20 years later, remembering September 11
Naval, Air Force, and Army ROTC units stood vigil at the Meridian on the University of Rochester’s Eastman Quad to mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Among the nearly 3,000 people who died during the attacks were six University of Rochester alumni: Jeremy Glick ’93; Jean Hoadley Peterson ’69N; Jeffrey Smith ’87, ’88S (MBA); Zhe (Zack) Zeng ’95, ’98S (MBA); Aram Iskenderian ’82; and Brendan Dolan ’86.
In 2019, Ellen Bakalian, the widow of Jeffrey Smith, wrote “Everything My Husband Wasn’t There For,” an essay for The Atlantic, which was reprinted with permission in the summer 2021 issue of Rochester Review.
A rite of passage for new medical students
During the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s annual Robert L. & Lillian H. Brent White Coat Ceremony, first-year medical students don brand new white coats to symbolize the start of their journey to becoming medical professionals. This year’s event took place at the Larry and Cindy Bloch Alumni and Advancement Center, with the participants’ health and safety top of mind.
Pipeline program lets East High students experience life in the lab
Lulu Abdullahi (right), a junior at East High School in the Rochester City School District, practices soldering to repair an experiment component with Manuel Gomez-Ramirez, an assistant professor in the University’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. For six weeks, Abdullahi and a classmate visited campus as part of NEUROEAST, a new Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience program.
Celebrating spring at annual Springfest, Dandelion Day festivities
Dandelion Day, one of the University’s long-standing traditions, included a mix of in-person and virtual programs.
University community marks COVID-19’s one-year anniversary
Moment of silence and other activities mark the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which the University community responded
Testing regimen screens students as they return to campus housing
University Health Service and other campus offices team up to test students before they move back into their campus housing assignments for the spring semester.
With ‘Flight of Sites,’ students and faculty set choreography to campus architecture
Flight of Sites: Dances in Innovative Spaces, a two-day concert featuring student and faculty choreography, embraced both an outdoor and online audience experience.
An adapted classroom: Students and faculty find new ways to engage in teaching and learning
Students and faculty members adapt to new—and safety-conscious—ways of interacting as teachers, scholars, and researchers.
Instrument to detect dark energy is poised for debut
Members of a University of Rochester cosmology group who are a key part of a multi-institutional effort to create the most detailed 3-D map ever made of the universe are looking forward to the launch of the instrument later this year in Arizona.
The team—Regina Demina, professor of physics; Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, postdoctoral research associate; Segev BenZvi, assistant professor of physics; and Kelly Douglass, visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy—are working on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project, an initiative to provide a more comprehensive look at dark energy and how it’s influencing the expansion of the universe. The instrument—including the 5,000 robotic positioners of the telescope’s focal plane (above)—will capture data from 35 million galaxies, potentially providing insight about the life cycle of galaxies and about the cosmic web that connects matter in the universe.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the lead institution on the project, announced on June 1 that DESI was complete and was moving toward its startup.
Special goodbye for a special UHS nurse
University Health Service staff members organized a “Drive-by Good-bye” for Liz Feuerstein, a UHS staff nurse who retired from the University after almost 32 years of service on Friday, May 1. Several former University staff and retirees came back to campus for the socially-distanced retirement event, including nurse coworkers from over years. The Department of Public Safety led the parade.