In Review

Members of the faculty were formally appointed to lead key institutes and centers this spring.

Joan Shelley Rubin, the Dexter Perkins Professor in History, was formally installed as the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center.

Rubin, who joined the faculty in 1995 and specializes in 19th- and 20th-century American history, has led the center since 2015 and was selected for the Gabrellian Directorship last fall.

The position is named in recognition of the support of University Trustee Ani Gabrellian ’84 and her husband, Mark Gabrellian ’79. The couple also established the annual Hagop and Artemis Nazerian Lectures, named for Ani Gabrellian’s parents and directed by the center.

Scott Carney ’99 (PhD) became the director of the Institute of Optics this summer.

Previously a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carney earned his PhD in physics at Rochester, studying with Emil Wolf, the Wilson Professor of Optical Physics, who has been part of the institute since 1959.

Carney replaces outgoing director Xi-Cheng Zhang, who will remain on the faculty as the M. Parker Givens Professor of Optics.

Carney is editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Optical Society of America A, and is noted for work that bridges the gap between pure and applied research.

Mark Watters, a six-time Emmy Award–winning composer and conductor, has been named the inaugural director of the Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media at the Eastman School of Music.

Watters served as music director for two Olympics—the 1996 Centennial Games in Atlanta and the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City—for which he won two of his six Emmys. He also received Emmys for Outstanding Music Direction for Movies Rock; Outstanding Music for True Life Adventure Alaska: Dances of the Caribou; and two Outstanding Music Direction and Composition Daytime Awards for Aladdin and Tiny Toon Adventures.

Named for Emmy-winning composer Jeff Beal ’85E and vocalist and University Trustee Joan Sapiro Beal ’84E, the Beal Institute was established to prepare students for evolving opportunities to write, produce, and perform music for film and visual media.

Eastman Musicians Join Rochester Jazz Festival

Eastman School of Music musicians—current students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as students and faculty from the Eastman Community Music School—were among the performers at this summer’s Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival.

The festival featured performances in many of Eastman’s venues, including Hatch, Kilbourn, and Kodak Halls, while Gibbs Street, home to Eastman Theatre and other school facilities, was renamed “Jazz Street” during the event.

Eastman has been involved in the festival since it was founded in 2002.

Team Meliora to Vie for Hult Prize

A team of four recent graduates of the College is in the running for the Hult Prize, the largest social entrepreneurship competition in the world, with a reward of $1 million seed money.

One of three wild card entrants selected by Hult officials last spring, Team Meliora will join regional champions from Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai, and Shanghai at the September Hult Prize finals in New York City, with former president Bill Clinton announcing the winner.

The team—Edgar Alaniz ’17, a biochemistry and clinical psychology major, Carlos (Yuki) Gonzalez ’17, a financial economics major, Ibrahim Mohammad ’17, a mechanical engineering major, and Omar Soufan ’17, a biomedical engineering major—aims to efficiently build homes from recycled plastics for refugees.

The Hult Prize, a partnership between Hult International Business School and the Clinton Global Initiative, was established in 2010 and encourages teams of entrepreneurs to solve some of the planet’s biggest challenges with innovative ideas for sustainable start-up enterprises.

The 2017 Hult Prize President’s Challenge is “Refugees—Reawakening Human Potential.”

College Seniors Recognize Top Teachers with Singer Awards

Four graduating seniors were joined at commencement by former high school teachers selected to receive the Singer Family Prize for Excellence in Secondary School Teaching.

Each year, seniors in the College are invited to nominate a high school teacher for the prize. Winners receive $3,000 for themselves and $2,500 for their school and travel expenses to attend commencement.

Paul Singer ’66 supports the prizes through the Paul Singer Family Foundation. Singer, says his son, Gordon, “feels strongly that while devoted secondary school teachers play a vital role in the intellectual development of American society, they often receive little recognition or acclaim for their endeavors.”

This year’s recipients were Marvin Gordon Hall, a mathematics and robotics teacher from Campion College High School in Kingston, Jamaica, who was nominated by Mark Auden ’17, a mathematics and physics major; Deborah Morand, an English teacher from Fitchburg High School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, nominated by Brian O’Neil ’17, a biological sciences major; Lisa Ricci, an Italian teacher from Thomas R. Proctor High School in Utica, New York, nominated by Nicholas Contento ’17, a neuroscience and anthropology major; and Jesse Warren, an English teacher, from Pomona High School in Arvada, Colorado, nominated by Shelby Corning ’17, an environmental sciences major.

Rochester Poet to Direct Oldest American Writers’ Conference

Poet and professor of English Jennifer Grotz has been named the next director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

Established in 1926, Bread Loaf was conceived of by poet Robert Frost and first led by John Farrar, founder of the publishing company Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The first woman to hold the position, Grotz will be the seventh director of the oldest American conference for writers.

Grotz is the author of four volumes of poetry—including The Needle (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) and Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016)—and has published poems in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, among other publications. She’s also a literary translator, with two books translated from French—Rochester Knockings (Open Letter Books, 2015) and Psalms of All My Days (Carnegie Mellon, 2013)—as well as other translations from French and Polish.

This spring, Grotz was named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2017, one of just 11 poets to be recognized among this year’s honorees.

Frost took part in the original conference for 42 years, and other notable attendees and faculty have included Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Truman Capote, John Irving, Julia Alvarez, and Toni Morrison.

Grotz attended Bread Loaf for the first time in 1995, and became the assistant director in 2005. Her appointment as director follows a national search.

She will become director in October.