Rochester Review

January–February 2014, Volume 76, No. 3

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Emily Boynton, Adam Fenster, Melissa Greco Lopes, Susan Hagen, Peter Iglinski, Caitlin Mack, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Chris Roth, Leonor Sierra, Brandon Vick, and Leslie White

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Published six times a year for alumni, students, their parents, and other friends of the University, Rochester Review is produced by University Communications.

Opinions expressed are those of the authors, the editors, or their subjects and do not necessarily represent official positions of the University of Rochester.

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2014 University of Rochester

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Alumni photographs, courtesy of the subjects. Unless otherwise credited, all others are Rochester Review photos.

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Letters

Lockerbie’s Sad Reminders

“Lessons of Lockerbie” in the November–December 2013 issue was a saddening reminder of classmates’ lives and potential cut short by “macrocosmic” events. Mark Zaid ’89 is admirable for his refusal to let Class of ’90 graduates Eric Coker and Katharine Hollister be forgotten.

The Class of ’73, of which I was a member, suffered a very similar loss only 10 years after graduation, when Stuart Steckler and Irene Bigotte Steckler died in the August 31, 1983, downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 by the then Soviet Union over Sakhalin Island. It is believed that the plane mistakenly strayed from its flight path over restricted Soviet territory and was shot from the sky with all its innocent passengers and crew.

Stuart and Irene were returning to their jobs as English instructors near Osaka, Japan. At the time—30 years ago now—People magazine wrote: “The Stecklers were traveling through India ten years ago when they happened to stop at a Vipassana meditation center. Fascinated, they stayed three months. ‘The first time they came back from India, there was a mosquito in the room,’ remembers Irene’s mother, Eve Bigotte. ‘I tried to get rid of it, and Irene said, “Mother, must you kill it?” ’ ”

In this age of social media, one of the most poignant manifestations of Stuart’s and Irene’s stolen lives is the lack of “hits” in a search on their names. But those who knew them need not search far for their memory. They were beautiful souls and the world is coarser for their absence.

Marian Kester Coombs ’73

Crofton, Md.

More for Art

I really enjoyed the public involvement in the selection process for the new sculpture to be installed in the courtyard in front of Sage Art Center (“Campus Gateway Sculpture Proposals Sought,” September–October 2013). Working in the art field, I am always appreciative of public works and installation.

At the same time, I would like to see the money for a commission like this spent first on renovating the Sage studio spaces. Many new buildings are going up around campus, but we don’t want to forget about maintaining the existing ones.

Better, up-to-date spaces for art students would mean more course offerings as well. The art and art history faculty were extremely knowledgeable when I was a student, but they can only do so much with limited resources.

Emily Wroczynski ’10

Wilmington, Del.

The writer is a Questers International Graduate Fellow in Art Conservation at the University of Delaware, a joint program with Winterthur, the estate of horticulturist Henry Francis du Pont that’s now a prominent museum of decorative arts in Wilmington, Del.

Review welcomes letters and will print them as space permits. Letters may be edited for brevity and clarity. Unsigned letters cannot be used. Send letters to Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P.O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; rochrev@rochester.edu.

BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

Mighty Membrane

bioreactor (Photo: Adam Fenster)

PUMP IT UP: A composite photograph highlights a super-thin silicon membrane that could one day lead to diagnostic devices the size of credit cards. Part of research in the lab of James McGrath, associate professor of biomedical engineering, the project demonstrates a new version of an electroosmotic pump—a device in which fluids move through porous media in the presence of an electric field. The Rochester researchers were able to reduce the required electrical voltage from 10 kilovolts in a typical pump to about one-quarter volt, demonstrating a potential way to drastically reduce the size of future devices.

STUDENT LIFE

Fudge Factor

fudge (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Candy Engineer: Kiara Medina ’15 of Ridgewood, N.Y., sorts M&Ms as part of the process of making fudge for sale at the Common Market, the on-campus convenience store in Wilson Commons. She and Jessica Brogdon ’16 of Watkins Glen, N.Y., were among this year’s “candy engineers” at the market. In addition to making the gooey treat, holders of the competitive jobs help devise new flavor combinations and help plan fudge production and inventory for the store.

INNOVATION

Start-Up Scene

optics (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Optical opportunity: Members of the student-led company Ovitz—Pedro Vallejo-Ramirez ’16, Joung Yoon (Felix) Kim ’14, Samuel Steven ’13, graduate student Aizhong Zhang, Len Zheleznyak ’05, ’06 (MS), and Nicolas Brown ’16 (left to right)—strike a pose with a portable eye-diagnosis instrument that they developed and are working to commercialize. Developed with the Institute of Optics and the Flaum Eye Institute, the “EyeProfiler” is designed to be smaller, cheaper, and more accurate than existing devices and especially suited for use with children. The group won a $10,000 award in November at a competition sponsored by High Tech Rochester, a nonprofit organization that promotes entrepreneurship in Rochester and western New York. For more about the company: www.o-vitz.com.

UNIVERSITY CAMPAIGN

‘Thanks a Billion!’

The Meliora Challenge, the University’s comprehensive fundraising effort, passes the $1 billion milestone.

By Sara Miller

billionGIFTED PHYSICIAN: A commitment from ophthalmologist James Aquavella—above, examining Spencer Eisenhauer at the Flaum Eye Institute—helped The Meliora Challenge reach the $1 billion mark this fall. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The University is moving into the final phase of its first comprehensive fundraising initiative on a historic note, reaching the $1 billion mark in November. The milestone places Rochester among 29 private universities that have raised at least $1 billion and moves the University closer to the $1.2 billion goal set for The Meliora Challenge in 2011.

“This is a special day, literally a red-letter day,” said President Joel Seligman during a November 20 announcement. “I encourage everyone to take a deep breath and stop and smell the roses. It’s important to celebrate the victories.”

Planned to be completed in 2016, the Campaign is the largest comprehensive fundraising effort in the University’s history. The $1.2 billion goal incorporates five priorities: $225 million for student support, primarily endowed scholarships and fellowships; $350 million for faculty support with an emphasis on endowed professorships; $375 million to support programs vital to the schools and units; $130 million in unrestricted support through the annual fund; and $120 million for new facilities and campus renovations.

“We are grateful for the vision, generosity, and support of our alumni, friends, faculty, staff, parents, and students,” Seligman said. “Let me especially thank [Chief Advancement Officer] Jim Thompson and the great Advancement team for our progress to date. “On behalf of the University, I say to them all: ‘Thanks a billion!’ ”

Noting that the University will continue to face challenges, particularly due to changes in health care and other issues affecting the funding of federal agencies, Seligman also referred to remarks made by Rochester’s first president, Martin Brewer Anderson:

“But let me add, ‘Our work is but begun.’ We still have much to do to effectively support our faculty, students, and staff and to develop programs that place us in the vanguard of cutting-edge research, the highest quality education, clinical care, professional schools, and the creative arts.”

A commitment of more than $4 million from James Aquavella, professor of ophthalmology, pushed The Meliora Challenge past the historic mark. A clinician and researcher in the University’s Flaum Eye Institute, Aquavella made the gift in memory of his late wife, Kay, who was a nurse and administrator dedicated to the establishment of the institute.

Aquavella, who joined the University in 1963 and specializes in corneal surgery, said that he and his wife were guided by three great passions: their commitment to one another and their work together; the advancement of ophthalmology; and the University.

“Our gift to the University combines them all,” he said, noting that his work as a clinician and scientist and his wife’s work as a nurse and administrator at the institute are a “case study in the principles of Meliora.”

“I merely represent the many thousands of people who gave gifts of all sizes,” he said.

G. Robert Witmer Jr. ’59, chair emeritus of the Board of Trustees, said the Campaign is one of the University’s most significant initiatives in the five decades that he has been connected to Rochester, noting that the effort is an important partnership among alumni, faculty, staff, and members of the Rochester community.

Beginning with the founding of the University in 1850, and continuing through the 1920s campaigns that helped establish the River Campus and the Medical Center, the Rochester community has a long history of supporting the University, he said.

“The Rochester community has assisted the University and vice versa,” Witmer said. “It’s a symbiotic relationship, and the Rochester community has helped us accomplish what we have achieved to date.”

Seligman said that while major fundraising efforts often are characterized by the amount of money that they raise, he hoped members of the University community would remember that the fundamental purpose of the Campaign is to support faculty, clinicians, alumni, and students as they try to make a difference in the lives of those around them.

“When we started the Campaign, we realized that it’s not about the dollars,” Seligman said. “Dollars enable you. The Campaign is about touching people’s lives.”

Sara Miller is University spokesperson.

Meliora Milestones

billion_sideNEW FACILITY: One of several new buildings supported by the Campaign, Rettner Hall opened in 2013. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Chaired by University Trustees Cathy Minehan ’68, dean of Simmons College School of Management in Boston and a former U.S. Federal Reserve executive, and Rich Handler ’83, chairman and CEO of Jefferies & Company, The Meliora Challenge was publicly launched in 2011 after a quiet phase that began in 2005. The $1.2 billion goal incorporates five areas, including student support, primarily endowed scholarships and fellowships; faculty support with an emphasis on endowed professorships; support for school and unit programs; unrestricted support through the annual fund; and new facilities and campus renovations.

The Medical Center is a major part of the overall Campaign with a goal of $650 million, of which $510 million has already been raised. Among the key priorities are programs and research to find breakthroughs that will treat—and perhaps cure—many diseases, such as muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s, and cancer.

Key gifts since 2005 include:

A $30 million commitment from Board Chair Ed Hajim ’58, and his wife, Barbara, to fund student scholarships and to support the endowment of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.

$25 million in support from Rich Handler and his wife, Martha, for student scholarships. A $20 million commitment from Paychex founder B. Thomas Golisano for the construction of a new Golisano Children’s Hospital, scheduled to open in 2015.

$14 million in support from Trustee Robert Goergen ’60 and his wife, Pamela, including $10 million for the Robert B. Goergen Hall for Biomedical Engineering and Optics.

A $10 million gift from Eastman Kodak Company for the renovation of what is now Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre.

A $10 million gift from Rochester businessman E. Philip Saunders and his wife, Carole, to support research programs in muscular dystrophy, cancer, and translational medicine and to name the Saunders Research Building. Saunders dedicated the gift to veterans of the U.S. armed forces.

More than $10 million in support from the Wilmot family and the James P. Wilmot Foundation for the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center.

A multimillion commitment from Trustee Thomas Sloan ’65, ’67 (MS) and his wife, Linda Sloan ’67, to support arts programs.

Recent projects supported by the Campaign include:

Golisano Children’s Hospital, an ongoing project scheduled to be completed in 2015.

Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation, opened in 2013.

Raymond F. LeChase Hall, home to the Warner School of Education, opened in 2013.

The Eastman Theatre renovation and expansion project, completed in 2011.

Donor Data

Represented by all 50 states and 78 countries

90,000-plus donors in the Rochester area

50,000-plus donors outside Rochester

38 percent of faculty and staff have contributed to the Campaign

Facts & Figures

As of Dec. 1, 2013

The Meliora Challenge: $1 billion

68 endowed professorships 247 endowed student scholarships and fellowships

2,700 George Eastman Circle members

For more information about The Meliora Challenge, visit campaign.rochester.edu.

Can You ‘See’ in the Dark?

discover_darkPLAIN AS THE HAND: Lindsay Bronnenkant ’10 reenacts one part of a study exploring whether people have the ability to vaguely “see” the motion of their own body even in complete darkness. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A new cognitive sciences study finds that at least 50 percent of people can “see” the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light.

Reporting on results from five separate experiments involving 129 individuals, a team led by Duje Tadin, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, found that the eerie ability suggests that human brains combine information from different senses to create perceptions. The team, which included researchers from Rochester and from Vanderbilt University, published the findings online in the Association for Psychological Science’s journal Psychological Science.

As part of the experiments, the researchers set up several scenarios to gauge each subject’s self-reported ability to see the motion of their hands in conditions of total darkness. Participants also were fitted with a computerized eye tracker in total darkness to confirm whether self-reported perceptions of movement lined up with objective measures. The eye-tracker indicated that even in total darkness, many subjects could follow the movement of their hands smoothly, an ability that requires being able to track an actual object.

First author Kevin Dieter, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt, helped devise several of the experiments while he worked toward his PhD in Tadin’s Rochester lab. He says the

research “underscores that what we normally perceive of as sight is really as much a function of our brains as our eyes.”

For most people, the ability to see self-motion in darkness probably is learned, the authors conclude.

“We get such reliable exposure to the sight of our own hand moving that our brains learn to predict the expected moving image even without actual visual input,” says Dieter.

—Susan Hagen

Menstrual Cycle Influences Concussion Outcomes

How well a woman recovers from a concussion may depend on that time of the month.

In a study published in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, Medical Center researchers reported that women injured during the two weeks leading up to their period had a slower recovery and poorer health one month after the injury compared with women injured during the two weeks directly after their period or women taking birth control pills.

If confirmed, the findings could alter the treatment of and prognosis for women who suffer head injuries from sports, falls, car accidents, or combat.

In the study, researchers Jeffrey Bazarian, associate professor of emergency medicine, and Kathleen Hoeger, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, explored the influence of sex hormones such as estrogen and progesterone in how women recover from head injuries. They analyzed hormone levels of 144 women ages 18 to 60 who arrived within four hours of a blow to the head at five emergency departments in upstate New York and one in Pennsylvania.

The researchers believe that progesterone levels in women drop sharply after a head injury, especially among women whose progesterone levels are naturally high, as they are in the two weeks leading up to a period. That drop produces a kind of hormonal withdrawal which either contributes to or worsens post-concussive symptoms. And that may account for why women recover differently from men, the researchers conclude.

“I don’t think doctors consider menstrual history when evaluating a patient after a concussion, but maybe we should,” says Bazarian. “By taking into account the stage of their cycle at the time of injury we could better identify patients who might need more aggressive monitoring or treatment. It would also allow us to counsel women that they’re more or less likely to feel poorly because of their menstrual phase.”

—Emily Boynton

Depression Therapy Helps Poor, Minority Moms

A Rochester study indicates that screening for depression and providing short-term, relationship-focused therapy can relieve the disorder among minority mothers, even in the face of poverty and personal histories of abuse or violence.

Sheree Toth, lead author and executive director of the University’s Mt. Hope Family Center, found that a 14-week series of convenient, one-hour therapy sessions relieved depression in participants much better than standard clinic-based care. The study participants also continued to improve eight months after the treatment ended, regaining a sense of hope and control over their lives and reporting feeling more connected to and supported by others.

Published online in Development and Psychopathology, the findings are good news for mothers and their children alike, says Toth.

“Extensive research has shown that young children whose primary caregivers are depressed often begin life on the wrong foot,” she says. “They may fail to develop secure attachments, setting them up for a cascade of difficulties, from behavior problems during childhood and failure in school to involvement in the juvenile justice system and major psychiatric problems down the road.”

Despite the widespread prevalence of depression among minority mothers, researchers have largely overlooked the population. For the new study, researchers tracked 128 low-income mothers of one-year-olds, 60 percent of whom were African American, 20 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent Caucasian. In addition to poverty, the vast majority of the mothers faced extensive life challenges. All but 6 percent had been depressed for more than a year, 87 percent reported histories of child abuse, 30 percent had been raped or sexually assaulted by a relative, and 27 percent suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Over the course of a 14-week intervention that featured home-based therapy sessions, women

in the study group saw their depressive symptoms decline. By contrast, women who received community care remained clinically depressed at follow-up sessions eight months later.

The results, says Toth, point to the need for screening high-risk populations, and the authors suggest future research should explore ways to make the interview process more welcoming.

—Susan Hagen

To Sleep, Perchance to Clean

Rochester scientists are giving new meaning to the adage that a good night’s sleep clears the mind.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers led by Maiken Nedergaard, the Frank P. Smith Professor of Neurosurgery and codirector of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine, report that a recently discovered system that flushes waste from the brain is primarily active during sleep.

The findings could transform scientists’ understanding of the biological purpose of sleep and point to new ways to treat neurological disorders.

“This study shows that the brain has different functional states when asleep and when awake,” says Nedergaard. “In fact, the restorative nature of sleep appears to be the result of the active clearance of the by-products of neural activity that accumulate during wakefulness.”

The new findings hinge on a discovery last year by Nedergaard and her colleagues that the brain has its own closed “ecosystem” to manage the removal of neurological waste created by normal neural activity. The system differs from the lymphatic system that disposes of cellular waste in the rest of the body because that system doesn’t extend through the complex system of molecular gateways—called the blood-brain barrier—that controls what enters and exits the brain.

Using a new imaging technology, researchers observed what amounted to a neurological plumbing system that piggybacks on the brain’s blood vessels and pumps cerebral spinal fluid through the brain’s tissue. The process flushes waste back into the circulatory system where it eventually makes its way to the general blood circulation system and, ultimately, the liver.

The study indicates that the brain’s system is highly active during sleep, clearing away toxins responsible for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders. The researchers also found that during sleep the brain’s cells reduce in size, allowing waste to be removed more effectively.

The removal of waste from the brain is essential because nearly every neurodegenerative disease is associated with the accumulation of cellular waste products.

—Mark Michaud

Grant Holcomb Retires after Three Decades as Gallery Director

brief_holcombART DIRECTION: Holcomb oversaw the development of Centennial Sculpture Park, the largest initiative in the Memorial Art Gallery’s history, as well as major exhibitions at the gallery and the acquisition of works of art ranging from ancient Egypt to the 20th century. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

After leading the Memorial Art Gallery for nearly three decades, Grant Holcomb will step down this summer.

In announcing his retirement last fall, Holcomb, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the Memorial Art Gallery, noted that his decision coincided with the end of the gallery’s 100th anniversary year.

“What more appropriate time to conclude my long tenure as director than after an extraordinary and exhilarating year-long celebration of the gallery’s centennial anniversary,” he said.

Holcomb’s retirement also marks the end of a 29-year tenure that has seen the gallery increase its permanent collection, expand its facilities, and broaden its exhibition programs.

Named the gallery’s sixth director in 1985, Holcomb has also led collaborations with cultural, educational, and medical organizations—programs that emphasized the gallery’s role as a publicly engaged institution.

Last fall, the gallery formally dedicated Centennial Sculpture Park, which includes four site-specific sculptures and recasts 10 acres of the gallery’s grounds into a showcase of public art and urban space. A multiyear project, the park was the largest initiative in the gallery’s history.

University President Joel Seligman recognized Holcomb’s leadership of the gallery.

“Grant has shaped the gallery’s internal and external spaces and enhanced its collections in ways that will benefit art lovers for generations to come,” Seligman said.

Under Holcomb’s direction, the gallery also initiated high-profile exhibitions featuring the work of Maxfield Parrish, Edgar Degas, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence. The gallery also acquired works of art ranging from an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus and a Renaissance suit of armor to works by such noted 19th- and 20th-century artists as Albert Bierstadt, Leonard Volk, Walter Goodman, George Bellows, Joseph Cornell, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, and Christian Boltanski. The centennial year included the addition of major contemporary works by Yayoi Kusama and Kehinde Wiley.

Jim Durfee, president of the gallery’s board of managers, will lead a committee charged with identifying Holcomb’s successor.

New Public Safety Director Named

brief_holcombPUBLIC SAFETY: Fischer will lead the University’s Department of Public Safety. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A former trooper, investigator, and administrator with the New York State Police who has spent the past two years serving as deputy director of the University’s Department of Public Safety, has been named to lead the department. Mark Fischer, who joined the department in 2011 as part of a leadership succession plan, became director in December.

He succeeds Walter Mauldin, who will become a senior advisor, focusing on assessment, policy, and planning for the department. Mauldin joined the University in 1980 as director of what was then known as security services.

Ron Paprocki, senior vice president for administration and finance and chief financial officer of the University, saluted Mauldin for his long tenure in working to ensure the safety of students, faculty, and staff.

“Walter has provided nearly 34 years of key leadership to the department that serves our most critical function—the safety of our University community members,” said Paprocki. “He has created a department that is well respected by our community and by our local law enforcement agencies. Most recently, his leadership in the multiyear effort to establish the University’s first sworn officer program has resulted in a stronger and coordinated response structure within public safety.”

Fischer becomes chief of a 134-member force that includes 27 newly active sworn peace officers and another group of 25 currently in training.

Nursing Earns Accreditation

The School of Nursing has earned full, 10-year accreditation for all of its baccalaureate and master’s degree programs, as well as its doctor of nursing practice program, the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education reported last fall. The commission conducted a three-day, onsite evaluation of the school last March.

The commission evaluates the quality and integrity of baccalaureate, graduate, and residency programs in nursing, according to nationally recognized standards. The accreditation process is designed to hold nursing programs accountable to the profession, consumers, employers, higher education, and students and their families by measuring each academic program’s success at achieving its mission, goals, and expected outcomes. The process helps ensure that nursing graduates are prepared for their professional roles and fosters continuing improvement in nursing programs.

“This is a true testimony to the hard work and investment put forth by our entire school, our faculty, staff, and our students,” said Kathy Rideout ’95W (EdD), dean of the school.

Mellon Grant Focuses on Humanities and Technology

Doctoral students in the humanities will have new support to study and to learn to use new technology.

That’s after the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the University a $1 million grant to support a graduate program designed by Rochester faculty to train humanities students to integrate digital technologies into innovative research programs.

The award is one of a series of grants the foundation has made in recent years to equip faculty and students at colleges and universities with tools and protocols in the digital humanities.

Students from any of Rochester’s four humanities PhD programs—English, history, philosophy, and visual and cultural studies—are eligible for the fellowship. Fellows will study the theory and practice of digital humanities as a way to discover new avenues of inquiry within their own fields and to serve as apprentices and mentors to communities of undergraduates and faculty members who are collaborating on research projects.

The grant is the latest in a series of initiatives in the digital humanities at Rochester. In addition to hiring faculty in fields related to digital media, the University last fall opened Ronald Rettner Hall for Media Arts and Innovation, a space designed to facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration through technology.

Civil Rights Leader to Give MLK Talk

brief_holcombGUEST: The youngest person to lead the NAACP, Jealous is set to give the 2014 MLK address. (Photo: NAACP)

Benjamin Todd Jealous, the youngest person ever appointed president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is scheduled to deliver the University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Address in January.

A former community organizer and newspaper editor, Jealous was 35 years old when he was named president of the NAACP in 2008. He announced last fall that he planned to step down from the leadership position at the end of 2013.

A fifth-generation member of the NAACP, Jealous began his career in civil rights at age 18, opening mail at the organization’s Legal Defense Fund.

He has since become an outspoken leader of successful state and local movements to ban the death penalty, outlaw racial profiling, defend voting rights, secure marriage equality, and free wrongfully incarcerated people. A Rhodes Scholar, Jealous is a graduate of Columbia and Oxford universities.

The January 24 talk begins at 6 p.m. in Strong Auditorium.

HIGHLIGHTS

Women Swim Away with League Title

Three Yellowjackets recognized for individual performances.

By Dennis O’Donnell

sportsLEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: Lauren Bailey ’15 (above) won all seven events she entered in the Liberty League championships. She was named Swimmer of the Year while Danielle Neu ’17 was named Diver of the Year and Jen Enos ’17 was Rookie of the Year. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

The Rochester women easily swam away with the Liberty League title this winter to earn the Yellowjackets’ fifth straight conference championship while the men just missed repeating as league champions.

The women scored 1,960.5 points, more than 800 points clear of second-place Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who ended with 1,163 points. The men finished with 1,586.5 to RPI’s 1,702.

Lauren Bailey ’15 won all seven events she entered during the two days of competition at Union College, setting six school and seven conference records. She took individual titles in the 100- and 200-yard butterfly, the 200-yard freestyle, and the 200-yard medley, and she was part of the top 200-yard and 400-yard medley relay team with Karen Meess ’14, Alex Veech ’17, and Vicky Luan ’16, and part of the top 200-yard freestyle relay team with Khami Simpson ’17, Emily Simon ’17, and Luan.

The junior from Ossining, N.Y., was named the league’s Swimmer of the Year, one of several individual honors awarded to Yellowjackets. She was joined by Danielle Neu ’17, who was named Diver of the Year for her first-place finish in the 1-meter competition and second-place finish on the 3-meter board. Jen Enos ’17 was named Rookie of the Year after winning two events, the 500-yard and 1,650-yard freestyle, both in University and league record times.

For the men, freshman Kasey Kwong ’17 was named Rookie of the Year for his performance in winning four events and placing second in two others. He won the 200-yard medley and the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke and swam on the winning 200-yard medley relay team with James Frauen ’15, Pat Davis ’15, and Brett Maus ’15.

The swimming teams return to competition on January 18 with a dual meet against Ithaca College at the Speegle-Wilbraham Aquatic Center.

In other highlights from the late fall:

Men’s basketball: The Yellowjackets were heading into the new year at 5–5 for the season. The team was led by Nate Vernon ’14, Tyler Sankes ’15, and Sam Borst-Smith ’17, who have each averaged in double figures for scoring early in the season. The men won the annual Holiday Inn Tournament in November, and finished third in the Chuck Ressler Tournament and fourth in the Wendy’s Classic. They begin UAA conference play in January.

Women’s basketball: The women were 4–4 with one game left in 2013. Led by Ally Zywicki ’15, who was averaging 15.4 points a game early in the season, and Loren Wagner ’14, who was averaging 13.3 points a game, the Yellowjackets begin UAA conference play in January.

Squash: In a battle of two top eight programs, the No. 5 Yellowjackets defeated No. 7 Princeton in December at the Lyman Squash Courts. The win moved Rochester to 6–1 for the season. Freshmen Aria Fazelimanesh ’17, Ryosei Kobayashi ’17, and Mario Yanez ’17 won key matches to clinch the victory, with sophomore All-Americans Neil Cordell ’16 and Faraz Khan ’16 as well as senior Karm Kumar ’14 also winning their matches. At the Liberty League championships in late November, the Yellowjackets’ six-year title streak came to an end when host St. Lawrence University knocked off Rochester in the final match of the tournament. The Yellowjackets return to the courts on January 18 to host No. 3 Yale University.

Volleyball: Junior Xiaoyi Li ’15 was named UAA honorable mention, her first all–UAA honor this season after being one of the top players on a young Yellowjacket squad that ended the year with a 9–27 record. The setter from Derwood, Md., led the Yellowjackets with 944 assists this season while also providing a career high of 71 kills.

Men’s and women’s soccer: Jessica Smith ’14 was named first team all–East Region by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. Five men earned similar honors: Alex Swanger ’15 and Keith Grafmeyer ’16 were named to the first team; Andrew Sheridan ’15 and Max Fan ’14 were named to the second team; and goalkeeper Mike Moranz ’14 was named to the third team.

Dennis O’Donnell is director of athletic communication for the Department of Athletics and Recreation.

ATHLETIC HONORS

Two Named to Classic Hall

sports_sideCLASSIC FAME: Jon Onyiriuka ’08 and Alex Porter ’09 were inducted into the Wendy’s College Classic Hall of Fame. (Photo: Bonny Gardner/St. John Fisher College)

Two Rochester basketball players who helped lead the Yellowjackets to regional and national success have earned recognition from one of the longest-running Division III tournaments.

Jon Onyiriuka ’08 and Alex Porter ’09 were inducted into the Wendy’s College Classic Hall of Fame in December. Onyiriuka is the fourth Rochester men’s player to earn induction, while Porter is the first Rochester woman to be honored.

Launched in 1998, the hall recognizes outstanding players, coaches, administrators, and long-time contributors to the event. The men’s tournament played its 47th edition in 2013. The women’s tournament is 20 years old.

Onyiriuka was a four-year starter for the Yellowjackets, finishing his career with 1,267 points (seventh all-time entering the 2013–14 season), 829 rebounds (fifth), and 109 blocks (fifth) with three appearances in the NCAA tournament.

He’s a vice president at BTIG, a financial services firm in New York City.

During her four seasons at Rochester, Porter helped the Yellowjackets to an 88–24 record and advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Division III playoffs each year. She finished her career as Rochester’s all-time steals leader with 295, second in rebounding with 992, eighth in scoring (1,027 points), and eighth in field goal percentage (44.6 percent).

She works with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

100 Years Young

shapiro (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Lifelong Learner: Morris Shapiro ’33, ’34 (MS), professor of emergency medicine and professor emeritus of surgery, laughs during a December class session with residents and medical students. The oldest active member of the Medical Center faculty, Shapiro celebrated his 100th birthday in October. Practicing medicine since 1946, Shapiro continues to teach and regularly attends lectures and grand rounds.

AIMING HIGHER: THE UNIVERSITY'S STRATEGIC PLAN 2013-2018

Aiming Higher: Introduction

sp1Joel Seligman (Photo: Adam Fenster)

sp1Peter Lennie (Photo: Adam Fenster)

We believe in the Rochester ideal—that great research is inextricably linked to great teaching and community service.

The University consistently is among this nation’s leading research universities in terms of the path-breaking ideas of our faculty, the achievements of our graduates, the quality of our patient care, the creativity of our artists, and the magnitude of our federally sponsored research awards.

Our culture is one of transformative ideas. School of Medicine and Dentistry Dean George Hoyt Whipple performed research on the cure for pernicious anemia for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1934; breakthrough research led to the first vaccine against any form of cancer; progesterone was discovered here; morphine was first synthesized; the vaccine that virtually eradicated childhood meningitis was developed in our Medical Center. The University has helped transform business and related fields with its role in developing agency theory and positive accounting theory; political science, with scholarship and teaching of rational choice theory; nursing, with its unification model linking nursing education, research, and practice; and medicine, with the biopsychosocial model, which simultaneously takes into account the patient, the social context in which he or she lives, the physician’s role, and the health care system.

We are educational innovators. We have developed programs that are best in class or among the best in class, including political science, economics, evolutionary biology, brain and cognitive sciences, optics, orthopedics, finance, accounting, neuroscience, musculoskeletal research, vaccine development, and RNA biology.

We are one University. We have built on the proximity of our River and Medical Center campuses and the nimbleness of our faculty to collaborate in ways that transcend department or school lines. The Eastman School of Music was the first to link the study of music to a university; we created the first Institute of Optics that integrates quantum optics and engineering; developed the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, which has achieved national leadership in inertial confinement fusion; and our biomedical engineering programs that link the School of Medicine and Arts, Sciences & Engineering.

We are confident about our future. The University has evolved from a regional leader into a leading national research university with growing opportunities to contribute to local, national, and global progress. This transformation is gathering momentum as we have strengthened our faculty, programs, and staff, translated innovation from our campus to a broader community, while increasing our geographic and cultural diversity.

—Joel Seligman, President Peter Lennie, Provost

AIMING HIGHER: THE UNIVERSITY'S STRATEGIC PLAN 2013-2018

Our Vision in 2018

By 2018, we envision that the University will fortify its position as one of this nation’s leading research universities consistent with our core values of academic excellence, academic freedom, diversity, and community. Fundamental to our progress will be continued strengthening of our faculty, students, and staff. Five years from now we intend to be a university ever better in the quality of our teaching, research, clinical care, and creative arts.

During the next five years we will make major commitments to data science; health care; faculty growth in Arts, Sciences & Engineering; new or expanded programs to support learning and research; improved infrastructure; and classroom and library renovation.

We will successfully complete our first comprehensive capital campaign since 1924.

Our campus in 2018 will include College Town, an expanded Brooks Landing, a new Golisano Children’s Hospital, a new imaging sciences/pediatric ambulatory building, a new data science facility, and a science and engineering quadrangle, including the new data science building and Goergen, Wilmot, Gavett, Hutchison, and Hopeman halls, the Computer Science Building, and Carlson Library.

The University, the Medical Center, and each school will have a sustainable financial model.

Within our community we will build on our role as the region’s largest employer and engine of economic development to help catalyze the revitalization of Rochester.

AIMING HIGHER: THE UNIVERSITY'S STRATEGIC PLAN 2013-2018

Our Vision in Our 2008 Strategic Plan

sp3COLLABORATION: Elizabeth West Marvin, professor of music theory at the Eastman School and of brain and cognitive sciences in Arts, Sciences & Engineering, works with Varsha Nair ’14E, who is a Take Five Scholar for 2013–14. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In 2008, the Board of Trustees adopted our last University Strategic Plan. By the conclusion of the The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester in 2016, we envisioned:

A University whose quality placed it among the leading 20 research universities in the United States consistent with our core values of academic excellence, academic freedom, diversity, and community.

A student body that would grow from approximately 8,300 students in fall 2004 to approximately 10,000 in 2015.

A concomitant growth in our tenured and tenure-track faculty, made possible by a substantial increase in endowed professorships.

Dramatic improvements in student residential life, expanded athletic facilities, and a substantial start on expanded College performing arts programs and facilities.

Breakthrough programs such as the master’s degree in technical entrepreneurship and management that linked the College and Simon Business School.

Expanded facilities and a fully integrated Electronic Medical Records system providing higher quality patient care.

Approximately $1 billion or more of new facilities between July 2005 and June 2016.

A significantly higher and sustainable level of annual giving to provide unrestricted support for University programs.

A University-wide endowment draw of no more than 6.1 percent by FY2017, with the University continuing to maintain its target 5.5 percent annual endowment draw rate.

sp3OPTICS RESEARCH: Jannick Rolland, the Brian J. Thompson Professor in Optical Engineering, and optics graduate student Kyle Fuerschbach work on a lens experiment in Goergen Hall. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

We have substantially achieved our 2008 goals:

When normalized for faculty size in 2011, the most recent year for which we have data, we ranked 15th in federal research funding among the 176 top funded research universities, with more than $400 million in total sponsored research during each of the prior two years and $348 million in 2012.

Our student body has grown from 8,300 total students in 2004 to 10,510 this past year, effectively achieving the goal of our 2008 strategic plan. Since 2005, we have received $160.3 million in commitments for scholarships, fellowships, and other support for students.

Undergraduate student quality and diversity have been strengthened. At the College we have seen increases of high school GPAs from 3.56 to 3.81 and the two-score equivalent SAT from 1304 to an anticipated 1368 in the 2013–14 academic year. Simultaneously the percentage of our underrepresented minority and international students has increased.

Tenured, tenure-track, clinical, and other instructional staff have grown from 2,009 in 2004 to 2,499 in 2012. Since 2005 we have created or received commitments to create 68 new endowed professorships and deanships.

New programs have been developed throughout the University, including the Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation; the Center for Integrated Research Computing; 14 new majors in the College, including those in international relations, public health, digital media studies, and the Barry Florescue Undergraduate Business Program; and the Center for Medical Technology Innovation jointly developed by the School of Medicine and Dentistry and the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.

Twenty-four new major facilities projects have been completed or initiated since 2005 with an aggregate budget of $723 million, including Goergen Hall, Eastman Theatre renovation and expansion, LeChase Hall, Rettner Hall, and O’Brien Hall.

The Medical Center has been particularly active with new facilities projects, including the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center, the Saunders Research Building, and the Golisano Children’s Hospital, implementation of an Electronic Medical Records system, and new regional hospital affiliations, most notably with F. F. Thompson.

The University facilitated the separately financed development of Brooks Landing and College Town and worked with local, state, and federal governments to secure funding for the new Interstate 390 road network, which will provide the basis for future growth at the University.

We have grown to be the greater Rochester region’s largest employer with 22,019 full-time equivalent jobs, making the University the seventh largest private employer in New York state, with an increasing role in the community as the provider of 47,000 direct and indirect jobs, $2.4 billion in direct and indirect wages, $66.9 million in uncompensated health care in 2012, and, since 1996, 55 start-up companies using University-licensed technology.

We have reduced our endowment payout rate from 6.9 percent in 2000 to 5.9 percent in this year’s budget. This decrease has been achieved by a notable reduction in endowment payout in 2009–10 in Arts, Sciences & Engineering from $32 million to $22 million that has been maintained with annual adjustments since then; relatively low administrative costs for our research programs; and cost efficiencies in University hospitals that have reduced their budgets or enhanced revenue by a total of $99.7 million between 2009 and 2012.

We publicly launched The Meliora Challenge in October 2011, our first comprehensive capital campaign since 1924. Through June 30, 2013, we have raised in cash and commitments $945 million or 79 percent of the June 30, 2016, goal of $1.2 billion.

AIMING HIGHER: THE UNIVERSITY'S STRATEGIC PLAN 2013-2018

The Next Five Years

sp4DATA DRIVEN: About 650 faculty members, students, and research staff from more than 40 departments conduct research with the support of the University’s Center for Integrated Computing. Established in 2008 as a collaboration between the River Campus and the Medical Center, the center helps researchers use computational science and computing technology to conduct data-intensive research in such projects as modeling astrophysical fluid dynamics (top), simulating antimicrobial peptides (left), and analyzing the engineering science of ancient Rome (right), and dozens of others in medicine, engineering, and the biological and physical sciences. (Photo: Center for Intergrated Research Computing)

United States research universities today are among this nation’s greatest comparative advantages—centers of innovation, creativity, and training of new generations of leaders, professionals, artists, and scholars. As former Columbia University Provost Jonathan Cole memorably wrote in The Great American University:

[I]t is the thousands of scientists, scholars, and administrators who have been dedicated to their work on a daily basis that have truly put our universities at the top. Their ambition to excel and their fierce competitiveness to be “the best” have led American research universities to become the engine of our prosperity. The laser, magnetic resonance imaging, FM radio, the algorithm for Google searches, Global Positioning Systems, DNA fingerprinting, fetal monitoring, scientific cattle breeding, advanced methods of surveying public opinion . . . all had their origins in America’s research universities, as did tens of thousands of other inventions, devices, medical miracles, and ideas that have transformed the world. In the future, virtually every new industry will depend on research conducted at America’s universities. . . . The universities have evolved into creative machines unlike any other that we have known in our history—cranking out discoveries in a society increasingly dependent on knowledge as its source for its growth.

That research enterprise, placed firmly in a residential educational setting, also contributes immeasurably to the strengths and distinctiveness of undergraduate education.

Other nations throughout the world increasingly are competing with the United States research university model. Several nations, including China, India, Brazil, and Singapore, are making enormous investments in research universities that are transforming global higher education in ways that both provide challenges and opportunities. International universities compete for outstanding faculty, but they also partner with research universities in the United States to provide increased support for global collaborative research.

We begin this period with a comparative advantage in undergraduate and graduate education. For the foreseeable future, we anticipate an acceleration of outstanding domestic and international students seeking admission to the most academically successful United States universities and colleges.

At the University, our largest undergraduate program in Arts, Sciences & Engineering in recent years has seen validation of our approach in the systematic growth of its applications, quality measures, and diversity. We believe that the ever higher level of outstanding applicants is consistent with a widespread belief that higher education is a fundamentally important investment in students’ futures and that education at a leading research university or college is the best type of educational investment.

Our opportunity in the 21st century is to accelerate our progress by building on our greatest strengths—our faculty, our outstanding academic departments and schools, and our multidisciplinary programs.

Our challenge is to harmonize these strengths with our resources. The University today has approximately 2,500 faculty and more than 10,000 students in seven schools, with a total annual budget of approximately $3.0 billion and net assets also of approximately $3.0 billion. Compared to our key peer group of private universities with medical centers who are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), we are smaller in terms of total students, tenured and tenure-track faculty, and aggregate endowment.

We intend throughout the next five years to focus on enhanced support for our faculty and students and to develop additional support for existing and future programs where we particularly can make a difference in the quality of our research, scholarship, learning, clinical care, and the creative arts consistent with our resources.

The Digital Revolution

Advances in information technology are having an immense impact on all aspects of university life. Throughout the University, the transition to a digital future is well advanced. Faculty, students, and information services have been particularly affected by the digital revolution. Increasingly, faculty and students rely on digital rather than hard copy resources. New data management systems already have transformed our ability to reach out to our alumni and in the future will give us critical management tools to better employ financial reporting and student information systems.

Profound changes are also being driven by the explosion in the availability of data and the tools to deal with data. In 2013, Science Daily estimated that approximately 90 percent of the world’s data have been generated in the past two years. The University is responding to this challenge by investing in the emergent discipline of data science and the high-performance computing resources it requires.

In 2008 we created the Center for Integrated Research Computing through a collaboration between the River Campus and Medical Center faculties and administrators. Today the center includes 650 faculty, students, and research staff from more than 40 departments supporting computational and data-intensive research activities.

For the University as a whole, the creation of an internationally distinguished campus-wide Institute for Data Science is a top priority. Initially the institute will focus on three domains for research: predictive health analytics, cognitive systems, and analytics on demand. In data science, we build on enormous strengths, including the Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation, the Department of Computer Science in Arts, Sciences & Engineering, biostatistics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry, historic achievements in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and more than 100 principal investigators who have been awarded $307 million in research relying in part upon high-performance computation during the past three years. Between 2013 and 2018, the further development of a University-wide data science program will include expanding faculty across several schools by 20 tenured and tenure-track professors and constructing a new facility to bridge data science across critical disciplines.

Rapid changes in technology are driving changes in the new curriculum. Arts, Sciences & Engineering has introduced new programs in digital media studies, computer science, and a biomedical engineering master’s degree with a concentration in medical technology innovation; developed humanities laboratories to introduce students to the use of technology in the service of humanities scholarship; and currently is developing an increasing number of experiential learning components in traditional courses, including more active use of online resources to assist students in entry-level courses. The School of Medicine and Dentistry has begun a transition to an online/iPad–based curriculum. The Simon School is developing programs in data analytics.

Equally important changes are taking place in the way we deliver education. We envision major opportunities for master’s and certificate programs that employ online formats. This has already begun. For example, our School of Nursing has had success offering hybrid courses combining online and in-class teaching. For the 2012 academic year, 32 percent of all courses in nursing and 28 percent of the school’s tuition revenue came from online courses. In the new generation of strategic plans, the school intends to amplify its online efforts. Other schools, including Arts, Sciences & Engineering, the Warner School of Education, the Eastman School of Music, and the Simon Business School, will increase or begin online programs.

For undergraduate programs we believe that the current residential teaching model will remain dominant for the foreseeable future, and that ensuring its continued high quality is a key to our future success. But we anticipate that the residential undergraduate teaching model will evolve during the next five years at research universities such as Rochester with increased complementary use of new technology in undergraduate teaching and ancillary programs, allowing faculty to devote more time to working with students in laboratories, workshops, and discussion sessions rather than lecture formats.

International Engagement

Major universities are increasingly global institutions, drawing students from all over the world, competing internationally for the most talented faculty, and establishing international partnerships that extend their potency in research.

Substantial international engagement is an indispensable part of a first-rate undergraduate and graduate education, providing diversity for our students that will mirror future employment and life experiences, and strengthening our financial base. Knowledge knows no boundaries. In the 21st century the most successful higher education programs will be those that have a global reach.

We are already a university characterized by a global student body and faculty and a growing number of international programs.

Our enrollment of international graduates and undergraduates has grown from 1,050 students in fall 2000 (13 percent) to 2,080 students in fall 2012 (20 percent). International undergraduate enrollment in Arts, Sciences & Engineering notably has increased, from 2.8 percent of the entering class in fall 2004 to an expected 19 percent this fall.

The percentage of our tenure-track faculty that is foreign born similarly has grown from 8 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2012.

We anticipate that the next five years will be a period of increasing international engagement for the University, principally in the expansion of international partnerships in research and in the expansion of opportunities for our students to study and work abroad. We have already taken steps to establish strong research linkages with emerging major universities in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the Medical Center has completed a memorandum of understanding for educational programs with the Apollo Hospital Group, one of the largest health care systems in India. We are undertaking a major expansion of study abroad opportunities in Asia, Africa, and the South Pacific, mainly through exchange programs.

Fundamental Challenges

During the next five years, three fundamental challenges will dwarf all others at the University: the transformation of health care, the decline of sponsored research, and the cost of higher education.

The Transformation of Health Care

The American health care system faces mounting pressures for cost containment, quality improvement, and public accountability. The 2008–09 recession and the subsequent enactment of the Affordable Care Act have initiated fundamental change in the health care system. This transformation includes consolidation of hospitals and the development of broad health care systems in which incentives are shifted from the current dominant fee-for-service model to bundled or population-based annual fee or “capitated” models that reward the combination of better service and lower cost rather than high procedure volume. It is reasonable to anticipate that there will be significant future reductions in third-party payor support for our hospitals and physicians as a result of implementation of lower cost insurance products through health care exchanges and a systematic effort to “bend the cost curve” in Medicare and Medicaid. As a result of these changes, the Medical Center faces substantial financial challenges to its clinical enterprise. Health care reform portends fundamental change in the way hospitals deliver care, the way clinicians are trained, scientists discover therapies and cures, and insurance companies and health care providers compete in offering health insurance.

The University long has had a major role in health care through its hospitals, School of Medicine and Dentistry, School of Nursing, and health care research programs. Approximately 83 percent of the consolidated University $3.0 billion budget in 2013 originated in the Medical Center. Sixty-eight percent of the overall University budget involved patient care.

The Medical Center’s objective in the next five years is to change the way it cares for patients by developing an integrated system of robust services across the health care continuum that delivers the highest quality care at the lowest cost. The Medical Center will continue evidence-based practices to provide the highest quality of care to its community; develop research programs of excellence to accelerate discovery; adopt new skills and competencies for practitioners; and help evolve its educational system to meet the demands of a transformed health care landscape.

Sponsored Research

In the 2011–12 academic year, 14 percent of the University’s overall budget, or $348 million, originated in federal, state, and corporate and foundation sponsored research. The majority of this total came from federally sponsored research programs, most significantly the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy.

The decline in support for sponsored research has affected all aspects of research throughout the University. In the School of Medicine and Dentistry, which in 2013 was awarded $132 million from NIH, reliance on institutional support for sponsored research recently has ranged between 40 and 45 percent of the school’s budget. As real dollar support for sponsored research has declined, the school increasingly must rely on its endowment (which is smaller than many of our AAU peers with medical centers) and margin transfers from Strong Memorial Hospital.

The school today is developing a comprehensive plan to address how best to diversify its funding sources and otherwise respond to a probable period of stagnant federally sponsored research support.

Other parts of the University reliant on sponsored research such as the Laboratory for Laser Energetics have developed similar contingency plans.

sp4STUDENT SESSION: President Barack Obama talks about higher education with Wesline Manuelpillai ’16 (to Obama’s left), Brandon McDonald ’13 (across the table), and other University students during lunch at Magnolia’s Deli & Cafe during Obama’s visit to Rochester last August. (Photo: AP Images)

The Cost of Higher Education

We cannot be complacent about the high cost of education at our University, particularly for undergraduates. In recent years, the rising cost of higher education has been a focus of intense public discourse. In the 2012 national elections, for example, both leading political parties emphasized reducing the rate of increase or absolute cost of higher education. In August 2013, President Barack Obama proposed linking federal financial aid to students to college and higher education quality metrics.

These types of initiatives have prompted research universities to engage in systematic efforts to achieve greater cost efficiency and reduction in the rate of increase of undergraduate tuition. The University has been unrelenting in its efforts to be cost efficient and to moderate the rate of tuition increases. Between 2004 and 2008, for example, the rate of tuition increases at our schools, when adjusted for inflation, averaged 4.2 percent; during the last five years, inflation-adjusted tuition increases have averaged 2.1 percent at Rochester. During the period of our next generation of strategic plans, the University’s commitment to cost efficiency will continue to be unswerving.

We, however, do not believe that online or for-profit education will be an effective substitute for the residential model used in our undergraduate programs—even if some believe that there are potential cost savings—because of the fundamental differences in the quality of these programs and the lesser success in online and for-profit institutions in graduation and job placement. We believe that the recent growth in for-profit educational institutions and generally increased use of online teaching models such as MOOCs (massive open online courses), along with declining state support for public universities, will continue to widen the gap between the most outstanding research universities and liberal arts colleges and other postsecondary institutions.

AIMING HIGHER: THE UNIVERSITY'S STRATEGIC PLAN 2013-2018

University Objectives and Goals for 2018

sp5TEACHING: Russell Peck, the John Hall Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry, meets with Lillian Dickerson ’13, an English and music major. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

We unequivocally are committed to being an institution that emphasizes the greatest possible quality in our academic, clinical, professional, and creative arts programs consistent with cost efficiency. We seek to be:

One of the nation’s leading research universities

Our fundamental objective is to strengthen our position as one of this nation’s leading research universities. At Rochester this means strength not only in research, but also as a university that is strong in liberal arts undergraduate education, professional training in the schools of business, education, medicine and nursing, outstanding clinical care throughout our health system, and commitment to the creative arts exemplified by the Eastman School of Music.

For the entire University, the recruitment, support, and retention of the most accomplished and diverse administrative leadership, faculty, students, and staff is a top priority.

A top University priority will be the creation of the Institute for Data Science, the expansion of data science faculty and programs across the University, and the construction of a new data science facility.

We will implement a University Research Strategic Plan to strengthen the vitality of the research mission at the University. Among other topics that will be addressed by the plan will be Research Foundations for a Healthier Society; Light and Sound; and Energy and the Environment.

We will emphasize improving infrastructure and renovating classrooms, laboratories, and library space to provide our faculty, students, and staff with state-of-the-art facilities.

A University that Emphasizes Quality Education

We will continue to strengthen undergraduate, graduate, and professional education.

Arts, Sciences & Engineering will build on its momentum in residential education to enhance its curriculum by adding new majors, including, subject to faculty approval, a new undergraduate business degree developed with the Simon Business School; teaching, learning, and research opportunities that employ digital technology; increasing student retention; opportunities for student research; and strengthening career preparation. By 2018, Arts, Sciences & Engineering will increase its faculty from approximately 350 to 380; increase its two-score equivalent SATs for entering students from 1368 to at least 1400; increase applications from approximately 16,000 to 20,000; and increase six-year student graduation rates from 85.6 percent to 88 percent.

The School of Medicine and Dentistry will implement the Institute for Innovative Education to provide education across the entire Medical Center and better employ information technology in medical education. The institute will oversee state-of-the-art education programs and the development of a new simulation center.

The Simon School will develop major new programs in data analytics and pricing; lead efforts to develop a new branch campus in New York City initially in conjunction with the School of Nursing and the Warner School; and partner with Arts, Sciences & Engineering on an enhanced undergraduate business degree program.

The Eastman School of Music will develop, subject to faculty approval, a new undergraduate program in convergent media, a new master of arts program in music leadership, and programs in online education.

Our schools generally, led by the School of Nursing and the Warner School, will expand or implement hybrid or other online education, especially in master’s programs.

sp5CARE: Stanley Schaffer, associate professor of pediatrics, talks with Tacarra Colquitt and her daughter, Kennedy Smith, at Golisano Children’s Hospital. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A university known for improved health care

We will improve health care for our community through transformative approaches to clinical care that are nationally recognized.

The new Accountable Health Partners will become the region’s leading accountable care network, recruiting a substantial additional number of primary care and specialist physicians into its network by 2018.

The University of Rochester Medical Faculty Group (URMFG) will become a model of an integrated University-based practice that includes centralized administration and a compensation plan based on performance, service, and quality.

The Medical Center will further its current recognition of specialty areas in the top 50 in the U.S. News Best Hospitals rankings, especially within its Centers of Excellence, including the Wilmot Cancer Center and the Golisano Children’s Hospital.

We will complete the initial phase of construction of the new Golisano Children’s Hospital by 2015 and achieve greater recognition of our Pediatric Programs of Excellence.

sp5SERVICE: Preservice teachers Teresa Long and Claire Winchester ’13 and Rochester school children Katelyn Doucet (left) and Isaiah Hepburn (right) collect water samples for a Warner School summer science camp project. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

A university known for service to the community

We will strengthen our service to our community and society.

Enhancing programs to support Rochester K-12 education, health care, and community programs.

Enhancing our position as the regional and national leader in economic development and technology transfer.

Strengthening technology transfer and start-ups consistent with our academic mission through active engagement of the business community, including our innovation advisory network, composed of our alumni; increased ties with our career center; and expansion of the technology development fund.

Maintaining or increasing our licensing revenue.

Completing major projects, including the expansion of Brooks Landing and College Town.

We will successfully complete our capital campaign

We will successfully complete our capital Campaign by June 30, 2016, raising a minimum of $1.2 billion, achieving each of our specific Campaign goals, including support for students and faculty, while increasing the membership of the George Eastman Circle to 3,300, and achieving a higher sustainable level of annual giving that continues after the Campaign.

We will develop fully sustainable financial models

We will more fully implement sustainable financial models for our University, the Medical Center, and each school.

We will limit, except in extraordinary circumstances, the aggregate University endowment draw to no more than 5.9 percent, while maintaining the target of 5.5 percent.

We will maintain competitive compensation programs for our faculty and staff and complete significant infrastructure and deferred maintenance projects.

We will develop new programs for revenue enhancement and cost efficiencies through shared services and new technologies to support University objectives.

We will review use of our facilities in Arts, Sciences & Engineering, the River Campus Libraries, and the Medical Center to determine if we can more efficiently use existing space.

AIMING HIGHER: THE UNIVERSITY'S STRATEGIC PLAN 2013-2018

Conclusion

sp6 (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Our emphasis in the next five years will be on systematic improvements in quality balanced by a determination to create sustainable financial models for our University and each school and the Medical Center.

We build on tremendous momentum and with the knowledge that we have successfully implemented many of the goals of our 2008 strategic plans.

We will always remember that our most important resource is our people—our faculty, students, alumni, and staff. All that we have achieved or aspire to achieve is based on a University community that is exceptionally collaborative, mutually supportive, and committed to the spirit of our University motto—Meliora, ever better.

We are one University. We are the Rochester family.

You Love Them, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!

The “world sort of stopped and everybody listened” 50 years ago, when the Beatles were introduced to America.

By Robin L. Flanigan

fea_beatlesA LOVE LIKE THAT: Arriving in America 50 years ago this winter, the Beatles set off a wave of musical and pop cultural excitement. (Photo: AP Images)

In the spring of 1964, walking across the Eastman Quadrangle, Edwin (Ned) Ferguson ’66 heard someone shout from a first-floor dorm room: “They’re on!” He rushed to the room, which was covered with Beatles photos and posters, and gathered with eight or nine others around an AM radio to jam to “She Loves You.”

Ferguson, now a physician living in Madison, Wis., has remained a devoted fan all these years. He sings to his digitally remastered Beatles CD box set every night before bed, and hires a band several times a year so he can play along to Beatles songs.

“No group will ever be remembered with such love 50 years later,” he says.

The legendary British foursome will be remembered with great pomp and circumstance in February—the golden anniversary of the month the group debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show, gave birth to the British Invasion, and ushered in the frenzy known as Beatlemania.

The University’s Institute for Popular Music, dedicated to promoting the scholarly study of music produced primarily for commercial consumption, will celebrate the occasion with music by faculty and student performers at 8 p.m. February 9, exactly 50 years, to the hour, since an estimated 73 million viewers tuned in to see and hear the Beatles. Lectures by experts on Beatles music and equipment will be coordinated with the event.

The first of its kind in the United States and only the second major academic center for the study of popular music in the world (the other is at England’s University of Liverpool), the institute received attention from around the globe when it opened in 2012. With an advisory board of leading scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom, it supports research in musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, and performance, as well as five existing majors and programs, including courses on the Music of Black Americans and Progressive Rock in the 1970s. Future plans include the creation of predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships.

Founding director John Covach says that after years of visualizing such a distinguished repository of musical knowledge at the University, the time for such an institute has arrived.

“The field of musical scholarship tends to be a very conservative field, not politically, because many musicians are liberals, but in the sense that oftentimes you have people who know more about papal tax records in the 16th century than they know about American Idol,” says Covach, who has dual appointments in the College’s Department of Music, where he’s the Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professor, and at the Eastman School, where he’s a professor of music theory. “Years ago, there was nothing about popular music that seemed to scratch the itches that made them study classical music. But today, people my age who are chairs of departments and tenured professors all grew up listening to the Beatles, and they don’t have a sense that popular music is second rate. There is no bias or cultural divide.”

fea_beatlesHE’S GOT A FEELING: Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music, says people sometimes underestimate the influence of popular music in helping shape cultural history. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Covach, both musical scholar and performer, was five years old when he begged his father to go to the store to buy the first Beatles album. It was sold out, but his father brought home the Beatles’ second album instead, which had been released that day. He listened to it relentlessly on a record player with a nickel taped to the tone arm, singing along while jumping on his bed with neighborhood friends. When his grandmother took him to see A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 British comedy starring the Beatles, she had to hold him up throughout the film so he could see over the heads of the standing, screaming, mostly female audience. (She took him to see the film again a few weeks later, after the excitement died down.)

There’s little question that the Beatles defined a pivotal moment in musical history, for the group and for a generation—and beyond.

“The Beatles are absolutely one of my favorite groups, and I suspect that I own more of their music than the average fan,” says Cassia Kuhn ’15, a film and media studies major who has collected “every studio album from the band and each member’s solo career, a few compilation albums, live performances, and plenty of bootlegs. I find it fascinating that they were at, or at least close to, the start of so many trends found in rock and other genres.”

Jacob Arthur ’14, a music major, owns every Beatles album. He appreciates that the band pushed the envelope so far that “it has become difficult for artists to find barriers to break down that the group didn’t already tend to.”

fea_beatlesDIG IT: “They are by far the most musically talented pop group of all time,” says Richard Sorrell (above) who, along with Class of 1966 classmates like Ned Ferguson (left), first heard the Beatles while at Rochester. “No group will ever be remembered with such love 50 years later,” says Ferguson. (Photo: Charles Sykes/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Richard Sorrell ’66, who has taught history at a New Jersey community college since 1971, offers a popular course on the social history of rock and roll, devoting multiple weeks to the Beatles. He attributes the band’s success in this country to three factors: the enormous hype preceding their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, the emotional catharsis that needed to happen following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the sheer number of youthful baby boomers yearning to express themselves musically.

fea_beatles (Photo: Andy Manis/AP Images for Rochester Review)

The professor thinks people often underestimate how influential music can be. He says he’s instantly transported to another era when a Beatles song comes on the radio: “If I hear ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’ I think of them on the Sullivan show. Any song from Sgt. Pepper, I think of when I started graduate school in Buffalo. The first time I ever heard ‘Get Back,’ I was driving to school for a substitute teaching assignment. I can instantly see those images.

“They are by far the most musically talented pop group of all time.”

Sorrell remembers having to help persuade the upperclassmen in his dorm to let him and some 70 others watch the Sullivan performance on the basement television. The older students, who “were into Peter, Paul, and Mary and the Kingston Trio and thought rock and roll was beneath them,” finally relented.

Beatlemania!

The Institute for Popular Music (www.rochester.edu/ popmusic/) has organized several events marking the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first American tour.

Feb. 5: Noted instrument expert Andy Babiuk will discuss the Beatles’ musical gear.

Feb. 9: Walter Everett, professor at the University of Michigan and author of two books on the Beatles, will talk about the band’s legacy, a presentation followed by a concert featuring University faculty, staff, and students backed by the Rochester band, the Smooth Talkers.

Feb. 9: John Covach’s Coursera course, The Music of the Beatles (www.coursera.org/course/beatles) begins. During the spring semester, Covach also will teach an on-campus course on the Beatles.﻿

Ferguson, who caught a Beatles concert with Sorrell in 1966 just before the band stopped touring, was part of that basement crowd. “Their vocal harmonies were in sync, their guitar work was impeccable, they shook their heads and their long hair flopped back and forth,” he says. “It was breathtaking.”

That sentiment resonates widely, even if looking only at the popularity of the free courses Covach teaches through Coursera, the free network of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Enrollment in his two-part History of Rock course has exceeded 100,000 students since last May, when it launched, with nearly 3 million video views worldwide. Meanwhile, nearly 17,000 people have signed up so far for The Music of the Beatles, which will go live, fittingly, at 8 p.m. February 9 and track the musical development of the band through its relatively short but distinguished six-year run. The group “was an interesting blend of a number of qualities that we tend to appreciate in popular music, all in one very tidy little act,” Covach says. The music was always authentic, mostly happy, and often avant-garde, and each member had a distinct personality.

Not everyone finds the group unceasingly endearing, however.

“Toward the end I’d moved on to other music,” recalls Chuck Brush ’66, a retired research and development director who lives in Arizona and once saw the band perform at a Cincinnati baseball stadium. For a music appreciation class during his senior year at the University, he wrote a paper on ways the Beatles used harmony and counterpoint. He got a bad grade. “It probably wasn’t that good to begin with, but the professor was an old-school type who probably wanted a biography of Beethoven.”

Covach, who received special dispensation to stay up past his bedtime to watch some of that famed Ed Sullivan Show performance, maintains that people can’t fully understand American culture without becoming familiar with the venerable group’s music.

And that goes for scholars who never were fans of the Beatles.

“You cannot talk about the history of the presidency in the 20th century and, if you’re a Democrat, only study presidents who were Democrats because you think the Republicans were misguided,” he says. “An album like Sgt. Pepper is important because it was important to so many people who were involved in the events of the 60s.

“The world sort of stopped,” he says, “and everybody listened.”

IN PERSON

‘Meet’ the Beatles

“There are lots of neat things about my life, but when I tell people about this, their mouths drop,” says an alumna about her chance to be part of a historic musical moment.

By Amy Zimmerman Freese ’71

fea_beatles_sideHERE & THERE: David ’68 and Amy Zimmerman Freese ’71 still sing the occasional Beatles song (“Here, There, and Everywhere” is Amy’s favorite) five decades after Amy saw the band as a high schooler on the Ed Sullivan Show (below). (Photo: Michael Perez/AP Images for Rochester Review)

fea_beatles_side (Photo: AP Images)

My girlfriend’s dad was president of an advertising agency, and some of his clients advertised on the Ed Sullivan Show. He got tickets for us and our boyfriends. We were beyond excited.

We all got dressed up, and at 14 years old, without a chaperone, we took the train from Westport, Conn., to New York City, got off at Grand Central Station, and got ourselves to the theater. We felt very grown up.

I didn’t know who went to the Ed Sullivan Show on a regular basis, but that night, it was all kids. I remember standing in line outside. We weren’t sure we knew what to expect, but we knew it was important.

We had really good seats; in the 10th row left of center. The set was blue and gray. Ed Sullivan came out before the show and said, “If you kids can’t behave, I’m not going to bring the band out.” I can still hear his voice in my head. He said this was the Beatles’ first appearance in the United States, and then the curtain opened, and there they were.

It was like the sun was shining behind them. Everyone was standing up and screaming and crying. It was pandemonium. We wanted to hear the music but you couldn’t hear a drumbeat, a guitar, or anything. We just saw them playing and swinging their hair. They were certainly groomed. Oh, my God, they were so cute. Especially Paul. It’s funny, I specifically remember that we did not scream, but my friend remembers that we got caught up in the moment.

We did feel like we were at the beginning of something special, that something cataclysmic was coming, though we couldn’t define it at the time. I don’t remember the trip home. I don’t even remember leaving the theater.

It was one of those defining moments of my life. There are lots of neat things about my life, but when I tell people about this, their mouths drop. It’s like being there when man discovered fire.

It’s not just that I grew up when the Beatles were popular or that I have every one of their albums (and an extra copy of the White Album, which has never been opened). It’s that after that show, things were different. I was there when an era started.

—As told to Robin L. Flanigan﻿

Amy Zimmerman ’71 met David Freese ’68 on campus when she was auditioning for the a cappella group, the Tritones. David, a member of the YellowJackets, accompanied her on guitar for her first solo: Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” They dated and, of course, sang Beatles songs together. They got married in 1970. Today, Amy is a director of technology for a law firm and David is a professional photographer and photography professor in Philadelphia, where they live.﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Mapping the Milky Way

Figure eight? Peanut shell? A mathematical model sheds light on the shape of the galaxy’s center.

By Leonor Sierra

fea_galaxyCENTERED: How did the Milky Way get its distinctive bulge? Work by a Rochester-led team may help explain the evolution of the spiral galaxy that’s home to as many as 400 billion stars, including—about 24,000 light-years from the center—the solar system’s sun. (Photo: European Southern Observatory/NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Kornmesser and R. Hurt)

More than 24,000 light-years from the sun—near the intersection of the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpius—the center of our spiral galaxy is home to a dense concentration of stars that date to within a few billion years of the birth of the universe.

Those ancient stars reside in an astrophysical neighborhood known as a “bar” because of its rectangular shape that measures roughly 10,000 light-years in length. And within the bar, orbiting a powerful source of energy believed to be a supermassive black hole, the stars form a bulge that rises vertically to the plane of the bar.

If it were possible for observers to situate themselves on the edge of the galaxy, at eye-level with the horizon of the spiraling cosmic dust, and to look back toward the center of the Milky Way, they would see that bulge, higher at each end and taking a slight dip in the middle, like an astrophysical saddle-back ridge.

Or, as Alice Quillen, professor of physics and astronomy, likes to think of it: shaped like a peanut shell.

How did the bulge get its shape?

That’s a question Quillen, along with an international team from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia, the Astronomy Institute in Germany, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, and the Paris-Meudon Observatory in France, addressed in a paper published late last year in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The team reported results of a new mathematical model that suggests the stars move in peanut shell– or figure eight–shaped orbits. Where previous explanations envisioned a relatively straightforward orbital journey—often described as banana-shaped—the new model indicates a more complicated pattern.

fea_galaxyTIME TRAVELER? “It’s hard to look back into the past of our galaxy, but simulations can give us clues,” says Alice Quillen, professor of physics and astronomy, who led an international team that developed a mathematical model describing the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Consider the center of the Milky Way.

The difference is important: astronomers develop theories of star motions not only to analyze how the stars in the galaxy are moving but also to understand how our galaxy—and others like it—formed and evolved. The paper came out as the European Space Agency was preparing for the December launch of the Gaia spacecraft, which is designed to create a 3-D map of the Milky Way’s stars and their motions. The map will help astronomers better understand the composition, formation, and evolution of the galaxy.

“It is hard to look back into the past of our galaxy and know what was there, but simulations can give us clues,” says Quillen.

Unlike the solar system, where most of the gravitational pull comes from the sun and is simple to model, describing the gravitational field near the center of the galaxy—where millions of stars, vast clouds of dust, and even dark matter swirl about—is a more daunting challenge.

In their work, Quillen and her colleagues focused on the forces acting on the stars in or near the bulge. As the stars go through their orbits, they also move above and below the plane of the bar.

And like a child on a swing, each time a star crosses the plane of the bar at what’s known as the resonance point, the star gets a little push that moves it a bit higher above the plane, forming the edge of the bulge. Through computer simulations, the researchers demonstrated that between the two vertical oscillations of each orbital period, the stars follow orbits consistent with the effect of the resonance, giving rise to the observed shape of the bulge.

“This may be what happens in our galaxy,” says Quillen.

Quillen says astronomers are interested in finding out how much the bar has slowed over time and whether the bulge “puffed up all at once or slowly.”

Understanding the distributions of speed, direction, and velocity of the stars in the bar and the bulge might help determine the galaxy’s evolution.

“One of the predictions of my model is that there is a sharp difference in the velocity distributions inside and outside the resonance,” Quillen says. “Inside—closer to the galactic center—the disk should be puffed up and the stars there would have higher vertical velocities.”

One of the goals of the Gaia spacecraft will be to measure the motions of the stars and allow astronomers to look for such variations in velocity.

“Gaia will generate huge amounts of data—on billions of stars,” says Quillen, noting that the data will allow her and her colleagues to further fine-tune their model.

“This can lead to a better understanding of how the Milky Way might have evolved into the shape it has today.”

Leonor Sierra writes about the sciences for University Communications.

Hudson’s Way

Carolyn Niehaus ’09 helps bring math, science, and history to life on an innovative “floating museum.”

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

niehausHANDS-ON DECK: Niehaus, program director of the New Netherland Museum, promotes hands-on learning aboard the Half Moon (below), a replica of the ship by the same name that Henry Hudson sailed in 1609. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It’s early on a weekday morning in September, and Carolyn Niehaus ’09 is boarding a small wooden ship anchored in the Hudson River just south of Albany.

Transported to the ship by a small motorboat, Niehaus gains a foothold on the hull, climbs several feet, and jumps on to the deck where she joins a small crew and a gathering of middle school students and their teachers.

The group is participating in the Voyage of Discovery, a signature program of the New Netherland Museum, which Niehaus serves as program director. For almost two weeks, Albany area eighth graders, their teachers, and Dutch counterparts from a school in Heerenveen, the Netherlands, have been retracing the path that Henry Hudson traveled with a mixed English and Dutch crew in the fall of 1609. They’ve retraced that path aboard a 1989 replica of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon. The ship itself is the site of the New Netherland Museum, which is why Niehaus describes it as an experiential “floating museum.”

The students have been conducting experiments as part of a multidisciplinary curriculum in history and science that Niehaus helped design. And they’ve worked as a team on virtually every aspect of running and maintaining the ship: steering, keeping watch, cooking, cleaning, monitoring for fire hazards—an important role on this mostly wooden vessel.

niehaus (Photo: Adam Fenster)

As the predawn fog has lifted and the sun begins to shine, the group prepares to raise the anchor. It’s a complex process, Niehaus explains, and a prime example of the discipline and teamwork that the voyage instills. “It’s important to be quiet, so they can all hear each other, because they can’t see each other,” she says as the students divide into three groups and scurry off to separate stations on the ship.

When Niehaus graduated from Rochester, she didn’t expect she would be more than passing through her hometown of Albany. But when she was offered a job with the museum, she found it hard to resist.

William Reynolds, the captain of the Half Moon and director of the museum, made sure to make it so. He met Niehaus in 1999 when she was an eighth grade participant in a version of the program she now directs. “Right off the bat, she showed real leadership,” he says. She started giving dockside tours of the ship. In high school, she recruited friends to join her. After she went off to Rochester, Reynolds recalled a visit she made to the museum’s small office as her graduation was approaching. “I nabbed her,” says Reynolds.

“I really enjoyed working with my hands but also being mentally stimulated,” Niehaus says of her early connection to the Half Moon. “I really enjoyed being in this challenging environment and figuring out how to get things done.”

At Rochester, she majored in English literature and designed her own minor field in sustainability. Although she’s an experienced deckhand and has performed multiple roles on the crew, these days she spends more time in the office and on the road, managing virtually every aspect of running and continuing to build the museum.

A major focus of hers is working with K–12 educators to design hands-on, experiential curricula geared to New York State learning standards. It’s also a strength, she says, growing out of her broad liberal education and the ways in which she was encouraged as a college student to draw connections among concepts and disciplines. “That’s what I loved about Rochester,” she says. “I could study all these topics and connect them for myself.”

It’s not a surprise, Niehaus finds, that other Rochester friends have been drawn to playing roles in the Voyage of Discovery program. Among them are Julia Cosgrove ’11, who sailed on the Half Moon as a seventh grader, studied ecology and evolutionary biology at Rochester, and joined students in the summer of 2008 to work on shipboard science projects. Sara DuBois ’10, who majored in anthropology and Russian studies, played a similar role. And Carl Adair ’08, who majored in English and is a doctoral student in English at Princeton University, sailed last summer on the Half Moon, serving as the ship’s cook.

Niehaus’s leadership has been critical in ensuring the Half Moon has an integral role to play in advancing learning across disciplines, touching on standards taught in science, math, social studies, and English.

During the Voyage of Discovery, students have learned about mechanical advantage, the way in which levers and pulleys amplify force, helping students lift and move heavy items. They’ve tracked the rise and fall of tidal heights, current speeds and direction, the rise and fall of celestial objects. “These are topics we’ve chosen because they show repeatable, predictable patterns,” she says. “The students can collect this data and graph it and get curves that show them that if they take measurements in a way that is regularized or repeatable, they can predict what will happen.”

It’s a lesson that many children learn in textbooks. But Niehaus is working to make the Half Moon experience more broadly accessible. “I’ve been working on a livestreaming program so that students can tune in and watch a live videostream of students presenting their projects,” she says. As classroom students see how their peers have collected data, they can use that data to form their own graphs and draw their own conclusions. Livestreaming, Niehaus says, offers “a personal connection. It’s their peers who are collecting the data.”

As the Half Moon approaches its dock in downtown Albany, a crowd of parents, civic leaders, and reporters await, as they have each year since 2009, the 400th anniversary of Hudson’s journey and the year Dutch students began participating in the program. When the welcoming ceremony is over, Niehaus will return to the office to prepare for the publication of a brand new curriculum, “Indians of the Hudson Valley.” Like every other set of lessons she helps design, it’s an interdisciplinary mix—covering history, economics, cross-cultural exchange, and ecology and the environment.

As winter approaches, she’ll coordinate the museum’s sizeable base of volunteers, as together they re-outfit the ship with replica artifacts for regular, public dockside tours as well as school tours.

She’ll be seeking more opportunities to share the museum’s resources with other kinds of audiences, such as corporate groups and incoming high school or college classes. “It’s a great way to build a leadership community,” she says, referring to the day-to-day teamwork required to operate the ship.

And she’ll be preparing for the next Voyage of Discovery. Interest in the program, she says, has been self-sustaining. “It’s driven by teachers—teachers who say, ‘This is great, we want to be a part of this’—and then help to make that happen.”

When a Dead Language Is Cutting-Edge

Marcy Braverman Goldstein ’92 makes an enterprise out of an interest she once thought “obscure.”

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

goldsteinIN DEMAND: Based in Charlotte, N.C., Goldstein takes her Sanskrit workshops on the road, to places such as Willow Street Yoga Center, in Silver Spring, Md., where she conducted “Sanskrit: The Language of Yoga in Texts, A¯sana, and KIrtan,” in November. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It’s not a typical path to entrepreneurship: a bachelor of arts in religion, followed by doctoral study of religion with training in what’s often considered a dead language to boot.

But the knowledge Marcy Braverman Goldstein ’92 has painstakingly acquired, and which she shares with tuition-paying college students near her home in Charlotte, N.C., is knowledge she’s discovered many other people in her community would like to have themselves.

“I realized the knowledge from my education—the actual content of it—was something that many people truly want to know. And they don’t necessarily want to pay $2,000 to take a course at their local university,” Goldstein says.

Goldstein majored in religion at Rochester and developed a special interest in Hinduism and its scriptural language, Sanskrit. At the time, she says, “my interests seemed obscure.” But she continued her studies, earning a doctorate at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Among the world’s most ancient languages, Sanskrit is rarely spoken. Yet it’s the language of an increasingly popular activity in the West: yoga. Yoga is a multimillion dollar industry in the United States alone. And as evidence has mounted for its benefits to physical and mental health, physicians and other health professionals have begun to integrate yoga in their treatment plans.

Yet the quality of yoga instruction is uneven, and an important element missing in much of it, Goldstein says, is Sanskrit.

Two years ago, she founded Sanskrit Revolution, a sole proprietorship through which she offers Sanskrit workshops for yoga instructors and students. She’s enjoyed as much demand as she can take on while still continuing to teach at the college level—something she has no plans to abandon.

Sanskrit words don’t just name every pose—or, in Sanskrit, a¯sana. Their sounds are an integral part of the practice of yoga itself. Some instructors have begun to incorporate more Sanskrit into their lessons—replacing English names for poses, such as the “corpse pose,” for example, with its Sanskrit name, śava¯sana—but with few places to turn for accurate knowledge of the language, mispronunciations are common.

Does it matter? That depends, Goldstein says. “For some people, yoga is just a physical fitness routine, and that’s fine.” But in her workshops in the Charlotte area, on the road, and at national conferences, she has identified a large community that wants a lot more out of yoga. “For many people,” she says, “it’s a way of life.”

This latter group is an eager audience for what Goldstein offers.

“Sanskrit is a language of sound, rhythm, and melody,” she explains. “What Sanskrit says about itself is that each sound has a particular vibration that is healing in a particular way.” Whether one accepts that argument or not, Goldstein says, most people agree that some sounds are inherently more peaceful than others. Although she notes that scholars generally reject the notion of a “pure Sanskrit”—a single, correct, and unchanging set of pronunciations—Goldstein also says, “There are some absolute mispronunciations.”

“I sometimes say to people, ‘How do you soothe a sleeping baby? Do you go to the baby and say, ‘kuh kuh kuh kuh’? Or do you say ‘shhhh’?,” she says.

In her workshops, she goes over the most commonly mispronounced āsanas, exploring their meanings by breaking the words down into their roots, and discussing the shades of meaning implied in each syllable. Participants in her workshops earn what’s called a CEU, or continuing education unit, part of an effort by the national governing body the Yoga Alliance to professionalize—a development Goldstein embraces, particularly given the increasing interest in yoga by health practitioners who’ve undergone rigorous training in their own fields.

She says Sanskrit Revolution wasn’t hard to get started. It grew out of something she was already doing. “I started teaching Sanskrit casually at some of the big yoga studios in L.A.,” she says, recalling her years as a graduate student in Santa Barbara. “People just kept coming back.”

As is the case for many entrepreneurs, digital tools have made it possible for her to reach a wide audience. She traces the start of her business to the day she bought the domain name for her website, www. sanskritrevolution.com, and has since added a Facebook page. In addition to a schedule, information, and links, Goldstein is working on a Sanskrit dictionary that will be downloadable as an app. She envisions adding to her website an online store for the purchase of study materials and Sanskrit Revolution gear. And she’s exploring online teaching as well.

On her website, Goldstein welcomes visitors by telling them the story of how she got interested in Sanskrit in the first place: as a student in the course Asian Search for Self, taught by Rochester professor of religion Douglas Brooks. Brooks, who also teaches outside the academy, says that in addition to her scholarly credibility, Goldstein is offering “accessibility to a very difficult and usually inaccessible subject.” And if yoga instructors were to learn “just enough Sanskrit—and they will if they study with Marcy—they bring credit to the traditions of India and to their own profession.”

For Goldstein, accessibility is perhaps the highest aim of Sanskrit Revolution. “I want to make this accessible,” she says. “It can only go so far in the confines of a university setting.”

Highest Honors

newsSCIENTIST AND ACTIVIST: Cooper, a chemist and local civil rights leader, was recognized by the Rochester Area Community Foundation. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Walter Cooper ’57 (PhD) has been awarded the Rochester Area Community Foundation’s highest honor for philanthropy, the Joe U. Posner Founders Award.

The first African American to receive a doctorate in chemistry from the University, Cooper began his career as a research scientist at Eastman Kodak, working his way up to manager of research innovation and obtaining multiple patents in polymerization during his three decades with the company.

An activist during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Cooper became associate director of Action for a Better Community, was a founding member of the Urban League of Rochester, and served on the New York State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In later years, he helped found the city of Rochester’s urban-suburban transfer program and served as a New York State regent. He continues to work with the regents, advocating for educational rights for the children of migrant workers.

In 2008, the University awarded Cooper the Frederick Douglass Medal.

Calling Dr. Cove

An unprecedented and lifesaving procedure performed at Strong Memorial Hospital in 2010 by Rochester cardiologist Christopher Cove ’89M (Flw), ’89M (Res) was the inspiration for an episode last fall of the ABC television medical drama Grey’s Anatomy.

Fans of the show tuned in October 24 as a fictional medical team injected a form of medical superglue into a man’s heart to halt the growth of a rare type of cardiac tumor. It was a dramatization of the procedure Cove had performed three years ago on a 30-year-old woman from Wayne County, N.Y.

After several unsuccessful attempts to destroy a tangle of vessels pulling blood away from the woman’s heart, Cove consulted with Rochester neurosurgeon Babak Jahromi. Jahromi had treated similar tumors in the brain by injecting a glue-like substance called Onyx into the vessels, shutting off blood supply to the growth.

Producers of Grey’s Anatomy contacted Cove after reading about the procedure. Cove served as a consultant during the making of the episode, ensuring the medical accuracy of the dramatization.

newsSHOWCASED: Work by Engelman will adorn the 1952 Frank Lloyd Wright home known as the Brandes House. (Photo: Courtesy of Rosalyn Engelman ’78 (MS))

In Sync with Frank Lloyd Wright

The new owners of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1952 Brandes House, in Sammamish, Wash., commissioned fine artist Rosalyn Engelman ’78 (MS) for a centerpiece painting. At a reception held at her Manhattan studio in October, Engelman unveiled the diptych painting, which she designed in context with the home’s Japanese-inspired interior. Engelman developed an interest in Japanese art as a master’s degree student at Rochester.

The Brandes House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

An Asteroid of His Own

Bill Golisch ’80 has his very own asteroid—or at least, an asteroid that bears his name.

Upon Golisch’s retirement after 30 years as a telescope operator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Infrared Telescope Facility, the International Astronomical Union gave asteroid number 8457 a new official name: Billgolisch. The new name comes with a citation to Golisch, whose “expertise and dedication to observers have helped facilitate observations used in hundreds of planetary research projects.” The NASA facility is located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Golisch has retired to San Diego.

Sound Science

Acoustical consultant Matt Roe ’07, ’08 (MS), official measurer of a record-setting roar, delves into the complexities of noise.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

roeTAKING MEASURE: Acoustical consultant Roe sits aside his spectrum analyzer, the complex machine he takes on the road to measure various aspects of sound. (Photo: Stephen Brashear/AP Images for Rochester Review)

At the Seattle firm SSA Acoustics, acoustical consultant Matt Roe ’07, ’08 (MS) says his typical work “really runs the gamut.” To help control noise, Roe advises on the design and construction of virtually every type of building—multifamily residences, commercial buildings, and lots of K–12 schools. But this past fall, Roe found himself with a wholly different kind of assignment. A fan group of the Seattle Seahawks football team set out to lead Seahawks fans in a record-setting stadium roar. As the Seahawks prepared for a September match-up against the San Francisco 49ers, the group invited a representative from Guinness World Records to the game, as well as Roe, who would conduct measurements to pass muster with Guinness. Following a game-changing play by the Seahawks,

Roe measured an instantaneous maximum sound level of 136.6 decibels. It was a record, surpassing the old record of 131.76 decibels, set in 2011 by Turkish soccer fans at the Ali Sami Yen Sports Complex in Istanbul. Kansas City Chiefs fans would top the Seahawks record within weeks, but Roe returned in December as the Seahawks fans achieved a new record of 137.6 decibels.

What equipment did you use to measure the record-setting cheers?

We used a real-time spectrum analyzer. It’s a pretty complex piece of machinery, measuring sound in a multitude of different ways. In this case, we were looking primarily for a peak sound level, which is what Guinness World Records specifies. Every time you start up the spectrum analyzer, you have to calibrate it to a known level with a certified calibrator. It’s not something that can be reliably done unless you have practice with the specific piece of equipment. So we all train and practice with the equipment that we have in our office.

Does the peak sound level measurement reflect what laypeople might simply think of as volume?

Not exactly. The complicated thing about noise is that there are a lot of different ways to describe it. Sound can be broken down both by frequency, which corresponds to pitch, and level, which is described by the decibel rating. But there are different types of decibel ratings. Some ratings weigh various elements of sound to account for the way our ears process pitch as well as level, reflecting our perception of loudness. The 137.6-decibel measurement refers to what’s called a dbA, or A-weighted decibel rating. A-weighted decibel ratings weigh mid to high frequencies more heavily than low frequencies, generally corresponding to how our ears perceive sound.

Not all stadiums are created equally in helping to amplify sound, are they?

In general, that’s the case. The previous record had been set at a stadium in Turkey that was almost entirely enclosed. All of the seating was covered underneath an awning. Geometrically, that’s sort of similar to the way Seahawks Stadium is set up, with large reflective surfaces covering the main crowd areas. And that promotes additional reflection of sound back toward the field. It’s said that there have been the highest number of false starts at Seahawks games in CenturyLink Field of any stadium in the country. And that can pretty well be attributed to those reflective surfaces. Not to diminish anything from the fans. They’re also really loud.

It’s been reported that the record-setting roars were as loud as a jet engine. True?

Not exactly. You’re not comparing apples to apples, and in the general vernacular, that isn’t really recognized. Typically, when we describe noise, we use a metric called the LEQ, which is the equivalent continuous sound level. It’s an averaging out of peaks and valleys. So when you see a number like 120 or 130 decibels quoted for a jet engine, that’s an LEQ rating. We were measuring what’s called a peak, or instantaneous, maximum. That’s the loudest part of the whole sound that we measured. The LEQs that we were measured were significantly lower than the 137.6 decibels that we measured for the record.

This contest has faced some criticism, including from many football fans. Is it unsafe?

If you were exposed to that kind of level of sound regularly, that would be a concern. We were wearing hearing protection, and a number of the fans were wearing ear protection. They were giving it out at the stadium.

CHANCE ENCOUNTERS

Musical Meet-Up

Boston-area alumni find each other while working (and playing) together in the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra.

csoYELLOWJACKET STRINGS ATTACHED: Living and working in the Boston area, alumni Dewing, Beall, and Etingoff (left to right) met while playing in the all-volunteer Cambridge Symphony Orchestra. (Photo: Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP Images for Rochester Review)

If you’ve moved away from Rochester and live in a sizeable metro area, maybe you’ve met and even befriended a fellow Rochester alumnus or two. Someone you never knew as a student. Someone who may have attended many years before or after you did.

That’s the kind of chance encounter that happened to Lydia Beall ’02, Abe Dewing ’93, and Kim Etingoff ’10. Living in the Boston area, they met as members of the all-volunteer Cambridge Symphony Orchestra.

Abe, who oversees digital advertising for the Boston Herald, joined the orchestra in 1994. A violinist, he’d been in the University symphony and chamber orchestras at Rochester. “I was able to enjoy music at my own pace. It wasn’t, ‘Be an Eastman student or nothing,’ ” he says. “I learned, ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe a community orchestra would be an option for me.’ ”

He not only joined the Cambridge Symphony, but became a board member and took charge of the group’s marketing. He started an arts blog at the Boston Herald, for which he writes a weekly installment about the symphony.

Lydia, also a violinist, runs an education program at the Boston Museum of Science. A chemical engineering major, she didn’t join any music groups while at Rochester. “I thought about it,” she says. “But I thought it might be too much while I was in college.”

As a working professional, she decided she had the time and will to pursue her music again. She’d been a friend of the orchestra on Facebook and decided to join. She met Abe when she approached him about arranging for the orchestra to perform at the museum as part of a program on the science of sound.

“It’s a pretty rigorous orchestra environment, but casual enough that people who have full time jobs can do it simply because they love it,” she says. She adds that the group is performing a lot of 20th-century music, “which is unusual.”

Kim, a violist who’s working toward a master’s degree in urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts, says, “I was a part of both the chamber orchestra and the symphony orchestras at Rochester, so I wanted to keep that tradition going in my life.” The Cambridge Symphony Orchestra, she says, “was nearby, community based, and had a great repertoire, so that’s the orchestra I gravitated toward.” She met Abe shortly after she joined, who in turn introduced her to Lydia.

It’s a community-within-a-community that could expand. “I actually know of two more Rochester alums who just moved to Boston and are interested in joining the CSO as well,” Kim says. “So our numbers might keep growing!”

—Karen McCally

Have you experienced a chance encounter you’d like to share? Write to us at rochrev@rochester.edu.

TRIBUTE

Tatiana Tchekina: ‘World-Class Musician’

tchekinaCOLLABORATOR: A distinguished pianist, Tchekina was a sought- after accompanist. (Photo: Eastman School of Music)

Since 1967, the partner-duo of pianist Tatiana Tchekina and violinist Oleh Krysa made more than 20 recordings together and traveled around the globe performing solo and chamber music recitals. Their partnership came to an end in December, when Tchekina, 69, died in an automobile accident outside Rochester.

An assistant professor of accompanying at the Eastman School, Tchekina was “a world-class musician” and “a valued member of our faculty who influenced the lives of the many students with whom she collaborated on performances and competitions,” said Dean Jamal Rossi.

Born in Moscow, Tchekina was educated at the Moscow and Kiev Conservatories and joined the Eastman faculty in 2002.

She and Krysa celebrated contemporary music, recording works by Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, Ukrainian composers Boris Lyatoshynsky and Myroslav Skoryk, and others. The couple had several works dedicated to them, including Larry Sitsky’s Bylina and Sydney Hodkinson’s ’57E, ’58E (MM) Scherzo Frénétique.

Their global tours occasionally included performances with their sons, violinist Peter Krysa and conductor Taras Krysa. Oleh Krysa, who was in the vehicle with Tchekina, sustained minor injuries in the accident.

“Professor Tchekina was a great artist,” said Eastman professor of violin Federico Agostini. “With her immense background and experience she was also an extraordinary collaborative pianist in our school. Some of the best violin students we have here at Eastman were blessed by having the great privilege to perform with her. She will be missed by all of us as a wonderful friend and as a great musician.”

—Helene Snihur

KUDOS

Alumni Honors

cn_honorsNEW YORK CITY: Board Chairman Ed Hajim ’58 (right), pictured with President Joel Seligman, received the Dean’s Medal. (Photo: Matt Wittmeyer)

cn_honorsCHICAGO: Mark Goldstein ’78 was recognized with the John N. Wilder Award. (Photo: Courtesy of Mark Goldstein ’78)

Two longtime University advisors and supporters were recognized for their achievements and service during ceremonies at regional events this fall.

Arts, Sciences & Engineering

Dean’s Medal

Ed Hajim ’58, chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees, received the Dean’s Medal at a presentation in New York City in November. During a nearly 60-year connection to the University, Hajim has volunteered in a number of roles as a student, alumnus, and advisor. As a trustee since 1988, Hajim has chaired the board’s Investment Committee, and he has served on the Health Affairs, Compliance and Compensation, Financial Planning, and Strategic Planning committees. Appointed chairman of the board in 2008, he serves as Executive Committee chair of The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester. The Edmund A. Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences was named in his honor in 2009 in recognition of his 2008 gift commitment of $30 million—the largest single gift commitment in University history. A significant portion of this commitment was designated for scholarship support for engineering students.

John N. Wilder Award

Mark Goldstein ’78, president and chief operating officer of Actuant Corporation, received the Wilder Award at a ceremony in Chicago in October. After joining the diversified industrial company in 2001, Goldstein was named COO in 2007 with a scheduled advance to CEO in January 2014. He also serves on the board of directors of Pall Corporation. Actively involved in the placement of Rochester students, Goldstein has worked with the career centers of both the College and the Simon Business School to help graduates begin careers at Actuant. With his wife, Jill Goldstein ’79N, he has established the Mark and Jill Goldstein Endowed Scholarship in support of Rochester students who are the first in their families to pursue a college education.

Books & Recordings

Books

Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam

By Aaron Hughes

Columbia University Press, 2013

Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in Judaic Studies at Rochester, draws on contemporary identity theory in an overview of Islamic ideologies, cultures, and traditions as they’ve developed over centuries.

Singing in the Rain: Weathering the Storm of Dementia with Humor, Love, and Patience

By Vicky Ruppert and Ann Henderberg

Createspace, 2013

Ruppert, a retired microbiologist in the Medical Center’s clinical microbiology laboratory, and Henderberg recount their experiences as caregivers to their late husbands, both of whom suffered from dementia. The book includes a foreword by Robert Bazell, former health and science correspondent for NBC News and a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale.

Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics

By Ramón Rivera-Servera ’96

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Rivera-Servera, associate professor in the department of performance studies at Northwestern, explores the role of performance in the development of Latino and Latina queer culture in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Thoracic Outlet Syndrome

Edited by Karl Illig ’95M (Res), ’97M (Flw) et al

Springer, 2013

Illig, the director of the vascular surgery division of the University of South Florida’s medical school, presents a comprehensive textbook on a frequently misdiagnosed group of disorders associated with the compression of nerves, veins, and arteries traversing the base of the neck to the arm.

Pictures, Pop Bottles, and Pills: Kodak Electronics Technology That Made a Better World But Didn’t Save the Day

By K. Bradley Paxton ’71 (PhD)

Fossil Press, 2013

Paxton, chief executive officer of the data quality management firm ADI, advances hypotheses to explain the failure of the past half-century of Kodak electronics and equipment technology to save the company from bankruptcy. Paxton is a former general manager and vice president of the electronic photography and printer products divisions as well as former director of electronic imaging research laboratories at Kodak.

Princess Bing Bong and the Birthday Party Blunders

By Vanessa Hurlbut Paniccia ’96

Authorhouse, 2013

Paniccia tells the story of a “quirky, silly princess who marches to the beat of her own drum.” When Princess Bing Bong throws a birthday party, things don’t go as planned.

Pivot: How Entrepreneurs Adapt and Change Course to Find Ultimate Success

By Remy Arteaga ’84 and Joanne Hyland

Wiley, 2013

Arteaga, director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado’s business school, and Hyland help entrepreneurs navigate resource and organizational uncertainties to achieve success in their ventures.

Corporate Christianity: How Double-Minded Pastors Are Hijacking Christianity

By Bobby Mills ’69 (MA)

Morgan James Publishing, 2013

Addressing lay Christians, Mills argues that many pastors have built lives of material satisfaction at their community’s expense, and suggests how Christian institutions can reconnect to Jesus Christ.

As Birds Soar: One Family’s Journey Living with ADHD and Autism Spectrum

By B. Suzanne

Smashwords, 2013

Indie author Carol Needleman-Karr ’77, writing under the pen name B. Suzanne, tells the story of Amy and Sam Cooper as they confront the practical and emotional challenges of raising their son, diagnosed with autism and ADHD.

Writing Home: Civil War Letters from the Hinchey Family Archive

By Mickey Schlosser and John Robortella

Gates (N.Y.) Historical Society, 2013

Robortella, the retired associate director of marketing and communications at the Simon School, and Schlosser recover and publish more than 60 letters written by Civil War soldiers, discovered in the papers of a noted western New York pioneer family. The book is edited by George Tomczyk, retired director of public affairs at the Simon School, and includes a foreword by Bob Marcotte, former Rochester Democrat and Chronicle columnist and Arts, Sciences & Engineering writer in University Communications.

Legendary Locals of Greater Utica

By James Davis ’97, ’99W (MS)

Arcadia Publishing, 2013

Davis presents more than 200 vintage images of significant figures in the history of the Utica, N.Y., region along with accompanying text. Subjects include the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, Congressman Roscoe Conkling, the pollster John Zogby, and others.

Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire

By J. P. Losty and Malini Roy ’97

British Library, 2012

In a book accompanying the 2013 exhibit of the same title, Roy, curator of visual arts at the British Library, and Losty, curator emeritus, showcase the library’s extensive collection of illustrated manuscripts and paintings commissioned by Mughal emperors and other officials. The works span four centuries, from the foundation of the Mughal dynasty by the Babur in the 16th century, through the heights of empire in the 17th century, until its decline and eventual collapse in the 19th century.

Southwestern Allure: The Art of the Santa Fe Colony

By Valerie Ann Leeds ’79

Boca Raton Museum of Art, 2013

Leeds, an independent curator who assisted the Boca Raton Museum of Art in developing its fall 2013 exhibition Southwestern Allure: The Art of the Santa Fe Colony, documents the exhibition in the accompanying book. The exhibition, which travels to Orlando and Santa Fe in 2014, explores the development of Santa Fe as a notable artist colony between the years 1915 and 1940.

Secrets of San Miguel

By Alice Denham ’50 (MA)

Madeira Press, 2013

Denham, who splits her time between New York City and San Miguel de Allende, offers a memoir of her experiences in the Mexican artists’ and writers’ colony over several decades.

Stars and Vectors: A Science Fiction Collection

By R. Scott Russell

Createspace, 2013

Russell, a senior technical associate in the Hajim School’s mechanical engineering department, presents 13 stories and poems to transport readers from “a backyard observatory wherein mystery is glimpsed in the midnight sky, to a race against time itself across the altered surface of the moon.”

Recordings

Winter Morning Walks

By Maria Schneider ’85E (MM)

Maria Schneider, 2013

Jazz composer Schneider presents a classical crossover recording of two song cycles based on works by poets Ted Kooser and Carlos Drummond. Soprano Dawn Upshaw performs on the recording along with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The Truth about Me

By Shauli Einav ’08E (MM)

Cristal Records, 2013

Jazz composer and saxophonist Einav performs a series of “whirlwind compositions” with a new band featuring French as well as American musicians. Also in 2013, Einav released Generations (Posi-Tone Records), on which he performs with pianist Don Friedman, drummer Eliot Zigmund, and others.

Coalescence

By Andre Canniere ’03E (MM)

Whirlwind Recordings, 2013

Composer and trumpeter Canniere offers a series of post-bop compositions evoking environmental, social, and personal themes.

The Line

By Kneebody

Concord Records, 2013

Kneebody, the quintet that includes Adam Benjamin ’99E, Shane Endsley ’97E, Kaveh Rastegar ’01E, and Ben Wendel ’99E, performs original compositions fusing jazz, rock, and electronic music. Also in 2013, Wendel released Small Constructions (Sunnyside Records) with pianist Dan Tepfer.

It’s a Cello Thing

By Ailbhe McDonagh ’08E (MM) and Orla McDonagh

Ailbhe McDonagh, 2012

Cellist Ailbhe McDonagh and her sister, pianist Orla McDonagh, perform works by Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninoff, and others. The McDonagh sisters are both on the faculty of the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin.

Shifting Treks

By Sydney Hodkinson ’58E (MM)

Navona Records, 2013

The recording features three of Hodkinson’s orchestral works. Pianist and Eastman professor Barry Snyder ’66E, ’68E (MM) performs on the recording along with the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra. Also in 2013, Veritate Winds, the faculty woodwind ensemble at Stetson University, where Hodkinson is the Almand Chair of Composition, released Woodwind Odyssey (Clear Note), the premiere recording of Hodkinson’s wind works.

Suites and Treats

By the Brass Arts Quintet

Mark Records, 2012

The Tennessee Tech faculty brass ensemble that includes trumpeters Charles Decker ’68E and Chris McCormick ’88E (MM) and hornist Greg Danner ’81E (MA) performs a mix of original pieces as well as new arrangements of familiar tunes in a recording commemorating the ensemble’s 50th birthday.

Books & Recordings is a compilation of recent work by University alumni, faculty, and staff. For inclusion in an upcoming issue, send the work’s title, publisher, author or performer, a brief description, and a high-resolution cover image, to Books & Recordings, Rochester Review, 22 Wallis Hall, P. O. Box 270044, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0044; or by e-mail to rochrev@rochester.edu.

Thinking about the Café

The café has helped shape European history, says French historian Jeff Jackson ’99 (PhD). Is it doing something similar in the U.S.?

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

I became interested in cafés just by going to cafés in Paris. One of the things you realize is that Parisian cafés function very differently than a lot of American spaces that are supposed to be similar. A lot of Parisians have small apartments, so in many ways, they function as people’s living rooms. Alternatively, going to a Parisian café can be like watching a performance. Generally, the chairs face the street. They’re not turned facing one another, but instead, face outward, so it’s almost like you’re sitting in an audience watching the street as if it were a stage.

jackson(Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

My first book was a study about the reception of jazz in Paris in the 1920s. The café played an important role. When jazz traveled outside its origin point in New Orleans, people performed it in certain venues. And often those venues helped to shape the way that people heard and understood the music. When jazz went to Paris in the 1920s, the kinds of places that you could go to hear jazz, primarily cafés and cabarets, shaped people’s encounter with it.

For centuries, the café has been an institution that’s provided precisely the kind of thinking space that places like Apple and Google have been trying to create. It’s a space where people can converse and exchange ideas, but at the same time, can sit quietly by themselves and write or contemplate. People can go back and forth between sociability and privacy, and it’s that blend that makes it work. Also, so much that happens in a café, both historically and today, is fueled by stimulants, notably caffeine.

Jeff Jackson ’99 (PhD)

Memphis, Tennessee

Professor of history, Rhodes College; coeditor and contributor, The Thinking Space: The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy, and Vienna (Ashgate)

Favorite Café in Rochester: “I don’t know. What coffee shops were there in the ’90s?”

Favorite Café in Memphis: “I have several.” Top picks: Café Eclectic and Bluff City Coffee.

Howard Schultz, the chairman and CEO of Starbucks who turned it into a national phenomenon, wanted to bring something of the Italian café experience to Americans. Of course, what he did was change it fundamentally. There’s a really good book called Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, by the historian Bryant Simon. He argues that Starbucks has become a private workspace rather than a social space. And the bulk of their business is to-go. There are always tables—an homage to the European café—but relatively few people actually sit in Starbucks.

Starbucks is the coffee shop for people who don’t like coffee. Or so Simon argues. And it’s true in so many ways. I don’t drink coffee, but I go to Starbucks because I can get a mocha, which is filled with milk and chocolate. But an espresso? No way.

I remember spending an afternoon in a Parisian Starbucks, and it was in a student neighborhood. It was just filled with college students, and they were all hanging out, talking, and drinking coffee. They were gathered in groups of six or seven, using it like a very traditional Parisian café. I had my headphones on. I was working.