Rochester Review

January–February 2016, Volume 78, No. 3

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Sean Dobbin, Adam Fenster, Peter Iglinski, Jim Mandelaro, Bob Marcotte, Melissa Mead, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Leslie Orr, Monique Patenaude, Jennifer Roach, Scott Sabocheck, Leonor Sierra, Helene Snihur, Leslie White, and Brandon Vick

Editorial Office

22 Wallis Hall

University of Rochester

Box 270044, Rochester, NY 14627-0044

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Box 270032

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E-mail: rochrev@rochester.edu Rochester.edu/pr/Review

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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 © 2016 University of Rochester

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Unless otherwise noted, photographs are courtesy of the subjects.﻿﻿﻿

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Rochester Review:

A Historic Win for the Finger Lakes

By Joel Seligman

presidentCELEBRATION: Area community, political, and business leaders celebrated a $500 million economic development award, announced by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (podium). (Photo: Adam Fenster)

We won! Last month the Finger Lakes region won a $500 million Upstate Revitalization Initiative (URI) award in a nearly yearlong competition established by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. This is a monumental development for the University and Rochester and our nine-county region.

The URI award represents a five-year commitment to accelerate economic growth and help eradicate poverty—outcomes that will extend opportunity to all of our region’s residents. The region’s 135-page plan, “United for Success: Finger Lakes Forward,” was developed by the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Council, which Danny Wegman, next year’s Board of Trustees chair, and I cochaired, in collaboration with the 34 members of the council and 450 regional participants in 20 work groups.

Underlying the plan are three industry pillars most likely to create jobs and economic growth and three enablers to best facilitate the transformation of our region’s economy. That transformation is the ultimate aspiration of the Upstate Revitalization competition.

Optics, photonics, and imaging, the first pillar, amplifies the $115 million in matching fund support that the State of New York will provide to the University of Rochester and RIT for the Rochester region as part of the successful AIM Photonics submission. Our region today has some 26,000 jobs in optics, photonics, and related imaging industries. The anticipated support from winning this competition will extend our historic strengths to new areas such as optics materials surface finishing, imaging systems, and laser technologies.

Agriculture and food production, the second industry pillar, touches all nine counties in the region. The Finger Lakes is the breadbasket of New York. Twenty-one percent of all upstate New York farmland is in our region, along with approximately 19,000 jobs in the agriculture and food production industries. Our region is a leader in dairy, yogurt, apples, organic food, and wine production and is home to such nationally recognized firms as Constellation Brands in wine and spirits; LiDestri Foods in food processing; and Wegmans Food Markets in food processing and grocery store distribution.

The third industry pillar, next-generation manufacturing, recognizes that our region is in the midst of an economic transformation that will include new industries such as energy storage, photovoltaics, nanoscale manufacturing, new applications of 3-D printing, biomaterials, and software development. During the next five years, much of the region’s next-generation manufacturing will be located in three innovation hubs, including Eastman Business Park and a downtown Rochester Innovation Zone.

Pivotal to facilitating the acceleration of our economic growth are three enablers— Pathways to Prosperity, which reflects an unprecedented effort to address poverty in Rochester; entrepreneurship and development to stimulate the establishment and growth of new ventures; and higher education and research, which recognizes the decisive role that the University of Rochester and other universities and colleges play in the increasingly knowledge-based future of our region.

We are proud of what we have achieved to this point. More than $300 million in state investments to date have also played a critical role in the revitalization of downtown Rochester and in nearby new developments at College Town and CityGate, as well as in Geneva, Canandaigua, Penn Yan, and many other communities across the nine-county Finger Lakes region.

The $500 million in URI support represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build upon this momentum and create a foundation for sustained economic growth. These new funds will be used to make strategic investments in the core industry clusters and enablers that will drive future job growth. URI funds will also be used to strengthen our region’s quality of life and—in collaboration with the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative and the Governor’s Rochester Anti-Poverty Task Force—undertake a historic effort to lift more families and communities out of poverty.

We are deeply grateful to Governor Cuomo and the New York State Legislature for their unprecedented commitment to revive the upstate economy and help confront the roots of poverty in our region.

Now the hard part begins. The Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council will soon be releasing plans to implement its URI plan, including the process for project sponsors seeking to apply for URI funding. Among other projects that were recommended in the United for Success plan were support for the University’s data science initiative, our Laser Lab, the Medical Center’s potential program in neurorestoration, and the Eastman School’s community music program.

This is a huge win for the Finger Lakes. All of us who participated in the competition have rolled up our sleeves and now are ready to implement the plan.

What’s on the Horizon?

lettersWOODWARD HOUSE: The house in Leroy, New York, served as a classroom for students in a former academic outreach program, the Wide Horizons Program. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Regarding the article “How Wide Was the Horizon?” (Ask the Archivist, November-December 2015): I was a member of the class in 1957. We met in the Woodward House in Leroy. (It had been gifted to the U of R, but due to the cost of maintaining it, was sold and, I believe, now destroyed.) We would meet in the afternoon and conclude with dinner in the large dining room. Our high school advisors would meet in a separate part of the house.

I believe that the first lecturer was [English professor] Katherine Kollar but don’t remember what book we were expected to read before the lecture. I also remember that [political science professor] Vera Micheles Dean gave a lecture. The one subject I do remember is a presentation on Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise but I do not know who was the lecturer.

I graduated from Byron-Bergen Central in 1958, so Genesee County was also included in the Wide Horizons Program. I attended Clarkson College (now Clarkson University) for one year before transferring to the U of R. I graduated in chemical engineering in 1962. (That’s a separate story discussed during our 25th and 50th reunion.)

George Zeltner ’62

Indianapolis

A Few More Yells

The article on “class yells” (”What’s Your Class Yell?”, Ask the Archivist, September-October 2015) evoked a few memories which I thought I would share.

I was a member of the Class of 1952, and don’t remember the class yell. However, I was on the Frosh Orientation Committee for the Class of 1954. They did not come up with a yell, so the committee made one up:

“Hobble gobble, razzle, dazzle, rip, rah, roar, U of R, U of R, fifty-four!”

I was not a member of Chi Rho but did participate with them. As a member of the aforementioned committee, we were responsible for checking in the frosh at each event. We were able to spot freshmen who were in “need” of learning the traditions and pass the names on to Chi Rho for “appropriate instruction.”

Thanks for the memories.

David Rosenthal ’52

Palm Desert, California

The 1962 class cheer:

Yellow and blue, yellow and blue, We’re the class of sixty-two. We’re the class that’s on the top, We’re the class that will not stop. There is nothing we can’t do, U of R, U of R, sixty-two.

Ethan Coven ’62

Berkeley, California

P.S. On getting old: I remember the class cheer, but not where I left my keys.

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.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

On the Way to Revitalization

Finger Lakes region wins $500 million award to spur economic development.

By Scott Hauser

CELEBRATION: Governor Andrew Cuomo; New York Senator Joseph Robach; Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren; Wegmans CEO Danny Wegman; University President and CEO Joel Seligman; and State Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle celebrate the awarding of $500 million in funding from the governor’s Upstate Revitalization Initiative. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A $500 million award from the state represents a historic opportunity for Rochester and the Finger Lakes region, but the important work is just beginning, says President and CEO Joel Seligman and other political and community leaders.

“We have to roll up our sleeves. We have to go to work,” Seligman told a standing-room-only audience at a December reception to celebrate New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s selection of the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council’s submission in a statewide economic development competition.

“Five years from now, this city will be well on its way to revitalization.”

In November, Cuomo selected the council’s plan, drawn up by area business, community, academic, and political leaders, as one of three proposals to each receive a five-year, $500 million state award.

Led by Seligman and Board of Trustees Chair-elect and Wegmans Food Markets CEO Danny Wegman, the council identified several public-private initiatives to spur job growth, increase regional wealth, attract private investment, and reduce poverty across the region. Among the initiatives are efforts to expand manufacturing around optics, photonics, and imaging; support new endeavors in agriculture and food production; and create better programs to help move people out of poverty.

Joining the Finger Lakes in winning the competition were proposals from the Southern Tier and central New York. The Upstate Revitalization Initiative competition was based on the success of the Buffalo Billion, a 10-year, $1 billion award announced in 2012.

Cuomo said Rochester has a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to take advantage of the skills and expertise of the region to help transform the economy of New York.

Noting that the area’s neighbors—Buffalo, the Southern Tier, and central New York—will also be building on their success, he said Rochester’s historic strengths as an inventive and entrepreneurial city will help lead an economic synergy throughout upstate and western New York. “Some of the greatest minds and some of the greatest inventions come from Rochester,” Cuomo said. “And don’t you forget it.”

“It’s time to rebuild Rochester to a level that it’s never been before. That’s your mission.”

In addition to Seligman and Wegman, Cuomo was greeted by Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren, State Senator Joseph Robach, and Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle. Each of them thanked Cuomo for his commitment to spurring economic development in the Rochester region and in other areas of the state outside New York City.

Warren and other speakers highlighted aspects of the plan that are particularly designed to address poverty. “When we had challenges with poverty, Governor Cuomo stepped up for Rochester, New York,” Warren said.

Robach, who admitted that he had been a critic of Albany’s “neglect” of western and upstate New York, said that the historic award represented an important, positive shift in the state’s approach to economic development. “This really is a great day for Rochester,” said Robach.

COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP

Finger Lakes Forward!

fingerlakes (Photo: Adam Fenster)

UNITED FOR SUCCESS: Led by President and CEO Joel Seligman and Board of Trustees Chair-elect and Wegmans CEO Danny Wegman, a multicounty group representing the Finger Lakes region succeeded in winning a five-year, $500 million award as part of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s statewide effort to boost economic development in New York. Before making a joint presentation in Albany last fall, members of the multicounty group showed their spirit at the Rochester Convention Center.

NANOSCIENCE

Historic Technology

douglass (Photo: Adam Fenster)

FAMOUS FACE: One of the earliest known images of abolitionist Frederick Douglass is on display at Rush Rhees Library. On loan from the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the image, a daguerreotype believed to have been taken in the early 1840s, was at one time a gift to Rochester suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony. While at Rochester, the daguerreotype will be analyzed in conjunction with a research project that’s showcased in a library exhibition, Researching the Daguerreotype at the University of Rochester: Nanotechnology Meets Local History, which is on display at Rush Rhees through February 29.

MUSICAL MOMENT

Most Famous Bass

bass (Photo: Adam Fenster)

BASS LEVEL: Doctoral student Spencer Phillips (right) and James VanDemark, a professor of double bass, and their fellow bassists at the Eastman School of Music practiced on a unique piece of history this winter when a 200-year-old bass that once belonged to virtuoso Serge Koussevitzky, the famed music director of the Boston Symphony, was in residence at Eastman. The International Society of Bassists loaned “the most famous bass in the world” to VanDemark and his students for a month, the first time that the bass has had a temporary home at a music school. While performing as the principal bass of the Hamilton, Ontario, Philharmonic in the 1970s, VanDemark took lessons on the bass when he studied with bassist Gary Karr, who was given the instrument by Koussevitzky’s widow.

STUDENT ACTIVISM

Commission Assesses Race and Diversity

President and CEO Joel Seligman charges commission to help “strengthen a University that is welcoming and supportive of all.”

By Jennifer Roach

diversitySPEAKING OUT: About 150 University students marched across the River Campus to protest racism at the University and to present President and CEO Joel Seligman with a list of demands to improve the racial climate at Rochester. Leaders of the Douglass Leadership House, the Minority Student Advisory Board, the Spanish and Latino Students’ Association, and the Black Students’ Union organized the demonstration. (Photo: Matthew Mann)

A University-wide commission exploring issues of race and diversity at Rochester is expected to complete its report this spring.

The Presidential Commission on Race and Diversity was charged late in the fall by President and CEO Joel Seligman with assessing the state of the campus climate and offering recommendations for improvement.

Cochaired by Paul Burgett, vice president, senior advisor to the president, and University dean, and Richard Feldman, dean of the College, the commission held the first of a planned set of forums and town hall meetings in December.

“It is clear to me that the climate on our campus is not all that it should be,” Seligman wrote in a statement to the University community. “Some of our students, faculty, and staff have experienced instances of hostility, notably recently because of their race. I cannot ignore evidence that our campus climate can be improved.”

In his address to campus, Seligman responded to student leaders from several minority leadership groups, who presented him with a three-page petition designed to improve the racial climate on campus. The students organized a peaceful march from the Douglass Leadership House on the Fraternity Quad to Wallis Hall and then to Rush Rhees Library.

In addition to forming the commission, Seligman outlined several actions, including

implementing a Bias-Related Incident reporting system—similar to the existing Care system, which provides reports about students who may need emotional or academic support—by the start of the semester in January;

the launch of an effort—similar to the national “It’s On Us” campaign to raise awareness about campus sexual assault—to address hate speech based on race;

a review of the Student Code of Conduct to determine if additional provisions should be added to address hate speech.

Seligman had already approved a campus-wide survey of faculty and staff to assess campus climate. The results are anticipated by May.

One item on the petition asked the University to block the anonymous social media application Yik Yak from Rochester’s wifi network. At a forum in December to discuss Yik Yak, students acknowledged that the app would still be available on campus through cellular data connections if it were blocked from wifi, but said barring it would be an important symbolic gesture on the part of the University.

The app has been a particular point of concern for students and the administration after anonymous users last spring posted what University Counsel Gail Norris described as “very concerning” comments that threatened particular students and the Douglass Leadership House. While the company behind the app failed to respond earlier last year to a subpoena issued by the Monroe County District Attorney as part of a University-led investigation to determine who posted the comments, Norris says there are indications that the company is being more responsive to complaints about abusive and threatening comments. “In addition to our work with the DA to issue the subpoena, we communicated with Yik Yak directly on the troublesome posts.”

In his address, Seligman asked the commission to recommend whether Yik Yak should be barred from the wifi network.

“Mutual respect and mutual pride is what all of us should most want to strengthen at the University of Rochester and at each institution in our lives,” Seligman said. “Working together we can further strengthen a University that is welcoming and supportive of all in our community.”

The commission includes administrators, students, faculty, and staff.

Seligman’s full message is available at Rochester.edu/president/memos/2015/petition-response.html.﻿﻿

ADMINISTRATIVE LEADERSHIP

A Distinguished Career

University celebrates Ronald Paprocki ’69, ’86S (MBA) for nearly five decades of service and leadership.

inrev_paprockiLEGACY OF LEADERS: Senior vice president, treasurer, and CFO Ronald Paprocki (third from right) was recognized by Board Chair Ed Hajim ’58, Presidents Emeriti Thomas Jackson and Dennis O’Brien, President and CEO Joel Seligman, and Board Chair Emeritus G. Robert Witmer Jr. ’60. (Photo: Keith Bullis for University Communications)

Very few University initiatives involving facilities, construction, and the academic infrastructure happened at Rochester over the past few decades without the input of Ronald Paprocki ’69, ’86S (MBA). With a career that has spanned the administrations of five Rochester presidents, the University’s treasurer, senior vice president for administration and finance, and chief financial officer has played a major role in helping shape today’s University.

In December, University administrative leaders, including three living presidents, recognized Paprocki for his nearly 50 years of service and leadership on the eve of his retirement in January. Paprocki received the Charles Force Hutchison and Marjorie Smith Hutchison Medal, the University’s highest alumni award, as part of a series of activities to wish him a happy retirement.

ARTS & SCIENCES

‘Being Human’

Dean Gloria Culver says it’s the big questions that unite the school.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

culverRECOGNIZING RESEARCH: Gloria Culver, new dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, says supporting faculty research is key to everything in the school: “The teaching will be better, the research will be better, and the students involved in research will get more out of it.” (Photo: Brandon Vick)

As an undergraduate biology major at Ithaca College, Gloria Culver didn’t confine her intellectual life to the lab. She was an art history minor and enrolled in many women’s studies courses. She became a C. P. Snow Scholar, a prize named for a British scientist and novelist that honors students whose interests span science and the humanities. Snow believed “that scientists need to be informed about the humanities and the broader impact on society and civilization that science has. Even as a 19- or 20-year-old, I saw and was taught that this is a really important intersection,” says Culver, a biology professor whose research has contributed to understanding how infections might be controlled, with implications for reducing harmful bacteria, including “super-bugs.”

Her appointment as dean was formally celebrated in December.

How do you lead something as varied as the School of Arts & Sciences?

What I really want to do is figure out what makes us one cohesive school. Part of it is the education of global citizens who think deeply about questions and about what it truly means to be human. And I mean that at every level, from the philosophical level down to the molecular and cellular level. I think that’s one defining principle that brings together a lot of what we do.

All of the disciplines are becoming more collaborative and more multidisciplinary and more interactive. We have grown so much in these multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary programs and centers that they now eclipse in Arts & Sciences the number of departments we have. We have 18 departments, but if you use the broadest definition, we probably have 25-plus centers and programs, such as the Frederick Douglass Institute, the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership and the Susan B. Anthony Institute, the Center for Energy & Environment, and the Goergen Institute for Data Science. None is within a single department or even a single discipline. It makes this job exciting because there aren’t boundaries.

What are some of your priorities?

I think it’s clear that the Humanities Center and the Institute for Performing Arts are priorities that have recently been launched but still need much attention to become long-term successes. The center examines human culture in its many forms and offers programs for faculty, students, and the public. And the institute brings together our programs in music, theater, and dance to inspire more students to explore the arts.

Additionally, something I think is hugely important is trying to find a way to support the research of our faculty. And so I’m working with Dave Williams, who’s the dean of research for Arts, Sciences & Engineering, to figure out—given the decrease in funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, all things that affect the School of Arts & Sciences—how we can help our faculty maintain their level of research. How do we help them be competitive for getting the limited number of funds that are available? It’s something that affects every faculty member in this school.

How can you address that?

We have internal funding mechanisms—they’re called “pump primers.” These are grants that are given by Arts, Sciences & Engineering to try to help people get preliminary data or try out new ideas or have meetings with collaborators to come up with research proposals. We also are doing things like boot camps on grant writing. And we’re trying to get analytics on how our departments specifically compare to our peer-group departments. Are there areas where they are doing much better than we are, either in awards or citations or honorifics? And if so, why are they doing better? And what can we do to support the faculty so that they do as well as their peers?

You have to gather the data over time, and so it’s not an easy fix. But if it were easy, everyone would do it. The easy things have been done, and they’ve been done over and over and over again. And so, what can we do differently? How can we be creative?

Part of our strength is our amazing undergraduate population. How do we include them in what we’re doing, such that it gives us a different edge? One place where we’ve been very successful lately is in the National Science Foundation Career Award grants. These are only for junior faculty. They have a big research component, but they absolutely must have a novel teaching component, and that teaching component has got to be undergraduate, generally. I think this is one space where we might have a niche that we can really explore and expand on.

What are other priorities?

I would like to strengthen our faculty. I’d also like to strengthen the experiential learning that our faculty does with our undergraduates. It’s about getting students out there, doing things—research, education abroad, involvement in the community—as opposed to sitting in a lecture hall. I think that’s hugely important.

And this gets to the research support, but I think that we need to find ways of supporting our faculty—endowed professorships, things like that. If we strengthen the faculty generally that will bring everything in the school up. The teaching will be better, the research will be better, and the students involved in research will get more out of it.

In your remarks at your investiture, you said that thinking broadly is the school’s future, and that Arts & Sciences is “grounded in questions of global inquiry and an understanding of what it means to exist.” How so?

I think we rarely speak in broader terms of what we’re really doing and how it addresses what happens in society. But if you look around at the sort of race questions and medical questions and ethical questions and political questions that are asked in the departments here, those are the things that you hear about on NPR every morning, right? Those are the things that the faculty here are addressing and that they’re teaching our students. And I think the ultimate reward of being a successful academic is knowing that you have students who go out in the world and make a difference. And that’s what we do, if we’re good and we’re lucky.

What is your view of falling enrollments nationally in the humanities?

I find it incredibly disturbing that enrollments in the humanities are down so much. I worry about the fate of students who leave universities with very little exposure to the humanities. How are they going to think about world issues and societal issues, and how are they going to come to terms with broad questions if they don’t have the intellectual background to think about them?

What do you like best about the job so far?

My favorite part is the people I get to interact with, and talking to people about their interests. The best part of my job is that I can talk to a linguist, an astronomer, a political scientist, and a chemist—and that’s just the first two hours of my day. How fun is that?

To me, the people and the ideas and trying to figure out how to let people thrive and take these new ideas that they have and work through the next possible steps—it’s fun. I have been quoted saying that I can’t believe I get paid to do this. And there are days when I don’t feel that way. But it’s really an intellectual luxury.

I think the University is poised to do some amazing things, between the strength in our sciences and our engineering school, what we have in music, what we have in the medical school, and the foundation in undergraduate education and arts and sciences. It’s a privilege to be here. What I would hope is that we have the ability to really move some of these ideas forward. Part of that is funds, part of that is motivation, part of that is the willingness of people to do some hard things—but I think we have all of the right pieces.

It’s about doing the difficult things and finding opportunities that have been unrealized and making them happen. And sometimes failing. I guess that’s my research background: you do a lot of experiments. Some of them fail, some of them are ambiguous, and some are successes. And then you take the successes to the next step. And sometimes you pull out the failures and you try again later on, because you have new technology, or new people, or new ideas.

So that’s what I get to do every day.

MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

Inspiring Beauty

Exhibition highlights the historic Ebony Fashion Fair.

magSTATEMENT DESIGNS: The Ebony Fashion Fair showcased the work of haute couture designers such as Tilmann Grawe. (Photo: Courtesy of Johnson Publishing Company)

magWORLD VIEW: The exhibition features 40 ensembles from some of the world’s most prominent designers and design houses, including France’s Emmanuel Ungaro. (Photo: © Chicago Historical Society/John Alderson)

Some of the historic work of world-class designers will be on display at the Memorial Art Gallery this spring, when the museum becomes the only venue in the Northeast to host a national exhibition showcasing the 50-year history of the Ebony Fashion Fair.

Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair brings together 40 ensembles, both haute couture and ready-to-wear, and includes glamorous gowns, feathered coats, and statement designs from the 1960s to the 21st century.

Among the designers represented are Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Pierre Cardin, Patrick Kelly, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood, and Alexander McQueen.

The exhibition is the first to explore the history of the fair, a traveling showcase that helped redefine the concepts of empowerment, pride, and achievement for African Americans. It was the brainchild of Eunice Walker Johnson of Chicago, who with her husband and business partner, John, owned Johnson Publishing Company. Among the company’s ventures was the groundbreaking magazine Ebony.

As part of the exhibition, which opens January 30 and runs through April 24, the Memorial Art Gallery is hosting a series of talks and other activities.

Since opening in 2013 at the Chicago History Museum, the exhibition has traveled to the Museum of Design Atlanta, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Minnesota History Center, and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. After Rochester, it moves to Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, and the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

Details are available at mag.rochester.edu/InspiringBeauty.﻿﻿

NEUROBIOLOGY

Astronauts and Alzheimer’s?

A NASA-funded study explores how space travel affects the brain.

By Mark Michaud

nasaRESEARCH FRONTIER: Understanding the biological risks involved with space travel is a priority for NASA as the agency develops plans for missions to Mars and other areas of outer space. (Photo: John Frassanito and Associates/NASA)

A Rochester neurobiologist is taking Alzheimer’s research where few scientists have gone before.

Kerry O’Banion, a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy and the Del Monte Center for Neuromedicine, has been awarded $1.8 million from NASA to study whether extended deep space travel places astronauts at risk for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

One of nine grants announced by NASA, the study is part of a research effort to better understand and reduce the risks to humans associated with long journeys in deep space, specifically focusing on neurological and cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Understanding the potential health impact of space travel is a priority for NASA as the agency develops future plans for voyages to Mars and other destinations. While space is full of radiation, the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere generally protect the planet and people in low Earth orbit from such particles. Once astronauts leave orbit, they’re exposed to forms of cosmic radiation that cannot always be effectively blocked.

The studies will be conducted in part at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where accelerators can reproduce the radioactive particles found in space.

The Rochester study builds on earlier work by O’Banion and his colleagues, who in a 2012 study showed that exposure to a particular form of space radiation called high-mass, high-charged particles caused biological and cognitive changes in mice.

The results indicated an accelerated risk for the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

STUDENT EXPERIENCES

The Scientist as Storyteller

A biophysics graduate student shares his love of storytelling in venues old and new.

By Kevin Wesley

radioRADIO DAYS: Graduate students Clarence Ling (left), Jon Baker, and Karl Smith rehearse a script for The Bootleggers at the WRUR studios in Todd Union. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

For Karl Smith, the storytelling bug began with a Montgomery Ward No. 22 typewriter purchased for $5 at a moving sale.

Typewriter perched on his lap, the doctoral student in biophysics has become a fixture at the Rochester Public Market, Corn Hill Arts Festival, and other Rochester-area arts-oriented venues. For 10 cents, he crafts a half-sheet-long tale about grandchildren, lost loves, pets, or the absurd. The clacking of keys on paper draws a curious crowd.

“I derive a lot of meaning and joy from making things that other people draw joy from,” says Smith.

As a graduate student at Rochester, Smith has been finding lots of ways to share his love of storytelling. In addition to his peripatetic typewriting, he’s the leader of Rocket Radio Theater, a troupe of radio performers whose core membership includes fellow like-minded medical science graduate students Clarence Ling, Jon Baker, Carolyn Klocke, Bronwyn Lucas, and Matt Payea.

The project began in 2013 with a recording at Smith’s kitchen table. The group, which now records in the studios of campus radio station WRUR, hosts several serial drama podcasts and stand-alone stories created by Smith. Its feature series, The Bootleggers, takes place during prohibition-era Rochester, playing up aspects of local history and landscapes.

The serial’s theme song, “Boy Gone Bad,” was cowritten by Smith and Payea, a PhD candidate in biochemistry, who also helps produce scripts for the show.

“It’s become something for us all to do as friends, and I think that’s probably one of the reasons we’re all still willing to take an hour or two out of the day to yell into a microphone,” says Payea. “Karl deserves all the credit for this, unequivocally. He writes the scripts, organizes us, books the studio, and has bought a lot of the equipment we use.”

In his research as a biophysicist, Smith explores nanoporous silicon membranes in the lab of James McGrath, professor of biomedical engineering. Smith describes the membranes as “coffee filters made of glass that are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.”

But he hopes to continue to combine storytelling and science after graduation, perhaps as a science journalist or a podcaster.

“There’s this weird aspect to this work that people feel very comfortable telling me a lot about their lives,” Smith says. “Every once in a while you get a story where you can add something—give them something they can take with them.”

He’s planning to take his typewriter to the Appalachian Trail for a trek after Rochester, crafting stories as he hikes.

“I want to live in a world,” he says, “where people are standing on street corners writing stories.”

Kevin Wesley is a Rochester-based freelance writer. Carlie Fishgold ’12 contributed to this story. For more about Smith’s storytelling, visit 10centstories.com.﻿﻿

LIVING ART

Celebrating Sauerkraut

Taking an artistic view of food history.

By Kathleen McGarvey

fermentationREINVENTING FERMENTING: An example of engaging in social practice art, students in the workshop create their own vegetable ferments, like sauerkraut and kimchi. Art students use scanners and other devices to capture visual effects from the fermentation process. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

What happens when traditional food practices meet performance art? Something beautiful, judging by the glimmering chopped cabbage that resulted from the recent Open Source Fermentation Workshop at Sage Art Center. EdibleEcologies, a collaborative created by Leila Nadir, lecturer in sustainability studies, and Cary Peppermint, assistant professor of digital art, addresses what the pair calls “industrial amnesia” by reviving endangered food practices and making people active participants in food production rather than passive consumers.

Nadir and Peppermint are a hybrid artist-scholar team—called EcoArtTech—who create environmental art projects. Their work has been featured at a variety of institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the MIT Media Lab.

The fall fermentation workshop involves what the pair term “collaborative hacks” between them—and the students and others they lead in the workshop—fruits, vegetables, microbes, and the operating systems that power networked devices.

It’s a case of microbiology meeting media technology. The project reintroduces people to the idea that bacteria on plants are not only essential to fermentation but also can be beneficial to health. And it uses ethical hacking of free and open-source operating systems to spread the word.

The workshop brought together students from three courses: Food, Media, Literature; Introduction to Digital Art; and Advanced Video Art. The art students scan the vegetables for two to four weeks as they ferment with sensors for pH levels, color, and temperature, data that is then translated into visual effects. Peppermint and Nadir say the goal is to teach people to become less reliant on mass-produced versions of both food and media technologies.

And the whole enterprise wasn’t just nourishing and aesthetically pleasing—there was a whiff of danger, too. Be sure to keep the lid loose on the jars of fermenting vegetables, Nadir and Peppermint implored participants. With a tight lid, gas has nowhere to escape, and fermentations can explode.

Worlds in Words

Open Letter takes a global approach to literature.

Interview by Kathleen McGarvey

translationOPEN BOOK: Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, is a new Open Letter novel. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Open Letter, the University’s nonprofit literary translation press, sold its 100,000th book this fall. The publishing house is also a partner in the University’s program in literary translation studies. Seven years after the press’s founding, and with 78 books in its list, director Chad Post says that he hopes to broaden Open Letter’s geographic perspective even more.

What’s the focus of Open Letter?

We go for a balance of two kinds of authors: classic authors that we know will sell well and new voices. For the well-established authors—like Marguerite Duras, Elsa Morante, and Juan José Saer—we like to bring some of their books back into print and to publish ones that have never been translated.

And we’re trying to find new voices that have never made it into English before. That’s what our NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] funding is for. It’s our “Emerging Voices” series.

Are the emerging voices all contemporary?

Not necessarily. Lúcio Cardoso from Brazil, who has never been published in English before, wrote what’s considered to be the greatest Brazilian gay novel. He died in the 1960s. He was a huge influence in Brazilian literature, and we’re publishing his novel Chronicle of the Murdered House. On the other hand, we’re also publishing Josefine Klougart—a young Danish author who was a finalist for the biggest Nordic prize twice by the age of 30.

But they’re both voices that haven’t been experienced by American readers.

How do you ensure geographic variety?

It’s something we look at. There are certain areas that we’re not good at yet, such as the Middle East and Africa. The systems there are different. For example, there aren’t agents. It’s much more time-intensive than it is when working with someone from France or Germany. So far we’ve published one South African author. And the same with India—there are almost no books that are published in translation in the United States from Indian authors, and that’s another area we’d like to find someone from.

We haven’t hit all the regions yet, but it’s pretty wide. We have Chinese authors, all the western European countries, a lot from Latin America and South America.

We’re doing a series of books as part of a Danish women writers series. In tracking what gets published in translation, I’ve found that in the past eight years, only 26 percent of translated books published in the United States are by female authors. That’s pretty bad. Incredibly low. We’re publishing five books over the next five years in the Danish women writers series. And it looks like we’ll do the same with authors from South Korea.

There’s only one major country over the past eight years that’s had more female authors translated than males, and that’s Finland. And it’s all crime novels.

Are there other presses that do what Open Letter does?

There are a lot of people who publish literature in translation, at least one book—but presses who publish a significant number, there are probably 10. They don’t all do exclusively translations [as Open Letter does], but they do a number of them. Oddly enough, the press that does the most translations of anyone is Amazon Crossing. They published 128 books over the past eight years—and most of that in the past four years.

Has globalization changed things?

There’s not a lot of coverage of translations, but when there is, it tends to be in a different tone than it used to be. It used to be more dismissive—“this isn’t the ‘real’ book,” or, “if you’re going to read translations, here’s a good book.” Now it’s more positive and more generally accepting of international literature as a valuable part of book culture as a whole.

All these books that have broken through—such as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium trilogy”—have shifted the conversation away from “We don’t want to read books from Finland or Sweden” to “These are interesting.” That’s changed the conversation dramatically.

What are the hallmarks of a good translation?

The main thing I look for is voice, that you can feel the voice and style of the original book in the translation. With a good translation, you can hear and feel the voice and know right away that you’re on sure footing as a reader.

It’s easier to note what can be bad about it—a lot of inverted clauses that are mimicking the original syntax, wooden and flat dialogue. When it feels mechanical, it’s just not working. Translations can be completely accurate, but not feel like they’re “written.” They don’t feel organic—and a good translation feels organic when you read it.

What’s ahead for Open Letter?

We’ve had a lot of authors we’ve worked on who have won big awards recently, and I think one of these years we’re going to have a book that sells 8,000 copies. We’re in the right position to be able to do that. It’s nothing you can predict. Things just have to lock into place right, and when that happens, it will be really important.

And I think we’ll hit more regions of the world. But mostly we’ll continue to help train translators through the University, working with students and getting them out into the workforce. A lot of our translators have had success recently, and that’s gratifying—getting published, getting grants, awards, and residencies. They’re the things you need to do to move from a college graduate who does translations to a career translator whom people automatically go to. A number of them have fallen into that category.

You published Voices from Chernobyl by this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Svetlana Alexievich, when you were with Dalkey Archive Press. Any lessons for Open Letter in that?

A Nobel Prize isn’t something you can really plan or prepare for. I think if you look for high-quality books from a vast number of voices and areas, you’re just going to stumble upon the right one at the right point in time.﻿﻿

Reading Between the Lines

sewardFINE LINES: A digital humanities project is bringing together history students and retired volunteers to work with correspondence from the William Henry Seward Papers, like this page from an 1822 letter. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

In an unusual cross-generation archival collaboration, volunteers from the Highlands at Pittsford—a University-based retirement community—and students under the guidance of Thomas Slaughter, the Arthur R. Miller Professor of History, are joining forces to transcribe and annotate family papers from the William Henry Seward Papers. The collection of correspondence, legal papers, diaries, account books, and manuscript records of Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state was bequeathed to the University by his grandson. Slaughter and his students are creating the Seward Family Digital Archive to provide a searchable public website with materials from Rochester’s collection—the University’s most frequently cited manuscript collection—the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York, and a small private collection still held by the family. But reading handwritten script doesn’t come easily to the digital generation. So they’re partnering with retired volunteers for whom a letter written in cursive is familiar terrain. A letter from Lazette Miller Worden, sister of Seward’s wife, Frances, (above) shows the system of vertical and horizontal writing that correspondents in the period sometimes used “when they had a lot to say, ran out of paper, and wanted to get the letter in the next mail,” Slaughter says.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Team Develops Tool to Make Predictions about Breast Cancer

discoverCELLULAR SITES: Using a microscope built by a Rochester professor, researchers were able to predict how malignant cells would spread. (Photo: Courtesy of Edwin Brown)

A Rochester biomedical engineering lab may have discovered a new way to judge whether breast cancer cells are likely to spread.

In a paper published in the journal BMC Cancer, Edward Brown, associate professor of biomedical engineering, reported that by studying how laser light scatters as malignant cells move, he and his team were able to independently predict metastasis-free survival and overall survival among 125 tissue samples.

Brown, who built the multiphoton microscope used to analyze the tumors, says the goal of his research “is to aid in treatment decisions by complementing the information that’s already available, to help women avoid being over-treated.” For the study, he analyzed samples from patients in the Netherlands. The women, with an average age of 52, each were diagnosed with a common form of early-stage breast cancer and were not treated with chemotherapy. Scientists followed the cases for 15 years and correlated the outcomes to the optical signature of each tumor.

Brown’s microscope shines lasers on cancerous tissue and then allows scientists to study how the light scatters as malignant cells move.

Because the scattered light patterns can seemingly predict how cancer will behave later on, Brown says the data could perhaps add new information to what is currently provided to patients at diagnosis.

Brown’s lab has been working for a decade to improve upon diagnostic technology.

—Leslie Orr

Harnessing the Brain’s Immune System against Alzheimer’s

A new study suggests that the brain’s immune system could potentially be harnessed to help clear the amyloid plaques that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, Kerry O’Banion, a professor of neurobiology and anatomy, and a Medical Center team focused on a type of cell that serves as one of the central nervous system’s first lines of defense against infection and injury. The cells, called microglia, are typically activated to control inflammation, destroy pathogens, clean up debris from dead or damaged cells, and seal off injury sites.

For the study, the researchers tricked the microglia into an anti-inflammatory response to see if the cells would help clear amyloid beta from brain tissue.

Once the microglia were mobilized in models of Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers observed a more than 60 percent reduction in amyloid beta in the brain.

“While we still need to fully understand the complexity and potential unintended consequences of this approach, it is clear that microglia play an important role in the removal of amyloid beta from the brain and may represent a novel approach to treating this disease,” says O’Banion. —Mark Michaud

Finding a Better Alternative to Ethanol

Work by a Rochester chemistry professor may point toward more efficient fuel additives to replace ethanol in the engines of motor vehicles.

In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, William Jones, the C. F. Houghton Professor of Chemistry, reported that he and his research team converted the common fuel additive ethanol to butanol in a process that’s highly efficient and that resulted in fewer unwanted by-products.

Though commonly used as a fuel additive, ethanol has a lower energy output and can be more corrosive to engines than other forms of alcohol molecules.

The new research puts a spotlight on butanol, a form of alcohol that can be derived from ethanol but has several advantages over ethanol. “Butanol is much better than ethanol as an alternative to gasoline,” says Jones. “It yields more energy, is less volatile, and doesn’t cause damage to engines.”

Although both ethanol and butanol molecules have a single oxygen atom, the higher carbon-to-oxygen ratio in butanol gives it a higher energy content, while its larger size make it less volatile.

By introducing the catalyst iridium into a chemical reaction that’s often used to produce butanol, Jones was able to increase the amount of ethanol converted to butanol by almost 25 percent over current methods.

—Peter Iglinski

Data Mining Instagram: Teenage Drinking Patterns

Could Instagram offer a novel way of monitoring teen drinking habits?

A team of researchers from Rochester report that the data behind the popular photo-oriented social media application can expose patterns of underage drinking more cheaply and faster than conventional surveys and can help uncover important demographic information about teen consumption.

The researchers say they hope that exposing the patterns could help lead to more effective intervention.

Jiebo Luo, a professor of computer science, and colleagues presented their work at the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data in Santa Clara, California.

Studying the social media behavior of underage drinkers who “are willing to share their alcohol consumption experience” in social media allows researchers to observe the activity passively in an “undisturbed state,” the team notes.

Using techniques they pioneered that teach computers to extract information from images on the Internet, Luo and his team analyzed the profile faces of Instagram users to get sufficiently accurate guesses for age, gender, and race.

The researchers found that underage alcohol consumption, as with adults, happens more on weekends and holidays and at the end of the day. They found no strong bias toward one gender for alcohol consumption—the activity matched the gender ratio of Instagram users.

—Leonor Sierra

Surprise! It’s Pi!

Rochester scientists have found further proof of pi’s omnipresence in math and science.

In a paper published in the Journal of Mathematical Physics, Tamar Friedmann, a visiting assistant professor of mathematics, and Carl Hagen, a professor of physics, reported that they found the famous mathematical constant lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the energy states of the hydrogen atom.

The calculations uncovered a classic 17th-century formula for pi, known as the Wallis formula, that defines pi as the product of an infinite string of ratios made up of integers.

“The value of pi has taken on a mythical status, in part, because it’s impossible to write it down with 100 percent accuracy,” says Friedmann, “It cannot even be accurately expressed as a ratio of integers, and is, instead, best represented as a formula.”

Through a series of calculations, the two were able to obtain values for a series of energy states and compare those values with the values obtained by Danish physicist Niels Bohr almost a century ago. By comparing the ratio of Bohr’s values to how the values obtained with their calculations changed as higher and higher energy levels were taken into account, they found that the ratio yielded—effectively—the Wallis formula for pi.

Mathematician Moshe Machover of King’s College London calls the finding a “cunning piece of magic.”

“This derivation of pi is a surprise of the familiar, much like a magician’s trick,” says Machover. “A child who sees a trick done for the first time may be only surprised. But an adult, who has seen numerous tricks over the years, experiences both surprise and familiarity.” —Peter Iglinski

Hark! What’s That Distance?

It’s an axiom of weather watching that you can count the seconds between a lightning flash and the rumble of thunder to estimate your distance from the atmospheric source of the light.

But new Rochester research indicates that your brain can also detect and process sound delays that are too short to be noticed consciously and that the human brain uses such unconscious information to make finely tuned adjustments when estimating distances.

In a study published in PLOS One, Duje Tadin, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a team of researchers reported that humans can unconsciously notice and make use of sound delays as short as 40 milliseconds, about the time it takes for a sound to travel 40 feet.

In experiments using projected three-dimensional images, the researchers found that people consistently calibrated the perceived distance of an object if it was connected to an audible sound, coordinating both senses to make careful adjustments to understand what they were seeing.

“Much of the world around us is audiovisual,” Tadin says. “Although humans are primarily visual creatures, our research shows that estimating relative distance is more precise when visual cues are supported with corresponding auditory signals. Our brains recognize those signals even when they are separated from visual cues by a time that is too brief to consciously notice.”

—Monique Patenaude﻿﻿

GLOBAL ROCHESTER

Syria

A Rochester junior organizes support for victims of his homeland’s civil war.

globalHELPING HAND: Omar Soufan ’17 (above), with roommate Ibrahim Mohammad ’17, has organized a rehabilitation center in Lebanon to help wounded Syrian refugees. Soufan was raised in Syria. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Omar Soufan ’17 has spent the past two years helping his fellow Syrians recover from the trauma of his homeland’s internecine civil war.

Rochester and Syria

People

3 alumni living in Syria in fall 2015

4 students from Syria in fall 2015

Syria Consortium

The University has identified and supported students from Syria as part of the Institute for International Education’s Syria Consortium for Higher Education in Crisis. Rochester has been one of the few research universities from the Association of American Universities to participate since the consortium’s launch. The first two Syrian refugee students enrolled in August 2012.

Historical Journey

Henry Augustus Ward (1834–1906)—a professor of natural sciences at Rochester from 1861 to 1875—traveled through the Middle East, including the Syrian Desert, in 1855. He chronicled his experiences in a diary that’s now held by Special Collections in Rush Rhees Library. In the pencil-written journal, Ward describes the people, historical sites, and—fittingly—the natural phenomena that he found, writing in one instance that the Syrian “desert spreads out like an ocean on either side while we pass from hill to hill.”﻿﻿

Along with roommate and friend Ibrahim Mohammad ’17, the biomedical engineering major from Syria has organized a rehabilitation center in Lebanon. The facility, sponsored by the Syrian American Medical Society, tends to wounded Syrian refugees, many suffering from paralysis and amputation as a result of injuries suffered in the war.

“You don’t need a reason to help your people,” says Soufan, a Renaissance and Global Scholarship recipient. “When your country is literally burning to the ground in front of you, don’t expect other people to help if you don’t do something about it yourself.”

So far, Soufan and Mohammad have raised $3,700, along with $2,200 in donated equipment from a defunct medical facility. According to the Syrian Medical Society, which also provides some financial support for the initiative, more than 1.4 million Syrians needed medical treatment in 2014 alone. With one physical therapist and four doctors, Soufan’s clinic receives about 15 patients per day.

Last August, Soufan traveled to Lebanon to supervise the installment of the equipment. He also served as a translator between a psychiatrist visiting from the United Kingdom and patients suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and he traveled briefly to Syria.

Soufan was born in Chicago in 1994, when his mother was visiting her brother, an anesthesiologist. His entire family is from Syria, and that’s where he grew up, along with his younger brother and sister.

He returned to America in 2011 and enrolled at the College of DuPage outside of Chicago. After two years, he enrolled at Rochester.

There, he met Mohammad, a Palestinian refugee living in Lebanon. Together, they are doing what they can to help strangers in need more than 5,000 miles away.

“It’s our job to find the solution,” Soufan said. “Not someone else’s.”

—Jim Mandelaro

ASK THE ARCHIVIST

Do We Have to Swim?

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

ataIN THE SWIM: Coach Speed Speegle (center) and members of the men’s swimming team line up poolside for a photo in the 1949 Interpres. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

U of R required—and maybe still does—each graduate to swim the length of the pool. I did not know how to swim and was assigned to swimming coach Roman (Speed) Speegle’s swim class. He dreamt that one day, someone he taught how to swim would make his swim team. I became his experiment. The frosh swim team had a meet against a Rochester high school team. I was chosen to swim the backstroke segment of the 200-yard medley. By the time I finished my 50-yard segment, the high school team had finished their 200. Needless to say, I did not make the team or fulfill the dream.—David Rosenthal ’52, Palm Desert, California.

Rosenthal directed the 1952 Quilting Club production Andean Love Call.

Taking a deep dive into this letter, the question of when the University’s swimming proficiency test began and ended bobs to the surface, along with a few laps involving pools and a short course about physical education through the decades.

In 1914, the American Red Cross began teaching water safety; in support, numerous colleges in the United States started to require a swim test for students.

Need History?

Do you have a question about University history? Email it to rochrev@rochester.edu. Please put “Ask the Archivist” in the subject line.﻿﻿

With the opening of the pool-equipped Alumni Gymnasium on the Prince Street Campus in 1900, the University hired Edward Green as its first full-time physical education instructor. According to the October 17, 1900, Campus (precursor to today’s Campus Times): “The freshmen and sophomores will be required to exercise three hours a week for two college years, while the juniors and seniors will put in two hours a week.”

Irene Phillips became acting physical director for women in 1909. Women students had twice-a-week sessions “to develop the body symmetrically, maintain and improve its health, and so educate the nervous system that the body may become the well-trained servant of the mind.” Swedish and German gymnastics, basketball, tennis, and aesthetic and folk dancing were offered.

The 1917–18 course bulletin is the first to include a notice that, “Every junior and senior will be required to learn to swim before completing her course.”

Ironically, there was no pool in the Anthony Memorial Gymnasium, the women’s athletics facility dedicated in 1914 to honor Susan B. Anthony and her sister Mary. Arrangements were made for the women to use the pool at the YWCA instead.

By 1922, the men also had to pass a swimming test. Speed Speegle arrived in 1926, and Hazel (Gram) Wilbraham, Class of 1927, was hired right after her graduation. In 1945, the alumnae, led by Mrs. Dexter Perkins (née Wilma Lord, Class of 1918), launched a campaign for a pool of their own. Funds were raised through dances, barber shop quartet competitions, and, of course, synchronized swimming shows.

Ultimately, the efforts were unsuccessful, but the move to the River Campus in 1955 brought the construction of Spurrier Gymnasium, named in 1974 for Merle (Spurt) Spurrier, professor of physical education, with the Wilbraham Pool. The current Speegle-Wilbraham Aquatic Center was dedicated in 1982.

The synchronized swimming group took the name “Doll-Fins” in 1958, and put on annual shows—in the men’s pool—with titles including “Water Wonderland” (1958), “Scents and Nonsense” (1963), “Pooh with Apologies” (1965), and “Peter Pan” (1966).

In 1972, Title IX of the Educational Amendment, which prohibited sex discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving any type of federal financial aid, was signed into law.

Our peer institutions began dropping physical education as an academic offering, and the freshmen of the Class of 1978 would be the last to have the requirement (at least according to the course bulletin); the swim test seems to have ended in 1971.

For more on the intercollegiate women’s athletics program at the University, see “The Opportunity to Do the Things We Love,” Rochester Review, November–December 2012. To hear excerpts from the Quilting Club’s production of Andean Love Song, visit: livinghistory.lib.rochester.edu/qc1952.

Neutrino Breakthrough: Physics Team Earns International Recognition

inrev_inbriefDETECTION STORY: Buried a kilometer underground in Japan, the Super-Kamiokande is one of the largest neutrino detectors on Earth. (Photo: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo)

Several Rochester faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students received international recognition for their work to understand neutrinos, subatomic particles that may hold a key to why the universe has mass.

As part of a Japanese-based team known as the T2K Collaboration, physics professors Steven Manly and Kevin McFarland, postdocs Phil Rodrigues and Daniel Ruterbories, and former graduate student Melanie Day were among the laureates who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

The prize, set up by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner together with well-known entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, is valued at $3 million. This year’s award was shared with four other international experimental collaborations. The committee for the physics prize included Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter, and other past winners of the prize.

In experiments using a proton accelerator to create an intense beam of neutrinos directed at the Super-Kamiokande detector in a mine deep in a mountain 295 kilometers away, the T2K team was the first to demonstrate that one type of neutrino can change into another type. In physics, the three types of neutrinos—muon, electron, and tau—are known as “flavors,” and the change from one flavor to another is an “oscillation.”

By demonstrating that muon neutrinos can oscillate to electron neutrinos, the team showed that neutrinos have mass, a discovery that opens the door to further study about why the universe as a whole has mass, McFarland says.

“It may be that without the neutrino, the matter that we and the Earth around us are made of would have been gobbled up by antimatter in the early universe,” McFarland says. “We may owe the neutrinos a big ‘thank you.’ ”

The T2K Collaboration has included more than 500 members from 64 institutions in 12 countries.

The Rochester team currently working on the experiment also includes graduate student Konosuke Iwamoto.

Physics professor Arie Bodek, senior researcher Howard Budd, and graduate student Hyup Woo Lee are past contributors who are still at Rochester.

New York Renews Funding for Emerging Sciences Program

The Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences (CEIS) has been renewed as one of New York’s Centers for Advanced Technology (CAT), a recognition that includes $9.2 million in state funding over the next 10 years.

One of 15 CATs in New York supported by NYSTAR, a division of Empire State Development, CEIS is designed to spur technology-based research and economic development in New York, as well as to promote national and international research collaboration and innovation, and better leverage the state’s research expertise and funding with investments from the federal government, foundations, businesses, venture capital firms, and other entities. In the past 10 years, CEIS has provided more than $4 million to magnify the impact of more than 200 corporate-sponsored research projects at Rochester, RIT, Cornell, Columbia, and other partner universities. The funding has generated $740 million in direct economic impact and created or retained at least 440 jobs.

University Joins Pulmonary Fibrosis Care Network

The Medical Center has been selected to join a national network dedicated to treating and researching pulmonary fibrosis, a respiratory disease that affects about 200,000 Americans a year.

UR Medicine’s Pulmonary Division was selected to be part of the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation Care Center Network, a multidisciplinary effort designed to provide patient care through teams of experts in pulmonary medicine, rheumatology, radiology, and pathology. The network includes 40 medical centers in 26 states.

Also known as lung scarring, pulmonary fibrosis can severely reduce the ability of the lungs to transfer oxygen into the bloodstream, causing shortness of breath.

While many forms have specific causes and are treatable, a common form, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, is difficult to treat and has no cure.

Rochester: Bicycle Friendly

A national program to promote and encourage bicycling on college and university campuses has recognized Rochester.

The University received a Bronze Award from the League of American Bicyclists as part of the organization’s Bicycle Friendly University program. The effort recognizes institutions of higher education for promoting and providing a more bikeable campus for students, staff, and visitors. Applicants are evaluated on efforts to promote bicycling in five areas: engineering, encouragement, education, enforcement, and evaluation and planning. Rochester was one of 49 new and renewing campuses recognized this year, according to the organization, which has identified 127 bicycle-friendly universities in 42 states.

Golisano Children’s Hospital Debuts Dual Imaging System

inrev_inbriefS. S. ROCHESTER: Golisano Children’s Hospital became the first children’s hospital in the country to take medical images with technology that combines two imaging processes into one device. (Photo: Medical Center)

Golisano Children’s Hospital has became the first children’s hospital in the country to use a new medical imaging approach designed to reduce radiation exposure while allowing for two different types of measurement to be taken at the same time.

The hospital, which officially opened last July, administered the first scan with an integrated PET-MRI this fall. The scanner combines two common imaging procedures—positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging—into one device.

The combination allows young patients to undergo only one treatment. At the same time, the device provides clinicians with precise information about metabolic functions as well as three-dimensional images about particular areas of a patient’s body.

Labeled the “S. S. Rochester” and decorated to look like a pirate ship, the device is designed to be welcoming and child-friendly. It’s housed in an imaging suite that also features a computerized tomography scanner decorated to resemble a lighthouse.

Regional Hospitals Join UR Medicine

UR Medicine, the University’s network of clinical health care affiliates, now includes five hospitals. That’s after Jones Memorial Hospital in Wellsville and Noyes Health in Dansville officially joined the network.

Approved by each organization’s board, the affiliation agreements were announced at ceremonies at each hospital this fall.

The move expands UR Medicine’s network to five hospitals, including Strong Memorial and Highland Hospitals, both in Rochester, and Thompson Health in Canandaigua.

The addition of the new hospitals is part of a regional effort to strengthen health care services for patients across the Southern Tier of New York.﻿﻿

HIGHLIGHTS

Winning in the Winter

Women’s swimming and diving, basketball jump out to fast start

Dennis O’Donnell

highlightsHISTORIC HONORS: Forward Michelle Relin ’16 (above) and goalkeeper Tara Lamberti ’16 became the first field hockey players to earn first-team All-American honors at Rochester. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

The women’s swimming and diving team won a seventh straight Liberty League championship while the men’s team had two outstanding performers. Women’s basketball is back in the top 25 polls while the men are getting top-notch scoring performances. Squash is nationally ranked and the track and field teams have qualified some individuals for regional championships.

Here’s a roundup as the winter season was getting under way.

Winter

Women’s swimming and diving: The Yellowjackets bested host RPI by nearly 200 points to win their seventh consecutive swimming and diving crown. Individually, Vicky Luan ’16 was part of two Liberty League records and one pool record. She won the 50-yard freestyle, breaking the league record, and swam on the 400-yard free relay with Emily Simon ’17, Natalie Wong ’19, and Becca Selznick ’19 which also broke a league record. The quartet also set an RPI pool record in the 200-yard free relay. Alex Veech ’17 set a Rochester record and posted an NCAA provisional qualifying time in the 100-yard breaststroke. Jen Enos ’17 won the league 1,650-yard freestyle for the third straight year, and Emily Simon ’17 set a league mark in the 100-yard freestyle. On the diving board, Danielle Neu ’17 posted qualifying scores on both the one- and three-meter boards for the NCAA regional diving qualifier meet scheduled for late February.

Did You Pitch a Perfect Game? No-hitter?

The NCAA Statistics Service is trying to produce a database of all perfect games and no-hitters in college baseball and softball.

While Rochester’s softball records are up-to-date—four no-hitters, including a perfect game—because the varsity sport debuted in 1998, the records for baseball, which date to the 19th century, are a little less complete.

If you have information on a no-hitter or perfect game in baseball at Rochester, please email the Athletic Communications Office with the information (year, opponent, score, location, and, if you know it, the name of the pitcher).

Email the information to SportsInfo@rochester.edu.﻿﻿

Men’s swimming and diving: Gunnar Zemering ’18 and Elliott Schwinn ’19 took home the primary league awards. Rochester finished second behind RPI, posting twice as many points as third-place RIT. Zemering was named the men’s Swimmer of the Meet, one year after he won the men’s Rookie of the Meet honor. He had three individual wins and two relay wins in his seven races. He set a league record by winning the 100- and the 50-yard freestyle. He swam on the winning 400-yard free relay that set a league mark as well. The other swimmers were Danny Aronson ’19, Ryan Berger ’17, and Dylan Sharkey ’16.

Schwinn won the 1,650-yard freestyle, setting a league record, posting an NCAA provisional qualifying time, and breaking the existing Rochester record by 22 seconds. He set league records in the 400-yard intermediate medley and the 500-yard freestyle.

Women’s basketball: The Yellowjackets opened the season with six straight wins and stood at 7–1 overall in mid-December. Al Leslie ’18 was named the UAA Player of the Week after getting 25 points and 21 rebounds in a three-point win at Ithaca. Rochester had four straight games against teams which made the NCAAs last year, losing a close battle to Geneseo in the Wendy’s Classic, then topping St. John Fisher for third place. The third game came against Ithaca and the fourth awaited just before New Year’s in the San Juan (Puerto Rico) Shootout. The opponent was Montclair University, which reached the Final Four last season. Rochester was ranked 21st in the media poll and 23rd in the coaches’ poll at the break.

Men’s basketball: Jared Seltzer ’16 and Sam Borst-Smith ’17 formed a potent one-two scoring combination for the men who won six of their first 10 games. Rochester won the Chuck Resler Tournament and reached the championship game of the final Wendy’s College Classic before Roberts Wesleyan prevailed, 79–77. Seltzer went on a torrid scoring stretch, getting 66 points in three games to accompany 34 rebounds. He was averaging 19.0 points per game at the break. Borst-Smith, who missed one game with an injured hand, was scoring at a 16.9 clip.

Men’s track and field: Brant Crouse ’17 (500 meters), Jon Kuberka ’16 (long jump), and Boubacar Diallo ’16 (triple jump) all qualified in their events for the ECAC championships in March.

Women’s track and field: Alexandra Goldman ’17 qualified for ECACs in both the 20-pound weight throw and the shot put in the season’s first meet. Emily VanDenburgh ’16 qualified in the long jump as did Amanda Hall ’16. Graduate student Yvette Igbokwe qualified in the 60-meter dash.

Squash: The Yellowjackets were 2–1 in their first three matches, defeating Drexel and Princeton, but falling to a vastly improved Pennsylvania team.

Fall

Women’s cross country qualified for the NCAA Division III national championship race as a team for the first time since 1987. The Yellowjackets finished 14th in a field of 32 squads. In the regional race, Rochester was 5th of 37 teams. Catherine Knox ’16 and Anne Peterson ’17 took home all-regional honors.

Field hockey earned an NCAA bid, won a first-round home game, and upended a higher-ranked team to get to the national quarterfinals. Rochester defeated Misericordia, 2–1, in the first round at Fauver. Michelle Relin ’16 scored two goals in the last 10 minutes to rally Rochester.

In a Sweet 16 match with Salisbury University, the 20th-ranked Yellowjackets defeated No. 7 Salisbury, 3–2, when Callie Fisher ’17 broke a 2–2 tie with seven seconds remaining. Rochester finished 18-6 after an Elite Eight loss to fourth-ranked Ursinus College in the quarterfinals.

Dennis O’Donnell is director of athletics communications for the Department of Athletics and Recreation.﻿

ALL-AMERICANS

Four Earn National Honors

Two football players and two field hockey players received national honors this fall.

In football, Matt Mender ’16, a biomedical engineering major from Glens Falls, New York, and Jeff Weinfeld ’16, a chemical engineering major from Newton, Massachusetts, were elected NCAA Division III Academic All-Americans by the College Sports Information Directors of America.

Mender, a defensive tackle, was elected to the first team, and Weinfeld, a punter, was elected to the second team. The 2015 season was the second consecutive Academic All-America honor for Mender.

In field hockey, Tara Lamberti ’16, a psychology major from Penfield, New York, and Michelle Relin ’16, an optical engineering major from Lititz, Pennsylvania, were named Division III All-Americans, an honor chosen by the National Field Hockey Coaches Association and sponsored by Longstreth.

Lamberti, a goalkeeper, and Relin, a forward, both earned first-team honors, becoming the first Yellowjacket field hockey players to earn first-team accolades and the first to earn multiple All-American honors. Both were named to the second team in 2014.﻿﻿

BY THE NUMBERS

Milestone Season

Men’s soccer team posts program’s 600th victory, 200th for head coach.

appleHIGH MARKS: Chris Apple ’92 coached the men’s soccer team to the program’s 600th win. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Chris Apple ’92 Men’s Soccer Coach

202 career coaching victories, including a record at Rochester of 183–54–43

16 number of wins in a single season (2005), the most in the program’s history

14 number of years as head coach

9 number of NCAA Division III tournament appearances

6 highest national ranking at the end of a season (2009), the highest-ever finish for the Yellowjackets

5 number of UAA championships as a coach (plus three as a player)

3 number of players who have been named UAA Player of the Year under his coaching

4 number of times he and his staff have been named UAA Coaching Staff of the Year

2 number of times he was named All-American as a player

1 number of times he was named Academic All-American as a player﻿﻿

When Jeff Greblick ’17 put in a key goal midway through the second period of Rochester’s game against Moravian College in late October, the junior from Lagrangeville, New York, did more than ensure a 3–0 victory.

The win also marked the 600th for the men’s soccer program, putting Rochester among only eight NCAA Division III programs to reach that milestone. Since 1934, the program’s record is 601–335–109, a .627 all-time winning percentage.

In September, the team also notched the 200th career win for coach Chris Apple ’92, whose record at Rochester is 183–54–43.

He has led Rochester since 2001, when the All-American and Academic All-American Yellowjacket returned to his alma mater after coaching stints at Notre Dame and North Carolina Wesleyan.

‘A Vision for What Nursing Could Be’

Five decades ago, founding School of Nursing Dean Loretta Ford came up with an idea that has helped transform the face of health care.

By Nora Hicks

nursingFOUNDER: As the School of Nursing’s founding dean, Loretta Ford led the program for more than a decade (above), helping to advance the role of nurse practitioner, a history that she recounted on campus this fall (below). (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

As one of the few health care professionals serving a large section of mountainous and rural Colorado in the 1940s and ’50s, Loretta (Lee) Ford realized that she had to be a bit of a “Lone Ranger.”

Trained as a public health nurse, she was often the only source of care for children and families, making sure they received immunizations, checking in on nursing homes, collecting health statistics, and even testing wells.

“I was very used to being fairly independent in terms of my decisions, but I learned [how to do] that in the hospital,” Ford says.

nursing (Photo: Matt Wittmeyer for the School of Nursing)

When necessary, she consulted physicians, but by the 1960s, physicians, especially in rural areas, were becoming scarce.

“There was a shortage of physicians,” Ford says. “The shortage was a good thing because it gave us the opportunity to try something new.”

That new development turned out to change much of the face of health care during the past 50 years. In 1965, Ford, along with Henry Silver at the University of Colorado Medical Center, introduced the model of the nurse practitioner.

Connecting the patient-oriented focus of skilled nursing practice with advanced education in both clinical care and research, the new model of nursing professional was designed to better meet the needs of patients as well as allow nurses to practice to the full extent of their capabilities.

Kathy Rideout ’95W (EdD), dean of the School of Nursing, says the idea helped transform the roles of nurses. “In that next level of care, you would have individuals who would assess, diagnose, treat, and manage patients in a variety of different settings and with a variety of different issues.”

When Ford was named the founding dean of the School of Nursing in 1972, she brought her forward-looking outlook for the profession, Rideout says.

nursingNEW MODEL: First introduced in 1965, the role of nurse practitioner brought together practice and education in a way that has helped transform health care. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

“With her came her vision and her plans for what nursing could be, recognizing what it was and recognizing the strength within each one of us to move the profession in a whole different direction.”

The school celebrated the anniversary and Ford’s role in leading the transformation during a series of events this fall hosted by the Margaret D. Sovie Center for Advanced Practice. The center is named in recognition of the late Margaret Sovie, who as director of nursing at Strong Memorial Hospital worked with Ford to integrate advanced practice nursing into acute care. That approach, known as the unification model of education, practice, and research, changed how health care facilities support professional nursing practice.

“The marriage of education and practice was vital to nursing in Rochester,” Ford says. “Rochester had the philosophy and the interdisciplinary aspects to develop a team approach and establish a system that was receptive and responsive to new ideas.”

Today, there about 200,000 nurse practitioners in the United States. More than 400 nurse practitioners are employed at Strong Memorial Hospital, and the School of Nursing offers master’s programs that prepare nurse practitioners in six different specialties.

Julie Berkhof, regional clinical leader at Wilmot Cancer Institute and a graduate of the School of Nursing’s family nurse practitioner program, says she takes pride in being an integral part of the patient care team.

“Nurse practitioners make everything possible. To be a part of the patient story is huge, and if you interviewed any of the nurse practitioners here they would say that’s the best part of their job. It all flexes based on the needs of patients, first and foremost.”

As for Ford, she hopes members of the profession continue to challenge themselves to contribute in new ways to improving health care. As the landscape of care changes, whether that’s driven by federal policies, new technology, more personalized approaches, or advancements in data gathering, nurses must bring energy, imagination, and courage to their work, she says.

“We have opportunities for nurses to be innovative, to be inquiring, to ask some really tough questions.”

Arts for All

A new Institute for Performing Arts aims to bring the arts to all students.

By Kathleen McGarvey

ipaSTAGECRAFT: Theater students perform the climactic final scene of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma, directed by guest artist Gisela Cardenas. (Photo: Yeoman Photography for the International Theatre Program)

The theater in Todd Union is a familiar home to students in the International Theatre Program. And musicians are well acquainted with the stage of Strong Auditorium.

But the performing arts are essential to students from every major, whether they opt for a place on the stage or a seat in the audience.

That’s the thinking behind the creation of the Institute for Performing Arts.

“We’re trying to make the performing arts and the humanities available to every student,” says institute director John Covach, professor in the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Music, a professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music, and founding director of the University’s Institute for Popular Music.

“A majority of students participating in performing arts on the River Campus are non-majors,” says Gloria Culver, dean of Arts & Sciences. “We hope the institute will make the entry into performance, collaboration, and the creation of new work even easier for a greater number of students, as well as provide new resources and space for students and faculty to develop their artistic interests.”

The institute’s long-term aims include collaborations with the Eastman School and the Memorial Art Gallery.

Within the first year, Covach says, the institute will work to meet several goals: raising funds so that every student can attend all events sponsored by the music department and the theater and dance programs without a ticket charge; providing additional funding to cover the cost of students traveling to and attending performances put on in the community by arts groups with which the institute has entered into a partnership—including the Rochester Broadway Theatre League, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Geva Theatre Center, and Garth Fagan Dance; beefing up trips to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, and perhaps adding trips to the Shaw Festival, also in Ontario, and to New York City; and installing informational kiosks on campus to heighten the visibility of the performing arts.

In the longer term, Covach hopes to improve the performing arts facilities on the campus, to allow for more ambitious performances.

“The Institute for Performing Arts is an advocate for the performing arts,” he says. “We don’t control what performances get put on. My job is to facilitate cooperation and to make sure everybody is aware of what’s happening and we get as much student participation as possible.” He also works with the surrounding area’s arts community.

It’s a matter of turning the spotlight on a performing arts scene that is already “vital and exciting,” he says.

International Theatre Program

The heart of the theater program is “learning through doing,” says Nigel Maister, the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director of the International Theatre Program. Through it, all undergraduates in the University have the opportunity to work with professional artists in theater in staging ambitious and challenging dramatic works. But for students who want to explore theater without being in a production, an increasing range of classes is also offered.

ipa HISTORICAL HITS: Kurt Li ’18 and Jeremy Staffa ’18 (far right) perform as part of the Rock Repertory Ensemble, a group for guitarists, bassists, drummers, keyboard players, singers, and sometimes wind and brass players. (Photo: Vasiliy Baizuk for Rochester Review)

Rock Repertory Ensemble

Established in 2009 by John Covach, professor of music, and directed by Christopher Meeker, adjunct instructor of music, the ensemble performs historical rock music, with an emphasis on music from 1955 to the early 1990s. Students perform each song as it was recorded, and everything is learned by ear. The selected songs broadly represent rock history. “We want to push [students] out of their comfort zone and challenge them musically,” Covach says.

ipaSPIRITUAL SONGS: Director Thomas Green (opposite) leads a rehearsal of the Gospel Choir in Lander Auditorium. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Gospel Choir

In 1976, Campus Ministries created the UR Gospel Choir. Forty years later, it’s still going strong. Now a credited ensemble in the music department, the choir that began with just eight students has a membership of 35 singers. The group performs spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs frequently on campus and in the Greater Rochester community. Thomas Green has directed the choir for the past year.

ipaALL TOGETHER: Darius Colson ’17 plays his violin as a member of the Chamber Orchestra (left), which performs music from the baroque to contemporary periods in four concerts each year. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Chamber Orchestra

The chamber orchestra—led by David Harman, professor of music and director of orchestral activities—features musicians from the River Campus who are selected each year through competitive auditions. They come from a wide variety of majors, and many are in the sciences. Over the past 20 years, the orchestra has toured Chile, Italy, Canada, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands. The Department of Music also sponsors a 100-member symphony orchestra, whose membership is drawn from River Campus students and the wider Rochester community.

ipaIN MOTION: Students in the course Contemporary Dance: Context and Practice (also below right, opposite) learn technique and theory as well as dance history and current trends. The dance program offers a robust guest artist residency series and an annual public dance festival. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Program of Dance and Movement

The Program of Dance and Movement provides experiential and theoretical study of dance, emphasizing dance’s many facets: a form of art, creative process, and community building; a dimension of self-awareness; and a contemplative practice. Faculty, led by director Missy Pfohl Smith, draw on practices and techniques from around the world.

Play Nation

Video games aren’t just entertainment. They’re driving computer technology, challenging conventions of storytelling, and finding their way into the classroom.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

gamingSTORYTELLING: Jayne Lammers (left), a former high school English teacher and an assistant professor of teaching and curriculum at the Warner School, and Kristana Textor, a second-year doctoral student advised by Lammers, study the use of video games as teaching tools. Initially a skeptic, Lammers discovered that the life-simulation game the Sims—in which players create characters, assign them traits, and create stories around them—could engage students in writing and learning about narrative. Textor, long a video game enthusiast, sees video games as cultural products useful in teaching students to examine media and storytelling critically. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It was mid-summer, and Kedar Shashidhar ’15, ’16 (KEY) had hit a creative roadblock. He was leading a group, mostly of fellow students, in the development of a video game plotline, and the protagonist that he’d created seemed cookie-cutter. They were aiming for a psychological thriller, and got started, Shashidhar says, with “a typical kind of disgruntled, middle-aged, white male protagonist.” It felt flat. “None of us could buy it.”

When they scrapped the male protagonist for an older female lead, the story—and hence the game—started to take shape. It centers around Courtney Mayhall, a veteran police officer, and her adult daughter, who followed her mother’s career path. The two are thrust into a working relationship in pursuit of a serial killer haunting the backwoods of Georgia. They’re captured. And you, the player, as Courtney, have a set of decisions to make. There are tactical decisions about how to escape. But those decisions have consequences, compelling Courtney to make moral choices as well. And complicating matters further is the tension between Courtney, a sober and sassy veteran of the force, and her fresh-eyed and feisty daughter, Ava.

If you’re over 40, if the last video game you played was Pac-Man, or if video games conjure up images of greasy-scalped tween boys shooting cartoon rifles for hours upon hours in dark basement playrooms, then you might want to pause right here.

Here’s the brief tutorial: video games, still a young medium, are evolving in ways that were only dimly foreseen by their earliest creators and that are motivating critics and skeptics to take a second look. Video games, once considered a distraction at best and later blamed for everything from poor grades to violence and antisocial behavior, now elude generalization. They’re coming out of playrooms and into classrooms, as scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, and sciences are starting to find value in games for both teaching and research.

To get a sense of the landscape, it’s useful to draw an analogy to film. Historian Jeremy Saucier ’10 (PhD) is the assistant director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester. “Imagine that, when you were five or six years old, you watched The Fox and the Hound or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” he says. “And then imagine you never watched a movie again. And you thought that’s what movies were. You’re missing an enormous amount of incredible stuff.”

Like film, the world of video games has expanded to include multiple genres. There are role-playing games and simulation games. There are games that are played solo, and games played in groups or teams. There are massive multiplayer online games. There are blockbuster games that have helped catapult global video game sales ahead of film. There are noncommercial, experimental games that find their way into art galleries, and increasingly, games that incorporate complex scores composed by serious musicians.

Shashidhar’s game crosses a few of these genres. It’s both a role-playing game and an experimental game—though he does plan to sell it. An audio and music engineering major from Painted Post, New York, Shashidhar is a participant in the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Year, or KEY, program. Established with funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the program allows successful applicants to spend a fifth, tuition-free year at the University to pursue coursework related to an entrepreneurial venture. He’s created a company, Blackout Games, and pulled together three programmers, two other sound designers, two writers, and a composer—all but one of whom are Rochester students or recent graduates—to create the game, called SightUnseen.

The game is entirely audio-driven. Courtney is in advanced middle age, and has lost much of her sight through macular degeneration. Dialogue, written by Katherine Varga ’15, ’16 (T5), an English major from New Britain, Connecticut, who cut her teeth in playwriting with campus theater groups such as TOOP—The Opposite of People—will be narrated by voice actors. But the player, as Courtney, will navigate forests, brush, and abandoned buildings through a dense soundscape.

“We can track the way audio interacts with the world and capture every reflection, diffraction, obstruction, and occlusion,” says Shashidhar, describing the three-dimensional audio model he’s developing. “We’re essentially creating an auditory snapshot of the world, and creating it with such accuracy that it’s like actually experiencing real life.” Audio verisimilitude requires not simply the replication of a single soundscape, but consideration of psychoacoustics, or the perception of sound. “Your ears localize in the real world, so you can tell the way the sound flows. We’re able to model that,” he says. The goal of the soundscape is to make you, the player—as Courtney— feel as if someone is behind you, above you, whispering in your ear.

When the first home video game entered the consumer marketplace 40 years ago—Pong, debuting just in time for Christmas 1975—it had already been about 15 years since the creation of the first games to be projected and played on a screen. Like many products in consumer electronics, video games emerged out of university laboratories in the years during and after World War II, rising in tandem with the development of computers.

But while commercial gaming may have arisen out of powerful computers in university laboratories, it’s the commercial gaming industry, which topped $100 billion in 2014, that’s driving a lot of computer technology today.

“The competition among game developers for the best graphics, the best sound, the best experience overall, is what pushes a lot of development,” says Ted Pawlicki, a professor of computer science at Rochester. In years past, graphic and sound elements in video games strained all but the most powerful home computers. Today, however, a typical computer used for writing papers, keeping track of personal finances, and even storing substantial photo, video, and music collections comes with greater memory and processing speed than most people need for such tasks.

The advancement of computer technology has benefited researchers. “People making the fast graphics cards weren’t thinking about physicists simulating planetary motion,” Pawlicki says. “They were thinking about selling games to kids at Christmas. It’s hard to say if those technologies would have been developed if it hadn’t been for the entertainment market.”

Meanwhile, the market has expanded far beyond kids. According to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry trade group, in the United States alone (relatively even with China as the world’s largest video game market, in monetary terms) nearly 60 percent of the population now plays video or computer games. Of those, more than two-thirds play on a video game console such as PlayStation or Xbox. Half of American households own a game console. Nearly 40 percent of American gamers are over the age of 35. And more than 40 percent are women.

As a professor and head of the undergraduate program in computer science in the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Pawlicki has encountered plenty of students interested in developing video games. As a means of training computer scientists, he believes video game creation is a powerful tool. “Video games really—and I believe uniquely—draw on every component of computing,” he says. “You need good algorithms, you need good coding skills. But you also need knowledge of good graphics, of user interaction. And you can’t ignore networking and security.” For computer science majors, producing a video game calls upon virtually every skill they’ve learned.

At the production end, video games can clearly be a teaching tool for programmers, graphic artists, scriptwriters, and composers. But what about at the consumption end? Can playing video games aid in learning? The answer among a small but growing group of educators ranges from a cautionary to a resounding yes.

Count Jayne Lammers, an assistant professor of teaching and curriculum at the Warner School of Education, in the “yes” column. In the world of skeptics and holdouts, Lammers has a lot of credibility. She’s a former high school English teacher and the head of Warner’s secondary English teacher preparatory program. As you’d expect, Lammers is an avid consumer of literature, storytelling, and the printed word. She began her career, she says, inspired “to help struggling adolescent readers.” Her students faced a number of barriers to reading. Among them, in Lammers’s view, was an uninspiring curriculum. “What I was required to teach was a programmatic, scripted kind of curriculum that seemed really beneath the 9th and 10th graders in my classroom,” she says.

She enrolled in the doctoral program in education at Arizona State in hopes that further study might help her to gather some new ideas. The summer after her first year, she received an email from her department asking her if she wanted to be a research assistant on a project led by two new faculty members. The professors were James Paul Gee and Elisabeth Hayes, and they’d come from the University of Wisconsin’s Games, Learning, and Society program. Their project concerned video games and literacy, and was premised on their belief that video games were self-teaching tools—or learning systems, as they called them—worthy of study and some type of replication as teaching tools that could enhance classroom learning in ways that traditional curricula weren’t.

Lammers wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Yearning for new ideas, the incorporation of video games into learning was far from anything she had in mind. “I thought video games were part of the problem,” she says. They were something “taking my kids away from books, and from reading and writing in authentic ways.” But she was a graduate student, it was a job, and she took it.

The project involved using video games to get girls interested in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—careers. Since men often credit video games with inspiring their interest in computers (something that Pawlicki confirms, in his own case and from many years teaching computer science), the thinking was that introducing more girls to video games might motivate them to follow a similar career path.

They focused on a blockbuster game, the Sims, first released in 2000, and now in its fourth version. Among the best-selling video games of all time, and notably popular among women and girls, the Sims is a life-simulation game, in which players create characters and shepherd them through daily life. In observing the girls at play, Lammers saw that the game was actually a form of storytelling. “They were manipulating their game to tell stories,” she says. “And they did that in either text or image-based stories.”

Lammers was captivated. As she learned more, she realized that outside of the game, young players were creating Sims fan fiction, and making Sims television shows and movies. “As I realized what they were doing, not only in the game, but also with the corresponding online space, how they were supporting one another, it was like a writer’s workshop happening right before my eyes with young women from all over the world,” Lammers says. “It made it hard to argue that there weren’t literacy practices happening.”

At Warner, Lammers has been studying the ways in which youths use online spaces to demonstrate fandom—literary and otherwise. She notes that readers of the popular Hunger Games series have created and shared role-playing games with Hunger Games characters, rewrites of the stories, and stories combining characters from multiple works of popular fiction, including the Harry Potter series.

Lammers has recruited several graduate students, among them Kristana Textor. Textor, a second-year doctoral student in teaching and curriculum at Warner, was a documentary camera operator and a part-time instructor in an after-school program in New York City when she first started thinking about games as a source of rich group discussion. Born in 1976, Textor calls herself “a former arcade rat,” with a lifelong love of games, her personal favorites ranging from the mesmerizing puzzle game Tetris to the first-person shooter blockbuster Call of Duty: Black Ops.

In the program, she and the high school students played plenty of games. “But then we would also break them down and discuss them,” she says. The games elicited discussions about culture, prejudice, ideology, the use of different musical genres to suggest setting and mood.

Textor says she had “no idea there could be a field of study tied to this.” But at a national gaming conference, she started talking to scholars. She applied for, and won, a fellowship from the Strong National Museum of Play, where she met Saucier, and later, Lammers.

Textor has fine-tuned her game-based learning program in Rochester, working with K-8 students in the summer enrichment Horizons program, a national initiative with which Warner has an affiliate, as well as students at East High School, which is being managed in partnership with the University.

She’s also trying to address a gap in knowledge and understanding between gamers and non-gamers. During three afternoons this past fall, Textor held an event called “Games for Curious Scholars.” In a laboratory in LeChase Hall that’s equipped with television screens, she brought PlayStation and Xbox game consoles as well as an array of games and books on gaming.

She invited members of the University community, particularly people with little knowledge of video games, to drop by and play, free from judgment or expectations, and with her support, if needed. Among her aims was to demonstrate just how broad an appeal games can have. “Video games are so interdisciplinary,” says Textor, who plans to continue holding the event in the spring. “You can really look at them from any angle. There’s the programming angle, you can look at them as cultural artifacts, you can look at them as works of art, and you can look at them as social environments. To me, games are at the heart of this wheel with infinite spokes off it.”

gamingIMMERSIVE HISTORY: Mike Jarvis, an associate professor of history specializing in colonial North America and the 18th-century Atlantic world, is working with students to create a virtual version of St. George’s, Bermuda, the oldest continuously occupied settlement from British North America. The end product, Virtual St. George’s, will be an immersive, gamelike experience in which students enter a virtual version of St. George’s at various turning points in its history and take on the roles of actual people whose lives have been pieced together through historical records. Jarvis, who also directs the College’s digital media studies program, says immersive history inspires students to ask historical questions they might not have considered through traditional research methods. (Adam Fenster (Jarvis); Steve Boerner (background illustration and photo composite))

Among the people who came by Textor’s event last fall was Mike Jarvis. Jarvis is an associate professor of history and director of the digital media studies program, and admittedly, not as new to video games as the target participants.

He stopped by in between a presentation and a lecture he was to give to play Assassin’s Creed. As a historian, he has mixed feelings about the game. First released in 2007, Assassin’s Creed is described as “a historical fiction action-adventure.” The version Jarvis played involves a long backstory, but in brief, a modern character named Desmond Miles has been catapulted back into the past, to 18th- century North America, where he meets his ancestor, a half-English, half-Mohawk North American who goes by the name Connor.

“The landscapes are beautifully rendered,” Jarvis says. They’re also deeply researched. Although the game play consists of accomplishing various sorts of missions, the game allows you, through your character, to wander at will through its model of the natural and built environment. “It’s amazingly powerful to walk the streets of 1750s Boston and see the taverns and see the ships in the harbor,” Jarvis says of the game’s historically accurate rendering.

But the characters—“the actual historical characters you meet,” Jarvis says—“are not at all authentic.” They’re merely superimposed onto the 18th-century landscapes. But imagine if that weren’t the case. Imagine if the characters, like the physical setting, were deeply researched. What would Connor’s experience be, as half-Mohawk? What if the game permitted you to take on the role of a colonial goodwife? A free black? A slave? A revolutionary? A loyalist? How might the experience vary in each case? And most important, to Jarvis, as a historian, what kinds of historical questions might the experience of such game play prompt the player to ask?

To create such a game, he already had a lot of research groundwork covered. As a graduate student working toward his doctorate at the College of William and Mary, Jarvis, who may well be the world’s foremost expert on Bermuda, began to amass what became multiple filing cabinets full of information on the built environment of St. George’s, Bermuda—the oldest British colonial settlement still in existence—as it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. After he completed his first book and earned tenure—“a wonderful thing, knowing you have security, and can then think of bigger projects,” he says—Jarvis revisited his mini-archive. He had recorded names and details of all the people who lived in every residence of St. George’s, through at least 10 generations. In 2013, he began using three-dimensional visualization software to create virtual versions of the settlement at multiple periods in its long history. With the help of undergraduate and graduate students, who have conducted more detailed research into the lives of individual residents, right down to the furnishings of their homes, he’s getting closer to the point where he will be able to use game-generating software to transform the static model into one that’s immersive and interactive.

He envisions the finished project, Virtual St. George’s, as a powerful teaching tool, a model that he hopes will inspire other historians. He anticipates that the project will prompt users to ask questions about aspects within certain time periods, as well as change over time. “You could literally pause a minute and consider from different angles the very same scene,” he says. “Mentally, it’s what we try to do as historians.” You could take on the role of a black slave, a white laborer, an artisan, and so forth. Then, jump ahead even 10 years, and everything might change. “Two snapshots across time invite you to think about the world as a very changeable place, rather than a static place, or to say, ‘it happened a long time ago,’ and to assume everything was the same across decades or centuries.”

Jarvis is focusing first on St. George’s in 1775. “The powerful story to tell there is that the American Revolution affected all the British colonies, and not just the 13,” he says. Bermudians were at the center of Atlantic world trade. Their food came from the North American colonies, which had just decreed that they would no longer trade with colonies loyal to the Crown.

“A lot of Bermudians were trying to figure out how to survive, and you had others who ideologically supported the Americans’ just grievances,” he says. “You would get a variety of different understandings, and hear very different versions of the Boston Tea Party,” depending on what role you played.

For his course, Digital History: Building a Virtual St. George’s, he has students design a game, which he assesses for its value as a historical teaching tool. In designing a historically grounded game, he says, “you don’t write a monograph. You write a multigraph.” In doing so, you script counterfactual history, stories of what might have been. And there’s no better way, Jarvis argues, to impress upon students a notion historians labor to instill: that the world we have is not inevitable. It’s the result of countless choices, each with its own set of consequences.

If games involve a series of choices with consequences, and if they can be made to simulate natural environments, urban environments, or familial environments—then perhaps, some game enthusiasts say, they might be used to make the world a better place.

Together, Pawlicki and Jarvis are overseeing the capstone project of four seniors majoring in digital media studies. The students—Gina Fabio of Auburndale, Massachusetts; Yukun Liu, of Beijing, China; John Lockard of Sayre, Pennsylvania; and Lean Mateos, of Elba, New York—are in the beginning stages of developing a game called Aster. According to Pawlicki, the game offers “a different take” on a traditional war game. “This one’s a little more socially conscious,” he says. “Rather than take on the role of a combatant, in this game, you’re going to play from the refugees’ standpoint.”

Fabio, who is focusing on graphics and storytelling, came up with the basic idea. The protagonist is seeking to rescue her friends and townspeople. There’s another problem, though, in addition to the risks of being captured or killed. Refugees are placed in a camp, which slowly evolves into a town, Aster. They need water, shelter, food, medical care, and clothing. As the player, you have to decide: where should limited resources go? To attempt more rescues? Or to take care of critical needs in Aster?

“There’s no combat,” Fabio says. “You spend your time avoiding enemies rather than fighting them. And if you do get caught, you can’t fight your way out of it. You have to talk your way out of it, or escape.”

gamingTACKLING MORAL QUESTIONS: Senior digital media studies majors (from left) John Lockard, Yukun Liu, Gina Fabio, and Lean Mateos, are creating a game set in a war zone. The question isn’t who and how many you can kill, but who and how many can you save? And as refugees gather in the city of Aster, from which the game takes its name, how can you balance the resource needs of those struggling to escape the war zone and those who have made it to Aster as refugees? The students, who will use an array of technical skills, as well as graphic, musical, and narrative elements to create the game, see Aster as both entertainment and a means for players to think about how they make difficult choices. Adam Fenster (photos); Steve Boerner (background illustration and photo composite))

While all four of the students had pitched ideas, Fabio’s intrigued the group because it appealed to them as gamers on multiple levels. Not least, it promised to be fun. But they were also compelled by the complexity of the problems it posed. As an exploration of actions and consequences, it seemed to have endless potential. “One concept we’ve talked about is the idea that, if there aren’t enough resources for the people you’ve saved, they would start to leave Aster, and go back to where they came from, because you don’t have enough to sustain them,” says Mateos, whose focus is programming.

Although none of the four group members put it quite in this way, Aster could easily be considered an outgrowth of the so-called serious games movement. The earliest incarnations of serious games were military simulations. But since the Cold War, policymakers in many realms have partnered with game developers to create simulations to help address public problems. Diane Tucker is the director of the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. “Like games, policies also can be seen as systems—structures created by the interrelated rules, regulations, and other mechanisms by which policymakers try to close a gap between reality and a goal,” she wrote in a 2012 article “Gaming Our Way to a Better Future.” “Policies can have unintended consequences that a game version of a policy can reveal.”

Tucker is the creator of the Wilson Center game Budget Hero, launched in May 2008 and retired in August 2014. During that six-year period, the game was made available for free, used in classrooms across the country, compelling players to set priorities, examine trade-offs, and in the process, appreciate the complexity of the federal budget. The Wilson Center tracked data to reveal trends in policy choices and sought feedback from users. According to its own analysis, the majority of players reported that it changed the way they thought about the federal budget.

Another major figure in the serious games movement is Jane McGonigal, director of games research and development at the Palo Alto, California, nonprofit Institute for the Future. She’s a folk hero among gamers and, last summer, paid a visit to Rochester to address 200 high school students from around the globe housed at the River Campus for the International Baccalaureate World Student Conference. Among the reasons for her popularity among gamers is that she attacks some common, negative stereotypes about gamers head on. If gamers are lazy and lack motivation, she points out, how can it be that more than 10 million people around the world have spent more than 50 billion hours collectively, working, in teams, on a difficult, complex massive multiplayer online game called World of Warcraft? If gamers are governed by the need for instant gratification, how can it be that it takes, on average, 500 hours to reach the point of “leveling up,” where so many players report “the real fun” begins? Most important, she asks, what if all those hours of collective thought and effort were poured into the equally challenging task of trying to solve real-world problems?

McGonigal is part of the team that developed World Without Oil, a simulation of a world in which oil becomes scarce and that seeks to predict how societies around the globe would respond to an actual oil crisis. With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a team of designers created the game, and then recruited nearly 2,000 participants, equally divided by gender, across age groups, and in every state of the United States and 12 other nations. The recruits played over a period of 32 days in real time, representing 32 weeks in the simulation.

The result was a fascinating case study demonstrating a mix of competition for survival, and later, widespread cooperation toward mutual survival. It’s arguable whether game behavior would approximate actual behavior. But what wasn’t contestable was that participants reported devoting an unprecedented amount of thought to the full range of consequences of oil scarcity. They’d witnessed, and participated in, a range of cooperative solutions that could provide a template for policymakers in actual environmental or economic crises.

McGonigal is an advocate of gamification, or the quest to better engage people in all kinds of tasks by turning those tasks into games. Even enthusiastic gamers, such as Textor, find some of her claims extravagant. When it comes to gamification, Textor says, it’s best to proceed with caution. She wants to make clear that advocates of using games as teaching tools are not automatically suggesting that games are a panacea for student disengagement, among other challenges many educators face.

“A lot of times, people will say, ‘Gamify! Let’s gamify the classroom because everybody loves games!’ It’s a little more complicated than that,” she says. “You have to consider the details of what you’re gamifying. It’s not just a matter of using carrots and sticks.”

But used thoughtfully, video games show potential in ways that Textor, Lammers, Jarvis—and perhaps other faculty at Rochester who have incorporated games into their teaching and research—hope will encourage more educators to explore them.

Regardless of what happens in the classroom, the gaming market is likely to continue to expand and to become even more diversified. The most dynamic sector (in terms of creative development, if not profit) is in indie games, made available for free or at low cost on websites such as Steampowered.com or Humblebundle.com. Fabio describes such sites as part of a new gaming culture. That culture values the social good, sometimes tying games, and their revenues, explicitly to social causes, or simply incorporating the moral element she finds compelling in many games. She’s accessed “a ton of games,” she says, on Humblebundle, which allows game buyers to pay what they want, and divides revenues between the developer and charity. She also describes the indie game culture as thoughtful. “There are a lot of games that have very emotional sorts of stories that really make you think.”

Mateos points out that the city of Aster is named after a flower. “The idea is that your city blossoms like a flower,” he says.

In fact, if you look at an aster, it looks much like a wheel, with a dense supply of spear-like pedals. It’s like Textor’s metaphor: a game that’s a wheel with infinite spokes.

Jennifer Farmer ’99: Communicating Against the Grain

In an era of political and cultural polarization, how do you communicate a message on behalf of a group that’s often generalized and stereotyped in the mainstream media?

farmerHOW SHE DOES IT: Farmer, a communications director at a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, blogs frequently about civil rights and the challenges of communicating to a skeptical media at Advancementproject.org/blog. (Photo: Kevin Wolf/AP Images for Rochester Review)

It’s a question that weighs on the minds of people on both ends of the social divide, from religious conservatives to social and cultural radicals, and many people in between.

Jennifer Farmer ’99, who often introduces herself as “the granddaughter of a pastor and the daughter of an evangelist,” makes a living spreading the messages of what she describes as marginalized groups. She’s the managing director for communications at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C. She’s worked on behalf of workers who are members of labor unions and young African Americans caught up in the legal system. Since 2013, she’s managed an educational and public relations campaign centering on the story of Kiera Wilmot, an African-American mechanical engineering student at Florida Polytechnic University who, as a high school junior, was arrested and charged with two felonies after conducting an unassigned experiment in her science classroom involving common household chemicals.

Focus on people and their stories. I lead with personal stories because it’s hard to argue with those. If the issue concerns race, sometimes I’ll take race out of the equation, and I just tell what happened. So in Kiera’s case, I might say, a 17-year-old student was expelled for a science project gone wrong. She was a model student. She was the kind all parents hope for. And so I start from a very broad place. And when people hear that, they think, “Well, how is that possible? How did that happen?” And then I weave in details about how her mother felt. How her twin sister felt. And at that point, sometimes people will say, “Well, maybe this person did do something wrong.” So then I add a little bit more information to show that it was through no fault of her own. She was curious in a way that we all want our kids to be.

Introduce and discuss the idea of implicit bias. When I’m ready to introduce the idea of structural racism, I start by talking about the role that implicit bias plays in how we react. Everyone has a bias of one form or another. And sometimes we can be acting on those biases without even realizing it, which is what implicit bias is.

Connect people to social contexts, and show why context matters. People often get things wrong, I think, when they look at things only from an individual standpoint, rather than an institutional one. This can work both ways. Often, when people see something like the viral video of the African-American high school girl in South Carolina dragged across the classroom by a white police officer, people will place blame on individuals without also placing blame on the structures that permit that activity to happen. For example, they won’t realize that police officers are disproportionately placed in schools that are predominantly African-American and Latino. And they also won’t realize that these police officers don’t get adequate training for the role. They’re trained to enforce a criminal code, and if you place them in a school setting without training, of course you’re going to have disastrous results, with or without implicit bias.

Talk openly about the power of media to shape our perceptions. We’re all consumers of media, and media influences how we look at one another. I try to get people to think about the information they’re receiving rather than just to embrace it.

—Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

A New Era for NYC’s Chinese Immigrants

chiewBARRIER BREAKER: “Some of the people who are successful now went through our services to get to where they are,” says Chiew. “So they’re very aware of the struggle and the barriers.” (Photo: Shannon Taggart for Rochester Review)

In the past generation, two important shifts have taken place in New York City’s Chinese immigrant community. First is the decline of the garment industry, a main source of jobs for the many immigrants who arrived poor, and with little knowledge of English. The second is the composition of the immigrant community.

The first Chinese immigrants arriving in New York City after 1965—the year that federal legislation permitted Chinese immigration back into the United States after nearly 80 years of virtually uninterrupted prohibition—were mostly from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The dominant language was Cantonese. Now, new arrivals from China are more diverse than ever before, with Mandarin-speaking Mainland Chinese now eclipsing the earlier Cantonese-speaking Chinese- American community.

As director of workforce development at the Chinese-American Planning Council, Simon Chiew ’02 is helping immigrants as well as businesses navigate the new landscape. Chiew, who was born in Malaysia, and whose family was assisted by a similar organization when they arrived in the United States, says it’s important for new arrivals to extend their lives beyond their immediate communities.

“We want them to integrate outside of their community,” he says. “We want them to go to the library, we want them to take the subway, we want them to shop in supermarkets that are not owned by their fellow immigrants. We want them to explore, and we want them to live and use the resources that New York City has to offer.”

The garment industry once made it possible for Chinese immigrants to sustain themselves almost entirely within their own communities. But the sector, which was already eroding through much of the 1990s, was dealt a decisive blow after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The tragedy left many Chinese employees struggling to find alternative employment. The council has focused much of its job training since then on preparing immigrants for the hospitality and service industries. It’s an approach that capitalizes on the rise of a newly affluent class of Chinese who are traveling the world and spending large sums of money. By 2020 overseas spending by Mandarin-speaking Chinese is projected to top $458 billion per year.

The program Chiew runs, the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton Fundamentals in Luxury Retail program, is a collaboration of the council, the luxury retailer, and the Parsons School of Design. The program, to which Mandarin-speaking immigrants must apply, takes the successful applicants through eight weeks of classroom instruction on subjects from fashion history to retail operations, and a two-week internship at one of the stores. Of the 60 people who have participated in the program since it began in 2014, 80 percent have found employment in stores such as Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Dior.

“Most of our students never saw themselves in luxury retail,” says Chiew. “A lot of the people we are working with are severely underemployed or long-term unemployed.”

Salina Zhao, an alumnus of the program, came to the United States from southern China at the age of 11. Before she began her training, she was afraid to set foot inside a luxury retailer. “I was intimidated,” she recalls. “If I can’t afford something like that I wouldn’t even enter into the store.”

As part of the program, Zhao interned at Christian Dior at the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store. She was hired by Dior right after. She says Chiew prepared her well.

“I think Simon prepares us as much as possible for everything that we’re going to experience in the future. He will spend an hour or two going through our résumé, making sure it’s as professional as possible, and going through even small details like how we dress up and how to professionally answer the questions.”

Now she looks forward to career advancement within the company. “I think this program really gave us a huge opportunity to get into a different environment,” she says, describing the training experience as a valuable shortcut into a world that would otherwise be hard to reach.

Chiew says successful alumni are part of what will help the council’s training programs to continue.

“Some of the people who are successful now went through our services to get to where they are. So they’re very aware of the struggle and the barriers,” he says. “Our focus on building our alumni network and having them contribute either with funding or with their time has really improved. People do want to give back.”

—Maya Dukmasova ’12

In the News

in_the_newsNOMINATED: Recordings by Eastman alumni Maria Schneider, Kristian Bezuidenhout, and John Fedchock (from left) are among those nominated for 2016 Grammy Awards. (Photo: Provided)

Eastman Counts Seven Grammy Nominees

One Eastman professor and six Eastman alumni have been nominated for 2016 Grammy Awards, which will be presented on February 15 in Los Angeles:

Kristian Bezuidenhout ’01E, ’04E (MM), fortepianist and pianist: Best Classical Instrumental Solo for Mozart: Keyboard Music, Vol. 7 (Harmonia Mundi); Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for Beethoven: An Die Ferne Geliebte; Haydn: English Songs; Mozart: Masonic Cantata (Harmonia Mundi).

Martha Cluver ’03E, soprano, and Eric Dudley ’01E, tenor, of the ensemble Roomful of Teeth: Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Render (New Amsterdam Records).

John Fedchock ’85E (MM), trombonist, bandleader, and arranger: Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella, for “You and the Night and the Music” from Like It Is (Summit Records).

Bob Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM), recording engineer: Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, for Sound & Color by Alabama Shakes; Sound & Color was also nominated for Album of the Year.

Paul O’Dette, professor of lute and of conducting and ensembles at Eastman: Best Opera Recording for Steffani: Niobe, Regina Di Tebe (Erato) by the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, with O’Dette conducting.

Maria Schneider ’85E (MM), jazz composer and bandleader: Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album for The Thompson Fields (ArtistShare); Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals, for arrangement of “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” by David Bowie, from his retrospective album Nothing Has Changed (Columbia/Legacy).

Smithsonian Recognizes Rudolph Tanzi ’80 for Ingenuity

Rudolph Tanzi ’80 is among the best known and most accomplished scientists in the field of Alzheimer’s disease research. In its annual announcement of top American innovators, Smithsonian magazine named Tanzi, the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard and the director of genetics and aging research at Massachusetts General Hospital, as among 12 winners of its American Ingenuity Award.

Late in 2014, Tanzi and Doo Yeon Kim, also of Harvard, developed a new means of tracking the progress of Alzheimer’s and experimenting with new treatments. According to the citation in Smithsonian, the new technique, a cell culture dubbed “Alzheimer’s in a dish,” “is considered the most persuasive and useful laboratory model yet invented of the neurodegenerative disease. It offers researchers a chance to both track the course of Alzheimer’s in unprecedented biochemical and genetic detail, and to quickly and cheaply test thousands of potential treatments that might block or at least slow its malign progress.”

Earlier in 2015, Time magazine acknowledged the discovery by naming Tanzi one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People.

A National Honor for a Pediatric Pioneer

Robert Brent ’48, ’53M (MD), ’55M (PhD), ’88 (Honorary) is the winner of the 2015 Gustav O. Lienhard Award, a national honor recognizing outstanding achievement in improving health care service. The award is given annually to one person by the National Academy of Medicine.

Early in his career, Brent conducted pathbreaking research on environmental risk factors for birth defects. His research provided groundwork for much modern understanding of the nature and degree of risk to the developing fetus from radiation, as well as from various drugs and chemicals. Brent has also played an educational role, offering free counseling to pregnant women about the risks for most of his 60-plus-year career. Brent is the Louis and Bess Stein Professor of Pediatrics at Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia.

in_the_newsBetter Basketball: Former Yellowjacket basketball star John DiBartolomeo ’12 (with the ball) had a chance to post up against one of the professional game’s all-time greats this fall, when his Israeli professional team took on sure-fire Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers in an exhibition preseason game at Staples Center in Los Angeles. DiBartolomeo and the Maccabi Haifa lost 126–83 in the game, which was part of a U.S. tour for the team. (Photo: Seth Ribnick/Maccabi Haifa Basketball Club)

Top Teacher

alegantCASE BY CASE: Oberlin music professor Brian Alegant ’93E (PhD) was named Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (Photo: Tanya Rosen-Jones/Oberlin)

Brian Alegant ’93E (PhD) is earning high marks for his work as a professor of music theory at Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Alegant, who has taught at Oberlin since 1996, was named this fall as one of four U.S. Professors of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, or CASE, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Representing undergraduate baccalaureate institutions, Alegant was one of four professors selected from nearly 400 nominees for the national honor.

According to Oberlin, he’s the first music professor to be honored in the 35-year history of the award.

A respected theoretician whose research interests include performance and analysis, pedagogy, and twelve-tone music, Alegant has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.

His book on the twelve-tone music of Luigi Dallapiccola (published by the University of Rochester Press) has also been well regarded by peers and colleagues.

Known for cultivating music theory classes that are notoriously challenging—and students who sign up on wait lists to take part in them—Alegant routinely earns accolades from students for his brilliance, passion, fairness, and wit.

“The whole idea for me,” he has said, “is to put the student in charge of his or her own learning.”

At Oberlin, Alegant also serves as chair of the conservatory’s Division of Music Theory, a position that makes him a mentor to Oberlin’s one-year postdoctoral instructors, each of whom has gone on to full-time work in higher education.

While a doctoral student at the Eastman School of Music, Alegant received the school’s Teaching Assistant Prize in 1985.

CASE launched the program in 1981, and since then has recognized 1,200 teachers at state and national levels. Awards are given in four categories: undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, and community college institutions.

Nominees are judged on their influence and involvement with undergraduate students, their approaches to teaching and learning, their contributions to undergraduate education in their institution, community, and profession, and support from colleagues and students.

The entries are judged by top U.S. instructors and other leaders in education.

Patriotism Rocks

fishmanAN AMERICAN BAND: Drummer Fishman (second from right) says he and the members of the band Madison Rising built their music on patriotism and traditional American values. (Photo: AO Films)

So much for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The rock band Madison Rising, which has opened for Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynryd and this past Veterans Day shared the stage with Dropkick Murphys and Trace Adkins, says it’s built on patriotism and traditional American values.

“We need to come together as a nation and just believe in great things, be positive,” says drummer Sam Fishman ’10, a founding member of the band, which puts its hard-rock, post-grunge energy behind anthems such as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America.” “To spread that uplifting message using these songs, it’s a higher calling. It’s more than just music.”

Madison Rising released its self-titled debut album in 2011, followed by last summer’s American Hero (RED), with originals including “Hallowed Ground II” and “Reflection (PTSD).” Its audio and video release of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 2012 catapulted the foursome into the national spotlight. Partnered with Concerned Veterans of America and the Young Marines National Youth Organization, the band’s 70-city tour continues into 2016.

The band wants to be perceived as inspirational, not confrontational, as it promotes the principles of liberty, independence, small government, and personal responsibility. Its tagline: Music with meaning.

“We’ve had people call us crazy right-wingers, but if you talk to us, you realize that’s not true,” says Fishman, who lives in New Jersey and is a drum instructor when he’s not touring. “We have our beliefs, and they tend to resonate with conservative audiences, but we’re really about respecting one another. We want to make people feel better about standing up for what they believe in.”

Given its strong following among military, veterans, and first-responder groups, Madison Rising has launched Madison Rising Shows for Heroes, a nonprofit that will allow the band to double the number of charity shows they’ve been able to do in the past. Lead singer Dave Bray served in the U.S. Navy as a corpsman for the 2nd Battalion/2nd Marines; other members are lead guitarist AJ Larsen and bassist Tom DiPietro.

Entrepreneur and GoDaddy.com founder Bob Parsons, a former Marine, introduced the band at a 2013 show with Steppenwolf in Scottsdale, Arizona. The group had impressed him with “a rendition [of “The Star-Spangled Banner”] that I think is one of the most exceptional songs I have ever heard in my life,” Parsons told the crowd. “These guys take it to a whole new level.” Calling Madison Rising his “favorite group,” he sent the musicians a $10,000 check days later to show his support.

Fishman, who majored in music and took lessons, mostly in jazz, at the Eastman School of Music, dabbled in funk, reggae, and “everything I could get my ears on” before learning about the formation of Madison Rising on social media. He found out about the band’s focus after his audition.

“I was absolutely into it,” he recalls. “My grandfather served in the Marines at the Battle of Iwo Jima. If he were alive and seeing what I was doing with this band, he would be ecstatic.”

A former lead drummer for the University’s jazz ensemble, Fishman credits his undergraduate music history and theory classes, as well as impromptu jam sessions on nights and weekends with Eastman students, for preparing him to perform at his current level. The band has been featured in NFL half-time shows, the opening ceremony of the 2014 Special Olympics, and other events with tens of thousands of spectators.

Says Fishman: “It’s such a comforting feeling to know people are being affected by our music in such a positive way.”

—Robin L. Flanigan

KUDOS & COMPLIMENTS

Honors for Alumni and Friends

Awards celebrate service and achievement.

Arts, Sciences & Engineering

Dean’s Medal

mw_honorsRonald Rettner (Photo: Courtesy of University Advancement)

Ronald Rettner, president of Rettner Management and managing partner of Baron Associates in Yonkers, New York, received the Dean’s Medal from Arts, Sciences & Engineering. Widely regarded as an entrepreneur, business executive, and developer, Rettner has worked with organizations throughout New York on redevelopment projects to revitalize business districts and neighborhoods. His higher education leadership roles include service as a University trustee since 2012. He provided the lead gift for Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation, which opened in 2013 as a hub for the arts, sciences, and engineering on the River Campus. A member of the Advancement, Facilities, and Strategic and Financial Planning Committees of the board, he has also established the Ronald Rettner Campus Improvement Fund to help refurbish historic academic buildings and spaces. He and his wife, Karen, are members of the George Eastman Circle, the University’s leadership annual giving society. Karen Rettner is also a member of the Eastman School of Music National Council.

Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

Distinguished Alumnus Award

mw_honorsStuart Elby (Photo: Courtesy of University Advancement)

Stuart Elby ’82, senior vice president of Cloud Network Strategy and Technology at Infinera Corporation, received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. A 30-year veteran of the telecommunications industry, he is credited with bringing to market the first disposable plastic fiber-optic delivery system. Elby joined Infinera, a California-based company that provides optical networking equipment, software, and services to telecom, cable, and Internet providers, from Verizon Labs, where he served as vice president and chief technologist. A member of the George Eastman Circle, Elby has served on the Dean’s Advisory Committee for the Hajim School since 2013. He’s also actively involved in several professional organizations, including the Optical Society and the Open Networking Foundation, and he has served on advisory boards of the New York State Centers for Advanced Technology.

Simon Business School

Distinguished Alumnus Award

mw_honorsRam Sundaram (Photo: Courtesy of University Advancement)

Ram Sundaram ’91S (MBA), a partner and global head of principal funding and investment at Goldman Sachs and Company in New York City, received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Simon Business School. Since joining Goldman Sachs as a vice president in 2001, he has held a number of leadership positions, including tenure as cochair of the firm’s bank capital committee, as well as serving on the finance committee, the securities division executive committee, and the securities division’s U.S. operating committee. Together with his wife, Preethi Krishna Sundaram ’01S (MBA), he has served on the board of directors at the Child Mind Institute in New York City. Sundaram has supported the Goldman Sachs Scholars Fund at Simon, helped sponsor the school’s New York City Conference, and as a volunteer, has made several keynote presentations at Simon events and activities.

Alumni Service Award

mw_honorsRobert Dorr (Photo: Courtesy of University Advancement)

Robert Dorr ’97S (MBA), senior member of the high yield credit sales team at J. P. Morgan Chase in New York City, received the Alumni Service Award from the Simon Business School. Since joining J. P. Morgan in 1999, Dorr has held several leadership roles for the company in the United States and Great Britain. He has served on the Simon Executive Advisory Committee, the Simon Alumni Council, helped sponsor Simon’s New York City Conference, and hosted events for Simon students. An active volunteer, Dorr has mentored students, organized and supported networking opportunities, and worked to guide Rochester undergraduates and Simon students interested in working at J. P. Morgan. He is a member of the Westchester-Fairfield Counties Regional Cabinet. He and his wife, Lori Weiser, are charter members of the George Eastman Circle.

PASSAGES

Robert Woods ’42: Decades of Leadership

tribute_woodsLIFE TRUSTEE: A longtime volunteer, Woods was elected to the Board of Trustees in 1965. (Photo: Provided)

A life trustee, Robert Woods ’42 enthusiastically waved the flag for Rochester from his home base in Chicago, where he was president of the area alumni chapter for more than 30 years.

Elected to a five-year term on the University’s Board of Trustees by national alumni ballot in 1965, Woods helped lead alumni activities and fundraising while serving in several board-level advisory roles for Rochester. Throughout a long career as a partner and later president of a Chicago investment firm, he was a board member of Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Association and Infant Welfare Society, among other civic roles.

At Rochester, he was a history major, a two-sport varsity athlete, president of the Students’ Association, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Keidaeans. He also met his wife of 71 years, Ruth Diller Woods ’44, while a student, and together, they were sometimes referred to as the “prom king and queen” of their time.

He died in October at the age of 94.

Books & Recordings

Books

Art for the People: Carl W. Peters and the Rochester WPA Murals

Edited by Jessica Marten

Memorial Art Gallery, 2015

Marten edits the catalog accompanying the exhibition of the same name at the Memorial Art Gallery. The catalog includes new scholarship that examines and positions the Rochester murals within a national context. Contributors include Joan Saab, associate professor of art history and visual and cultural studies at Rochester, as well as Marten, curator of American art at the museum.

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage

Edited by Catherine Loomis ’97 (PhD) and Sid Ray ’95 (PhD)

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015

Loomis and Ray edit a collection of essays from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference of the American Shakespeare Center. The essays explore “the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.” Loomis is a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of New Orleans, and Ray is a professor of women’s and gender studies at Pace University.

Dead at His Desk: A Medical Mystery

By Kenneth Cohn ’72

Estate of Kenneth H. Cohn, MD, 2015

Offering glimpses into the world of modern hospitals, the late Cohn presents a medical mystery thriller in which a hospital CEO is murdered. Cohn, who died in June, was founder of the consultancy Healthcare Collaboration, serving physicians and health care executives.

Into the North Woods

By Naya Clifford ’93

Maine Authors Publishing, 2015

Clifford presents her debut novel, the story of a college student and his girlfriend who descend into violent extremism. The book “explores how the path from simple belief to terrorism grows unfettered in isolation.” Clifford is a clinical social worker in Rockland, Maine.

Hitchcock and the Anxiety of Authorship

By Leslie Abramson ’78

Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abramson demonstrates the ways in which the films of Alfred Hitchcock “exhibit a complicated, often disturbing vision of cinema authorship—one that problematizes rather than exemplifies the director’s long-standing auteurist image.” Abramson is a film scholar who teaches cinema and the law at the Loyola University of Chicago.

Borderlands

By Margaret Adams Birth ’85

Finishing Line Press, 2015

Birth’s collection of poetry explores “a variety of borderlands,” from physical places and spiritual explorations to images or sounds.

Content Warfare: How to Find Your Audience, Tell Your Story, and Win the Battle for Attention Online

By Ryan Hanley ’03

Ryan Hanley, 2015

Hanley, head of marketing at TrustedChoice.com, offers a guide to online content marketing.

These Shallow Graves

By Jennifer Donnelly ’85

Delacorte Press, 2015

Donnelly presents her sixth work of historical fiction, the story of a wealthy young woman in 1890s New York who takes great risks searching for the truth about her father’s apparent suicide.

A Salamander’s Tale

By Paul Steinberg ’75M (Res)

Paul Steinberg, 2015

Mixing personal narrative with modern medical history, Steinberg shares his experience living with metastatic prostate cancer for 30 years—“possibly longer than any other man in history.” Steinberg practices psychiatry in Washington, D.C.

Looking Through Water: A Novel

By Bob Rich ’69S (MBA)

Skyhorse Publishing, 2015

Rich tells an adventure story as well as a coming-of-age tale about the relationship between a grandfather and his grandson. The chairman of the Rich Products food company, Rich is donating proceeds from the sale of the novel to Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, a nonprofit agency serving disabled active duty military personnel and veterans.

What Do I Do Now? Thriving Through the Seven Phases of Adult Life

By Steve Miller ’73M (Res)

CreateSpace, 2015

Miller offers a guide for adults on life transitions, with advice rooted in the teachings of major world religions and modern psychology.

Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939

By Tait Keller ’96

University of North Carolina Press, 2015

Keller, an assistant professor of history at Rhodes College, explores the Alps as a site of political, environmental, and cultural contention as Germany and Austria transformed themselves into modern, industrial states.

Fundamentals of Research on Culture and Psychology: Theory and Methods

By Valery Chirkov ’01 (PhD)

Routledge, 2015

Chirkov offers a detailed guide to conducting multidisciplinary research on human behavior in different cultures. Chirkov is a professor of psychology at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

kabot wannakarm (Literature Rebel)

By Thanet Aphornsuvan ’73

Sommadhi Books, 2013

Aphornsuvan’s book, published in Thai, explores “relationships between history and politics through the literary lives of notable figures in China, Russia, Thailand, and the United States.” Aphornsuvan is a professor at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand, and head of its ASEAN, or Association of Southeast Asian Nations, studies program.

In My Mind’s Eye: A Cornish Girlhood

By Jenny Lloyd ’92 (PhD)

CreateSpace, 2015

Through a series of “snapshots,” Lloyd reflects on her youth in England in the 1940s and 1950s. She shares “memories of World War II, her life on the farm, and her experiences at boarding school.” Lloyd is an associate professor emerita of history at SUNY College at Brockport.

Zarr: The Legacy of the Vorx

By Randy Smart ’04M (MS)

Smashwords, 2015

In a science fiction e-novel, Smart tells the story of a man, kidnapped as a child and raised by his parents’ killers, who discovers the truth of his upbringing from a chance encounter with a stranger.

Charles Harold Davis (1856–1933): Mystic Impressionist

By Valerie Ann Leeds ’79

Bruce Museum, 2015

Independent curator Leeds explores the life and work of the oft-overlooked impressionist painter Davis. The book, among the first scholarly treatments of Davis, accompanies a major museum retrospective of his work at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Rochester Through Time

By Mary Hasek Grenier ’72 and Emily Morry ’13 (PhD)

Fonthill Media, 2015

Grenier and Morry present a visual history of Rochester with an emphasis on the city and region’s natural resources, as well as its leaders and citizens.

Petty: The Biography

By Warren Zanes ’02 (PhD)

Henry Holt & Co., 2015

Zanes presents a life’s story of rock and roll musician Tom Petty. Zanes is a former member of the band the Del Fuegos, executive director of the Little Steve Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, and a longtime friend of Petty’s.

An Absence of Justice

By Roderick Cyr ’01S (MBA)

CreateSpace, 2015

Cyr presents a thriller in which a leading authority on technology and a journalist preparing an exposé join together to capture a band of wealthy and powerful killers.

The Dating GPS: Guys, Pricks, and Sweethearts

By Alexsandra Sukhoy ’03S (MBA) et al

CreateSpace, 2015

Sukhoy and coauthors share stories and articles about “dating adventures, misadventures, and the path that leads to whole and healthy love.” Sukhoy is founder and CEO of the career coaching consultancy Creative Cadence.

State-Building and Democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Edited by Soeren Keil and Valery Perry ’92

Ashgate, 2015

Perry coedits a collection of articles detailing the evolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the two decades since the end of the war among the former states of the Yugoslav federation.

Recordings

Broadway: 1985–2015

By Johnny Russo ’66E

East Hill Classic Jazz Band, 2015

Russo and the East Hill Classic Jazz Band offer a retrospective of their favorite Broadway cuts from the past 30 years, as well as four newly recorded songs. The band, led by Russo, also includes Drew Frech ’65E on banjo.

American Hero (RED)

By Madison Rising

Purple Eagle Entertainment, 2015

The rock band Madison Rising, which includes drummer Sam Fishman ’10, performs a mix of originals and patriotic anthems.

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.

On the Importance of Being a Well-Read Physician

Literature can be a physician’s friend.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

sada (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I practice oncology, where we work with people through some very personal life issues. I, and many physicians I work with, love to read. One of our very beloved oncologists who recently retired carried a book around with him, and he read every day at lunch. He was extremely busy, seeing patients for 10 or 12 hours a day, but just a consummate reader. I think that tells you how important reading is.

I see a wide range of patients, and reading a wide range of literature helps me understand and relate to each of them. When I was in medical school at Rochester, there was a push for having more medical students with a background in the humanities. At the end of the day, everybody goes through the science courses, the clinical courses, and the residency. But good medical care means having patients know you care about them. You can’t fake that. I think literature instills in people an appreciation of other people and how to empathize and sympathize with others.

When I was an undergraduate, one of the courses that influenced me the most was in African-American literature. It sounds cliched, but literature allows you to be transported into places where, potentially, you’d never be. A big advantage of reading in a discussion setting is being able to hear the perspectives of other readers. It was a diverse group in that class. There was only one other Asian American besides me. It was great to hear the other perspectives as we read through the tradition together. African-American is still one of my favorite areas of literature.

Yvonne Hsaio-Fan Sada ’01, ’05M (MD)

Assistant professor of hematology and oncology, Baylor College of Medicine; Investigator, clinical epidemiology, Department of Veterans Affairs; winner, Gold Foundation Leonard Tow Award for Humanism in Medicine; winner, Schweppe Award for Humanism in Medicine

Home: Houston, Texas

Undergraduate Degrees at Rochester: BA, English; BS, neuroscience

Reading habits: “I never read what a book is about before I start. I always like to be surprised. But I also like to reread books. First of all, you discover something new every time. And I don’t always remember how stories end.”

I had a couple weeks off last summer and I read [the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction] The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. It does a great job of showing the importance of social class in influencing the different journeys life can take us on. The worlds the protagonist moves between are in such stark contrast. I see that kind of range in any given week when I’m seeing patients, both at the VA and at the Baylor Clinic. Even at the clinic there’s a range—patients on Medicaid, or who are uninsured, and people who have professional jobs with great insurance.

When I was taking courses for my English major, Shakespeare and earlier was a real stretch for me. I really struggled to understand the meaning behind the works. That experience has helped me communicate better with patients. Before I could even get to the bigger questions these works raised, I had to perform an act of translation. Translation is a lot of what I do now. We speak as physicians in medical jargon, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot to patients. How do we reconstruct or translate the way we’re thinking into words that people can actually understand? I draw a lot on analogies and imagery, which my background in English and my love of reading has helped me do well.

I love to read the classics. A few years ago, I finally made it through Anna Karenina. And when it was over, there was a moment where I thought, not much has changed as far as the human experience goes. In medicine you see so much human drama, and you experience so much with people. I can’t say I can think of any patients off the top of my head whose stories remind me of a specific work. But just like every story in literature is different, every patient is different, and every patient’s story is different. And so for me, it’s a different journey with every single person.

CAMPUS MOMENT

Great Outdoors

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

UNUSUAL AUTUMN: Molly Goldstein ’17 takes her computer to the steps of Strong Auditorium during an unusually warm November evening.