Rochester Review

May–June 2016, Volume 78, No. 5

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Emily Boynton, Adam Fenster, Peter Iglinski, Jim Mandelaro, Bob Marcotte, Melissa Mead, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Susanne Pallo, Monique Patenaude, Scott Sabocheck, Leonor Sierra, and Brandon Vick

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

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

ISSN: 0035-7421

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Rochester Review:

May the Force Always Be with You

By Joel Seligman

presidentBOARD CHAIR: The namesake of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Ed Hajim ’58 (center) has worked closely with President and CEO Joel Seligman (left) and Hajim Dean and Provost-elect Rob Clark in his role as chair of the University’s Board of Trustees. Hajim is stepping down this spring from his role as board chair. (Photo: University Communications)

“May the force be with you.” With these words, Ed Hajim ’58 has ended his remarks to graduates at dozens of ceremonies during his eight years as chair of the Board of Trustees.

At this May’s board meeting, Ed will complete his service as chair. Ed will leave a remarkable legacy. During the past eight years, our University has undergone a transformation, and we owe especial gratitude to the support provided by Ed and the board. Ed has been my friend, the person to whom I speak whenever a critical issue occurs, my boss, my partner. Ed has been the inspirational leader of our Meliora Challenge Campaign, helping to ensure that it has far exceeded its initial $1.2 billion goal. He has the ability to capture the attention of an audience within the first few sentences of his remarks. He is a true leader.

Since joining the board in 1988, Ed has held key roles on our board concerning investment policies, advancement initiatives, and strategic planning efforts. When it came time to select a successor to now Chair Emeritus Bob Witmer ’59 in 2007, Ed was the unanimous choice.

Ed personifies Meliora. He has lived the ideals of ever better his entire life, rising from remarkably difficult beginnings to become a highly regarded executive on Wall Street. Often referring to the River Campus as his “first real home,” Ed earned an NROTC scholarship to study chemical engineering at Rochester, where he became deeply involved in the life of the University. He held leadership positions in student government and in his fraternity, Theta Chi, and founded the humor magazine UGH.

He often proudly recites his class chant, “Better than good, better than great, we are the class of ’58.” At our 50-year medallion ceremonies for alumni, Ed greets a substantial number of earlier graduates as friends.

After serving in the Navy, Ed earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and built a remarkable career in finance. He was the youngest board member at Lehman Brothers and later served as chairman at Furman Selz. Ed became chairman and CEO of ING Aeltus Group. After 2002, he served as president of Diker Management. At each step of the way, Ed was a savvy investor, a shrewd businessman, and a boss who knew as many of his employees as he could, making sure that their marriages, children’s births, and other life-changing accomplishments were acknowledged and that business successes were shared with those who contributed to the enterprise.

Ed is a remarkably generous man who recognizes the transformational impact that universities like Rochester can have not only in the lives of individual students and their families, but also on the economic and social fabric of the nation as a whole. In 2007, he made a $30 million commitment to the University, the largest single gift commitment in our history. This lead gift was a critical catalyst in launching The Meliora Challenge Campaign. In recognition of Ed’s generosity, the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences was named in his honor in 2008.

Ed directed that a substantial portion of his gift be for student scholarships, and he makes a point of meeting each Hajim Scholar in person. Scholarship support was decisive in Ed’s decision to attend Rochester. Ed never forgot. Ed also has created scholarships for students at Harvard Business School, the University of Vermont, the University of Denver, Westchester Community College, the Brunswick School, and Middlesex School.

Let me thank Ed’s wife, Barbara, and Ed’s family also for their support and genuine love and appreciation for the University. They also are part of the Rochester family and I value their friendship.

Ed is indefatigable. Long after he steps down as chair, I anticipate, like Bob Witmer, he will continue to provide valuable support to our University and board.

Ed has been—and will continue to be—a force at Rochester, always challenging us to be a better institution and a better community. His inspiration now is part of our history. His contributions as a leader and in philanthropy have altered the trajectory of our future.

May the force always be with you, Ed.

Letter on Letters

I enjoy receiving each issue of the Review. As a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, I naturally tend to look at the music articles more than the others. However, I was reading the article “Lives in Letters” (March-April 2016), and the achievements of William H. Seward caught my attention. What I especially noted was his involvement in acquiring Alaska (“Seward’s Folly”). As a stamp collector, primarily of Canadian and musical stamps, the Alaska reference rang a very distant bell. After some snooping around the Scott Catalogue of postage stamps, I found what I was looking for. Scott Catalogue #370 and #371 (the imperforate version) honors Mr. Seward. These U.S. stamps were issued in 1909 as the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition Issue. I thought Professor Slaughter and company, as well as readers, might be interested. Keep up the good work.

Alan Denike ’74E

Regina, Canada

Top Teams

I just read the great article about the 1989–90 men’s basketball team (“Princes of the Palestra,” March-April). Nice work!

The article prompted me to think about the 1991 men’s cross country team, which also won an NCAA Division III championship. That championship was the pinnacle achievement during the long and successful career of cross country and track coach Timothy Hale. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Coach Hale’s teams were as successful as any team, in any sport, in any era, in UR’s long history. Coach Hale went on to become the athletic director at SUNY Oswego. He is retired now and living in North Carolina.

The runners on the 1991 championship team—Dave Boutillier ’93, Jim Dunlop ’92, Anthony Kerr ’93, Ray Lawson ’92, Joe Mello ’92, Christian Reed ’92, ’94 (MA), and Chris Rizzo ’92, ’93 (MS)—are an outstanding group of men, and they have all achieved success in their careers in business, education, and the military.

Tom Tuori ’87

Rochester

The writer was a six-time All-American member of the men’s cross country and track and field teams.

lettersVISUALIZING DEBATE: Members of the 1995–96 debate team take part in a “visualization for victory” exercise organized by then coach Sam Nelson (far left). (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Engaged in Debate

The picture on page 53 of the March-April issue is from the 1995–96 school year. I was the coach of the Debate Union at the time. That’s me on the end, with the beard. I’m leading some team members in one of my “deep visualization for victory” training exercises. Others in the picture include Randy Pittelli ’95, Louise Vella ’97, Bimal Desai, Alex Helderman ’96, Chetan Gulati ’99, Paul Kerr, Jon Herman, Curtis Sturdivant ’98, David Nowak ’99, Ryan Pitterson ’97, Liz Jarrait ’96, Carrie Rosen ’97, Miranda Chiu ’96, Josh Clinton ’96, and Angela Watterworth Kroboth ’98. This was a wonderful team and included many more amazing debaters not pictured here. All of that year’s debate team members still keep me supplied with fond memories all these 20 years later!

Sam Nelson

Ithaca, New York

Nelson, who coached the Debate Union from 1990 to 2005, is director of forensics at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School.

I believe that the photo that appeared on page 53 in the March-April issue was from 1995. I was active on the debate team from 1992 to 1996. My partner, Marc Schatten ’95, and I won the Eastern Regionals Junior Varsity Championship in 1993, beating Cornell. Among those I recognized are Sam Nelson (coach), Miranda Chiu ’96, Carrie Rosen ’97, Elizabeth Jarrait ’96, Alex Helderman ’96, and Bimal Desai.

Josh Clinton ’96

Brentwood, Tennessee

lettersFROSH FUN: In fall 1966, the women of the Class of 1968 hosted Frosh Camp for the Class of 1970 in the nearby Bristol Hills, where the juniors posed for a photo. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Recollections

Frosh Camp was the best experience ever—playing baseball, writing the class song, a big pajama party, meeting upperclassmen on the bus who taught us all the University songs (Ask the Archivist, September-October 2014). We got on the bus as clueless and random individuals, and left the bus as a united group who felt the U of R was where we were supposed to be.

The Class of 1967 was required to pass the swimming test to graduate (Ask the Archivist, January-February 2016). At graduation, one student in my group was stunned to receive a letter to that effect instead of a diploma.

As for “You Say ‘Interpreze,’ I Say ‘Interpress,’ or Maybe ‘Interps,’” (Ask the Archivist, March-April 2016), we pronounced the yearbook “Interps.”

Lauren Conner Taylor ’67

Ocean City, Maryland

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.

BASKETBALL

Radical Rebound

rebound (Photo: Adam Fenster)

DYNAMIC DUO: Guard Sam Borst-Smith ’17 (right) won national attention for an intentionally missed free throw that led to a Yellowjackets’ overtime victory against the University of Chicago in February. Borst-Smith caught his own rebound and passed the ball to Mack Montague ’17 (left), who made the winning shot. The play aired on ESPN and went viral on YouTube, leading fans to cast enough votes for Borst-Smith to win State Farm’s inaugural Assist of the Year award. Borst-Smith was recognized in Houston during the NCAA college men’s basketball Final Four events.

OPERA

Wedding Music

figaro (Photo: Adam Fenster)

LOVE STORY: Eastman Opera Theatre mounted a production of Mozart’s beloved comic opera Le Nozze di Figaro—“The Marriage of Figaro”—at Eastman Theatre this spring. With two rotating casts of Eastman School of Music undergraduate and graduate students, the production was the fifth at Eastman in the last 30 years, and was inspired by the art of 18th-century French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

STUDENT LIFE

Commons Core

commons (Photo: University Libraries)

WILSON’S WAY: Students, faculty, and staff gathered this spring among balloons, cake, and commemorative items to mark the 40th anniversary of the dedication of Wilson Commons, the hub of campus life designed by architect I. M. Pei as “a place to be, and a place to remember.” Envisioned by benefactor Joseph Wilson ’31 as the center of University life, Wilson Commons is known for its signature honeycomb windows, constructed with 18,000 square feet of glass, to place in focus the tower of Rush Rhees Library.

HUMANITIES

Parting Words

Literary critic Jane Tylus considers Renaissance rituals of separation—and why bidding farewell was so hard.

By Kathleen McGarvey

tylusLEAVE-TAKING: Critic Jane Tylus compares the gesture of Saint Peter in a Renaissance painting by Sano di Pietro to the “posture of the poet who is ready to say goodbye to a poem but hasn’t sent it off yet.” (Photo: Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti, Florence, reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of Harvard College; Photo: Paolo De Rocco, Centrica srl, Firenze)

Saying good-bye—in life and in art—isn’t easy.

For Jane Tylus, a professor of Italian studies and comparative literature at New York University, the idea that there’s a convergence between both forms of parting became clear when she saw a 15th-century painting that she describes as “probably the most beautiful and thought-provoking painting I’ve seen in a long time.”

It was Congedo della Vergine, by Sano di Pietro, at Villa I Tatti, near Florence. The painting depicts a non-Biblical story of the Virgin Mary’s leave-taking from the disciples as she prepares to be reunited with Jesus Christ. In one panel of the painting, Saint Peter stands at the threshold of her house—there to say good-bye, but hesitating at the moment of doing so.

“This gesture of Saint Peter, who knows what is in front of him, but isn’t ready to go in just yet—this, to me, captures the posture of the poet who is ready to say good-bye to a poem but hasn’t sent it off yet,” says Tylus, who also is faculty director of the NYU Center for the Humanities. Like Saint Peter, she says, the artist stands before a work, declaring, “‘I’m about to say good-bye—but not yet. I can’t bear to say good-bye yet.’”

The painting led Tylus to what she calls a “new way of thinking” about “what a lot of visual and literary art is doing in the Renaissance.”

Ferrari Humanities Symposia

Jane Tylus was the 2016 keynote speaker this spring for the Ferrari Humanities Symposia, an annual event designed to highlight the broad interdisciplinary connections that are fundamental to a liberal arts education. Tylus is the director of NYU’s Center for the Humanities and a professor of Italian studies and comparative literature.

University Trustee Bernard Ferrari ’70, ’74M (MD) and his wife, Linda Gaddis Ferrari, established the symposia to broaden the liberal education of the University’s undergraduates, enhance the experience of graduate students, and expand the connections of University faculty with other scholars from around the world. Established in 2012, the series has hosted speakers including Anthony Grafton and Stephen Greenblatt.

—Kathleen McGarvey

As this year’s keynote speaker for the Ferrari Humanities Symposia, Tylus outlined some of her new ways of thinking about how artists and others depicted rituals of separation in early modern Europe. Tylus’s lecture, “Saying Good-bye in the Renaissance: Leave-Taking as a Work of Art,” was one piece of a three-day visit that involved a variety of activities, including a meeting with humanities graduate students, a public talk on the future of the humanities, and a presentation and roundtable conversation on the city in history with faculty and students from a multidisciplinary undergraduate course, Cities: Contested Spaces.

In her recent work, Tylus has written about the most significant women writers in Renaissance Italy, including Catherine of Siena, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, and Gaspara Stampa. Thomas Hahn, a professor of English and the organizer of the symposium, praises her skill as a translator whose work “extends far beyond linguistic expertise and elegance” in books such as Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others (Chicago, 2009)—winner of the Modern Language Association’s Howard R. Marraro Prize—and Siena: City of Secrets (Chicago, 2015).

“Her purpose in these books wasn’t just to recover the past but to situate these writers alongside the monuments and poetry that we all regard as a common heritage—for example, the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Michelangelo,” he says. “She ‘translates’ not just the words of individual writers, but a full sense of an age, a city, a work of art.”

The topic of Tylus’s keynote address was spurred by personal experience: coming to terms with the loss of parents and reflections on mourning and grieving. But her scholar’s mind soon ranged beyond her private sadness to thoughts about how contemporary beliefs and practices surrounding loss differ from what they were centuries ago.

A practicing Catholic, Tylus says she realized that “in my life, there’s a lot more continuity with the Middle Ages. There are sharp differences that Protestantism introduces to Catholic practices of not really saying good-bye.”

With the Protestant Reformation came enormous departures from Catholic religious practice, including a rejection of the idea of purgatory, where souls would be purified before ascending to heaven. Practices such as allowing the living to shorten, through paying for indulgences, the deceased’s time in purgatory meant that relationships continued, in some fashion, after death, Tylus says.

At the same time, artists were carrying on a long poetic tradition of pausing before the end of a work to contemplate the act of letting go. With many names—among them, the congedo in Italian and the envoi in French—the end of a poem was often a place where poets would turn to address the work itself and consider what might happen to it once it leaves them.

Michelangelo’s non finito, or unfinished, sculptures for the tomb of Pope Julius II—itself unfinished—are one example Tylus points to of a similar phenomenon in the visual arts. The figures “look like they’re imprisoned in the stone because they’re not finished,” she says. Late in his life, Michelangelo wrote a series of sonnets about his art’s lack of value when it comes to his life beyond death. “It’s a sad kind of rejection of the meaning he’s had as an artist, as he’s also saying good-bye to that life itself in his poems,” she says.

Produced a century later, Shakespeare’s work is “riddled with questions about when and how we say good-bye to loved ones,” she says. One particularly well-known example is Polonius’s comically excessive leave-taking from son Laertes in Hamlet, but Tylus finds particular meaning in the famous closing speech of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest. Prospero implores the audience to “release me from my bands/With the help of your good hands.”

“There’s a real sense that Prospero is going to die and is calling to the audience for life beyond death,” she says.

For Michelangelo, who was heavily influenced by some tenets of the Reformation, these radically new ideas struck at the roots of a sense of human community extending beyond death.

What was at stake, Tylus says, was nothing less than “the worth of a work of art in the face of the Reformation.”

Tanks and Pancakes

Physicist Segev BenZvi and scientists at an ambitious observatory use simple tools to probe the universe.

Three hundred giant tanks, each holding more than 50,000 gallons of purified water, perch on the side of the Sierra Negra volcano in central Mexico, standing 13,500 feet above sea level. Four photosensors lie at the bottom of each tank.

The array of tanks is part of the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory, or HAWC, a joint project of Mexico and the United States. While the technology is comparatively simple, the project is ambitious: observing gamma and cosmic rays, and contributing to the search for dark matter.

Segev BenZvi, an assistant professor of physics, and fellow scientists are looking for very energetic gamma rays and cosmic rays that enter Earth’s atmosphere. When the high-energy rays interact, they create a “particle cascade”—a shower of high-energy particles—that falls to Earth.

BenZvi and colleagues on the project are studying extremely high-energy particle acceleration, from supernova remnants, black holes, neutron stars, and pulsars—“objects with very, very large amounts of energy, some of which is being dumped into accelerating charged particles out in space,” he says. When they interact, they produce gamma rays and cosmic rays.

HAWC is a “scaled-up” version of a classic physics student experiment, he says, that uses a water tank in the lab to measure for muons—heavy, unstable versions of electrons that are the ground-level remnants of particle cascades.

But the project is innovative in three ways: its high-altitude location brings better sensitivity to the particles, which get absorbed by the atmosphere as they descend; its “optically isolated, densely packed” tanks; and the algorithms that let the scientists make use of the data they assemble.

Construction of the observatory began in 2011 at a site in the Parque Nacional Pico de Orizaba, a national park and home to the dormant volcano Pico de Orizaba, Mexico’s highest peak. HAWC was formally opened last spring. When the experiments are complete, in about 10 years, the scientists will restore the area to as close to its original condition as they can. The park is a “cloud forest,” with one of the highest tree lines in the world. An environmentally sensitive site, the forest affects cloud formation and rainfall in areas south and west of the park. No trees were removed in creating the observatory.

The high-altitude location poses minor challenges for researchers, like shortness of breath, says BenZvi. “And shortness of temper, believe it or not,” he says. “You just get really irritated. Your thinking isn’t very clear. I find that I get bad at doing basic arithmetic in my head when I’m up there.”

The enormous tanks—23 feet wide and more than 16 feet high—are the same kind of tanks used by Midwestern farmers to irrigate their fields. A military contractor who manufactures “light-tight” tents for soldiers in hostile territory makes the tanks’ hemispherical domes.

Local workers assembled the tank array, and then made 4,000 trips by truck up and down the mountain to haul the water to fill them—a volume of 55 million liters, or the equivalent of a soda can’s worth of water for each person living in Mexico.

The tanks sample the air shower particles at ground level. There are about 100 million particles in a cascade at its peak. The number of particles decreases as the cascade descends.

“It’s like a pancake of high-energy particles that moves toward the ground,” BenZvi says. When the particles hit the ground, they move through the tanks—and when high-energy particles move through water, they produce ultraviolet light, known as the Cherenkov effect. The photosensors in the tank record the ultraviolet light. And from the pattern of times that the sensors in each tank are triggered, scientists can reconstruct the direction of the particle pancake.

The data they collect may also shed some light, as it were, on dark matter.

“There is very strong evidence, from all kinds of measurements in astrophysics, that there is something called dark matter,” BenZvi says. “But it’s not clear what it is. We think it’s a fundamental particle or particles.”

But scientists don’t know how massive it is or what its interactions are. “So it’s entirely possible that some of the gamma rays and cosmic rays that we see are actually not produced by neutron stars and supernovae and things like that—they’re actually produced when clumps of dark matter interact and decay. That’s the idea,” he says.

When anomalies are found in astrophysical data, scientists consider whether the source of the anomaly is a mistake in their model or the influence of dark matter.

“And that’s kind of the name of the game,” says BenZvi. “It’s a tough game, as you can imagine. It’s sort of like the joke about ‘unknown unknowns’—you don’t know what you’re not modeling.”

Telescopes offer another way to measure gamma rays. But they have a narrow field of view, taking in only a few degrees of the sky at a time. HAWC records information from two-thirds of the sky every 24 hours.

“Over the course of one day, we can see essentially the entire northern hemisphere,” says BenZvi, noting that the methods are complementary. “We’ve made the bet on more coverage, less sensitivity; they make the bet on more sensitivity, less coverage. If you have both types of instruments running, you can look for unexpected stuff with HAWC—we communicate with those guys through back channels: ‘Hey, we see something interesting. Point your telescope there.’ And that’s how a lot of the field works.”

Scientists are now processing their first year’s worth of data from HAWC, which they began to make public this spring. And they are expanding the array with some additional tanks—just a few, which will bring with them a four-fold increase in sensitivity.

And there is talk of creating a second observatory, possibly in Chile. The southern hemisphere provides the best vantage point for observing the center of the galaxy—and it’s “a very strong candidate for observing dark matter, because we believe there’s a super-massive black hole in the center of the galaxy, and so there should be a gravitational well there where dark matter is concentrated,” says BenZvi.

“If we have a HAWC in the southern hemisphere, literally the center of the galaxy will be right overhead,” he says.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Brushing Up on Older Scots

Scholars discuss the literature of medieval and early modern Scotland.

scotsCONVENING SCOTS: Scholars are gathering at Robbins Library to discuss texts written in Older Scots, a descendant of northern Old English that was used in medieval and early modern Scotland. (Photo: Jon Arnold Images Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo)

Meet a Few Terms from Older Scots . . .

cummerwarld: n. useless person (i.e., “encumber-world”)

dowbart: n. dimwit

dreich: adj. tedious, dreary; (of weather) grey and miserable. Still common in modern usage.

glaik: n. fool; glaikit: adj. idiotic

lidder: adj. slow, sluggish, indecisive

maggil, maggle: v. to spoil

maggilit: adj. mangled, ruined

nipcaik: n. miser

quean: n. wench

skaldit skaitbird: n. scabby scavenger

skamelar: n. parasite

slawsy: n. fellow, guy

walidrag: n. wastrel

Feeling like a cummerwarld, or even a dowbart, because your Older Scots vocabulary is a bit rusty? Fear not: you needn’t be looking glaikit for long.

In May, the University is hosting the Rochester–St Andrews Conference on Older Scots Literature and Culture. The gathering draws specialists from the United States, Canada, and Europe to share papers on 14th- to 16th-century literature in Older Scots, the descendant of Old English that was used in medieval and early modern Scotland.

Rhiannon Purdie of the University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland, who is visiting the University’s Robbins Library as a Fulbright Scottish Studies Scholar, and Thomas Hahn, professor of English, organized the event. Papers examine early literary and political texts, historiography, and language and ethnicity, among other subjects.

The Robbins Library is home to the Middle English Texts Series, sponsored by the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages. Among the nearly 100 volumes published, the series has made available, in digital and hard copy, a number of Older Scots writings and more are in production, helping to make Older Scots literature more accessible to teachers and students around the world.

More information about the conference is on its website: Olderscots.com.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Accessing a New Point of View

Scholar Beth Jörgensen turns the lens of disability studies on Latin American culture.

jorgensen(Photo: Adobe Stock)

When Beth Jörgensen, a professor of Spanish, prepared in 2009 to teach a course about coming-of-age stories in Latin America, she reversed the common academic order of things.

“Very often, our research contributes much to our teaching,” she says. “My engagement with disability studies over the last seven years actually came directly out of teaching.”

Jörgensen decided to include in the course the book Gaby Brimmer: An Autobiography in Three Voices. The collaborative memoir tells the life story of Gabriela Brimmer, who was born to Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents in Mexico City in 1947. Brimmer learned to communicate by manipulating an alphabet board with the big toe of her left foot, the only part of her body that cerebral palsy allowed her to control.

To teach the book, Jörgensen immersed herself in disability studies, a field of cultural criticism that has emerged gradually over the past three decades. Now she’s the coeditor of a new book, Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies (State University of New York Press, 2016). With Susan Antebi of the University of Toronto, Jörgensen assembled the critical essays to turn the lens of disability studies on Latin American literature, film, and culture.

Disability studies may not yet have the wide recognition that women’s studies or African-American studies do, but their origins are similar.

“There’s an activist piece to it,” says Jörgensen. “Women’s studies came out of the women’s rights movement; African-American studies came out of the civil rights movement, in many ways. And disability studies has its roots in the disability rights activism of the last 30 years.”

The approach emphasizes reading literature, viewing film, and theorizing about culture to see how societies construct and view disability.

“It has become quite an important way of looking at literature, film, and art, especially in Britain and North America—Mexico, much less so,” she says. And in Latin American studies, its potential has been little explored.

The best-known literary work discussed in Libre Acceso is Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. In his essay, critic Juan Manuel Espinosa suggests that the novel can be read as an exploration of how a person with Asperger’s syndrome experiences the world.

Jörgensen calls her introduction to the field “eye-opening.” She began to “see things in literature that I hadn’t even noticed before, because I didn’t have the intellectual tools to notice them.”

But once readers begin to notice the trope of disability, they realize it’s omnipresent. The figure of a character with a disability is pervasive in world literature, she says, from at least the time of Oedipus. But critics haven’t until recently begun to consider what can be illuminated by considering the category “disability” carefully. Often, it’s a kind of plot device, she says, a “narrative prosthetic” that sets events or conflicts in motion, or a metaphor for social ills, or a mechanism for the moral growth of a non-disabled character.

The field has reshaped Jörgensen’s own understanding of disability and the concept of accommodation. Buildings are heated in the winter as an accommodation of our physical need for warmth, she points out.

“Society accommodates all of us,” she says. “Is it really a special accommodation, then, to put in curb cuts for people with disabilities?”

Common themes emerge in the essays, such as the “intersectionality” of identity that occurs when one is not only disabled, but also poor and a minority member of society. “You can’t just isolate the disability as if nothing else were also determining that person’s destiny,” Jörgensen says.

“All of the essays,” she adds, “make a case for the importance of inclusion, of how much we miss out on the richness of human diversity if we are not inclusive of people with disabilities.”

And now Jörgensen’s research on disability studies is informing her teaching. Last fall, she taught a new course, Disability Studies: Rethinking Difference and Diversity, in which she introduced students to scholarship that treats disability identities both as physical realities and as social and cultural constructions.

The course also explores the literary representations of physical, intellectual, and psychosocial disability in works from a variety of national traditions.

“Teaching a single book, and trying to bone up on what I needed to know to do a good job of teaching that book, opened a new field for me,” she says.

—Bob Marcotte, with Kathleen McGarvey

Connecting Veterans with Jobs

A new website aims to connect veterans and reservists with jobs at Rochester.

The site helps job applicants with military experience and knowledge to find positions at the University that match well with their qualifications. It builds on support services offered throughout the University designed to ease the transition from active service to employment or degree programs. Among them are the Veterans Alliance—an affinity group that helps active military and veteran students, staff, faculty, alumni, and their families succeed in higher education—and the Veteran and Military Family Services Office, which supports veterans as they transition from military life to the classroom.

Visit the new site at University ofrochester-veterans.jobs.

University Launches Antiracism Campaign

A new antiracism campaign, “We’re Better Than That,” was launched this spring as part of a larger effort to address issues of race and diversity at the University.

The catalyst for the campaign came last November, when about 150 students and supporters marched peacefully across 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.

For more information, visit Rochester.edu/better-than-that.

Top Marks for Health Care Equality

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation—the educational arm of the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization—has recognized UR Medicine’s Strong Memorial and F. F. Thompson Hospitals as “leaders in LGBT health care equality.”

The foundation annually surveys health care organizations across the country about their inclusive policies and practices related to LGBT patients, visitors, and health care employees.

Both Strong and Thompson earned top marks in meeting nondiscrimination and training criteria, demonstrating a high commitment to providing equitable, inclusive care for LGBT patients and their families.

Talking Strategy at Simon

The 16th annual Strategy and the Business Environment Conference was held at the Simon Business School in April. The conference, which has been held at Harvard, Stanford, and the Kellogg School of Management in recent years, featured papers from multiple disciplines, on topics including political risk, corporate governance, corporate social performance, activism, and regulation.

Apple Taps Parkinson App

An iPhone app developed by Sage Bionetworks and Medical Center neurologists to improve the study of Parkinson’s disease was highlighted by Apple during the company’s semiannual product launch event in March.

The mPower app, first unveiled in March 2015 during Apple’s “Spring Forward” product launch, gathers real-time data from patients to more fully understand Parkinson’s and how it affects daily life. The app also allows patients to track symptoms and how treatments are affecting the progression of the disease. With more than 12,000 registered users, it represents one of the largest studies of the disease.

HUMANITIES

In Review

chomsky (Photo: Adam Fenster)

GUEST LECTURE: The Humanities Center welcomed Noam Chomsky, the Distinguished Visiting Humanist for the 2015–16 academic year, to campus in April. Chomsky, the Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT, is widely considered the founder of the modern field of linguistics and a deeply influential public intellectual, having written and spoken on topics of power, force, exploitation, and the media for nearly 50 years.

For three days, Chomsky delivered talks—including a filled-to-capacity lecture on “Language, Creativity, and the Limits of Understanding,” in the Interfaith Chapel—met with faculty, graduates, and undergraduates (left) to discuss his linguistic and political works, and sat for Q&As and discussions at film screenings, including a sold-out screening of Requiem for the American Dream: Noam Chomsky and the Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, at the Little Theatre in downtown Rochester.

For more on Chomsky’s visit, and on the Humanities Center’s Distinguished Visiting Humanist program, see http://www.sas. rochester.edu/humanities.

AWARDS

In Review

jefferson (Photo: Adam Fenster)

MEDAL OF HONOR: Frederick Jefferson, a professor emeritus at the Warner School of Education, received the Frederick Douglass Medal in April, in recognition of his part in making the University and the Rochester community more diverse and inclusive.

A behavioral scientist, Jefferson came to Rochester in 1973 as director of the Educational Opportunity Program. Since then, he has served in a variety of roles, including director of the Department of Special Student Services and assistant to the president for University and community affairs. Today he is a University intercessor, specializing in issues related to racial and ethnic diversity.

A significant leader in the Rochester area, Jefferson has served as board chair of Action for a Better Community, as well as the local chapters of the American Red Cross and the United Way. He’s been an advisor to the Gateways Music Festival and currently chairs the board of the Baobab Cultural Center.

The Office of the President and the Frederick Douglass Institute created the medal in 2008 to honor scholars or civic leaders who represent Douglass’s ideals and have contributed to educational life.

A ‘Fishy’ Study Is Promising for Lung Infections

discoverALPHA OMEGAS: Omega-3 fatty acids, like those found in fish, may be key to fighting bacteria in lungs. (Photo: Adobe Stock)

Here’s another reason salmon and sardines can be a boon to human health.

A new study has found that omega-3 fatty acids—like those found in fish—may be key to helping the body combat lung infections.

People with inflammatory diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, often are plagued by a type of bacteria that omega-3 derivatives are effective at clearing.

COPD is most often caused by years of smoking. Quitting smoking can slow its progress, but won’t stop it, and anti-inflammatory drugs—the most common treatment—can put people at risk for secondary infections.

In a recent study in the Journal of Immunology, Richard Phipps, who holds the Wright Family Research Professorship in the Department of Environmental Medicine; Patricia Sime, chief of pulmonary diseases and critical care and the C. Jane Davis and C. Robert Davis Distinguished Professor of Pulmonary Medicine; and toxicology graduate student Amanda Croasdell tested the effectiveness of an inhalable omega-3 derivative to prevent bacterial lung infections. Unlike other anti-inflammatory drugs, the specialized agent used in the study reduced inflammation without suppressing the clearing of bacteria, and could hasten it.

Further study is needed to determine the effectiveness of the treatment in people, but the approach also shows promise for remedying other infections caused by the bacteria, including bronchitis, pneumonia, and ear infections.

—Susanne Pallo

A Little Bird Told Me . . .

Can a computer tell if you’ve been drinking when you tweet?

New research suggests that it can. In an innovative test case for analyzing ongoing behavior by Twitter users, computer scientists have investigated drinking in different communities.

Computer science graduate student Nabil Hossain and collaborators taught computers to analyze tweets about drinking in an effort to predict where Twitter users are when they report drinking.

Hossain is a member of the computer science group led by Henry Kautz ’87 (PhD), the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science.

Hossain is presenting the research at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, to be held in Germany in May. The paper was also posted on the arXiv.org repository.

An article in MIT Technology Review says the work is based on “two breakthroughs.”

The first is a technique for training a machine-learning algorithm to differentiate between tweets in which people discuss drinking and tweets in which they indicate that they themselves are currently drinking.

The computers can distinguish between people who are tweeting about an activity in which they’re presently engaged and those who have done it in the past or will in the future. The model could be applied to other behaviors.

The second breakthrough is a technique for locating tweeters’ homes with greater accuracy than ever before—and thereby determining whether they’re at home when they’re drinking.

Until now, predicting social media users’ home locations was done by establishing the place from which they most often tweet or the common location for their last post of the day.

In the new work, researchers applied machine-learning techniques to identify in-the-moment user behavior.

That allowed them to predict users’ home locations accurately within 100 meters.

When they combined the tools, researchers were able to discover patterns of alcohol use in urban and suburban settings, information that they hope can have applications for prevention and public health programs.

—Leonor Sierra

Counting the Ages of Stars?

People tend to get a little set in their ways as they age. So, it turns out, do stars.

As stars grow older, their activity becomes more predictable, researchers have found. In a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists describe a new conceptual framework for understanding how stars similar to the sun evolved. The researchers explain how investigating the physics behind the speeding up or slowing down of a star’s rotation, its x-ray activity, and its magnetic field generation can allow scientists to begin to plot the evolution of stars.

Using the sun as the calibration point, the model describes how the sun likely behaved in the past and how it’s expected to behave in the future. For stars of similar mass and radius, the model yields useful predictions.

Scientists aren’t yet able to accurately predict a star’s precise age, but lead author Eric Blackman, a professor of physics and astronomy, says that could be ahead. —Leonor Sierra

Solving a Calcium Mystery

Secretions like saliva and digestive juices are vital to countless activities that keep the human body running. Now a new study has uncovered a previously mysterious process that makes the secretions possible.

At the heart of the study is calcium, which is present in all human cells and acts as a kind of gatekeeper, opening up the channels that are required for the production and secretion of fluids like saliva.

For 15 years, David Yule, who holds the Louis C. Lasagna Professorship in Experimental Therapeutics, has studied calcium’s role in disorders like acute pancreatitis and dry mouth conditions in which patients have difficulty chewing, swallowing, and speaking due to a lack of saliva.

In his new study, published in the journal Science Signaling, he answers a question that has stumped researchers for years: what does it take for a particularly important calcium channel to open and start secretion processes?

Scientists knew that a specific protein, one that is composed of four identical units, is necessary—but using advanced molecular engineering and gene-editing techniques driven by Kamil Alzayady, a research assistant professor in Yule’s lab, the team discovered that all four units that make up the protein must be “turned on” for calcium to increase and start fluid secretion. Yule believes the complexity is likely a safety feature, ensuring that the calcium channel opens only in particular circumstances. That avoids harmful conditions that could result if it opened more easily, as too much calcium is also detrimental.

The team is continuing its research to investigate how genetic diseases affecting the protein result in brain and immune system disorders.

—Emily Boynton

SPECIAL GUESTS

Get Set for Meliora Weekend 2016

The 2016 edition of the fall celebration features big names in music, filmmaking, and political and cultural commentary.

melioraWEEKEND REPORT: Special guests for October’s Meliora Weekend include (clockwise from top left) singer-songwriter Ben Folds, singer Tony Bennett, filmmaker Ken Burns, The Daily Show host Trevor Noah, and Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The weekend also includes celebrations to mark the success of The Meliora Challenge Campaign.

Legendary singer Tony Bennett, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe—Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski—singer-songwriter Ben Folds, and The Daily Show host Trevor Noah are the featured guests at this fall’s Meliora Weekend.

The annual celebration, October 6–9, will also mark the celebration of the success of The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester.

Set to formally conclude on June 30, the Campaign has raised more than $1.3 billion in support of research, faculty professorships, student scholarships and fellowships, new construction and improvements to facilities and buildings, and new programs.

Registration and ticketing for the weekend opens in July. For more information, visit Rochester.edu/melioraweekend.

ARTS & HUMANITIES

Poetry Garden

poetry (Photo: Adam Fenster)

APRIL’S REIGN: A brilliantly illuminated edition of “The May Queen” by Alfred Lord Tennyson was one of the treasures from Rush Rhees Library that took center stage as part of a celebration of National Poetry Month in April. First published in 1832, the poem was illustrated by L. Summerbell in the 1870s. The online project highlighted other examples of poetic and literary work, including videos of faculty members reading some of their favorite poems. Visit Rochester.edu/newscenter/national-poetry-month-2016/.

GLOBAL ROCHESTER: ZAMBIA AND MALAWI

In Review

Neurologist Gretchen Birbeck confronts seizure disorders in sub-Saharan Africa.

globalSTOPPING SEIZURES: Birbeck has provided care for more than 3,000 patients with seizure disorders in Africa during two decades of work there. (Photo: Courtesy of Gretchen Birbeck)

Gretchen Birbeck’s first trip to Zambia came in 1994, when she was a University of Chicago medical student completing an elective at the remote Chikankata Mission Hospital, about 75 miles south of the capital city, Lusaka.

More than two decades later, she spends half her year in sub-Saharan Africa, working to improve care for people with seizure disorders.

The Edward A. and Alma Vollertsen Rykenboer Professor in Neurology at Rochester, Birbeck is the director for Chikankata’s Epilepsy Care Team. She’s also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Zambia.

ROCHESTER AND ZAMBIA AND MALAWI

People

3 alumni living in Malawi

3 alumni living in Zambia

1 student from Malawi in fall 2015

7 students from Zambia in fall 2015

Malawi Immersion Seminar

A three-week study abroad and field school experience run by the Department of Anthropology, the seminar addresses cultural, health, social, political, and ecological issues in Malawi. Students are trained in anthropological research methods, and the seminar welcomes undergraduates and graduate students from any university and any major. Joseph Lanning ’00, ’07 (Mas) directs the program. Since 2007, 103 Rochester undergraduates have participated; 17 medical students have also taken part, beginning in 2009.

Seizure disorders can be caused by many medical conditions, and they’re more common in the developing world. Neurological and psychological disorders account “for about a quarter of the global burden of disease, and much of that is in developing countries,” says Birbeck.

“There’s a disconnect between where disease is and where experts are,” she says.

She works to redress that disconnection, providing clinical care and conducting research. As a result, more than 3,000 patients have received treatment they otherwise wouldn’t have. And she has helped make changes to Zambia’s national policy that could help many more.

She’s also working to build up the resources and networks necessary to conduct clinical trials in Africa, and to create education and training programs for health care providers and researchers. She’s involved in cerebral malaria research in Malawi and Uganda, and mentors postgraduates and junior faculty carrying out research in Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, and South Africa.

While creating access to specialty health care is critical, Birbeck finds that tackling stigma and misinformation is also key. The difficulties are complex. There aren’t only problems procuring a diagnosis, finding treatment options, and getting access to medication. Open flames from fires and bodies of water also pose significant threats. “Burns and drowning,” she says, “are two of the most common causes of death of people with epilepsy in developing countries.”

In the years that Birbeck has been traveling to Africa, she has seen “slow inroads” in Zambia for treating epilepsy, with improvements in general services and better access to information about the disease. Meanwhile, a “roll back malaria” campaign has transformed the incidence of malaria seizures in Zambia, though Malawi hasn’t seen such progress. Efforts to deal with malaria haven’t kept pace with those for epilepsy, but there have been advances. “I’m not convinced malaria eradication is likely, but there are improvements in infection rates,” she says.

Overall, though, Birbeck sees reasons for optimism. “There’s much more expertise in-country,” she says. “Junior people are coming back as senior people, and staying.”

Their efforts are an amalgam of teaching people about seizures and making care available to them. Both are essential, she says, and her research and clinical care are different but interrelated efforts to improve the lives of people with epilepsy and other seizure disorders. “We’re educating the public, but we also work with the health care structure to ensure there are providers and treatment,” she says.

—Kathleen McGarvey

ASK THE ARCHIVIST: IT’S A DATE

In Review

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

ataPOSTCARD VIEW: Autumn color and various landmarks—no Women’s Residence Hall (today known as “Sue B”), but construction under way for Lovejoy and Hoeing—suggest the image dates from fall 1952. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

I just came across this great old postcard, which reminds me of the days when I arrived on campus. I am tentatively thinking 1953. I first became familiar with the campus in 1952–53. I have spent the last 62 years watching bricks and asphalt replace the green. —Robert Knox ’58 (PhD ), professor emeritus of physics, Rochester

The first thing is to rule out the obvious: the archives’ copy of the card has a 1959 postmark—far too late, but it does indicate the long shelf- or drawer-life of postcards. The printing code on the back of the card includes “53”—but should we trust that (and where is the fun, if we do)?

The front of the card has all the clues we need. Halfway down the left edge is a red roof: temporary housing for GI Bill veterans was put up in 1946. The extension on the back of Lattimore was added in 1949. Slightly obscured by the trees (and the image quality) is construction on Lovejoy and Hoeing Halls; ground was broken for Lovejoy in April 1952, and both residences opened in September 1953. A story in the Rochester Times-Union on June 23, 1953, noted the removal of the red-roofed “barracks.”

Across the campus the autumnal trees stand tall. Behind the tower of Rush Rhees Library, there is no evidence of the groundbreaking for what we today call Susan B. Anthony Hall. (You can hear the speeches at the September 1953 groundbreaking here: http://livinghistory.lib.rochester.edu/womens-center.)

Taking all these points together, it seems possible to conclude that the image was taken in the fall of 1952, just about the time you were arriving to begin your long association with the University.

Nina Simone seems to be enjoying her moment in the spotlight (new biography, two recently released films). I saw the documentary film The Amazing Nina Simone in a local theater and met the filmmaker. I was reminded of Miss Simone’s concert at the U of R in 1970 or 1971, and an incident that happened during the concert. I want to confirm my memory and to pinpoint the date. An obviously inebriated older man (that is, apparently not a student) began talking loudly during one of her songs. My recollection is that when the audience began to hiss to show its disapproval, Miss Simone—rather than getting angry (which, as the film documents, she had done in similar situations)—cupped the man’s chin in her free hand and sang directly to him until he was charmed into silence. Now, 45-plus years later, I’m wondering how the local newspapers reported the incident. I’d like to pass the story on to the filmmaker, but want to be sure I have the facts straight.—LeAnn Fields, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Nina Simone performed at the Palestra on February 26, 1971—the show started hours late, because the opening act, Kool and the Gang, had travel delays. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reports that Simone “began singing ‘Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair’ when one fan kept interrupting her with ‘Tell them about the ghetto, Nina.’ But Miss Simone appeared to enjoy the ‘exceptionally responsive’ audience.”

Gail Wright Sirmans ’72 described the event at greater length in the Campus Times: “She gave us all of herself, which is rare. Miss Simone is a hypersensitive artist and sometimes becomes impatient with her audience . . . ‘Black Is the Color of My True Love’ began the performance with vibrating intensity. She held back nothing and let herself drown in a rapturous combination of sound and soul.”

Later in her article Wright describes Simone’s response to an audience member. “One member of the audience consistently lashed out rude interjections. Maintaining her composure, [Simone] calmly stated, ‘If you are so tormented with this place, leave.’ While the audience began to show signs of annoyance with the noisemaker, Nina Simone remained intense but unperturbed. ‘I know where he is coming from. He’s okay, he’ll be all right. Let him be.’”

You and 2,000 other fans definitely had a memorable experience.

AWARDS

Six Yellowjackets Receive All-America Honors

allamericanSPRING AWARDS: Yellowjackets earning All-America honors this spring were Pat Rice ’16 (clockwise from top left), Tomotaka Endo ’18, Neil Cordell ’16, Ryosei Kobayashi ’17, Mario Yanez Tapia ’17, and Alexandra Leslie ’18. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Six Rochester athletes earned All-America honors this spring, in basketball, squash, and the heptathlon.

Alexandra Leslie ’18 was named a first team All-American by D3hoops.com and a third team All-American by DIII News. Since the end of last season, Leslie has received eight postseason honors, including three All-America teams, two All-Region teams, and one All-League team. She was also named Player of the Year at both league and regional levels.

For the second straight year, and only the third time in the 58-year history of the squash program, Rochester had four All-Americans, as named by the College Squash Association. Ryosei Kobayashi ’17 and Mario Yanez Tapia ’17 were first team All-Americans, and Neil Cordell ’16 and Tomotaka Endo ’18 were second team.

The awards capped off the most successful season in Rochester squash history, as the Yellowjackets earned a 12–4 record and reached the national championship match for the first time, falling in a 5–4 match to host Yale.

Pat Rice ’16 produced outstanding finishes in his last two events in the NCAA Division III heptathlon and garnered All-America honors. He finished fourth overall with 4,931 points at the New York state championships this winter. That was just shy of his Rochester record in the competition (4,980 points).

—Dennis O’Donnell

HIGHLIGHTS

Spring Sports Roundup

By Dennis O’Donnell

Rochester’s rowers won the coveted Kerr Cup in Philadelphia and followed that with a victory by the first varsity 8-shell team in the Liberty League championships.

At the 50th edition of the Kerr Cup, the first and second varsity women’s teams prevailed in the finals over Franklin and Marshall, Bryn Mawr, and Mary Washington.

At the Liberty League championships, Rochester was seeded third and edged leader William Smith with a sprint over the last 250 meters to win by less than a second.

Here’s a look at how the other teams were faring as April came to a close:

Baseball: Rochester was a game out of first place at 10–6 in the Liberty League. Evan Janifer ’16 had a 4–2 record and a 1.16 ERA. John Ghyzel ’18 was 5–0 with a 1.90 ERA.

Golf: The Yellowjackets finished second at the Liberty League spring championships. Four golfers will earn Scholar All-America honors from the Golf Coaches Association of America this year.

Lacrosse: Three goals in the first three minutes lifted Rochester to a 14–4 victory over Bard College for the first Liberty League win of the season and fourth overall. Jamie Wallisch ’17 and Madeline Levy ’18 each had 31 goals with the season winding down.

Softball: Rochester was tied for first in the Liberty League (with RPI) at 8–2. Elizabeth Bourne ’19 spun a two-hit shutout over regionally ranked Cortland in late April. At the UAA tournament, Eleni Wechsler ’17 had a win and a save as Rochester topped second-ranked Washington twice.

Men’s tennis: Rochester reeled off a six-match winning streak, four of those wins with 9–0 scores, heading into the UAA championships. Ben Shapiro ’16 was the overall leader in singles victories (15). Aaron Mevorach ’18 was second (14).

Women’s tennis: The Yellowjackets posted victories over William Smith, Ithaca, Nazareth, and RIT. Alex Wolkoff ’18 had 11 singles wins and Lauren Zickar ’17 had 10. The doubles team of Camila Garcia ’19 and Christine Ho ’16 was 16–10.

Men’s track and field: The team met eight ECAC qualifying standards at the Bucknell Invitational against competition from all three NCAA divisions.

Women’s track and field: The Yellowjackets broke three school records at the Bucknell Invitational: the 3,000-meter steeplechase, the 5,000-meter run (which dated to 1989), and the 4-by-100-meter relay.

HONORS & AWARDS

In Review

mcginnity (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

ACCOLADE: Maura McGinnity ’87, ’96S (MBA) (right) was recognized last fall with a Garnish Citation Award, presented by George VanderZwaag, executive director of athletics and recreation. A member of the 1986 national championship women’s soccer team, McGinnity is the development director of interdisciplinary biosciences at Stanford University. Named for a former coach, the late Lysle (Spike) Garnish, the award recognizes support of the intercollegiate athletics program.

Searching for Words

What’s at stake when languages are lost?

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

languagesTHE MULTILINGUAL NORM: Farai Mutonhori ’19 came of age fluent in five languages, and conversant in a sixth. Multilingualism on that scale is still the norm in parts of the world such as his native Zimbabwe. But linguists wonder how long that will be the case. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It’s Friday afternoon, and Farai Mutonhori ’19 arrives at the crowded entrance to the Wilson Commons Starbucks. Dressed in a white Oxford shirt and tie, the freshman electrical and computer engineering major from Masvingo, Zimbabwe, is taking time out from his usual routine of classes, workshops, and labs to talk about what some of his American friends consider to be one of his more unusual aptitudes. Mutonhori speaks five languages in addition to English. “I speak Zulu, Sotho, Ndebele, Shona, and a little bit of Venda,” he says.

As exotic as such multilingualism might appear in many contexts, in Mutonhori’s native region, it’s how things are. “It’s typical. People in Zimbabwe don’t speak one language,” he says. “There was a point where—it was very strange for me growing up as a kid. I would use, maybe, three languages in a sentence at some point. But as you go along, you get used to all of them, and you become fluent.”

Mutonhori’s first language is Ndebele. Ndebele is not, according to the definition accepted widely among linguists, an endangered language. But Mutonhori feels its position is precarious. When he was growing up, Zimbabwe was embroiled in civil war, and his Ndebele community fell under the domination of Shona-speaking ethnic rivals. His father responded by adopting a Shona surname. Although Ndebele remains, along with Shona and English, an official language of Zimbabwe, Shona domination continues. “Our president is Shona. In politics, Shonas make more of the decisions,” Mutonhori says.

There are regions of the globe, including much of sub-Saharan Africa, in which so many languages live within such a small geographic area that people there, like Mutonhori, may engage in conversations in multiple languages within a single day, depending on the people with whom they’re speaking. For linguists, such regions are laboratories for the study of the human capacity to absorb language and to shape and reshape it collectively over time.

But linguists worry there will be fewer such places in the future. The fate Mutonhori fears for Ndebele is a present reality for many languages around the globe. There are slightly more than 7,000 distinct languages in use in the world today, according to the Ethnologue, a definitive source of information about languages around the world researched and compiled by the Dallas, Texas, based organization SIL International. They come in striking varieties, spanning more than 140 language families, and including well over 100 deaf sign languages.

“We have an enormous world of variability out there,” says Joyce McDonough, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester. “When I look at a language, I am always astounded at the way they’re put together. They’re remarkable. They’re beautiful. And they’re disappearing.”

The Ethnologue groups languages on the basis of 12 categories of language status, from thriving, national languages to languages that no longer have any known speakers. Estimates among linguists range considerably, but the most conservative estimates predict that by the end of this century, half of the languages now in use will have vanished.

The prospect of widespread language loss confronts scholars with an irony. Humanity may have more access to education, more sophisticated tools for learning, and more cross-cultural contact than ever before. But at the same time, greater mobility and cross-cultural contact can place the spectacular range of human thought and invention at risk.

languagesCRACKING THE LINGUISTIC CODE: Nadine Grimm (above), a specialist in Bantu languages who has conducted field research most recently in Cameroon, oversees a new program in language documentation. Joyce McDonough (below), a scholar with a long track record of work with the Navajo and the Dene language communities in northwestern Canada, was instrumental in the program’s formation. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

languages (Photo: Adam Fenster)

McDonough, who has taught at Rochester since 1997, specializes in North American languages, in particular, Navajo and the related Athabaskan or Dene languages. She’s been working for several years on a study of the remote Dene-speaking communities in the Mackenzie River Basin of northwestern Canada. When a language disappears, she says, a culture disappears with it, as does knowledge that the community has built up over centuries. When a language is lost, entire oral traditions of storytelling can be lost with it. Highly specialized knowledge of local plant and animal life—knowledge built up over many years and held exclusively, in many cases, within endangered language communities—also vanishes.

There’s an additional problem that weighs heavily on scholars of language. To illustrate, McDonough draws an analogy between language and plants. “Imagine if we only had access to a few different types of plants and we had to describe the phenomena of plant life on the basis of that,” she says. “With the enormous amount of variability out there, we would be missing a lot.” Yet linguistic research has been based disproportionately on Indo-European languages. “The assumptions we make about what can and cannot be part of language or expressed by language are constantly confounded by new discoveries in under-resourced languages,” she and a coauthor wrote in an article in the Annual Review of Linguistics in 2015.

That’s a point echoed by scholars whose work is not directly related to language documentation, but relies on it nonetheless. Florian Jaeger, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, of linguistics, and of computer science at Rochester, develops computational models of human language processing. The integrity of his research, and that of colleagues who develop similar models of language acquisition, rests on the availability of diverse data sets.

“We can think of our brain as a filter,” says Jaeger, whose current research draws on Yucatec Maya, one of approximately 70 Mayan languages spoken in southern Mexico and Central America today. “You could come up with some linguistic innovation right now, but if I can’t make sense out of it, it’s not going to survive. So what is the structure of that filter? We will only figure that out if we have a good idea of the variability that’s actually out there.”

In 1991, recognizing the pace of language loss, the Linguistic Society of America issued a call to action at a symposium titled “Endangered Languages and their Preservation.” The type of language loss occurring in the modern era, participants argued, was not to be confused with the evolution of language that has taken place among virtually all languages throughout human history. Evolution involves the merging of features of multiple languages, usually within particular geographic areas, and at a relatively slow pace; in modern times, given much greater human mobility, language communities have been overwhelmed and subsumed by their more powerful counterparts with unprecedented speed.

For the past several years, faculty in Rochester’s linguistics department have responded, offering seminars to train students to work with endangered and understudied languages. Beginning this fall, the department will ramp up its efforts with a new master’s degree program specifically in language documentation.

The program will be overseen by Nadine Grimm, a specialist in African languages, particularly those in the Bantu family, who joined Rochester’s linguistics department last year.

Last fall, Grimm reached out to Mutonhori, looking for native speakers of languages that would be completely unfamiliar to the students registered for her spring seminar, Field Methods in Linguistic Description. She offered Mutonhori a job as linguistic consultant for the course, and he accepted.

The seminar, which has been taught over the years by several members of the department, is structured as a form of role-playing. Students play the role of a team of linguists documenting and analyzing an unfamiliar language. A hired linguistic consultant—in this case, Mutonhori—responds to students’ questions in a process called elicitation. Selecting a language has become trickier as Rochester’s global student population has increased, but over the years, the course has been taught with speakers of a variety of languages, including Turkish, Albanian, Finnish, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Bengali, and Swahili.

Linguistic description is not the same thing as documentation, Grimm notes. But the two practices are closely related, and she adopts the view that skills in documentation—involving the collection, annotation, and storage of primary audio and video data—require skills in description, which is concerned with the rules and patterns underlying elements such as grammar, structure, sound, and vocabulary. Despite the course’s title, by the end, students will have acquired important skills in data collection.

On a typical Thursday afternoon in the seminar, the students arrive with pages of charts. Some of the charts include long columns of English nouns, and adjacent to that column, blank columns for Ndebele translations in singular and plural forms, in forms accompanied by possessive pronouns and adjectives. Another chart lists numbers, beginning with zero to 20, then jumping to 100, 1,000, 10,000, and so on.

Rebecca Everson ’16, a dual major in linguistics and computer science from Rochester, Michigan, says the students work with nouns long before they tackle verbs. “Nouns are the building blocks and verbs are the connectors,” she says. “We begin with, for example, ‘apple,’ then ‘apples,’ then ‘two apples,’ then ‘your apples,’ ‘my apples,’ and eventually, ‘I dropped the apple.’ ”

The students take turns eliciting translations from Mutonhori, recording his responses in oral as well as in written form, using the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. As they listen and write, they take note of patterns that emerge. When they get to numbers, Mutonhori explains the way in which English, which along with Ndebele and Shona, is an official language in Zimbabwe, has seeped into Ndebele.

If you continued with the patterns that govern teens, then multiples of ten, and hundreds, he tells the class, “You could spend minutes just trying to say two-thousand.” Grimm interjects to explain that the morphology of numerals is consistent across hundreds of Bantu languages. Although all were originally founded on a base-five system, derived from the human hand, Bantu language speakers have now shifted to a decimal system, “a trend that is observed all over the world,” she says.

Mutonhori says that working with the class has led him to appreciate Ndebele in a new way. “Ndebele is a language I know from the back of my hand,” he says. “When I speak in front of the students, they’ll come up with things that I already know, but by looking at patterns. The way they have learned to come up with what makes sense—it’s very interesting.”

Mutonhori’s love for the language is rooted in personal history and heritage, but also in some of the features of Ndebele itself. “It’s a very poetic and expressive language,” he says.

His enthusiasm is palpable. “He’s really excited about his language,” Everson says. “That helps us be really excited about asking the questions about it. He’s always giving us new information, and sometimes we forget to press ‘record,’ because we’re so absorbed in what he’s trying to convey.”

Outside of class, the students enter written and oral data into computers using a specialized linguistic software called Praat, which helps them to analyze patterns in sound, the composition of words, sentence structure, and other linguistic elements.

languagesINTERDISCIPLINARY: Rebecca Everson ’16 (center), a dual major in linguistics and computer science, sees opportunities to improve the tools of language documentation, such as software often written by computer scientists without a strong linguistics background. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In the linguistics department lounge, shortly before class, Everson pours over data with Emy Lin ’16, a senior from Glastonsbury, Connecticut, who, like Everson, is a dual major in linguistics and computer science. They talk about what they’ve found, and some of the challenges that they and the other students have faced. Working on a laptop, Lin calls up a spectrogram that Praat has produced from her recording data and shows how the spectrogram will help her to elicit phonetic properties of Ndebele. Everson points to a series of blue lines swooping upward and downward across a series of spectrograms. She explains the way in which the lines illustrate tone.

“Tone matters in this language, which is something that took us a little while to figure out,” says Everson. Ndebele has a sing-song quality, and when the students want to clarify tone, Lin says, “we ask Farai to hum the words.”

There are other aspects to Ndebele that pose challenges. It’s a so-called “click” language, in which a series of clicking sounds serve as consonants. And while the students may have encountered languages with two, or maybe three, “genders,” Ndebele, they’ve discovered, has many more than that.

To help solve such puzzles, the students are permitted to consult sources on Bantu languages. But by the end of the semester, they will have constructed an overview of the basic features of Ndebele based almost entirely on the data they’ve collected and analyzed in their work with Mutonhori.

“It’s not a lot of time, but they manage,” says Grimm. McDonough, who has taught the language description seminar as well, says the students often begin “in a state of shock. How can we possibly do this?, they wonder. Our job is to help them understand that what they’ve learned here over the past four years actually enables them to do this task.”

Among the more difficult challenges of training students in language documentation is preparing them to work in indigenous communities. As for this aspect of documentation, Grimm comes with a sterling credential. As a doctoral student at Humboldt University in Berlin, she won a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation’s Documentation of Endangered Languages program, or DoBeS, as a participant in a fieldwork project in Cameroon that took place over a five-year period.

“It’s a very difficult grant to get,” says McDonough. According to the senior scholar, the hiring of Grimm is “a real coup. We’re thrilled to have Nadine here because of the training she received under the DoBeS project.”

From 2010 to 2015, Grimm spent months at a time in southern Cameroon as part of a team of three linguists, local French- and Gyeli-speaking interpreters, and members of the Bakola-Bagyeli community of hunter gatherers. Her research, focused on Gyeli grammar, entailed considerable documentation of the language, which is spoken by an estimated 4,200 people, and is considered threatened. The Volkswagen Foundation filmed a documentary of the work of Grimm and her colleagues, as part of their project. In it, Grimm reflected on the dynamics of economic and social change, and language evolution and loss.

In southern Cameroon, much like in Mutonhori’s native Zimbabwe, multilingualism is the norm. “It’s a setting where you have eight or nine languages in one area, and where everyone speaks several languages. You meet one person, you speak one language, then you meet someone else, you speak a different language,” she says. There’s also what’s called “code switching,” or shifting from one language to another and back again in a single conversation.

The jostling of so many language communities makes southern Cameroon an especially valuable site for research on the dynamics of language evolution and change. Language loss often conjures up images of Western domination. But in many parts of the world, such as southern Cameroon, language loss proceeds gradually, as one ethnic group is displaced and subsumed by another. Cameroon is undergoing economic changes that have threatened the livelihood of the Bakola-Bagyeli. In the coastal city of Kribi, a large port is under construction. As forests are cleared for the project, the Bakola-Bagyeli have been displaced and compensated with jobs and modern housing in Kribi. “In the course of this massive change,” Grimm says in the documentary, “they also adopt other languages of the area, and that ultimately leads to language shift and language loss.”

There are approximately 500 Bantu languages, of which Gyeli is only one. But it has unique features, underscoring that the significance of a language, from a linguist’s perspective, often bears no relationship to its prominence or vigor.

“The vocabulary of Bagyeli is quite different” from that of many Bantu languages, Grimm says. The Bakola-Bagyeli are hunter gatherers, whereas most Bantu language speakers are farmers. They’ve invented hunting tools and techniques, and have developed an intimate knowledge of plant life, all unknown in other communities—and, necessarily, an entire vocabulary around such esoteric knowledge and skills. Their knowledge of plant life, some of which has been shown to have medicinal value, has attracted the interest of Western pharmaceutical companies. During her time in Cameroon, it wasn’t unusual for Grimm to be mistaken for someone working for such an enterprise. It happened, she says, “all of the time.”

As part of their documentation, Grimm and her colleagues worked among Gyeli speakers in multiple contexts. They documented conversations among groups, dialogues, storytelling, and explications of daily activities, from hunting to children’s games. That’s an important practice in documentation, she stresses, and part of what distinguishes it from the mere collection of a relatively static group of words and rules. Video and audio recordings are designed to depict “language as it is spoken naturally in the language community,” she says. Spoken language is full of nuances that are derived from context. Those nuances provide linguists with rich insight into some of the core questions motivating language study—questions concerning the relationship between language and social relations, psychodynamics, how language evolves, and the ways in which humans acquire and process language.

Movements toward language preservation and revitalization have taken hold around the world. But they face enormous odds. Few expect that the displacement of the Bakola-Bagyeli, for example, will reverse itself.

“This work, in 100 years, will be what’s left,” says Grimm at the close of the documentary, of the data that she and other linguists collected that will be housed at the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics Language Archive in the Netherlands. “There won’t be a chance to come back and study the nature here. The Bakola will be alive—hopefully—but they’ll be different.”

Stories like this one exert a strong pull on linguistics majors, says Jeffrey Runner, a professor of linguistics and of brain and cognitive sciences, and chair of the linguistics department. Language loss “taps into something.” Students investigating endangered languages “feel like they’re doing something that’s valuable. There’s the social angle of helping save endangered languages, but there’s also the scientific angle of finding new features of language that we don’t know about.”

“Language documentation definitely interests me,” Everson says, reflecting on her long-term plans. She has accepted a job at a software engineering firm in New York City, which she will begin soon after graduation. She’ll stay involved in linguistics through a project she’s working on with Nadine Grimm’s husband, Scott Grimm. He’s also a member of the linguistics department and is producing a dictionary of Dagaare, which is spoken in parts of Ghana and Burkina Faso. Everson’s role, as she describes it, is “to try to make software to make dictionary creation a little bit easier.”

“I’m hoping to go back and get a PhD in documentation and revitalization,” she adds. She’s attracted by the prospect of fieldwork, and convinced of the urgency of language preservation. There’s another, more basic reason, too. “Language is part of a people,” she says. “And letting a language die is not OK.”

An Optical ‘Family Tree’

Tracing the companies with connections to the Institute of Optics.

By Kevin Wesley

opticsOPTICAL VISIONARIES: Students and faculty from the Institute of Optics, historically, have found entrepreneurial outlets for the expertise that they—like the group studying image formation in this undated photo—acquired at Rochester. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

When Duncan Moore ’74 (PhD), the Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Professor in Optical Engineering Science, three years ago began doing some research for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the optics company Tropel, he made an intriguing discovery.

Tropel—now a division of Corning Inc., and one of the world’s leaders in customized precision optical instruments—was formed by Robert Hopkins ’45 (PhD), then a professor at the Institute of Optics. Moore’s research indicated that former students of Hopkins went on to found 15 optics companies. He surmised that Hopkins, who later returned to the University’s Laboratory of Laser Energetics and continued teaching at the institute after creating Tropel, had intentionally instructed students in the ins and outs of starting and running a company.

Moore was wrong.

Despite many interviews with Hopkins’s former students, he “could not find one single instance” where Hopkins had talked explicitly with his students about launching their own businesses. Instead, alumni told Moore that it was seeing what faculty at the institute were doing that gave them the inspiration and tools to start their own companies.

The Business of Invention

Even as a child, Stephen Fantone ’79 (PhD) was fiddling with optics. He had a dark room and as a teen was grinding and polishing mirrors and building telescopes.

Today, he’s the founder, president, and CEO of Optikos Corp., a company based in Wakefield, Massachusetts, that is the world’s largest maker of equipment used to measure optical image quality. He has more than 65 patents to his name and serves on many corporate boards.

He says that the roots of his entrepreneurialism reach back to his graduate student years. He saw faculty members running their own businesses, and he himself took on consulting work while still a student. The combination of in-depth exposure to the local business community and the entrepreneurial success of faculty convinced Fantone that he, too, could venture into business.

He, along with other alumni, lectures to students when he is in Rochester.

“I’ve seen the skills of these students really blossom over the years,” he says. “These kids are far better at presenting themselves.”

And they present themselves so well that he has more than 15 institute alumni on his staff at Optikos.

“I have a lot of choices from where I can hire people,” he says. “There’s an intangible aspect to it. They’re all smart and motivated—and they have a passion for optics.” —Kevin Wesley

A lot of the alumni, Moore remembers, said something like “I saw Bob doing something and thought, ‘I could do that.’ ”

Apparently, they were right. More than 150 alumni and faculty members of the institute have started their own companies. And the University and the broader Rochester business community have long played a leading role in creating and maintaining some of the world’s most successful optics firms. Along the way, they’ve created a tight-knit community within the sphere of optics.

Founded in 1929, the institute was the first academic program focused on optics as a field. Since then, some 2,800 students have graduated, the largest group of optics degree–holders in the country.

“The people who leave Rochester never really leave Rochester,” says Alan Willner, president of the Optical Society, known by the society’s moniker, OSA. “Rochester people are famous for their camaraderie and loyalty to the institute. They’re proud of being a product of the institute. They wear it as a badge of honor.”

Moore agrees. “We tell potential students, ‘Look, if you graduate from the Institute of Optics, you can call any alumnus, regardless of their station in life. They’ll take the call.’ ”

Richard Pfisterer ’79, ’80 (MS) vouches for that. After graduating, he worked in the aerospace industry for several years, but grew to feel burned out. Eventually, he started his own company, Photon Engineering, in Tucson, Arizona. It’s a leading optical software firm. As he was considering whether to start the business, he knew he had a safety net in the institute.

“I don’t think any of us walk off the cliff without throwing a handful of dirt first to see if something is there,” he says. For Pfisterer, meeting someone else from the institute means that “somehow we were related. You always knew there would be a classmate or professor who would help you solve your problem.”

Ultimately, he says, it’s in the culture of the place. “As a student, you see faculty come and go. You see them having businesses. I think it’s about being in an environment where you see people doing this and coming back to talk about it. You think, ‘He’s teaching this, but he’s also doing this.’ ”

Today, efforts to teach optics students about business are more intentional. Students are encouraged to take courses in business and entrepreneurship. Writing courses teach students how to communicate about technical knowledge with different audiences.

Moore’s research indicates that 70 to 80 percent of institute alumni today are in industry, with 10 to 12 percent in research positions, and the remainder in academic posts.

“Only three people have ever retired from the institute,” says Moore, noting that, in addition to creating companies, faculty are often recruited away. “That is amazing.”

Kevin Wesley is a Rochester-based freelance writer.

Delving into Data Science

Students complete their first year in Rochester’s new program for harnessing the power of digital information.

By Kathleen McGarvey

hen it comes to tackling social problems and fueling business, experts agree that data—the vast volume of data that the digital world generates—increasingly is indispensable, a resource that scholars, business leaders, and consumers have only begun to tap.

In response a new field has emerged, called data science. It’s the creation and application of new methods for collecting, curating, analyzing, and making discoveries from large-scale data, in areas such as energy and the environment, economics and politics, health care, and marketing. The areas of application are only limited, really, by data scientists’ imaginations.

This spring, the inaugural crop of students in Rochester’s new data science programs—at the undergraduate and master’s degree levels—are completing their first year of study at the Goergen Institute for Data Science, a program of the Schools of Arts & Sciences. Some are completing their degrees, having finished a year of graduate study or having gotten started early by taking prerequisites for an undergraduate degree. Others are just beginning. But what unites them all is an enthusiasm for discovering ways to make the most of information.

“We want to teach the students the fundamentals—computer science and statistics—and then let them explore some of the applications in different areas. That’s what I think is unique,” says Henry Kautz ’87 (PhD), the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and a professor of computer science. He notes that programs emerging at other schools are often more specialized—dedicated to business analytics or health analytics, for example—but that the Rochester program provides a strong foundation for every area of focus.

Having a degree in data science “tells employers that these are people with a broad range of skills on the statistics side and the computer science side. They’re highly in demand,” he says.

That’s something to which Greg Munves ’04 can attest. He’s president and chief operating officer of 1010data, a New York–based company dedicated to big-data discovery and data sharing. “You need folks with Renaissance skills,” he says. “So instead of searching through people deep in computer science but with a little statistics or math, now you get people who have just the right amount of proficiency in each of those disciplines.”

Two of this year’s graduates are headed to 1010data. “For the size company we are, we have a disproportionate number of U of R alumni involved,” says Munves. “With the advent of the data science program, it’s become even more relevant for us to look to U of R for good talent.”

And once the program was launched last fall, students voted with their feet. Original predictions for the program’s first year were for five graduate and 12 undergraduate students. Instead, year one brought 26 and 30 enrollees, respectively. And those numbers could double next year, says Kautz.

The long-term goal for the master’s degree program is 50 students—the number for which the lab space was designed. For the undergraduates, there is no ceiling.

“We’ll grow the program as much as the students demand,” Kautz says.

Ling (Kelly) He ’17

datasci_heDATA-DRIVEN: “I can see the power of data science because I know more about it,” says He of her first year in the program, during which she contributed to research using social media data to connect students with mentors who can pique their curiosity about science, technology, engineering, and math. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Degree: Bachelor’s in data science

Data science concentration area: Computer science, statistics, and mathematics

Hometown: Hangzhou, China

When Ling (Kelly) He ’17 arrived at Rochester, she was thinking about majoring in economics or math. But she also became interested in the concept of “big data”—the huge data assets generated by digital life that can reveal important patterns. When she learned that the University was kicking off a new program, she wasted no time in signing up. Now she’s a double major in data science and mathematics, with a minor in Spanish.

Last summer, He began doing research under Jiebo Luo, an associate professor of computer science with expertise in data mining, machine learning, and other areas of investigation for data science. The project to which she contributed used data collected from social media to connect students who aren’t interested in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—with people who could nurture their curiosity.

“It’s amazing how you can make use of resources to find a pattern, or do something for the social good or for other applications in real life,” He says.

She didn’t know much about issues surrounding STEM education when she first joined the project, but now, she says, she’s “more passionate about it” than she ever thought she would be. “I can see the power of data science because I know more about it.”

This summer she has an internship in New York City with business-management consulting firm Ernst & Young, in a technology-advisory program of the company’s financial services office.

“There’s a lot to learn. It’s a new field with a lot coming out really quickly. It’s very fast-paced. Sometimes it can be overwhelming because we’re still learning the basic techniques. It can be overwhelming—but that’s what keeps you learning and going forward.”

Ian Manzi ’18

datasci_manziMAKING CONNECTIONS: Drawing together different fields and points of view is part of what attracts Manzi to data science. “I feed off the energy of being with people,” he says. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Degree: Bachelor’s in data science

Data science concentration area: Economics

Hometown: Kigali, Rwanda

Ian Manzi ’18 has been intrigued by computers ever since he was a child. But it’s not computers alone that spark his interest.

“A lot of people think of people interested in computer science as ‘antisocial’—people and machines. But I am not that,” he says. “I feed off the energy of being with people.”

He’s convinced he has found an ideal fit in data science for his analytical mind and gregarious personality.

Manzi arrived at Rochester unsure of what he wanted to pursue. He started with a major in computer science, but he found it too abstract. And so he moved this year to data science, which he says keeps the quantitative aspects of programming that appeal to him but also offers more opportunities for practical problem-solving.

Last year he completed an internship as an operations manager in his hometown of Kigali, Rwanda, helping local schools to transition to digital record-keeping.

“Marketers and programmers don’t speak the same language,” he says. “I understand both, and I helped the project to grow.”

It’s the act of communication that seems to fascinate Manzi most. He says that he wants to create computer platforms that help people converse across disciplines. “The answers we need for societal problems may be on the ‘other side’ ” of divisions, he says, and communication is essential.

Fostering conversations and looking for answers is something he knows a thing or two about. This spring, Manzi and Derrick Murekezi ’19, a geology major from Nyagatare, Rwanda, received a $10,000 grant from Davis Projects for Peace, a competitive national program that promotes peace and intercultural understanding. The two will use the funding to implement their summer project, “Critical Thinking for Peace: Sustaining Peace in Post-Conflict Regions,” in Rwanda this July. They’ll plan, set up, and operate a young leaders’ peace camp for high school students, where camp-goers will reflect on Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

And while he didn’t conceive of the project as having a data science dimension, he’s beginning to see ways that he might potentially work that in.

One thing data science has cultivated in him, he says, is the “ability to relate to different fields.”

Anthony Margetic ’16

datasci_margetic-trineNEW YORK, NEW YORK: With new degrees in hand, Trine (left) and Margetic are Manhattan-bound, to start work at data discovery and sharing company 1010data. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Degree: Bachelor’s in data science

Data science area of concentration: Biology

Hometown: Syosset, New York

Degree: Bachelor’s in data science

Data science area of concentration: Brain and cognitive sciences

Hometown: Wolcott, New York

This summer, two of the data science program’s first new graduates will be headed to Manhattan, to begin working at data discovery and sharing company 1010data.

Anthony Margetic ’16 and Tyler Trine ’16 got their feet wet at the company last summer, when they were interns there.

“It was exciting to be there for just two and a half months,” says Trine. “I want to go along for the ride.”

They’re already off to a roaring start, having devoted themselves to the program the year before it was even launched, structuring their schedules to get prerequisites out of the way before the program began. “It’s been a jam-packed two years,” says Trine.

But those two years have given them a new way of seeing the world. “Data science is a way of thinking,” says Margetic. “You want to get to the questions that no one else is looking for.”

It’s the fluidity and interdisciplinarity of data science that first drew him. “I love learning about all kinds of stuff. I didn’t want to be stuck in one field,” he says.

For Trine, discovering the field of data science was finding an intellectual home for the kind of thinking he was already doing. He had started reading philosophy and picked up a book on semiotics, the study of how we make meaning. The linguistics minor was intrigued by “what it means to be informed,” he says. “It became a preoccupation. I wanted to understand how people do it on a deep level, how we take in rich sources of information intuitively.”

Says Trine, “It used to be that data was scarce, and the main enterprise was squeezing the most out of it. Now we’re data-rich, but still information-poor.” Data scientists like Margetic and Trine hope to change that.

Margetic says that having the phrase “data science” attached to a degree helps set him apart because it highlights a breadth of skills. “If you’re a math person or an engineer, you have a subset of the skills I have as a data scientist.”

Francesca Romano ’16 (MS)

datasci_romanoPROBLEM SOLVER: Romano says that data science draws on her problem-solving skills. “It’s made me confident in my analytic and programming abilities. Everything that we’re learning, we can apply to all sorts of different problems—health care, market research. It’s a really diverse degree,” she says. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Degree: Master’s in data science

Data science area of concentration: Computation and statistical methods

Hometown: Rotterdam, New York

When Francesca Romano was an undergraduate at Siena College, she majored in math, with a minor in computer science.

“The thing I loved about math, the thing that drew me to it, was using my problem-solving skills and applying them to all kinds of problems,” she says.

Data science seemed to her the best way to continue to do that. This spring, the Rotterdam, New York, native is earning her master’s degree in the field.

“It’s made me confident in my analytic and programming abilities. Everything that we’re learning, we can apply to all sorts of different problems—health care, market research. It’s a really diverse degree.”

Although opportunities are plentiful, job hunting can actually be tricky, she says. While a lot of employers are realizing they need to hire people to help them make data-driven decisions, they’re not yet experienced in how to describe what they’re looking for. “I had to be creative in seeing what companies are calling these positions,” she says.

Her creativity has paid off. She’s accepted a position in cardiovascular services at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, New York, where she’ll be analyzing data from cardiovascular patients to identify trends or patterns that may be useful to the hospital in providing care.

“Society is becoming more and more tech-savvy and technologically advanced,” she says. “We’re collecting massive amounts of data, from phones, from everything we buy online, and more. Even if you’re not totally aware of what data science is and how it applies to you, I think it’s important to know that it’s become an important part of business and decision making.”

One thing Romano particularly likes about Rochester’s program is the range of students. “I think it’s been great that the first year they accepted people from so many different backgrounds,” she says. “It’s been really nice to see that everybody has a bit of a different strength—and that we can combine our strengths to accomplish something.”

Tiffany Sinclair ’15, ’16 (MS)

datasci_sinclairEARLY ADOPTER: Sinclair, who plans to pursue a data science career focusing on public health issues, says it’s exciting to be in on the ground floor of an emergent field. “There’s a sense that the field is really alive, and you can drive it forward,” she says. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Degree: Master’s in data science

Data science area of concentration: Health care

Hometown: Evanston, Illinois

Wherever you turn, data science is there, says Tiffany Sinclair ’15, who this spring is completing her master’s degree in data science.

“It really is in every field,” she says. “We’ve collected so much information over the decades, and now we finally have the ability to do something with it.”

For Sinclair, that something is contributing to public health. Her goal is to become a data analyst in a health-related position, and she plans to find opportunities to travel and examine how health care works in different countries.

The master’s program concentrates on methods, she says, teaching students how to glean useful information from data and how to apply those skills in different areas.

Sinclair says she’s always loved problem-solving and sorting through information to find meaning and draw conclusions. Studying data science has only sharpened those skills.

“It’s a lot of fun—and challenging, not having come from a computer science background,” says Sinclair, who as an undergraduate was a biology major and favored the pharmaceutical and analytical aspects of biology.

She says her favorite feature of the program is that while the basic concepts stay the same, each class comes at them “from a different angle.”

And it’s exciting to be part of a brand-new field. “I have a sense of knowing so much—and of not knowing anything at all, because everything is still being studied,” she says. “There’s a sense that the field is really alive, and that you can drive it forward.”

Homefront Heroes

Tiffany Miller ’00 is bringing recognition to a forgotten group of women veterans.

millerPREPARING FOR FINAL LANDING: Miller is seeking to overturn a ruling that prohibits World War II Women Airforce Service Pilots—known as WASPs—from interment at Arlington National Cemetery. (Photo: Courtesy of Tiffany Miller ’00)

Tiffany Miller ’00 knows what her late grandmother, the matriarch of the family, wanted done with her ashes. Elaine Danforth Harmon had clearly spelled out her wishes on a handwritten note found in a fireproof box after her death in April 2015: she wanted them placed at Arlington National Cemetery.

A year later, Miller and her family continue to fight to have that request granted for her maternal grandmother, who’d been a member of the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots) during World War II. At the time of Harmon’s death, Miller’s family was unaware that only a month before, the Army, which has jurisdiction over the cemetery, had ruled WASPs ineligible for inurnment at Arlington.

To Miller, it was the latest in a history of slights against the 1,074 women pilots who transported military planes, towed targets for live ammunition training, and trained male pilots to fly.

millerHIGH FLYERS: In recognition of her service during World War II (above, in 1944), Miller’s grandmother, Elaine Harmon (below at left), and other members of the WASPs in 2009 were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Barack Obama. (Photo: Courtesy of Tiffany Miller ’00 )

“My grandmother used to say that the WASPs were forgotten about for 30 years, and that has stuck with me,” says Miller.

During and after the war, WASPs were considered civilians. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed a law granting WASPs military veteran status in the first public recognition of the pilots since the end of World War II. In 2002, a military directive made WASPs eligible for inurnment at Arlington with military honors. Early in 2015, following a legal review of the 2002 rule, then Secretary of the Army John McHugh announced that the Army would reverse that policy.

Miller has been a leader in a national campaign to get the Army to restore the eligibility of WASPs for inurnment at Arlington. It’s led to interviews in the New York Times and other national media, a Change.org petition with more than 170,000 signatures—and even legislation on behalf of the pilots.

In a public statement released in January, an Army spokesman said that the 2002 rule had come from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has no authority over the Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington’s “eligibility criteria are far more stringent” than those of other military cemeteries, he said, “due to space limitations.”

But Miller’s efforts are paying off, with political support and public opinion overwhelmingly on the side of the WASPs. On March 22, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Women Airforce Service Pilot Arlington Inurnment Restoration Act, which directs the Army to ensure that the cremated remains of WASPs are eligible for inurnment in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. It passed 385-0.

“It’s just totally incredible and unexpected,” says Miller, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area and has been working toward such a result with her older sister, Erin, a lawyer, and younger sister, Whitney, a former lobbyist. A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate.

miller (Photo: Pete Souza/The White House)

For Miller, the battle to move her grandmother’s ashes from her mother’s bedroom closet to the nation’s most hallowed ground is meaningful on multiple levels. A women’s studies major at Rochester, she was also president of the Women’s Caucus (now called College Feminists). During her tenure, she organized a panel discussion about women and war, in which her grandmother—and her mother, who worked for the American Red Cross in Vietnam—participated. She says WASPs are still all but unknown. “People know about the Tuskegee Airmen because of Steven Spielberg, but not many people know about the WASPs,” she says. “When I tell people about them, they say, ‘Really? Women flew in the war?’ ”

To change that, Miller, with a background in project management, gives media interviews, attends press conferences, checks comments posted on her petition, and scours the Internet every day for the latest news stories about the legislation, introduced by Rep. Martha McSally of Arizona, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot to fly in combat.

Miller’s sister, Erin Miller, says Tiffany has always been “very tenacious.”

“She’s always been the kind of person who sees something that’s wrong and then immediately wants to do anything she can to make it right.”

Tiffany Miller is as firmly dedicated to women’s equality as she was in college. “She’s always sending [Whitney and me] New York Times articles about the injustices in the world, especially when it comes to women’s issues,” Erin adds. “That’s always something that’s at the front of her mind.”

Tiffany is especially proud of the Congressional Gold Medal that Harmon received from President Barack Obama in 2009. Shortly after returning from the White House, Harmon donated the medal to the College Park Aviation Museum in Maryland, where she lived.

“It wasn’t about her,” Miller says. “She wanted people to know who the WASPs were, that they did something for this country.”

Even more reason to get closure for herself, her family, and her grandmother, who died at 95 and was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame on April 7.

“There’s just no way it would be satisfying for anybody in my family to have a funeral somewhere else,” she says. “We’d feel as if we let her down, that we’d let the WASPs down. Knowing my grandmother, she wouldn’t have taken no for an answer. We have to make this happen.” —Robin L. Flanigan

Paper Dressmaker

ramosPLEATS OF PAPER: Dresses are among the diverse array of art objects that Roxana Ramos ’11 creates from paper. An artist who exhibits globally, she first showed her work on the River Campus. Her senior thesis exhibition, Narrative Threads, was displayed in the Art and Music Library. (Photo: Courtesy of Roxana Ramos ’11)

Paper art is thousands of years old, and artists working in the medium have melded the material into a surprising array of three-dimensional creations.

Such as dresses. You may not want to wear a paper dress to a gala, but you may want to examine one up close as part of an art exhibition.

This spring, Peruvian paper artist Roxana Ramos ’11 exhibits one of her paper dresses as part of the 20th Jeonju Hanji Culture Festival in Jeonju, South Korea. “Hanji” means “paper of Korea.”

“Paper dresses are a very approachable way for visitors to explore with art,” says Ramos. Paper is a familiar material that most visitors handle in multiple ways in their daily lives. “It helps people to see that design is more approachable than what they might think.”

Based in Peru’s capital city, Lima, Ramos has been a versatile paper artist since her time as a studio arts major at Rochester. In addition to teaching at Lima’s Toulouse Lautrec Design Institute, Ramos founded Lettra, a paper art and bookbinding “laboratory,” as she calls it, evoking the creative experimentation at the heart of her work. Her paper products are wide-ranging, with a focus on books that serve as art objects, constructed out of a variety of papers, ribbon, and incorporating materials from beeswax to chili powder.

In the past year, Ramos has exhibited at two other major international events: the Sofia Paper Art Fest in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Biennial Internationale des Arts des Fibre et du Papier in the United Kingdom.

Ramos says two themes she explores in her art are fragility and strength. And paper is a perfect medium to deepen that exploration. “There will be a point in time where my pieces will only exist in photographs or documentation,” she writes in her artist statement on her website at Roxanaramos.com. “This is the main part of their magic.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Big Data Coffee

A generation ago, the Seattle roaster Starbucks remade the American coffee-drinking experience, grinding beans right before the eyes of café customers and producing from this raw material a startling array of coffee drinks. According to Neil Day ’90, Starbucks ushered in the “second wave” of coffee culture in America. But today, he says, the now ubiquitous chain is two waves behind.

Day is a Silicon Valley technologist and the founder of Perfect Coffee, an artisanal coffee company that achieved something coffee connoisseurs recently thought impossible: making preground, single-serve coffee packets that produced coffee rivaling in quality the best freshly ground varieties. If artisanal coffee—farm-to-table, hand-roasted, and made in partnership with highly vetted growers—was the third wave, artisanal coffee that is easy to prepare at home is the fourth, says Day.

“It was a very analog thing in a very digital life,” he says of the first artisanal coffee he tasted in Portland, Oregon, in the early days of the third wave. Coffee soon became, he says, “a very serious hobby.”

Day started his career at Apple, and in 1999 founded one of the first e-commerce sites, HomeWarehouse.com, which was later purchased by Walmart. He went on to serve as the chief technology officer of Sears, then Shutterfly.

He observed the way in which technology was transforming everyday life, but had made little impact on coffee. The best quality coffee was fussy and complicated to prepare, and available only in select cafes with experienced baristas and long lines of customers. The goal of Perfect Coffee “was really just, at the end of the day, figuring out how to apply analytic and scientific tools to making fantastic coffee really accessible to people,” he says.

Day ran subscription-based Perfect Coffee for just two years before third-wave stalwart Blue Bottle Coffee bought it in the spring of 2015. Day is now Blue Bottle’s principal of coffee technologies.

So how did Day achieve the perfect preground cup? First, by identifying the key components of optimal coffee, and second, by delivering the most important of those components in each single packet.

But while he’s stressed convenience and accessibility in his business, Day continues to brew coffee from scratch at home. “I totally admit that I’m kind of ridiculous,” he says. “I make espresso pretty much every morning, and I may actually make two or three cups on the way to the one cup that I actually drink.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Building a High-Tech Habitat

in_the_newsGOING LOCAL: Fagnan’s venture capital firm is making an impact in Boston through its exclusive commitment to local start-ups. (Photo: Michael Piazza)

Among the regular features of Forbes magazine is a column by journalist Bruce Rogers, the “chief insights officer” of the publication, who profiles influential thought leaders. Last March, Rogers put the spotlight on Jeff Fagnan ’98S (MBA), founder and general partner of the early-stage venture capital firm Accomplice.

Fagnan formed Accomplice with three other partners from his previous job at Atlas Ventures. The new Boston-area firm invests only in local start-ups, with the goal of building a new “ecosystem” of tech start-ups in the Boston region.

Fagnan, who grew up in economically downtrodden rural Oregon, told Rogers that Accomplice is intended to be “a different type of a venture capital firm.”

“We knew we wanted to harness community,” he said. “We wanted everyone to believe that entrepreneurship and innovation are the lifelines and the lifeblood of society, especially Western society, and we need to do everything we can to promote and foster them.”

Tarah Mitchell ’07: Excellent in All She Does

in_the_newsMULTIDISCIPLINED: Mitchell, who oversees multimillion-dollar budgets as an Air Force officer, doubles as an elite bodybuilder. (Photo: U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Harry Brexel)

The core value of the U.S. Air Force is “Excellent in All We Do.” Tarah Mitchell ’07 is a living reflection of that value in at least two wholly separate domains.

The Air Force financial analyst based in Little Rock, Arkansas, has been a professional athlete in the International Federation of Body Building since 2013. In March, Mitchell placed in the top 10 in the international, invitation-only Arnold Classic Women’s Physique competition.

The event, in which Mitchell placed eighth among 54 elite women bodybuilders, was part of a multisport festival in Columbus, Ohio, which attracted thousands of athletes from more than 70 nations.

During her long period of training for the event, Mitchell was deployed to the East African nation of Djibouti, where she served as comptroller, overseeing a $3.5 million budget for the special operations forces charged with combatting violent extremist organizations in the region.

A Pivotal Post

Kevin McDonald ’14W (EdD) has been named the chief diversity officer of one of the nation’s most closely scrutinized university systems: the University of Missouri.

The University of Missouri’s flagship campus in Columbia was embroiled in protest and controversy last fall over racial incidents. Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system, announced his resignation in November.

McDonald, who begins his term on June 1, will be the university system’s first diversity officer. Prior to accepting the Missouri post, McDonald was vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Before that, he served in a similar role at Virginia Tech.

Political Scientist Named Chicago Provost

Daniel Diermeier ’95 (PhD) has been named provost of the University of Chicago. His term begins July 1.

Diermeier is dean of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy as well as the Emmett Dedmon Professor of Administration. He has taught at both Stanford and Northwestern business schools, and is the author most recently of Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset (McGraw-Hill).

ALUMNI HONORS

Celebrating ‘Mr. Rochester’

G. Robert Witmer Jr. ’59 recognized with the Eastman Medal

witmerMEDALIST: Witmer received the Eastman Medal this spring. (Photo: University Communications)

One of the University’s most prominent alumni leaders, G. Robert Witmer Jr. ’59, received the University’s George Eastman Medal in recognition of his career achievements and his service to the University and the Rochester-area communities.

Witmer has been an attorney with the Nixon Peabody law firm in Rochester since shortly after his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1962. As senior counsel at the firm, he has represented clients at the state and federal levels in cases that have helped shape real estate and environmental law.

Known as “Mr. Rochester” for his wide-ranging engagement as a civic leader in his hometown, Witmer has served as past president of the New York State Bar Association. He received the 2013 Rochester Rotary Award, the oldest civic award in the city, given to those who personify the organization’s motto of “Service Above Self.”

Witmer’s career at the University began in the 1950s, when he was an active undergraduate student, serving as cocaptain of the basketball team, president of the Theta Chi fraternity, and as a member of multiple other campus organizations. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors in history.

Currently holding the title of Board Chair Emeritus, Witmer has served in important advisory roles for the College, alumni affairs, the Medical Center, the Eastman School of Music, and the Board of Trustees. Elected as a trustee in 1979, Witmer served as chair from 2003 until 2008, a tenure that included the selection of Joel Seligman as the University’s 10th president and CEO and that put in place the groundwork for the 2011 launch of The Meliora Challenge Campaign. He is a member of a remarkable alumni family, counting more than a dozen relatives as graduates of the University.

He and his wife, Nancy, are charter members of the George Eastman Circle, the University’s leadership annual giving society. In recognition of the couple’s support and to honor his father, G. Robert Witmer Sr. ’26, and his mother, Marian Witmer, the residence of the University president was renamed the Witmer House in 2006. In March, the Witmers announced a $2 million commitment to establish the G. Robert Witmer, Jr. University Professorship to provide financial support for the University presidency.

TRIBUTE

Morris Shapiro ’33, ’34 (MS): A Beloved and Respected Physician for 77 Years

shapiro101 AND COUNTING: Shapiro continued to teach at the Medical Center until his death in February at 102. (Photo: University Communications)

When Morris Shapiro died last February, he was 102 years old and had worked as a physician for 77 years. As professor emeritus of surgery and professor of emergency medicine, Morrie was still teaching medical students a few months before his death. He was a teacher, mentor, and role model who inspired many of us at the Medical Center through his knowledge, technical excellence, and sensitivity to individual patients’ needs.

Dr. Shapiro was a surgical resident at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. On completion of his surgical training, he and the entire surgical team from Michael Reese volunteered in the Army as one of the first Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH). Morrie was the original “Hawkeye.”

In 1943, his MASH unit operated in North Africa while the Allies were fighting General Rommel. On the eve of the invasion of southern Europe, they crossed the Mediterranean and established a field hospital in Italy, where they operated on many casualties of that bloody invasion. When the German camps were liberated, they operated on released prisoners and captured enemy soldiers.

In this difficult and dangerous time, Morrie met his wife, Miriam, who was a MASH unit nurse. Morrie and Miriam returned to Morrie’s native Rochester after the war. Together they raised a family of two daughters, Donna and Barbara, and later were blessed with three grandchildren, Jessica, Kate, and Marissa.

From 1946 to 1983, Morrie cared for patients as a general surgeon, operating at Genesee, Rochester General, and Strong Memorial hospitals, and developing a large following of patients. When he was 70 years old, having been a doctor for 45 years, he decided to stop operating. Instead, he pursued other opportunities to care for patients and to teach the next generation. He established a breast clinic to provide access for women to receive appropriate evaluations for breast cancer. He also started working on a regular basis in the emergency department at Strong Memorial Hospital.

In 1993, he became a full-time faculty member of the newly formed Department of Emergency Medicine. He and Miriam donated resources to the department that were used to create the Shapiro Conference Room and the annual Shapiro Lectureship, given by an outside speaker who presents Grand Rounds and meets with the residents. Morrie was a beloved and valued teacher and colleague in emergency medicine for over 30 years—an amazing tenure considering that he didn’t start in emergency medicine until age 70.

In addition to his professional work as a doctor, Morrie made major contributions to the Rochester community as a leader in many charitable organizations. He was proud of his role in bringing Golda Meir and Eleanor Roosevelt to Rochester to speak. He led efforts to build the Jewish Home of Rochester and to make that new facility a model of care for the elderly and chronically ill.

Morrie was blessed with a keen mind, dexterous hands, and a positive attitude toward life. He was first in his class at every school he attended, but his patients loved him not for his good grades but for his caring and compassion. He accomplished much in his lifetime, motivated by interest and enjoyment. Those of us who knew him have had our lives enriched forever.

—Joel Pasternack ’80M (MD), ’82M (Res)

Pasternack is a professor of clinical emergency medicine at Rochester.

TRIBUTE

René Millon: Pathbreaking Anthropologist

millon (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

René Millon’s death last February left many colleagues and former students bereft of his friendship. A professor of anthropology at Rochester from 1961 to 1986, René remained interested in us, his students, throughout his academic career at the University and throughout his 30 years as professor emeritus of anthropology. In his 70s and 80s, he was still consulting and giving papers, and even in his 90s he was advising, telephoning, meeting, and corresponding with former students and colleagues.

millonMAPPING IT OUT: Millon’s project to map a pre-Columbian city in Mexico (top), undertaken in the 1970s, was unprecedented in scope and scale. (Photo: Provided)

René secured his scholarly reputation in the 1970s with the Teotihuacan Mapping Project. The project, funded primarily through the National Science Foundation, involved mapping the eight-square-mile area of the pre-Columbian city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico. According to René’s former student Martha Sempowski ’83 (PhD), a research fellow at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, the project was “considered groundbreaking in scope and scale. Its use of comprehensive aerial photography extended well beyond the estimated limits of the city proper. It was preceded and accompanied by surface survey and collection of about one million artifacts from some 5,000 sites within the mapped area.”

The project is ongoing, involving scholars from universities in Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Japan, and has had a significant impact on studies of urbanism worldwide.

René displayed a close—and sometimes maddening—attention to detail. Warren Barbour ’76 (PhD), a colleague, former student, and cherished friend of René’s, recalled René’s reaction when he handed him a paper with a typo. “Warren, it was a typo when you wrote it,” he said. “It was a colossal blunder when you handed it to me!”

In spite of his sometimes acerbic wit, there was something magical about René’s personality. His friend Kroum Markov ’91 fondly and most aptly dubbed him “Merlin.” His many admirers were pleased when he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, and when he and his close colleague, George Cowgill, were jointly awarded the A. V. Kidder Award for 2004 by the American Anthropological Association.

Despite his modest height, René’s were the proverbial shoulders upon which many subsequent archaeologists must stand.

—Gretchen Koch Markov ’57, ’83 (PhD)

Markov is a former student of Millon’s and a retired teacher in the Rochester City School District.

Books

Books

A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht

By Jonathan Post ’76 (PhD)

Oxford University Press, 2016

Post presents an overview of the poetry of Hecht, the renowned formal poet and former John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Rochester. Post, a longtime friend and former student of the late Hecht, is also editor of The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (Johns Hopkins University Press) and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA.

Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies

By Susan Antebi and Beth Jörgensen

SUNY Press, 2016

Jörgensen, a professor of Spanish at Rochester, coedits an analysis of such topics as impairment, trauma, illness, performance, queer theory, subaltern studies, and human rights, through the lens of the literature and film of Latin American nations, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru.

Crossing the Aisle: Party Switching by U.S. Legislators in the Postwar Era

By Antoine Yoshinaka ’05 (PhD)

Cambridge University Press, 2015

Yoshinaka, an associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, examines the causes and consequences of legislative party switching in the United States. Yoshinaka is also coeditor of American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization (Cambridge University Press).

Thinking and Acting Systemically: Improving School Districts Under Pressure

Edited by Alan Daly and Kara Finnigan

American Educational Research Association, 2016

Finnigan, an associate professor of educational policy at the Warner School of Education, coedits a series of articles exploring the role of central school district offices in improving educational outcomes in the lowest performing K–12 schools.

Goethe’s Families of the Heart

By Susan Gustafson

Bloomsbury, 2016

Gustafson explores Goethe’s representations of loving families, which included families with two fathers, two mothers, and adopted children, during a time of aristocratic dominance. Gustafson is the Karl F. and Bertha A. Fuchs Professor of German Studies at Rochester.

The Semper Sonnet

By Seth Margolis ’76

Diversion Publishing, 2016

Novelist Margolis presents a thriller in which the discovery of a long-lost Shakespeare sonnet, written for Queen Elizabeth I, “may hold the key to unlocking the past—or eliminating the future.”

Nu Book 1: The Esss Advance

By Charles Waugh ’71

Lulu, 2015

Construction of humanity’s first interstellar colonization ship is interrupted by alien visitors in Waugh’s science fiction novel, the first in a trilogy.

Cross Cultures: How Global Families Negotiate Change across Generations

By James Grubman ’74 and Dennis Jaffe

FamilyWealth Consulting, 2016

Grubman, a psychologist and financial consultant, offers practical advice for resolving the cultural and generational conflicts that can ensue when offspring are raised in a culture different from that of their parents.

Interact and Engage!

By Kassy Laborie and Thomas Stone ’95

Association for Talent Development, 2015

E-learning and training specialists Stone and Laborie share advice on how to engage and interact with audiences in virtual presentations.

My Three Sicilies: Stories, Poems, and Histories

By Joseph Amato ’70 (PhD)

Bordighera Press, 2016

Amato, an American historian of Sicilian descent, explores his ancestral homeland through original works of short fiction, poetry, and essays on social and family history based on his travels and research.

Earth’s Early Atmosphere and Oceans, and the Origin of Life

By George Shaw ’67

Springer, 2016

Shaw examines the role of reduced carbon and nitrogen compounds in the Earth’s early atmosphere and oceans in the emergence of life forms. A professor emeritus of geology at Union College, Shaw also edited Earth’s Early Atmosphere and Surface Environment (Geological Society of America).

A Song from the Heart: The Pedagogical Philosophy of Lorna Lutz Heyge, PhD

By Jean Ellen Linkins ’05E (MM)

Westbow Press, 2015

Music teacher Linkins explores the work of the pioneer in early childhood music education who founded Kindermusik and Musikgarten curricula.

In Defense of the Princess: How Plastic Tiaras and Fairytale Dreams Can Inspire Smart, Strong Women

By Jerramy Fine ’99

Perseus Books, 2016

Fine counters the notion that “the princess dream sets little girls up to be weak and submissive,” presenting instead a vision of the strong, feminist princess—the princess who is about “power, and not passivity.”

Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering

By Maurice Isserman ’79 (PhD)

W. W. Norton & Co., 2016

Isserman, the James L. Ferguson Professor of History at Hamilton College, examines the major role of mountain ranges such as the Rockies and the Appalachians, and their most infamous climbers, on American identity.

Interior Design Coloring Book

By Roxana Ramos ’11

CreateSpace, 2016

Paper artist Ramos presents a series of black-and-white drawings of interiors, designed to foster creative experimentation with color palettes.

Elementary Differential Geometry

By Andreas Arvanitoyeorgos ’92 (PhD)

Hellenic Academic Libraries, 2015

Arvanitoyeorgos, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Patras in Greece, presents, in Greek, an e-book for undergraduates on the differential geometry of curves and surfaces. He also published Geometry of Manifolds: Riemannian Manifolds and Lie Groups (Hellenic Academic Libraries) in e-book format and in Greek.

A Fish Out of Water

By Lynn Maunula Cleveland ’68

Kindle, 2015

A “Midwestern spinster and her Finnish-American friend investigate the drowning of a celebrated actress 30 years earlier” in Cleveland’s mystery e-book.

Teddy the Dog: Be Your Own Dog

By Keri Claiborne Boyle ’95

HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2016

Boyle’s children’s book tells the “tail” of “a feisty and witty divine canine who always wears sunglasses and can be best described as ‘attitude’ with fur.”

The Anxious Osprey

By William Guiffre ’56, ’63W (Mas), ’78W (EdD)

Books for Children Publishing, 2014

Children’s author Guiffre tells the story of how an osprey who is “afraid of flying, fears edges, and hates fish” ultimately learns to fly.

Stanley and Porkchop

Written and illustrated by Edward Goodman ’78

Tootsiepop Press, 2016

Goodman tells “the true story of two unwanted blind dogs who endured separate journeys” to Goodman’s home. Proceeds from the sale of the book benefit Goodman’s nonprofit organization to help blind dogs, Tootsie’s Vision.

A Man of Genius

By Lynn Rosen ’69 (MA), ’72W (EdD)

Una Publications, 2016

Rosen, a writer of short fiction, presents her first novel, a mystery that explores “the mind and misdeeds of a man of genius who revels in his cynicism and disdain, and leaves colleagues, lovers, and friends deeply scarred for knowing him.”

Recordings

Little Words

By Twin Talk

Katie Ernst, 2015

Twin Talk, which includes bassist, composer, and vocalist Katie Ernst ’11E, performs original jazz compositions set to the poetry of Dorothy Parker.

Looking Back: Flute Music of Joseph Schwantner

By Jennie Oh Brown ’97E (DMA)

Innova Recordings, 2015

A flutist with the Chicago-based chamber ensemble Picosa, Brown performs selections by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and former Eastman School of Music faculty member Schwantner. The recording includes notes by Cynthia Folio ’95E (PhD).

Come Dance with Me

By Todd Beaney ’85E (MM)

Todd Beaney, 2016

Pianist and composer Beaney and his jazz-rock sextet offer 10 original tracks, with a guest appearance by the Uptown Horns.

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.

3-D Investing

Risk, reward, and increasingly, impact are the three pillars of investment, says Rodney Schwartz ’79, ’80S (MBA).

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

masterclass (Photo: David Cowles)

I started out with a conventional career in finance. I began as a financial services analyst at PaineWebber, and in 1987 moved to Lehman Brothers, where I ran the equities business here in Europe. I joined senior management at Parabas, and left in the late 1990s to found Catalyst, a venture capital firm.

During that period as a venture capitalist, I got more interested in social impact. I was getting older. I had children. I told my kids certain values were important, and then was living a life that was completely different. Kids can see through that stuff. They judge you by what you do, not by what you say. So I felt like I had to do something that had an element of social benefit. And that’s really how I started this, what I call, this journey.

I founded ClearlySo, which is now the UK’s leading impact investment bank. When we say “impact” investing, what we’re including is any project that has a social, or environmental, or ethical impact. For example, it could be reducing water pollution, or it could be educating children with special needs, or it could be housing the homeless, or it could be reducing carbon emissions.

Rodney Schwartz ’79, ’80S (MBA)

Home: London

Founder, ClearlySo

On starting a Wall Street career: “I was in a hurry when I was at Rochester, but I wasn’t so much in a hurry to go to Wall Street. It was a second choice. It was kind of an accident. Back then Wall Street wasn’t so glamorous. The most glamorous sector was chemicals, particularly oil and gas. That’s where the big money was. A few months before I finished business school, I decided I didn’t want to go into my father’s business. And by that time, there were only a few companies that hadn’t finished interviewing.”

If you think about classical finance, there are just two variables that matter: risk and return. Impact investment is three-dimensional. In fact, at ClearlySo, we coined the term 3-D investing. You don’t just consider risk and return, but you also take social, ethical, and environmental impact into account. If you think about risk, there’s no instruction from God or on high that we should take risk into account. It’s just that people prefer payoffs that have less risk associated with them. And increasingly, in the same way, people are starting to prefer returns that have less negative impact, or more positive impact. It’s becoming a variable that people are starting to value.

There are people who refer to impact investing as an asset class, and I think that that is very faulty thinking. It isn’t really an asset class. It can’t really be an asset class, because it’s so many different assets. So there are equity impact investments, fixed income impact investments, derivative impact investments, property impact investments. So it spans asset classes. It’s more a dimension than anything else.

There are skeptics who say no, impact investing is really just something that’s trendy right now, but it will stop being trendy. But companies are starting to think about impact investment as a next-generation development in their corporate social responsibility, or CSR, strategies. It used to be that you basically just gave a bit of money to open up a new wing of a library, or a hospital, or something like that, and that was CSR. And then it was helping a community that was important to your business. Now they’re saying, “Look, we’re a business. Why can’t we be coming up with business solutions that have benefits to our broader community?

Impact investing is one of the fastest-growing areas in all of the financial markets. I would call it a movement. And a profound movement. I struggle to think of a big company in the UK that isn’t engaged with this agenda in some way. Businesses come to us in great numbers. But it’s still going to take time. If my grandchildren ever become business students, by that time I do think that in finance, impact will be considered as integral as risk is today.

DANDELION DAY

Spinning Celebration

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

SPRING FLING: Aisha Mohamed ’19, a chemistry major from Saint Paul, Minnesota, takes a turn on a spinning chairs carnival ride during Dandelion Day in April. The day marks the start of SpringFest Weekend.