President’s Message

As I expect is the case with the entire University of Rochester community, I was hopeful that 2022 would get off to an optimistic start. As the new year was upon us, the COVID omicron variant clouded the horizon.

While the evolving pandemic continues to give us reasons to be careful, the news this winter also provides a moment to be grateful for the extraordinary work of the nation’s scientific and medical experts—including those at the University of Rochester—who have committed themselves to developing vaccines, providing treatments and care, and adjusting policies to keep us safe.

One of the reasons that I have dedicated my professional life to research-driven institutions like Rochester is precisely because of the enormous impact our University and others like it can have on the local and global communities we serve. You can’t help but see reasons for optimism as you see the results of our research ’endeavors and our commitment to educational excellence as well as our leadership in community service and cultural enrichment.

The past two years have not been easy, and I am extremely proud of the way our community has risen to the occasion. I could highlight a magazine’s worth of reasons to be optimistic about the work of the University community but allow me to single out just a few particularly noteworthy examples to share.

In November, we celebrated the selection of our second Rhodes Scholar in two years, a remarkable example of the academic standing of our student body.

Kudzai Mbinda, a chemical engineering major from Harare, Zimbabwe, was among the 100 students worldwide chosen for graduate studies at the University of Oxford next fall. He joins Beauclaire Mbanya Jr., a member of the Class of 2020 from Cameroon, who was named a 2021 Global Rhodes Scholar. Having two of our students awarded one of the most elite academic honors in the world is a testament to Kudzai and Beauclaire’s scholarship and campus engagement and offers further validation of Rochester as an elite institution on the global stage.

We also learned that the University’s partnership with East High School in the Rochester City School District has been renewed by the state’s Department of Education.

Begun in 2015, the Educational Partnership Organization is administered by the Warner School of Education, through its Center for Urban Education Success. In its most recent report to the state, the EPO announced a remarkable turnaround in graduation rates—from 39 percent six years ago to over 85 percent today, as well as improvements in other markers of educational success.

Our work with East is an all-hands-on-deck partnership, involving all aspects of the University. Under Warner’s guidance, we’ve adopted a multidisciplinary approach that draws expertise from across the University. Among some of the University programs involved in East’s success are the Departments of Pediatrics, Neuroscience, Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation, the School of Nursing, the Eastman Institute of Oral Health, the Flaum Eye Institute, the Department of Athletics and Recreation, and the Memorial Art Gallery.

Everyone collaborating at East has the goal of creating a template of their work that can be replicated in urban schools across the city, state, and nation. Looking to the future, that will include institutional commitments to equity, advocating for a community-based approach to school transformation, and forging a relationship between neighborhood schools, area universities, and community resources on campus.

And in March, the Up Against the Wall exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery will showcase some of the most visually arresting and socially meaningful examples from the University’s one-of-a-kind collection of AIDS posters. Donated by physician Edward Atwater ’50, the collection of more than 8,000 posters (many of them available online) captures the spectrum of social, religious, civic, and public health agency responses to AIDS and HIV. A remarkable resource, the collection provides a historical look at the social dimensions of another pandemic, one in which Rochester and other institutions played key roles in combating.

These examples barely scratch the surface of the work being done at Rochester, but I hope they remind us that despite the conditions of the world around us—and maybe because of those conditions—the University of Rochester continues to demonstrate that the best way forward is by never flagging in our goal of making the world ever better.

I’m excited by the prospect of what we are doing and what we can achieve together.

Meliora!

Contact President Mangelsdorf at sarah (dot) mangelsdorf (at) rochester (dot) edu. Follow her on Instagram.