in a video game, you could walk up to a house in a particular year and knock on the door and Widow Tucker will answer the door. We know that Widow Tucker was 45 years old and she had three children and five slaves. We can restore everybody in the town to their houses in a particular target year.”

To create the original prototypes for the project, Jarvis has led undergraduates and graduate students in a project to integrate historical data into databases, conduct independent research on specific buildings and property owners using digital newspaper archives, and “build” individual houses using software such as Google’s Sketch-Up, a free rendering software used to model 3-D objects, and more advanced computer-aided design software. Using archaeological records, property rolls, and other information, the students can not only recreate the buildings, but they can also “furnish” them with objects that property owners listed in deeds and wills.

Jarvis says that by doing such work, he and the students are able to understand Bermudian society at a level that isn’t possible by simply poring over records. When you see the layout of a house, for example, and you know who lived there and how they lived, you start to ask new questions, he says.

“You know that there were eight slaves in the house. Where did they live? How did people interact on a daily basis? Where would white and black members of the household have slept each night?” he says. “What was the social space inside the physical space? The act of visually reconstructing these spaces raises these new questions.”

And as he brings more interactivity to his virtual version of Bermudian society, he expects those questions to become more compelling.

“There’s a level of historical accuracy that’s possible now with the new technology,“ he says. “Everybody who lived there—be they adult, children; black, white; slave, free—everybody is equally worthy of study, and by putting this together, I can see how 17th-century life was different from 18th-century life and how 18th-century life was different from 19th-century life in a very real way.”

fea_historyHISTORIC STATION: Drawing on blueprints, papers, and artifacts housed in Rush Rhees Library, Rubin and Saab are leading a project to create a 3-D model (above) of an iconic former Rochester train station, considered one of designer Claude Bragdon’s architectural masterworks (below). The result would be a multi-layered historical analysis of Bragdon’s ideas about art, architecture, and public space. (Photo: Courtesy of Joan Saab)

Rochester’s Third New York Central Train Station

fea_history (Photo: From the Albert R. Stone Negative Collection, Rochester Museum & Science Center, Rochester, N.Y.)

During its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, many thousands of travelers, soldiers, college students, and commuters passed through the landmark Third New York Central Train Station in downtown Rochester.

Few of them probably were aware that the monumental building—with its cathedral-like waiting room, geometrically patterned tiles, and other seemingly decorative embellishments—was meant to embody many of the artistic, architectural, philosophic, and spiritual ideas of its designer, Claude Bragdon. A figure straddling the 19th century’s ideas about urban architecture and the 20th century’s emerging modernism, Bragdon thought of the station as an “architectural performance.” He hoped it would be a space where his notions of transcendence and the possibilities of higher orders of human experience could be on display, say Joan Saab, associate professor of art and art history, and Joan Rubin, the Dexter Perkins Professor in History.

When the building was torn down in the 1960s, scholars of cultural history lost not only the physical structure, but also the experience of what it was like to stand in the space itself.

What if they could virtually capture the feeling of being in the building? Would that open a window on Bragdon, his artistic ideas about public spaces, and his influence on the cultural arts of the early 20th century?

Working with archivists and technologists at Rush Rhees Library, home to the leading collection of Bragdon’s papers and other materials, the two are leading an effort to bring the station back to life as a virtual, 3-D model.

“For me, this really came out of a teaching dilemma,” says Saab. ”When you teach architectural history, particularly buildings that no longer exist, it’s difficult to get a sense of what the spaces were like. And with Bragdon, there’s that extra richness because he had so many ideas about architecture that you can’t get from black-and-white photographs. But once you can colorize the tiles and put them in a space, you can say, ‘Oh, I get what he’s talking about.’ Whether or not it works is up to the person viewing the space. But that’s one of the things we’re trying to do. It’s moving Bragdon from 2-D to 3-D.”

Among the materials housed in Rush Rhees are blueprints, working designs, and correspondence about the train station, as well as artifacts from the building that were salvaged when the building was razed. The project aims to recreate an architecturally accurate version of the station—down to the detail of light fixtures, water fountains, and tiles—that viewers will eventually be able to interact with almost as they would an electronic game.

As technologically impressive as they hope the project will be, the two are making sure not only that the details are historically accurate, but that they also are put in their proper historical and cultural context, an approach that Rubin calls layering.

“Image if you could ‘go’ into the building, and you click on a cornice. You can learn what a cornice is; you can also see Bragdon’s comment about the cornice, or his letter to his sister about the cornice. There will be layers of information and context and analysis.”

While the project is using the train station as a focal point, the goal is to get a broader understanding of Bragdon and his place in American cultural history.

Station Memories?

As part of the project to create a virtual version of the Bragdon train station, the research group is interested in hearing from people who visited the building while it was still in use. Contact the team at Bragdon.UR@gmail.com.

“It’s really Bragdon through the train station,” say Saab. “You could do this for any building, but Bragdon is an interesting enough character that he can carry a project on his own. “He wrote quite a bit about his ideas—of the spiritual properties of the space and architecture as ‘frozen music’ and the relationship between colors and material and between form and bodies—that’s compelling to me as somebody who studies and teaches architectural history.”

The designer behind several prominent buildings in Rochester, Bragdon eventually had a falling out with George Eastman, and he left for New York, where he became a nationally recognized designer for theater and stage productions, as well as for producing “Song and Light” festivals in Central Park, an idea that he first tried out in Rochester’s Highland Park.

“As a cultural historian, I’m interested in the relationship between Bragdon’s spiritual ideas and modernism, which is the style that we see emerging in the period right when Bragdon is working,” says Rubin. “I’m interested in how to place him culturally. He had a cult following, and he was nationally known, but one of the things that intrigues me is that he is himself multifaceted.”

fea_historyVAULTS OF ANTIQUITY: By modeling the vaulted structures of the Baths of Caracalla, a 1,900-year-old example of Roman architecture, Perucchio can analyze the evolution and development of engineering in antiquity. (Photo: iStockphoto)

Eternal Rome

fea_historyDETAIL VIEW: A detail of a finite element model created by Perucchio and his team shows the vaulted structure of the frigidarium, an area of the Baths of Caracalla with the highest vaulted structure. (Photo: Courtesy of Renato Perucchio)

If anyone has come across the civil engineering code for Imperial Rome, circa 200 BCE, Renato Perucchio would like to borrow it.

Barring the likelihood that such a historic codex will emerge any time soon from a long-lost archive, the professor of mechanical engineering is using technology to recreate and understand the evolution of engineering in ancient Rome.

Since 2005, he has led a team that’s analyzing a series of monuments built in Imperial Rome from the eras of Trajan to Constantine. Using 3-D solid modeling and engineering structural analysis software, he’s analyzing a series of well-preserved concrete vaulted buildings, including some of the largest structures built in antiquity. The

goal, Perucchio says, is to understand the evolution of structural thinking and the technological evolution of ancient engineers.

“Civil engineering embodies the technology of the time and at the same time, the willingness of builders to take risks,” says Perucchio. “Clearly we don’t have the civil engineering code of Imperial Rome, but the complexity of these monuments make it such that you cannot build them based on an oral tradition.”

By analyzing how the structures were built and comparing earlier buildings to later monuments, Perucchio and his team can see how techniques evolved to help make sure the buildings could withstand damage.

“As an engineer you can study the factors that produced problems—often critical—in a building,” Perucchio says. “And then if you look at other buildings, you discover that specific items have been changed. What you infer is that, ‘Well, these people looked at what was going on, understood the mechanism of a possible collapse, and modified their design so that the collapse was avoided in subsequent structures.’

“It’s very much what we do today. Engineering proceeds this way—either doing it numerically or experimentally or combining the two.”

And today that analysis relies on massive computing power and sophisticated imaging, rendering, and 3-D simulation software. Using a technique called nonlinear finite element modeling, Perucchio and his students can not only model the structures, but they can also analyze damage to unreinforced concrete structures, the kind that might occur, for example, during an earthquake.

In order to do that, though, Perucchio’s team faces an added challenge. Modern engineering analysis tools are designed to analyze modern buildings built with steel, reinforced concrete, and other materials. The Roman engineers working in imperial times had none of those available.

“Paradoxically, materials that were used extensively in antiquity are very, very difficult to model with modern tools,” he says. “In order to understand the engineering of ancient peoples, we need to develop very sophisticated approaches that are much more complicated than modeling steel or modeling reinforced concrete.”

Working with small blocks from the monuments, the team adjusted their analytical tools to understand how ancient concrete reacted to the stressing and crushing and bending that every structure faces in its lifetime.

“The best way to think of these structures is that these are live entities that adjust themselves over time,” he says. “And in order to understand how they do that you need to have the physical properties of the material. That requires some very sophisticated experiments.”

In recent years, Perucchio begun analyzing other ancient structures, such as an enormous adobe pyramid in modern-day Peru that was built by the Moche people of South America, a civilization that thrived from 100 CE to about 800 CE. The work is conducted jointly with a multidisciplinary team including colleagues from Rochester and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima.

“The approaches that we have developed are really very powerful and can be applied to a fairly large number of structures,” Perucchio says. “The common feature is that these types of structures usually cannot be analyzed with modern tools. You have to develop your own data as well as your engineering analysis tools.”

And while Perucchio says his projects typically don’t address how ancient structures can be preserved or protected, the research can help guide such efforts by understanding how the structures were designed and where they are most vulnerable.

“For me, it’s a simple point: you learn through mistakes. That something was going to stand up, but instead it fails. These were very sophisticated people, and they understood that. They were able to conduct a critical analysis of their errors and develop new structural solutions. This is pretty much what engineers do even today.”

App-ed to Find a Parking Space?

meyerPARK TECH: Meyer wants to harness smartphones to alleviate the headaches of big city parking. (Photo: Steve Ruark/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Drivers in big cities will tell you that finding a parking place on the street is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Eric Meyer ’12 is one of them. Last spring, he launched Haystack, a new smartphone app for frustrated city motorists.

The idea struck him in December 2013. “I was tired of circling the block late at night searching for a spot in my Baltimore neighborhood,” Meyer says. “After too many tickets, I thought there must be a more efficient way for drivers to park and exchange information with their neighbors.”

Haystack is a social parking community that lets drivers exchange street spots in real time via a free smartphone application. Users download the app from the iOS or Android store, sign up with their car and credit card information, and begin using the service.

“Haystackers” can either be seeking or providing a tip about an available spot. The parties are matched to spaces based on proximity and car length. To offer a tip—which users will often do as they are leaving a spot—they indicate the location and type of spot they are about to leave and are paired with a nearby seeker. The users can communicate to smooth the exchange.

While Haystack enjoyed a smooth launch in Baltimore last May—Meyer was named a 2014 Innovator of the Year by Maryland’s Daily Record and Haystack won Best New Web or Mobile Product at Technical.ly Baltimore’s Innovation Week—it hit a roadblock in Boston. The city banned the app in August, charging that Haystack and its users are private parties profiting from a public resource. Haystack retains a 25 percent transaction fee on parking exchanges and the average exchange is about $3.

Meyer counters that the app sells information, not parking spaces. A political science major at Rochester, he says one of his biggest challenges hasn’t been technical, but political: that is, “navigating the archaic network of backward-thinking governments.”

“Urban parking is a critical issue, and we need innovative companies and city governments to work together to find effective solutions,” says Meyer, who has offered to work with Boston city officials to devise a mutually agreeable solution.

In those discussions, “Eric worked the room like an old pro,” says Lawrence DiCara, a partner at the law firm Nixon Peabody, who in the 1970s won a spot on the Boston City Council at the age of 22. “He knows that no city government can solve transportation problems on its own.”

Meyer is a serial entrepreneur. He launched his first registered business at 14, producing professional videos. A year later he started the Geneseo Summer Scholars day camp, the first iteration of Young Scholar Adventures, LLC. He also learned the ropes in a corporate environment, directing beverage programs and promotions for Phillips Seafood Restaurants, a $50 million company.

“Creating something new is incredibly exciting,” he says. “It’s that excitement I suppose that has driven my interest in a diversity of fields,” he says, rattling off problems he sees in the restaurant business, entrepreneurship education, and of course, parking. “Bringing people together to solve these problems is what gets me out of bed in the morning.”

–John Martin ’69﻿

New Leadership at an Iconic TV Brand

The National Geographic Channel has someone new in charge of programming: Tim Pastore ’00, ’02 (MA) was named president of original programming and production last August.

Pastore had been employed at National Geographic Studios for about a year before he was promoted into his new role, part of a wider overhaul in leadership at the channel.

Pastore got his first big break in television as producer of Discovery Channel’s The Deadliest Catch, for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding nonfiction series in 2007. In 2010, he was nominated a second time for a Primetime Emmy, this time for Dirty Jobs, in the category of outstanding reality program.

Pastore has been an executive producer for Life Below Zero, Flying Wild Alaska, Dual Survival, Gold Rush, and other series.

newsWINNER: Carstensen developed a noted theory on aging. (Photo: Fred Mertz for Rochester Review)

Dual Honors for Expert on Longevity

Laura Carstensen ’78—author of A Long Bright Future (Broadway Books), a TED speaker, and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity—received two awards from the Gerontological Society of America. A psychologist, she’s the only person ever to receive both awards simultaneously.

Carstensen earned the Robert W. Kleemeier Award for outstanding research in gerontology, and the Distinguished Mentorship in Gerontology Award. In A Long Bright Future, Carstensen debunked the notion that aging Americans are destined to drain the nation’s financial resources. Her own findings suggested that an increasing number of Americans over age 65 enjoy good health and maintain skills that are valuable to society. She’s also found that older Americans are happier, on the whole, than younger ones. She is considered the founder of socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits that as people grow older, they become more selective in their commitments, investing more time and resources in emotionally gratifying experiences, and often paring down their social circles.

In addition to her role at the Stanford Center on Longevity, Carstensen is a professor of psychology and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy, also at Stanford.﻿

The Untapped Power of Digital Play

kulmanTECH TRANSFER: Kulman helps patients translate skills honed in video games to real life. (Photo: Stew Milne/AP Images for Rochester Review)

About 10 to 15 years ago, Randy Kulman ’77 started noticing a distinct trend in his clinical psychology practice. “Time and again, every day, I was seeing these kids who didn’t seem to like doing anything, didn’t seem to pay attention to anything, and seemed to have no persistence,” he says. “But they liked to play video games. And they were really good at it. And they were the technology leaders in the house.”

As Kulman started to learn more about video games and other forms of digital play, he found that many popular games actually required several of the skills—the related skills of planning, organization, time management, focus, and persistence that psychologists call executive functioning skills—that the kids in his practice struggled with in their daily lives.

That discovery led him to a couple of big questions. Why are kids who struggle with executive functioning skills at school and at home able to master those skills in the context of video games? And how might those kids learn to transfer skills mastered in video games to other areas of their lives?

Kulman, who is not a gamer himself—“there are very few games that I really enjoy playing,” he says—developed a strong academic interest in play while at Rochester. Under the tutelage of Ralph Barocas and David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child, Kulman decided to pursue graduate study, where in his first major research project, “I was looking at the impact of watching Sesame Street versus Mister Rogers on imaginative play,” he says.

Kulman is founder of an educational consulting firm, LearningWorks for Kids, and has written two books: Train Your Brain for Success: A Teenager’s Guide to Executive Functions (Specialty Press, 2012) and Playing Smarter in a Digital World: A Guide to Choosing and Using Popular Video Games and Apps to Improve Executive Functioning in Children and Teens (Specialty Press, 2014).

What do some kids love about video games?

I think there are a lot of things. First, the games are adaptive. You get to a level and then they challenge you to get to the next one. They get harder and harder, but only at the level that you’re able to handle. They also teach through trial and error. It’s OK to fail, because that’s how you learn to play the game. The games also give immediate feedback. The best kind of feedback, the feedback that works best to help these kids to learn or to grow, takes place right when something happens, not half an hour later. Video games are also multimodal, so some of these kids who struggle with learning who might not read very well, or when they’re listening, that input channel is not as effective as others, don’t have to rely on just one channel of learning. There are sounds, actions, and pictures.

How can video games teach kids executive functioning?

Video game play alone has limited impact on improving executive functioning, though kids will often get much better at using these skills in the context of the game. That’s why in my practice we connect games with talking points, and then give what we call a “make-it-work” section, to help a kid to take the skill that he used in the game, think about that skill, reflect on it, and then do activities that take that same skill in the real world. And that’s why we give information to parents, teachers, and clinicians about how they can help their kids think about the skills they use in the game and then give activities in which they actually use those skills in the real world.

Is there such a thing as too much digital play?

Certainly. I like to talk about a healthy play diet. There are basically five types of play: what I call active, physical play; social play, which involves doing things directly with other people; unstructured play; creative play that’s a bit more structured, involving artistic pursuits; and digital play. A healthy play diet includes all five kinds of play.

—Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)﻿

Quick Study

leberFROM CT TO TNR: Leber, once at the Campus Times, now writes for The New Republic. (Photo: Paul Morigi/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Rebecca Leber ’11 is already an old pro at The New Republic.

“I find it pretty amazing to be working here,” says Leber, who this past June became the venerable policy and culture magazine’s newest staff writer.

Her rise at the century-old magazine, also known by the acronym TNR, was remarkably fast, even by the standards of the ever-changing world of digital media. As a staff writer, Leber has a dual focus: subject-specific policy journalism focused on energy, the environment, and climate change; and improving the magazine’s digital content.

“We are so pleased Rebecca is joining the team,” said senior editor Jonathan Cohn, in announcing her appointment. “She’s smart, she cares, and she knows her stuff. Readers are going to look forward to seeing her byline.”

Like many young journalists, Leber rose in the profession in tandem with the rise of digital media. At her previous job at the digital news and opinion outlet ThinkProgress, she worked on the team that helped the site gain one million Facebook fans, and edited their Tumblr, a blogging network and social media platform that takes advantage of multimedia formats.

“I was part of the social media unit, and that experience made me think a lot about what drives people to share stories with their friends and family,” she says. As part of her job, Leber will also write for Q.E.D., a domestic politics and policy offshoot that The New Republic rolled out this summer.

“Q.E.D. is staying on top of major policy news, and thinking of interesting ways to present information visually. TNR has been expanding its digital and social media presence for the last couple of years. Q.E.D. is really focused on extending that to policy journalism.”

As a journalist focused on energy and the environment, she says, “I write a lot about the constant political battles over environmental regulations, particularly the Obama administration’s new regulations on how much energy we get from coal in this country. Increasingly, I’m focused on how the world is moving forward on climate change in the next year.”

Leber has a clear notion about what needs to be looked at more deeply and brought to the attention of the public and policy makers. She says politicians are beginning to do a better job, but could “connect the dots” more between climate change and the impact it has now, and will have in the near future, on policy. “Hurricane Sandy was an example of politicians realizing that coastal infrastructure needs to be able to sustain more flooding and extreme weather,” she says. “It’s the same for other areas, like drought and water scarcity. There just aren’t great solutions out there right now.”

“What I’m trying to do, personally, is to write timely pieces on both big news topics and less-covered areas—with something unique to say each time, or context to add.”

She’s convinced that good writing stands out in either print or digital format. This year, as part of the magazine’s 100-year anniversary, The New Republic is publishing many of its best archive pieces online. “A lot of those are surprisingly successful on the Internet,” she says.

–John Martin ’69﻿

TRIBUTE

David Knill: A Role Model in Science, and in Life

knillLEGACY: An expert on human perception, Knill’s research helped transform the field, colleagues say. (Photo: University Communications)

I had the great privilege to be David Knill’s colleague and friend, as well as his department chair. Dave’s passion, integrity, and collegiality showed through in all facets of his life.

Dave died in October in the prime of his career as a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and associate director of the University’s Center for Visual Science. As a scientist, he was brilliant. He had a remarkable ability to see the core issues in a scientific question, and he was incredibly successful at developing simple theories and models that could account for a broad array of phenomenology regarding human behavior. Dave will be remembered by his colleagues as a pioneer in applying the principles of Bayesian inference to problems in human perception, an approach that has transformed the field. His work leaves a legacy that will be felt for decades.

In addition to his accomplishments, I will always remember Dave for his approach to science. In an era when it is easy to get caught up in media attention, funding levels, and journal impact factors, Dave’s focus was always on conducting rigorous science with the greatest level of care. He was motivated by finding the truth, not a headline. His integrity and transparency are a model for all young scientists to emulate. Dave gave freely of his time and expertise—several of his colleagues around the world have contacted me to describe instances in which Dave went out of his way to provide them with useful feedback and suggestions.

Dave was passionate about educating students. Among his important contributions to the graduate program in brain and cognitive sciences, Dave developed a course to teach PhD students how to write grant proposals and how to navigate the grant submission process. Dave was a caring and devoted mentor to the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in his laboratory, helping them through life challenges as well as scientific hurdles.

Perhaps most importantly, Dave always put family first. He was so proud of his sons, Ari and Josh, and he always had a big smile when talking about them. I enjoyed hearing stories about soccer games and bowling tournaments, among his sons’ many accomplishments. Dave knew how to maintain balance of work and family in his life, something to which we can all aspire.

David Knill’s time with us was far too short, but his impact will be disproportionately large upon the many people who benefitted from his personal and scientific influence.

—Greg DeAngelis

DeAngelis is a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, biomedical engineering, and neurobiology and anatomy, and chair of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Rochester. The Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences has established a website for friends, students, and colleagues to share remembrances of David Knill at www.forevermissed.com/david-knill/#about.

TRIBUTE

J. Daniel Subtelny: Orthodontics Pioneer

tribute_subtelnyTOP HONORS: Subtelny, who led the orthodontics department for more than 55 years, was the only individual to receive all four of the highest honors in his profession. (Photo: Medical Center)

We all realized just how highly regarded J. Daniel Subtelny was on September 27, when hundreds of alumni, faculty, administrators, and friends arrived in Pittsford, New York, to celebrate his life. People came from Hong Kong, Iceland, Mexico, Korea, Canada, and all points in the United States to honor a man who dedicated his life to the profession of orthodontics as a practitioner, researcher, and educator.

It was standing room only during the memorial service. Sub, as he was known to most of his colleagues, was eulogized by several friends and family members. Everyone recalled his love for his wife, Joanne, with whom he wrote his early books on cleft palate treatment, as well as his zest for life, for learning, and for the Department of Orthodontics—which he chaired for 55-plus years. While Sub was the only individual to have received all four of the highest honors in the profession of orthodontics, he will be remembered for his devotion to helping us be better orthodontists and people. His legacy lives on in the hundreds of former residents he educated, supervised, and guided the research of—resulting in the publication of scores of important contributions to our literature.

His memorial celebration was punctuated by remembrances of his Socratic method of teaching, his famous “Hot Seat,” and how it forced you to think about the questions you would face as a practitioner and your answers to them. Sub would always ask, “And what else?” until you were mentally pushed off balance and had to consider other options.

Active at the age of 92 when he died September 17, he was a vibrant educator until the end.

He will be remembered through the J. Daniel Subtelny Endowed Chair and Professorship, established by the Eastman Orthodontic Alumni Association and the University, which has been created to preserve his educational legacy in orthodontics, and, we hope, to capture the same verve and spirit that he showed in his remarkable career.

—Michael Spoon ’91D

Spoon is an assistant professor in the Division of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics at the Eastman Institute for Oral Health.

KUDOS

Celebrating Service

Annual ceremonies recognize the achievements and service of alumni and friends.

School of Arts & Sciences

James S. Armstrong Alumni Service Award

Peter Standish ’64, a life trustee of the University, is a retired partner of the law firm Weil, Gotschal & Manges, where he specialized in antitrust and trade regulation. He has served on several committees of the Board of Trustees, has helped lead the Class of 1964’s milestone reunion committees, and served on other University leadership groups. He and his wife, Lenore, are charter members of the George Eastman Circle, the University’s leadership annual giving society, and they have established a scholarship for undergraduates in Arts, Sciences & Engineering.

John N. Wilder Award

Debra Dorfman Drumheller ’74 held several executive positions during a 30-year career with ExxonMobil. She serves on the Arts, Sciences & Engineering National Council and on the Washington, D.C., Regional Cabinet. She and her husband, Robert, are charter members of the George Eastman Circle, and have established a scholarship for undergraduates studying economics.

Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

Distinguished Alumnus Award

Theophano Mitsa ’91 (PhD) is a coinventor of the blue noise mask, one of the most lucrative inventions in the University’s history. After a career in academic engineering, Mitsa has been an independent consultant, specializing in data science. A member of the Boston Regional Cabinet and the George Eastman Circle, Mitsa and the coinventor of the blue noise mask, Kevin Parker, have established a scholarship for students in the Hajim School.

School of Medicine and Dentistry

Dean’s Medal

The Wilmot Family has supported cancer research and care at the University for more than 30 years. Since 1981 the James P. Wilmot Foundation and members of the Wilmot family have provided tens of millions of dollars in support for academic, scholarship, and building initiatives. The James P. Wilmot Cancer Institute is named in recognition of the support of the family.

Distinguished Alumnus Award

David Satcher ’72M (Res), ’95 (Honorary) served as the 16th surgeon general of the United States. He also has served as assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, and as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently the Poussaint-Satcher-Crosby Chair in Mental Health at the Morehouse School of Health, he established an award program at the Medical Center to recognize the contributions of faculty and staff to the community health of Rochester.

Alumni Achievement Award

Ian Wilson ’99M (MD), ’04M (Res), ’06M (Flw) is a radiologist and assistant professor in the Department of Imaging Sciences. Wilson founded a nonprofit organization that supports a Rochester-area street art festival and a medical philanthropy organization that provides basic x-ray services to underserved communities and a web-based network of volunteer radiologists to analyze digitally transmitted x-rays.

Humanitarian Award

Norman Abell ’51M (MD) was a career missionary in the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society as a physician surgeon and hospital administrative leader. Beginning in 1956, Abell, with his wife, Jean, led medical initiatives in rural areas that are now part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Abell died in 2012. The award was presented posthumously.

Bernard Guyer ’70M (MD) is the Zanvyl Krieger Professor Emeritus of Children’s Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. In research and clinical positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Johns Hopkins over his 40-year career, Guyer has helped lead initiatives to improve maternal and child health in rural Africa, the northeast United States, and other parts of the world.

Alumni Service Award

Elethea (Lee) Caldwell ’73M (Res) is a professor emeritus of surgery at the School of Medicine and Dentistry. After completing her residency, Caldwell became a faculty member in the Division of Plastic Surgery, focusing her practice on the care of children with congenital deformities. Among her leadership positions, she served as medical director of the Ambulatory Care Center at Strong Memorial Hospital. She and her husband, Robert ’61M (MD), ’69M (Res), are members of the George Eastman Circle, and they have established a scholarship program for undergraduates interested in the study of medicine, as well as funding other support for students at the Medical Center.

John N. Wilder Award

Michael Buckley, a partner at the Rochester law firm of Boylan Code, has served on leadership boards at the Medical Center for more than 30 years. A member of the George Eastman Circle, Buckley has chaired the Highland Hospital Foundation, cochaired the hospital’s capital campaign committee, and chaired the Medical Center’s development committee.

School of Nursing

Dean’s Medal

Janet Scala ’55N is a retired surgical and office nurse. She founded the New Jersey League for Educational Advancement of Registered Nurses (LEARN) which helps inactive nurses return to active practice. She and her husband, Robert ’58M (PhD), are charter members of the George Eastman Circle, and they have established scholarships and stipend programs for students in nursing and in medicine.

Distinguished Alumna Award

Patricia Tabloski ’89N (PhD) is an associate professor and former dean for graduate programs at the William F. Connell School of Nursing at Boston College. A former member of the faculty of the School of Nursing and the Department of Medicine, Tabloski has held faculty posts at Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Connecticut.

Legacy Award

Aldo Fioravanti is a retired assistant director for the physical plant at the Medical Center. During a 22-year career at the University, Fioravanti was a construction engineer during a time when the square footage of the Medical Center doubled. Fioravanti established a scholarship for nursing students in recognition of his late wife, Anne, and his daughter, Joanne Fioravanti Makielski ’75N, ’78N (MS).

Thelma Wells is a professor emerita and a faculty research consultant at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. As faculty members at the School of Nursing, Wells and her colleague, Carol Anne Brink ’56N, ’62N, created a master of science degree program in gerontological nursing and cofounded the first continence clinic in the United States. Wells has been a leading supporter of a professorship to recognize Brinks.

Humanitarian Award

Patricia Bull ’74N is a retired captain in the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. As the volunteer lead for the Disaster Health Services team of the San Diego/Imperial Counties chapter of the American Red Cross, Bull has helped set up and staff evacuation centers in Houston after Hurricane Katrina, in San Diego after wild fires, and in El Centro, California, after a 2010 earthquake. A supporter of the School of Nursing’s annual fund, she has volunteered for fundraising and reunion activities.

John N. Wilder Award

The Davenport-Hatch Foundation has supported student scholarships and academic programs at the School of Nursing for decades. The foundation was established in 1952 by Augustus Hatch, whose daughters, Helen Hatch Heller ’37, ’37N and Elizabeth Hatch Hildebrandt, helped establish a scholarship that has assisted more than 200 nursing students and that represents one of the school’s largest endowments. The foundation has also supported University initiatives at the Eastman School of Music, the Memorial Art Gallery, Golisano Children’s Hospital, Highland Hospital, the Wilmot Cancer Institute, Simon Business School, and Visiting Nurse Service.

Simon Business School

Distinguished Alumnus Award

Steven Berglund ’77S (MBA) is president and CEO of Trimble Navigation, a company that designs and distributes positioning devices and applications that use GPS, optical, laser, and wireless technology. Berglund has held executive positions with several Silicon Valley companies since the 1980s, and he serves as chairman of the board of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. A member of the George Eastman Circle, Berglund visits the Simon School frequently and has recruited fellow Simon graduates to Trimble.

Alumni Service Award

Danielle Beyer ’05, ’06S (MBA) is managing director and head of investor relations at Mariner Investment Group. She has served as the leader of the Simon School’s Alumni Network of New York City, supporting the school’s alumni programming and other activities. A member of the George Eastman Circle, she has been an active volunteer for College and Simon reunion programs.

Meena Singh ’85S (MBA) is CEO of BRISC-CARR Group, a Canadian social enterprise that she cofounded to help underprivileged youth in India build employable skills. An active Simon alumna, Singh has served on the Simon Alumni Council, helped support the school’s initiatives in Toronto and Mumbai, India, and helped initiate the school’s executive education programs in India. She and her husband, Vijay Shankar, are members of the George Eastman Circle.

John N. Wilder Award

Jim Doyle Jr. is the executive director and founding member of ProVenture (Far East), a beauty care instrument company. He also chairs Baycross Christian Family Foundation, a charitable organization for homeless families in southwest Florida. Doyle established the James N. Doyle, Sr. Professorship in Entrepreneurship at the Simon Business School in recognition of his father, who was a faculty member at Simon.

Books & Recordings

Books

De Potter’s Grand Tour

By Joanna Scott

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Scott presents a historical detective novel based on personal family history. When her great-grandfather, a tourist agent and antiques collector, disappeared from a passenger ship in 1905, he was presumed lost at sea. Scott, the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at Rochester, constructs an alternative narrative, based on family legend, that the collector was actually murdered.

The Jewish World: 100 Treasures of Art and Culture

By Alla Efimova ’98 (PhD) and Francesco Spagnolo

Skira Rizzoli, 2014

Efimova, the former Reutlinger Director of the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berke- ley, and Magnes curator Spagnolo select and offer commentary on highlights of the collection. The Magnes collection is among the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections related to Jewish history and cultures. Efimova is the founding director of KunstWorks, a consultancy for artists and collectors.

The Festival: Photographs of the St. Josaphat’s Ukrainian Arts & Crafts Festival

By J. Adam Fenster and Michael Osadciw

SDDC, 2013

More than 100 photographs by Fenster and accompanying text by Osadciw tell the story of one of the city of Rochester’s signature summer events. The Ukrainian festival, a celebration of food, music, dancing, and crafts, has been held annually since 1973. Fenster is a photographer, and Osadciw is a graphic designer, in University Communications.

St. Anne in Renaissance Music: Devotion and Politics

By Michael Anderson

Cambridge University Press, 2014

Anderson, associate professor of musicology at Eastman, explores the devotion to St. Anne in 15th and early 16th century Europe through the lens of the music created to honor her.

Understanding Psychopathology: An Integral Exploration

By R. Elliott Ingersoll and Andre Marquis

Pearson, 2014

Marquis and Ingersoll explore the most recent research on the causes and treatments of mental disorders, incorporating psychological, neurobiological, cultural, and social perspectives. Marquis is an associate professor of counseling and human development at the Warner School, and Ingersoll is a professor of counseling psychology at Cleveland State University.

Last Features: East German Cinema’s Lost Generation

By Reinhild Steingröver

Camden House, 2014

Steingröver, associate professor of German and chair of the humanities department at the Eastman School, explores the “forgotten films” created by East German filmmakers during the period of German reunification. The films, delving into themes such as generational struggle, East German youth culture in the 1970s, the relationship between the artist and the state, and the protests of 1989, were lost during the political upheaval, and retrieved and made available on DVD as the Wende Flicks Collection (DEFA Film Library) in 2009.

The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace

By Ron Friedman ’08 (PhD)

Penguin Random House/Perigee, 2014

Friedman, a psychologist and founder of the consulting firm ignite80, offers his vision of an extraordinary work environment, informed by research in motivation, creativity, behavioral economics, and neuroscience.

Lost in Time: Locating the Stranger in German Modernity

By June Hwang

Northwestern University Press, 2014

Hwang, associate professor of German at Rochester, explores the relationship during the Weimar Republic between Jewish identity, urban modernity, and the idea of the stranger.

Fast Facts for the Radiology Nurse: A Nursing Orientation and Care Guide in a Nutshell

By Valerie Aarne Grossman

Springer, 2014

Grossman, manager of medical imaging nurses at the University-affiliated Highland Hospital, offers an overview of procedures and protocols in the relatively new specialty of radiology nursing.

George H. W. Bush: Character at the Core

By Curt Smith

Potomac Books, 2014

Through his lens as a speechwriter for George H. W. Bush for more than 20 years, including during Bush’s presidency, Smith chronicles Bush’s leadership and personal style. Smith is a senior lecturer in Rochester’s English department and teaches courses on public speaking and presidential rhetoric.

Philosophy of History After Hayden White

Edited by Robert Doran

Bloomsbury, 2013

Doran, the James P. Wilmot Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rochester, edits and introduces a series of essays assessing the lasting impact of White’s scholarship on historical methodology. White taught in the history department at Rochester from 1958 to 1968. Five essays in the collection originate from the 2009 Humanities Project colloquium at Rochester, “Between History and Narrative: Colloquium in Honor of Hayden White.”

Art Deco Mailboxes: A Design History

By Karen Greene ’69 and Lynn Lavelle

W. W. Norton, 2014

Greene coauthors a photographic survey of Art Deco lobby mailboxes, pioneered by Rochester architect James Cutler. Cutler, who was also a University trustee, patented the “Cutler mailbox” and mailchute system in 1883. Cutler-inspired mailboxes became a design feature of buildings around the world.

Reconstructing the Confucian Dao: Zhu Xi’s Appropriation of Zhou Dunyi

By Joseph Adler ’70

SUNY Press, 2014

Adler, a professor of Asian studies and religious studies at Kenyon College, reassesses aspects of the work of 12th-century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi.

Using Research Evidence in Education: From the Schoolhouse Door to Capitol Hill

Edited by Kara Finnigan and Alan Daly

Springer, 2014

Finnigan and Daly present a volume of case studies on research evidence, with the goal of bridging the gap between education research, policy, and practice. Finnigan is an associate professor of educational leadership at the Warner School and Daly is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Princess Bing Bong Rides a Bike

By Vanessa Paniccia ’96

Authorhouse, 2014

Children’s author Paniccia presents the third book in her Princess Bing Bong series. Paniccia won a Silver Award from Mom’s Choice Awards for the series.

Palliative Care and Ethics

Edited by Timothy Quill and Franklin Miller

Oxford University Press, 2014

Quill, the Georgia and Thomas Gosnell Distinguished Professor in Palliative Care at Rochester, coedits an up-to-date guide for health professionals, medical ethicists, patients, and caregivers. Contributors include Ronald Epstein, professor of family medicine; Robert Gramling, associate professor of family medicine; and Sally Norton, the Independence Chair in Nursing and Palliative Care.

What Would I Tell Her @ 13

By Sudesna Ghosh ’07

Harlequin, 2014

In a series of personal essays and interviews with prominent women, Ghosh offers advice for parents of teenage girls. She addresses a range of topics, including confidence, independence, body image, “teen tantrums,” and sexual abuse.

Language, Literacy, and Learning in STEM Education: Research Methods and Perspectives from Applied Linguistics

Edited by Mary Jane Curry and David Hanauer

John Benjamins, 2014

Curry, associate professor of teaching and curriculum at the Warner School, coedits a collection of studies suggesting ways in which research in linguistics and literacy can be applied to improve STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—education. Contributors include Jeffrey Choppin, associate professor at the Warner School and a specialist in mathematics education.

Waitin’ Round the Bend

By Charles ’70M (MD) and Mary Elizabeth Rodning

Negative Capability Press, 2014

The Rodnings, both published poets and artists in the ancient Japanese brush painting style known as sumi-e painting, present a book of original Japanese short-form poems and sumi-e paintings.

The Red Fist of Rome

By John Caligiuri ’79S (MBA)

John Caligiuri, 2014

In his first novel, Caligiuri envisions an “alternate history” of the tumultuous years in Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Recordings

Piano Masterworks of Beethoven

By Steven Herbert Smith ’66E (MM), ’78E (DMA)

Soundwaves Recordings, 2014

On a set of 11 CDs, Smith, professor emeritus of piano at Penn State, performs the complete 32 sonatas, in addition to nine variation sets, rondos, and bagatelles.

Appalachian Inspiration: Appalachian Chamber Music, Vol. 3

By John Beall ’73E (PhD)

Ravello Records, 2014

Beall, professor and composer-in-residence at West Virginia University, introduces three piano and string pieces incorporating Appalachian folk traditions. The recording includes notes by pianist Steven Herbert Smith ’66E (MM), ’78E (DMA).

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, author, or performer, a brief description, and a high-resolution cover image, 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.

How We Work

Psychologist Ron Friedman ’08 (PhD) says the modern workplace is surprisingly out of date.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

friedman (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

Shortly after I finished graduate school, I entered the business world. And I was surprised to realize that all of the research I took for granted about motivation, creativity, and working productively was not something that most people in the business world were even aware of.﻿ Everything—from the way that organizations hire, to the way that leaders motivate, to the layout and design of most office spaces—appeared blind to a wealth of research about how we can build a better workplace.

It’s remarkable how much research there is showing that flexibility yields positive results.﻿ The more flexibility you give people over their calendar—in other words, where and when they work—the more engaged and productive they are over the long term. Employees are able to calibrate their best times of day, as opposed to just sitting in the office in front of a computer because it’s not yet 5 p.m.

Empowering people to do their best work requires recognizing the limits of the mind and the body.﻿ The modern workplace is based on the factory floor. At many organizations, employees are expected to work as if they’re machines, as though they’re going to function the same way at four o’clock in the afternoon as they are at eight o’clock in the morning.

Ron Friedman ’08 (PhD)

Home: Rochester, New York

Occupation: Business consultant and founder of ignite80; author of The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace (Penguin Random House/Perigee).

On his first visit to Rochester: “I came to Rochester to study psychology with Ed Deci and Andy Elliott. In my interview, Ed asked me about my personal essay, in which I wrote that I thought happiness was among the most important topics you could study. He replied—I think these were his exact words—‘I think happiness is a bunch of crap.’ He said that if you’re singularly focused on being happy, you’re overlooking the benefits of other emotions. That had a real impact on me, and I write about allowing employees to feel authentic at work, rather than pressuring them to be relentlessly happy.”

Most workplaces provide an office or cubicle, and employees are expected to remain in that space for eight or nine hours a day. It’s a recipe for disengagement.﻿ I was in an organization where, if you left before about 7:30 in the evening, you were perceived as a slacker. So two things would happen. If people were done with their work at 5:30, they would go on social media for two hours; or, people would have in the back of their heads, the workday isn’t going to end until 7:30 anyway, so I’m not really going to do the difficult work until five o’clock.

Workplace design can foster autonomy by learning from the design of a college campus.﻿ Think about the expectations we have for students. The professors say, “Here are the outcomes that we expect by the end of the semester, and it’s up to you to get this done.” Students have different environments that they can then choose for the purpose of fulfilling their work. They can go to the library, or to their dorm, or to the gym. How they spend their time is up to them, and if they’re not successful, then at the end of the semester or school year, they may be asked to leave.

If you start your day with a brief planning session, you’re going to be a lot more productive.﻿ An exercise I often encourage people to do is to imagine it’s the end of the day and you’re going home with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. What have you achieved? Taking just a few minutes to think about what a successful day would look like helps us separate tasks that feel urgent from those that are truly important.

The problem I often see is the feeling of being overwhelmed at work—the constant emails, the constant text messaging, the constant conference calls.﻿ What’s the first thing you do when you sit down at the office? For many of us, it’s looking at email or checking our voicemail. That puts us in a reactive mind-set rather than a proactive mind-set. It’s the worst thing you can do.

STUDENT LIFE

Air Play

frisbee (Photo: Adam Fenster)

I GOT IT! David Weissman ’17 goes airborne during an afternoon game of Frisbee on the Eastman Quadrangle this fall.