Alumni Gazette

He’s an Astronaut!

Josh Cassada ’00 (PhD) is one of NASA’s newest astronauts. In July, he completed a two-year training program along with seven others selected in 2013 from among more than 6,000 applicants, the second-largest applicant pool in NASA’s history. A former naval aviator, a physicist, and previously the cofounder and chief technology officer for Quantum Opus, Cassada received technical space system training, robotics instruction, and specialized hardware instruction at space centers around the world. In the coming years, he and the seven other newly minted astronauts aim to be part of the first human mission to an asteroid, as well as to Mars. NASA now employs about 45 astronauts.

Champion Doctor

Bojan Zoric ’98 was a leading scorer and an Academic All-American when he played on the Yellowjackets men’s soccer team. Now he’s a physician for some of the world’s greatest soccer athletes: the 2015 World Cup–winning United States Women’s National Team.

The championship game was “exactly the type of game I like to see,” Zoric told Dennis O’Donnell, director of athletic communications at Rochester, in July. “No one needed me.” By which he meant, of course, there were no injuries during the game.

Zoric has been on the team’s medical staff since 2008 and also served the team during their gold medal performance at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. He grew up playing soccer, first in Croatia and then in Sweden, where his family moved when he was six. He came to the United States for college because it allowed him to pursue both higher education and soccer. In addition to serving the team, Zoric is part of a group orthopaedics and sports medicine practice, Sports Medicine North, in Peabody, Massachusetts.

Celebrating the Dalai Lama in Song

To celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday last July, Michael Wohl ’88 announced the completion of Songs for Tibet II, a follow-up to the 2008 recording Songs for Tibet, produced by the Art of Peace Foundation, which Wohl founded and directs. Wohl, who is also associate director of social entrepreneurship and entrepreneur-in-residence at the University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, wrote in the Huffington Post that the follow-up recording is intended to support Tibetans’ “desires for fundamental freedoms of expression.” Like the first Songs for Tibet, Songs for Tibet II features a star lineup, with 16 songs from such artists as Kate Bush, Elbow, Lorde, Of Monsters and Men, Sting, and Peter Gabriel.