The Rochester Curriculum: ‘How come nobody else is doing this?’
Twenty-five years ago, the chairs of the religion and physics departments united in a common goal: To rid the undergraduate curriculum of mandatory courses students didn’t want to take, and give students the freedom to delve more deeply into the subjects they loved.
Q&A: Jane Marie Souza on shepherding programs that span the University
As associate provost for academic administration, Souza provides academic guidance and support to all schools across the University, ensuring programs meet educational standards. One new project is a pilot program to offer students an “outcomes transcript” which would help centralize transcripts from multiple schools or departments.
A conversation with Rochester’s latest Nobel Prize winner
Recognized by the Nobel committee for his contributions to behavioral economics—a field that he helped create—Thaler’s research bridges the gap between economics and psychology.
Giving virtual reality a ‘visceral’ sound
Using recital halls as their “labs,” and recording some of the best music students in the world, University researchers are creating virtual reality videos of concerts that literally immerse viewers “within” the performance onstage.
Augmented reality lets students operate a chemical plant
Coffee mugs and popsicle sticks are transformed into chemical reactors as part of an innovative teaching experiment that allows student engineers to simulate reactions in a real-life, sprawling chemical plant.
Virtual reality app offers personalized psychotherapy
A multidisciplinary team of University doctors, engineers, and musicians is working together to create an immersive, customized experience that brings cognitive-behavioral therapy to a patient’s smartphone.
Training brains—young and old, sick and healthy—with virtual reality
Rochester researchers are using virtual reality-based brain training to better understand the brain’s plasticity in athletes who have experienced concussions and older adults with mild cognitive impairments. The goal? Improved therapeutic treatments patients can do at home.
Building the right mobile app for caregivers of children with FASD
A researcher and a computer engineer team up to build a mobile app that is already starting to help parents and caregivers facing fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.
On stage, in the lab
Thanks to the Dual Degree Program with the University’s Eastman School of Music, Ivan Suminski ’18, ’18E finds himself in an enviable dilemma. Should he apply to graduate school to continue his violin studies? Or to research the biophysics of the inner ear?
Setback helped sharpen student’s focus on what matters most
Juliana Conley ’21 is using her experiences from a series of life detours to guide her academic goal: modeling wildfires and other environmental phenomena associated with climate change, via an interdisciplinary degree in geomechanics.