In Review

Jimmie Reyna ’75, a circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the first Latino to serve on the court, will deliver the commencement address to the Class of 2017 at this spring’s ceremony.

During the ceremony on May 21, Reyna will also receive the Charles Force Hutchison and Marjorie Smith Hutchison Medal. It’s the University’s highest alumni award, presented for career achievements and notable service.

“It is an honor to welcome back to Rochester the Honorable Judge Reyna,” said Joel Seligman, University president, CEO, and G. Robert Witmer, Jr. University Professor. “He is an outstanding judge, esteemed for his integrity and judiciary achievements, as well as his strong commitment to community.”

Appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President Barack Obama in 2011 and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Reyna is widely recognized as an international trade lawyer respected for his skill in trade policy, business regulation, and compliance law, and has a distinguished track record of leadership in the Hispanic legal community.

He graduated from the University with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1975, at the same time as his wife, Dolores, who earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

He received a law degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1978. The Reynas’ youngest son, Justin, is also a Rochester alumnus, graduating in 1999 with a degree in religion.

Additional information about University commencement ceremonies and related activities is available at Rochester.edu/commencement. The May 21 ceremony will be live-streamed on the web.

Medical Center to Study Infectious Threats

The Medical Center will receive up to $9 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct surveillance and research on infectious diseases over the next five years.

The award renews the University’s role as a member of the CDC’s Emerging Infections Program, a national network that keeps watch on the activity of several infectious threats and conducts studies that guide policy related to prevention and treatment.

The New York State Emerging Infections Program, based at the Center for Community Health, partners with the New York State Department of Health to track a wide range of diseases that have an impact on the public. The program also evaluates new therapies and prevention methods, such as the use of the HPV vaccine to curtail human papillomavirus infection, to determine effectiveness across the population.

The Rochester region and several counties surrounding Albany comprise the New York State program, one of just 10 sites selected by the CDC. Data from New York are combined with data from sites in California, New Mexico, Minnesota, Tennessee, and other locations. Together, the communities are roughly representative of the U.S. population on the basis of age, gender, race, and health indicators such as population density and poverty level.

MLK Speaker Joy DeGruy: ‘We Need to Heal’

Nationally renowned author, educator, and activist Joy DeGruy urged students and other members of the University community to recognize the cognitive dissonance that’s inherent in a nation whose principles are based on freedom and democracy but that’s still living with the legacy of slavery.

DeGruy, an assistant professor at Portland State University and the author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing and Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: The Study Guide, said the trauma wrought by slavery and the slave trade continues to have psychological and biological as well as social consequences for African Americans.

“Trauma is trapped in the DNA, so when I say we need to heal, if we do not heal, we doom future generations,” she said during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address.

A self-described ambassador for healing, DeGruy is an academician in social work with more than 20 years of experience in the field.

She has spent her career amassing evidence of the trauma experienced by slaves, and how decades of subjugation under Jim Crow resulted in psychic injuries that have persisted in African-American communities across generations.

As this year’s speaker, she spent a day on campus meeting with students and faculty to discuss issues of race and civil rights and the responsibility of citizens to speak out against injustice.

She answered questions and talked about her background, her experiences as a teacher, and about fighting injustice.

“Choose your battles,” she told students. “But always be who you are.”

Financial Times Gives Simon High Marks

The Simon Business School was listed among the world’s best business schools in an annual ranking published by the Financial Times of London.

In specialty rankings, Simon was second in the world for finance and fifth in the world for economics.

Simon is also ranked 38th among U.S. business schools (from 41st last year).

The annual survey was based this year on information collected from global business schools and their Class of 2013 graduates.

Business schools are ranked by the Financial Times annually based on several criteria: the career progression accrued from the MBA, diversity, and research. Other factors include placement statistics (such as salary percentage increase and weighted salaries); measures of the diversity of schools’ students, faculty, and board members; and statistics of each school’s faculty and their research in 45 internationally refereed journals.

International RNA Society Recognizes Biochemist

Lynne Maquat has been chosen to receive the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award in Science from the RNA Society.

The international group of 1,000 members is organized to promote research in developmental biology, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, biomedical sciences, chemistry, genetics, and virology as they relate to questions of RNA structure and function.

Maquat was selected in recognition of her biochemical work to unravel what happens in cells during disease and for her work to mentor new generations of researchers and to advocate for young women in the sciences.

Maquat, who holds the title of J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, began her professional career studying inherited anemias.

She discovered a quality control process that blocks the creation of toxic proteins that cause disease, a process that plays a part in one-third of all inherited diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, and one-third of all acquired diseases, including a number of cancers.

She is the founding director of the University’s Center for RNA Biology: From Genome to Therapeutics.

The National Institutes of Health has continuously funded Maquat’s research for the past 34 years.

She’s published more than 150 papers and reviews and one of her projects recently received an NIH MERIT award, a highly coveted type of grant that provides long-term, stable support to investigators whose research skills and productivity are distinctly superior, as judged by their peers and leaders at the NIH. Maquat joined the Medical Center’s faculty in 2000 and has been a member of the RNA Society since its formation in 1993.

She will accept the award at the society’s 22nd annual meeting this June in Prague.