Rochester Review

July-August 2015, Volume 77, No. 6

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Valerie Alhart, Sean Dobbin, Adam Fenster, Peter Iglinski, Melissa Lang, Bob Marcotte, Melissa Mead, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Monique Patenaude, Scott Sabocheck, Leonor Sierra, and Brandon Vick

Editorial Office

22 Wallis Hall

University of Rochester

Box 270044, Rochester, NY 14627-0044

300 East River Road

Box 270032

Rochester, NY 14627-0032

(585) 275-4121

Fax: (585) 275-0359

E-mail: rochrev@rochester.edu www.rochester.edu/pr/Review

Design

Steve Boerner Typography & Design Inc.

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 © 2015 University of Rochester

Credits

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

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Rochester Review:

Celebration of Two University Stalwarts

By Joel Seligman

presidentTEAM LEADERS: Vice President for Communications Bill Murphy (left) and Chief Financial Officer Ron Paprocki leave “a great legacy at this University.” (Photo: University Communications)

I want to salute two extraordinary members of my senior leadership team who will retire in the next academic year. Bill Murphy is completing nine great years as vice president for Communications in July. Ron Paprocki, our senior vice president for Administration and Finance and chief financial officer extraordinaire, will retire in January 2016 after 45 years at the University. Both Bill and Ron have been stalwarts of our University, whose service has palpably strengthened our University.

Bill Murphy is widely considered to be the dean of university communications. After performing significant roles in the public affairs and communications programs at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ohio State University, Bill came to Rochester in 2006.

Bill has creatively and effectively implemented new ways to reach the public in a digitally transformed world—through photography, video, social media, and the web. With colleagues at Duke and Stanford, Bill led the creation of Futurity.org, a pathbreaking online collaboration featuring research news from the top universities in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Bill notably also spearheaded the creation of a suite of University-wide electronic newsletters for faculty, staff, students, parents, and alumni, and strengthened Rochester Review to reach more alumni more often, at lower cost, and with a more compelling presence.

Rocky, our now ubiquitous insect mascot, was brought to us by Bill and his team as part of a comprehensive campaign to strengthen our graphic identity and fortify our sense of One University. The result has been more attractive and cohesive publications, online resources, stationery, and representations of the University.

Bill’s sophisticated appreciation for the University’s missions in teaching, research, clinical care, and service, plus an historian’s sense of perspective and rich appreciation of data are assets that I will truly miss.

Bill has been particularly effective in working with the many different schools and divisions of the University as part of a communications team. Bill is a consensus builder, who justifiably should feel pride that he is leaving communications—and an outstanding team—far stronger than when he arrived.

For the past 15 years, Ron Paprocki, as senior vice president for Administration and Finance and chief financial officer has been indispensable to my predecessor, Tom Jackson, and me for his skill administering a broad portfolio of financial and administrative responsibilities, involving ultimate supervision of 1,800 employees. There is a great advantage in having one individual responsible for both finance and administration in achieving a frictionfree and well-informed administration. But this can only effectively occur if the person in place has the talent and breadth to effectively administer this range of assignments. In Ron, we have been so fortunate to have had an administrator with the skill and determination to do so.

Ron’s career at the University has spanned five Rochester presidents. He earned his bachelor’s degree with high distinction from this University and earned his MBA from the Simon School.

As chief financial officer during one of the nation’s biggest downturns in 2008–09, Ron helped navigate the University through that challenging financial crisis while helping achieve our overarching objective to protect our core. Thanks in part to Ron’s decisive leadership, the University avoided the disruption and significant layoffs seen at some peer institutions. In 2008, the Rochester Business Journal named Ron the Financial Executive of the Year for large nonprofit organizations in the Rochester area.

In 2008, Ron presented and the Board of Trustees approved the Campus Master Plan to provide a 20-year framework for the development of the University’s lands and facilities, with a focus on increased classroom, meeting, office, research, residential, and clinical spaces. The plan has served us remarkably well since then.

Ron deserves particular credit for his leadership in the development of College Town, whose plaza is now dedicated to him. Ron and his team negotiated key aspects of the development agreement and ground lease, providing oversight to financing, legal requirements, design plan, construction details, and environmental issues. His leadership was critical to establishing multiple key partnerships at the city, state, and federal level to advance the project.

Ron was also instrumental in the development of Brooks Crossing and significant changes to Interstate 390.

He deserves especial kudos for the quality of his leadership team.

Bill and Ron have been colleagues of the highest integrity, intelligence, congeniality, and dedication. Each leaves a great legacy at this University. I wish them both the happiest possible retirement.

He’s With His Telescopes

I was surprised and delighted to see an image from the Hubble Space Telescope (“Hooray for Hubble!”) in the May-June issue in honor of its 25th anniversary.

You might be interested in knowing that while Duncan [Moore, the Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Professor of Optical Engineering,] worked on correcting the manufacturing error to the lens, my late husband, Joe Oberheuser ’68 (MS), designed the primary optical system.

In fact, he either outright designed, or worked on, the optical systems of all but two of the more than 24 astronomical telescopes ever launched by the United States. Obviously we’re proud of him and that fact.

When Joe passed in 2005, someone commented, “Now he’s up there with all of his telescopes.”

Had time permitted to develop a tiny space-borne container, the astronauts on the last servicing mission would have put some of his ashes on Hubble.

Instead they were taken by the mission director to Florida for the launch—complete with a visitor’s badge—and then kept on his console in Mission Control throughout the entire mission. An honor, to be sure.

As an added acknowledgment of Joe’s work on Hubble, I was sent the large detailed model of Hubble that the astronauts used during training for their mission. It’s proudly displayed for everyone who visits to see.

Judie Oberheuser

San Angelo, Texas

A Call for Safety

The picture on page 40 (“Full Spectrum and Full Throttle”) of the May-June issue caused me to write. Long, dangly hair is a safety concern in a fabrication shop. It’s just as much a danger with machinery as it was in the days of open flames used as a heat source in a chemistry lab.

Fortythree years in the pharmaceutical industry, in the drug product development and investigational drug manufacturing arenas, has taught me the importance of considering all safe working practices, first and foremost. Such practices include both personal protection equipment and training in safe working procedures.

Since 2009, two university accidents, one at Yale in which long hair wrapped onto a lathe of a student working alone and another at the University of California in which a student received burns from a runaway reaction, resulted in the death of students.

Both could have been prevented by increased forethought about accident possibilities and prevention and increased training and supervision.

I offer these words in the spirit of constructive critique.

Charles Carney ’66

Newtown, Connecticut

Photo ID

In the Class of 1988 photo in the May-June issue (Class Notes), I recognize myself as the sole doctoral student in the gold robe standing at the top right. Being a “W,” I was used to being last.

Dirk Wilmoth ’87W (PhD)

Emory, Virginia

Thanks for the Feedback

Rochester Review is always great reading, but the latest issue (May-June) is superb. You must be very proud of the quality of your publication. Editorial direction, writing, visual content, and layout are invariably first class.

We alumni, students, and faculty have every reason to be proud of you.

Graeme Roberts ’90S (MBA)

Pittsford, New York

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.

COMMENCEMENT

Ready for the Big Day

inrev_commencement (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Family Portrait: Eight-month-old Henry Ivancic gets an early start on graduate school while his mother, Sarilyn Swayngim Ivancic ’07, ’15 (PhD), receives her doctorate in mechanical engineering during the doctoral degree commencement ceremony at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. Next up in the procession was Sarilyn’s husband and Henry’s father, Steven Ivancic ’08, ’15 (PhD), who also received his PhD in mechanical engineering. Altogether, more than 2,300 graduates were recognized during eight commencement ceremonies this spring.

GUEST ARTISTS

House of Composers

inrev_beal (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Jazz scene: Emmy Award–winning composer Jeff Beal ’85E (standing), whose scores for television include the ominously dissonant music for the acclaimed Netflix series House of Cards, leads a small group session with Eugene Bisdikian ’17E (bass), graduate student Chase Ellison (drums), Billy Petito ’17E (guitar), C. J. Ziarniak ’17E (saxophone; sitting), and Matt Blom ’16E (trumpet; sitting) in Howard Hanson Hall. Beal and his wife, vocalist Joan Sapiro Beal ’84E, were guests in residence this spring at the Eastman School of Music, where they led talks with students and faculty and performed in concert.

OPTICS

Mighty Microplasma

inrev_plasma (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Terahertz techniques: A microplasma generated by focusing intense laser pulses is captured in mid-air during a demonstration in the lab of optics PhD student Fabrizio Buccheri and Institute of Optics Director Xi-Cheng Zhang. In work published this spring, the Rochester team showed that such microplasma—which emit terahertz radiation, a form of electromagnetic radiation named for its frequency—could be created with much lower-powered lasers than previously thought possible. The terahertz radiation emitted by the microplasma could be used to analyze materials, such as identifying poisons in food or finding drugs and explosives in baggage.

MAD FOR MASCOTS

Building Buzz

inrev_rocky (Photo: Illustrations by Michael Osadciw)

FACE TIME: Since his debut in late 2007, Rocky, the University’s mascot, has worked his way into the hearts of several organizations across campus. Drawn by University graphic artist Michael Osadciw, Rocky and his many incarnations can be found on buses, posters, websites, memorabilia, and special projects. Rocky was created to replace URbee, the previous version of the mascot, as part of a year-long, campuswide graphic identity effort led by Bill Murphy, vice president for communications, who is retiring at the end of July.

HOSPITAL HISTORY

Golisano Children’s Hospital Opens for Patients

inrev_gchGOLISANO GOAL: Sue Bezek, director of pediatric nursing (standing, left to right), Nina Schor, pediatrician-in-chief, Medical Center CEO Mark Taubman, Board of Trustees Chair Ed Hajim ’58, University President and CEO Joel Seligman, and hospital namesake Tom Golisano cut a ribbon as part of ceremonies to dedicate the new Golisano Children’s Hospital, the largest capital project in University history.﻿﻿ (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The doors on the largest building project in the University’s history open this summer to patients, families, and friends throughout western and upstate New York.

The new eight-story, 245,000-square-foot Golisano Children’s Hospital was formally dedicated in late May during a ceremony that featured patients and their families, University leaders, and significant building donors, including hospital namesake B. Thomas Golisano.

The largest capital project undertaken by the University, the new hospital is a key component of the Medical Center’s campaign in support of The Meliora Challenge, the University’s comprehensive fundraising campaign that continues through June 2016.

The hospital will feature all-private rooms and specialized technology, including the first integrated PET/MRI in a children’s hospital in the nation, dedicated to healing sick and injured children. Each year, about 84,000 children across the Finger Lakes region are admitted to Golisano Children’s Hospital for care.

TRUSTEES

Danny Wegman Named Next Board Chair, Four New Trustees Appointed

inrev_trusteesDanny Wegman (Photo: Provided)

Danny Wegman, CEO of the iconic Rochester-based grocery store company founded by his grandfather and great-uncle, has been named chair-elect of the University’s Board of Trustees. A trustee for more than 15 years, Wegman will succeed current chair Ed Hajim ’58 in a five-year appointment at the May 2016 board meeting.

“Danny is one of the country’s most admired business leaders, a champion of our region, and a highly respected and dedicated board member,” says President and CEO Joel Seligman, who has worked closely with Wegman for the past four years in their roles as cochairs of the Finger Lakes Economic Development Council, part of New York State’s community-based economic development program.

The announcement was made at this spring’s board meeting, where four new trustees were also elected.

Wegman joined Wegmans Food Markets after high school and was named a store manager in 1969, the same year he graduated with honors from Harvard University with a degree in economics. He became president in 1976, and was named CEO in 2005. Today, the company operates 85 stores in six states and is consistently recognized in Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” earning the No. 7 spot in 2015.

In April 2014, Wegman, president and chairman of the board of the Wegman Family Foundation, announced a $10 million lead gift to the Goergen Institute for Data Science and a $7 million gift to support Golisano Children’s Hospital. Altogether, the foundation has provided $20 million to The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester. Wegman and his wife, Konstanze (Stency), are members of the George Eastman Circle, the University’s leadership annual giving society.

Newly Elected Trustees

inrev_trusteesBarbara Burger (Photo: Provided)

Barbara Burger ’83 is the president of Chevron Technology Ventures, a Houston-based division within Chevron Corporation. A chemistry major at Rochester, Burger went on to receive a doctorate in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and an MBA in finance from the University of California, Berkeley.

A member of the San Francisco Bay Regional Cabinet, the Texas Regional Cabinet, and the River Campus Libraries National Council, Burger is a charter member of the George Eastman Circle. She established the Barbara J. Burger Endowed Scholarship in the Sciences and has generously supported two professorships in chemistry as well as special projects at the River Campus Libraries and in the Department of Athletics and Recreation.

inrev_trusteesEdward Miller (Photo: Provided)

Edward Miller ’68M (MD) is CEO emeritus of Johns Hopkins Medicine and dean and vice president emeritus of the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, where he joined the faculty in 1994. He became the first CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, dean of the medical school, and vice president for medicine in January 1997, serving until his retirement in 2012.

He and his wife, Lynne Reilly Miller ’64, are members of the George Eastman Circle and supporters of the medical school. Lynne has supported student scholarships, including establishing a fund to support study abroad.

inrev_trusteesBrian Prince (Photo: Provided)

Brian Prince ’86, ’89S (MBA) is the founder and senior partner of the private-equity firm Hegemon Capital LLC. He recently served as president and chief executive officer of ORIX USA Corporation, a diversified financial services company.

A board member of the Friends of Rochester Athletics, he established the Prince Family Endowment for Men’s Soccer in appreciation of his experiences and leadership opportunities as a student-athlete and made the lead gift to support a multimillion dollar renovation of the University’s outdoor athletic facilities, named the Brian F. Prince Athletic Complex. In addition, he has generously supported initiatives at the Eastman School of Music, the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and the Simon Business School.

inrev_trusteesE. Philip Saunders (Photo: Provided)

E. Philip Saunders is an entrepreneur known for his business acumen and philanthropic spirit. He was instrumental in reshaping the travel center industry and has had business interests in fields as diverse as auto rental, recreation and tourism, packaged foods, property management, and banking. Saunders has founded several companies, including Genesee Regional Bank, Griffith Energy, Truck Stops of America, Travel Centers of America, and Sugar Creek Corporation.

In 2011, Saunders contributed $10 million to the Medical Center to support neuromuscular disease, cancer, and translational research. The Saunders Research Building, home to the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, clinical research programs, and academic departments, was named in his honor. His gift also supports the Saunders Family Distinguished Professorship in Neuromuscular Research and the E. Philip and Carole Saunders Professorship in Neuromuscular Research. He serves as a cochair of the Medical Center’s campaign in support of The Meliora Challenge and honorary chair of the George Eastman Circle Rochester Leadership Council.

—Sara Miller﻿﻿

NAMES AND FACES

New Leaders in Communications, Neuromedicine, and Economics Named

appointmentsCOMMUNICATIONS VP: Elizabeth Stauderman, the chief communications officer at Yale, will oversee Rochester’s communications efforts beginning in August. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Vice President for Communications

Elizabeth Stauderman, the chief communications officer at Yale University, has been named vice president for communications, effective August 1.

An experienced leader in external relations, institutional positioning, and issues management, Stauderman has more than 20 years’ experience in higher education, including roles in communications, alumni relations, annual fundraising, and student affairs. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Stauderman joined Yale’s Office of Public Affairs & Communications in July 2010 as deputy chief communications officer, and was promoted to chief communications officer and special assistant to the president in January 2012.

In that position, she advises Yale’s president and cabinet on strategic communications, counsels and represents the university on crisis issues, and leads a staff of 32 focused on national and international media relations, internal communications, video production and photography, institutional website development, and social media.

She succeeds Bill Murphy, who is retiring from the role that he has held since 2006.

appointmentsNEW LEADERS: Neurobiologist John Foxe (left) has been named research director of the Del Monte Neuromedicine Institute, and Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, will join the economics faculty in January. (Photo: Provided)

Research Director of the Del Monte Neuromedicine Institute

John Foxe, who currently serves as the director of research for the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has been named the research director of the Del Monte Neuromedicine Institute. A nationally regarded scientist in the field of neurobiology, Foxe was also named the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Professor in Neurobiology and Anatomy. Both appointments are effective October 1, pending the approval of the University’s Board of Trustees.

As research director of the Del Monte Institute, Foxe will be responsible for bringing together the leaders of departments and centers across the University that focus on the nervous system. He will oversee the creation of a strategic plan that coordinates and expands research and education programs and helps accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into new treatments.

Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics

Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and a leading scholar of monetary and financial economics, was appointed as the inaugural Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics, effective January 1.

Kocherlakota has served as the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank for the past six years. Previously, he held professorships at Northwestern University, the University of Iowa, Stanford University, and at the University of Minnesota, where he also served as the chair of the economics department. Kocherlakota has published more than 30 theoretical and empirical articles in academic journals on work that focuses on monetary economics and financial economics. In 2010, Princeton University Press published his book, The New Dynamic Public Finance, and in 2012 he was named one of the top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine.

Weighty Matters

Mechanical engineer Jonathan Ellis is part of a quest to redefine the kilogram.

The kilogram is the last remaining measurement to be defined by a physical object: a cylinder of platinum and iridium held in a vault under three glass bell jars at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in the suburbs of Paris. The international prototype, created in the 1880s and known familiarly as “Le Grand K,” is the standard by which all other kilograms are measured.

But for all the vault-like protections, Le Grand K is vulnerable.

“The big joke is, if someone were to sneeze on the kilogram, there are about 10 fundamental constants that would change, because they’re all tied to its value,” says Jonathan Ellis, an assistant professor of optics and mechanical engineering and a specialist in metrology, or the study of measurements.

And it’s not just a joke. Compared to official replicas held by other laboratories around the globe, Le Grand K is shrinking, albeit by just .05 milligrams in mass.

Established during the French Revolution by the French Academy of Sciences to standardize measurement, the seven basic units of measurement—the kilogram, the meter, the second, the ampere, the mole, the candela, and the kelvin—are now, with the exception of the kilogram, determined by what are called “realized standards,” or procedure-based methods. “Instead of being tied to an artifact, you’re tied to how you perform the measurement,” Ellis says.

He and the members of his Rochester lab are involved in an effort to create such a procedure for the kilogram. They’re contributors to a larger project being carried out by a group of national laboratories, including the BIPM and others from countries such as Denmark, Japan, Germany, and Australia. The lab representing the United States is the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

One effort to define the kilogram in terms of natural properties, begun in 1999, uses the watt balance, a device that defines mass by equating electrical and mechanical power. Ellis focuses his lab on how to make velocity measurements more accurate.

“When you use light to measure things, one of the limiting factors is the air,” he says. “Light has to pass through the air, and air has turbulence.” There are fluctuations in air pressure and in temperature. “For example, the human body will output about 100 watts of power, and so there will be a temperature gradient because you’re standing near the instrument, and that will affect the light that passes through. We’re talking about very, very, very small features and small distances”—on the atomic scale—“and so very small perturbations can cause a significant problem.” Even someone talking in the lab creates disturbance, with sound pressure and the exhalation of carbon dioxide.

So Ellis is taking part in an effort to find a way to measure that—and to do so more quickly than a temperature sensor or a pressure sensor can manage.

The watt balance method isn’t the only one under investigation. There is a competing method, called Avogadro’s Sphere, in which scientists are trying to make a pure silicon sphere that has the number of atoms that would equal the mass of one kilogram.

“Both measurements in and of themselves are accurate, but they don’t conform to each other,” Ellis says. “There’s some discrepancy there, and the international community is trying to figure out where, why, and how.”

—Kathleen McGarvey﻿﻿

Researchers Develop New Process for Creating ‘Quantum Dots’

discoverDOT MATRIX: A rendering of a quantum dot at the overlap of atomically thin layers of tungsten diselenide. (Photo: Michael Osadciw)

Rochester researchers have demonstrated that defects on an atomically thin semiconductor can produce light-emitting quantum dots. The research, an effort to integrate quantum photonics with solid-state electronics, is part of a field known as integrated photonics.

Also known as “artificial atoms,” quantum dots occur naturally in some nanomaterials and can be artificially engineered. The Rochester dots act as a source of single photons and offer a way to explore the physics of how photons interact with other nanoscale materials, an important vein of research into nanophotonic applications.

Led by Nick Vamivakas, assistant professor of optics, the group used tungsten diselenide to fashion a nanoscale semiconductor that served as a platform for solid-state quantum dots in a way that did not inhibit the electrical or optical performance of the semiconductor and that could be controlled by applying electric and magnetic fields. The work was published in Nature Nanotechnology.

Vamivakas says an advantage of the new approach is that it’s easier to create quantum dots in tungsten diselenide than it is with more traditional materials.

The next step, he says, is to use voltage to “tune the color” of the photons, which can make it possible to integrate the quantum dots with nanophotonic devices.

—Leonor Sierra

Thinking Alike Changes How We Speak

As social creatures, people tend to mimic each other’s posture, laughter, and other behaviors, including speech patterns. A new study shows that people with similar views tend to mirror each other’s speech patterns even more closely—as do people who are better at compromising.

“Our social judgments about others and our general attitude toward conflict are affecting even the most automatic and subconscious aspects of how we express ourselves with language,” says lead author Kodi Weatherholtz, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Florian Jaeger, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and coauthor of the study.

One reason people tend to align certain speech patterns is that it facilitates communication. But the study found evidence that speech alignment serves a social function. People tend to like those with whom they share characteristics, Jaeger says, and so speaking in a way more or less similar to others can be a subtle means of influencing liking, trust, and other interpersonal emotions.

The study was published in the journal Language Variation and Change.

—Monique Patenaude

‘Summer Slide’ Reduced When Kids Pick Own Books

At the end of the school year, districts often send students home with stacks of books in an effort to combat “summer slide,” the literacy loss experienced during the long break that hits low-income students particularly hard.

But a new study led by Erin Kelly, a fourth-year resident in the medicine-pediatrics program, showed that the programs can become significantly more effective with just a small tweak: let kids choose the books.

The findings were presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in the spring. Carol Anne St. George, assistant professor at the Warner School of Education, helped to implement the study, which was conducted in kindergarten, first-, and second-grade classes in the Rochester City School District.

More than 75 percent of students who were allowed to select at least some of their books maintained or improved their reading levels, compared to a one-month literacy loss seen in previous studies. No significant difference was seen between students who picked all of their own books and those who picked only some.

—Sean Dobbin﻿﻿

Pollution Linked to Lower Birth Weight

Women in Beijing who were pregnant during the 2008 Olympics, when pollution levels were reduced by the Chinese government, gave birth to children with higher birth weights compared to those who were pregnant before or after the games.

That’s according to a study led by David Rich, associate professor in the Departments of Public Health Sciences and Environmental Medicine, which suggests that pollution may be interfering with fetal development.

In the months leading up to and during the Olympics and Paralympics, the government launched a series of aggressive measures to improve Beijing’s notoriously poor air quality, including restricting automobile and truck use, closing factories, halting construction projects, and seeding clouds to induce rainfall.

The controls—which were relaxed after the games—produced a significant decrease in air pollution for a six- to seven-week period during the games, including a 60 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide and a 48 percent reduction in carbon monoxide.

The researchers compared birth weights of infants born to women whose eighth month of pregnancy occurred during the games with those whose eighth month occurred at the same time of year in 2007 and 2009.

They found that babies born in 2008 were on average 23 grams larger than those born the year before and the year after. The research was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Late pregnancy is a particularly important time for fetal growth, when the most physical growth occurs and development of the cardiovascular, central nervous, and musculoskeletal systems accelerates.

—Mark Michaud

Study Sheds New Light on Brain’s Power Source

The brain requires enormous energy to do its job. While it represents only 2 percent of the average adult’s body mass, the brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s energy supply. As a result, figuring out just how brain cells—specifically, neurons— generate energy has significant implications for understanding basic biology as well as neurological diseases that may be linked to too little or too much metabolism in the brain.

Now a new study, led by Maiken Nedergaard, the Frank P. Smith Professor of Neurosurgery and codirector of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine, shows that neurons in the brain are more independent than previously thought.

In research published in Nature Communications, the scientists found that neurons—and not astrocytes, as previously believed—take up more glucose in the brain, with consumption rising with brain activity and falling when the brain isn’t stimulated. With astrocytes, the uptake stayed relatively constant.

Understanding the “precise and complex biological mechanisms of the brain” is critical to dealing with neurological diseases, says Nedergaard. “If we are looking in the wrong place, we won’t be able to find the right answers.”

—Mark Michaud

New Sculpture Graces Jackson Court

inbriefBLOOMING ART: CALYX, a work by artist Sabri Gokmen and designed for a site in Jackson Court on the River Campus, was installed this spring as part of an initiative to bring more art to campus. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

What’s that blooming beside Jackson Court and Sage Art Center?

It’s CALYX, a new 12-foot tall sculpture installed this spring as part of an initiative to bring more public art to campus.

The work by artist Sabri Gokmen, a PhD student in design computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was selected from a pool of more than 120 submissions received from an international call for proposals to create a permanent outdoor art installation on the River Campus. Artists were asked to produce a work that reflected Rochester’s mission to “Learn, Discover, Heal, Create—and Make the World Ever Better.”

“Our goal with this project was to identify an experienced artist, like Gokmen, who makes site-specific art that reflects the surrounding environment and its history,” says Allen Topolski, professor of art and a member of the University’s selection committee. “I believe the sculpture lends a signature to our campus and represents an intersection between art and technology that our students are really excited about.”

The work is the latest addition to Jackson Court, a community gathering area near O’Brien Hall and Anderson and Wilder Towers.

Joel Seligman Looks Ahead at 10-Year Mark

President and CEO Joel Seligman marked his 10th year as the University’s executive leader this summer with a note extolling the achievements of faculty, students, and staff as well as notable progress on significant initiatives.

“Ten years ago on July 3 at 8 a.m., I sent my first email to the University of Rochester community with the following words: ‘The Campaign for the University of Rochester begins today.’

“Today I want to renew my vows. We are going to the Next Level, with significant initiatives during the next five years in data science, neuromedicine and neuroscience, the humanities and the performing arts, and the University’s role in the community.

“No one should ever have any delusions that progress for any institution in our country today is easy or assured. But I am proud to report an almost palpable sense of momentum at the University.”

Seligman was named the University’s 10th president and CEO in 2005 and was formally reappointed by the University’s Board of Trustees in 2014.

To read the full message, go to the website for the Office of the President at Rochester.edu/president.﻿﻿

Highland Hospital Breaks Ground on New Building

Highland Hospital held a ceremonial groundbreaking in June for a two-story building addition on the south side of the hospital campus. The $28 million project will enhance patient care through the modernization of facilities and the renovation of existing space.

Construction will run for 12 to 18 months, with an additional six months spent on internal renovation of adjacent building space. The addition will contain approximately 30,000 square feet of space for six new operating rooms and a 26-bed observation unit.

The new building was designed by HOLT Architects, which specializes in health care facilities. LeChase Construction will oversee the project.

Tech Company and University Announce Partnership

Massachusetts company MC10 Inc., a pioneer in biometric-sensor-enabled analytics, has announced a collaboration with Rochester.

The initiative aims to combine MC10’s technological capabilities in physiological sensing and pattern-recognition algorithms with the University’s clinical expertise and commitment to big data analytics.

The Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences will lead the effort.

MC10 sought a collaboration with the University based on its facilities and its vision to be a 21st-century leader in data science, including the recent creation of the Goergen Institute for Data Science.

New Effort Explores Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Researchers at the School of Medicine and Dentistry hope to improve understanding of the brain networks that play a central role in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) through a new multi-institutional initiative at the Medical Center.

Led by Suzanne Haber, professor of pharmacology and physiology, the team received a $10 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to establish a new Silvio O. Conte Center for Basic and Translational Mental Health Research at Rochester. Conte Centers are designed to bring scientists with diverse but complementary backgrounds together to improve the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders.

The Rochester center aims to pinpoint specific abnormalities within brain circuits that are associated with OCD and use the information to guide new treatment options for the three million-plus Americans who live with the disorder.

In addition to Haber, other team leaders include Ben Greenberg, professor of psychiatry and project leader at Butler Hospital and Brown Medical School, Randy Buckner, professor of psychology at Harvard University, Mary Phillips, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, Greg Quirk, professor of psychiatry at the University of Puerto Rico, and Steve Rasmussen, chair and professor of psychiatry at Brown University.

The Conte Center grant is the second that Haber has received from NIMH. The first funded research from 2009 to 2014 that focused on the circuitry underlying the effects of a surgical treatment, known as deep brain stimulation, on OCD. The findings highlighted the mechanisms of brain stimulation for the disease and helped modify the target used with deep brain stimulation.

inbriefTEACHERS’ MOMENT: Winners of the Singer Family Prize (seated) were recognized by the students who nominated them this spring: (left to right) Callie Andler with Tanya May ’15; Greg Beckman with Lilly Camp ’15; Heather Buskirk with Sandra Westover ’15; and Michelle Hill with Bonnie Ball ’15. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

Students Recognize Influential Teachers with Singer Awards

Each year, high school teachers or staff members who have had a profound impact on the education and growth of a graduate of the College are recognized during commencement weekend with a Singer Family Prize for Excellence in Secondary Teaching.

The 2015 award recipients are Callie Andler, a school counselor at Charlotte High School in Rochester, who was nominated by Tanya May ’15; Greg Beckman, an Advanced Placement literature teacher at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California, who was nominated by Lilly Camp ’15; Heather Buskirk, a physics and science teacher at Johnstown High School in Johnstown, New York, who was nominated by Sandra Westover ’15; and Michelle Hill, a math teacher at Hamburg High School in Hamburg, New York, nominated by Bonnie Ball ’15.

The teachers receive a plaque and $3,000, as well as $2,500 for their schools. They also receive travel expenses to attend the Arts, Sciences & Engineering commencement ceremony.

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

inbriefHEADLINERS: Walter Isaacson (left) and Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth are among the guests for Meliora Weekend. (Photo: Provided)

Isaacson and Chenoweth Lead Meliora Weekend Lineup

Walter Isaacson—president and CEO of the Aspen Institute—will deliver the keynote address at Meliora Weekend, October 8–11. The annual celebration also features Emmy and Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth in a performance sponsored by Eva Pressman, chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Henry A. Thiede Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Seth Zeidman, a neurosurgeon who is a member of Highland Hospital’s medical staff. More information is available on the website at Rochester.edu/melioraweekend.

ASK THE ARCHIVIST:

Shall We Count the Days?

A question for Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian.

ataCALENDAR SYSTEM: In the 1947–48 year (top), classes for freshmen began on September 15, while for 1972–73 (above), students registered in Rush Rhees Library for classes that would start on September 19. (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

My husband, Neil Chapman ’57, was a student from fall 1947 through spring 1951. He returned from fall 1955 through spring 1957. He insists he went to school much longer per semester than do current students. Thank you for the time you take to search. —Emily Chapman

A variety of factors affect the perception of the length of the academic calendar, and how precisely it can be calculated, but your husband is correct.

September 15, 1947, was your husband’s first day of instruction as a freshman (upperclassmen began a week later); the 1948 commencement was held on June 21; classes during his senior year started on September 17, and he received his degree on June 9, 1957. The 1947–48 academic year had 146 class days (151 for freshmen), 3 study days and 28 exam days, and these numbers do not factor in those courses which held Saturday morning sessions.

By comparison, for 2015–16, the first day of classes will be August 31; the main commencement ceremony will be held on May 15, after 140 class days, 7 reading period days, and 14 days of exams over two semesters.

Course loads have varied as well—your husband would likely have taken five courses per semester; today’s student typically takes four, although the number of credit-hours required for graduation in 2015 was four credit-hours higher, at 128. The semester system your husband would have known had a fall term extending into early January; beginning in 1976, semesters were divided by the New Year, and that same year brought the first fall break.

The very first day of class of our first academic year in 1850 was November 5—an anomaly, of course—and commencement occurred on July 6, 1851. Successive years saw the first day of classes shift to mid-September and the date of commencement gradually move earlier and earlier, to provide a 12-week summer vacation.

In his 1860 annual report to the Board of Trustees, President Anderson noted: “Some years since it was found that the students understood that the actual beginning of the term was not the day mentioned in the Catalogue, but from three to ten days afterwards. The consequence was that the actual term of study was shortened from two to four weeks in the course of the year for a large proportion of the students . . . .”

Many New England colleges in the 19th century offered a long winter break, during which students could earn money by teaching in elementary schools. Anderson felt those student-teachers then came back tired and were thus less productive in their own studies: “By giving our long vacation in the hot season we exclude the temptation to keep school and save the cold season for work.” World War II brought year-round “work,” with a three-semester calendar in the College for Men, and multiple commencements.

Records for 1955 show another anomaly: moving and construction interruptions associated with the merging of the Colleges for Men and Women delayed the start of classes until October 3; the academic calendar shows Thanksgiving reduced to a single day’s observance.

Other innovations have added value to the academic calendar offerings, notably, the Jan Plan (started in January 1968 by four undergraduates) and the 4-4-X calendar (announced in November 1972). Both were intended to provide opportunities for special academic projects or coursework. Some of the first Jan Plan students would spend a month (January, of course) in Washington, D.C., as part of Professor Richard Fenno’s first Washington Semester cohort. X-Period projects started after commencement and were offered tuition-free, and typically without earning credit; they could be as short as a week, or last the entire summer. Coincidentally, the X-Period option ended in 1986, just as the more substantial and enduring Take Five Program began.

Many alumni will remember history professor and University historian Arthur May’s annual end-of-semester invocation, “The first of June is the last of May.” Under today’s academic calendar, his joke would be told to an empty classroom.

GLOBAL ROCHESTER

Nigeria

Is There an App for Ebola?

globalAPP-LICABLE: Solomon Abiola has developed a mobile app for tracking the spread of Ebola. (Photo: Courtesy of the subject)

Solomon Abiola will be watching his phone closely this summer as he conducts a pilot research project in Lagos, Nigeria. The research associate at the Medical Center is developing a mobile phone app that he hopes will help doctors, health workers, and international aid organizations better understand the spread of the deadly infectious disease Ebola.

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Abiola and other researchers hope the app will complement traditional forms of monitoring such diseases.

Called Node, the Android operating system–based app is designed to monitor location patterns, sleeping and movement habits, and the resource needs of those who use the app to help them find care, improve the monitoring of disease, and increase awareness of disease prevention.

“I was in Nigeria when they declared their first Ebola case, and I thought that this app could have some potential for monitoring the spread of the disease,” says Abiola, who first came up with the idea for a disease-focused app during his undergraduate studies at Princeton University as a way of monitoring meningitis among students.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NSF announced a call for proposals for modeling and understanding the spread of Ebola, Abiola mentioned his app to his soon-to-be boss at Rochester, Ray Dorsey, the David M. Levy Professor in Neurology and director of Rochester’s Center for Human Experimental Therapeutics. Together with Henry Kautz, the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science, they put together a proposal to establish the feasibility of using Node to track a disease like Ebola.

Abiola is keen to stress that the potential for the low-cost app goes beyond Ebola. It could help with other infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.

He says that although the Ebola epidemic has waned considerably, it offers a chance to learn for the future.

“We now need to figure out how useful the app would be and work with people in the community to see how they would use it,” he says.

He spent the spring setting up contacts with universities and medical centers in Nigeria, including the Nigerian Academy of Sciences, the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, and the University of Lagos, with the hope of doing a pilot study with more than 100 people. The researchers have also been making changes to the app for more active monitoring.

“The app will ask you questions like ‘How do you feel this morning? Do you have a fever?’ and if you have a fever, it would tell you to come in and get screened,” says Abiola. “Instead of waiting, you can then get in front of a health care worker, preventing the spread of the disease to your family or anyone else you encounter.”

The researchers plan to use the $130,000 grant from the NSF to find out just how good the app would be at monitoring future outbreaks of Ebola or other diseases. Over the next six months, they are hoping to answer three questions:

How effective are smartphones at predicting the spread of a disease compared to more traditional epidemiology models? Can Node provide information on prevention of the disease, and can this change people’s behaviors? And is a health program based on mobile phones sustainable in West Africa?

Abiola says he’s excited that what started as an undergraduate student project could end up being a building block in public health monitoring. He will further develop the app as he continues his studies for a joint PhD in translational biomedical sciences and computer science at Rochester.

—Leonor Sierra

SCHOLAR-ATHLETES

A Standout Season

Six Yellowjackets earn Academic All-America honors for their achievements on and off the field.

By Dennis O’Donnell

sportsPITCH PERFECT: Two soccer players were named Academic All-Americans last fall: Alex Swanger ’15 (left) earned the honor for the second straight year, and Griffin Drake ’15 was tapped for the first time. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Rochester students had a standout year—on the field and in academia.

In the 2014–15 school year, six Rochester students earned Academic All-America honors, a recognition administered by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA).

Lauren Bailey ’15 of the women’s swimming and diving team, Emily Widra ’15 of the women’s rowing team, and Ethan Pacheck ’15, of the men’s cross country and track and field teams were honored this spring. They joined three honorees from the fall seasons: Alex Swanger ’15 and Griffin Drake ’15 of men’s soccer, and Matthew Mender ’16, a defensive tackle on the football team.

Swanger and Drake were key members of a soccer team that reached the second round of the NCAA Division III playoffs and that was known for its defense, posting eight shutouts and holding four other teams to one goal.

Swanger, a financial economics major from Penfield, New York, repeated as an Academic All-American, earning the same accolade in 2014. He worked as a research assistant in a campus Medical Center group, Surgical Health Outcomes & Research Enterprise. On the soccer pitch, Swanger earned all–UAA honors for the fourth straight season.

Drake, a defender from Indianapolis, graduated with degrees in political science and philosophy. A tutor for the political science class Business in Politics and a TA for Argument in Political Science, he was also a broadcaster on the campus Internet radio station, WRUR’s “The Sting.” When Rochester traveled to Germany in May 2015, he blogged for the team on the athletics department site.

sportsSTORIED SEASONS: Academic All-Americans Lauren Bailey ’15, Emily Widra ’15, Ethan Pacheck ’15, and Matthew Mender ’16 (clockwise from upper left), helped lead their Yellowjacket teammates throughout the 2014–15 athletic seasons. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Mender, from Glens Falls, New York, earned all–Liberty League honors in football and ranked among the league’s tackle leaders. A biomedical engineering major, he has worked in an auditory neuroscience lab. He was the only football player from a New York State Division III college named to the Academic All-America team this year.

Bailey and Widra were named to CoSIDA’s at-large team, a designation that encompasses sports that do not have their own specific team, including swimming, lacrosse, field hockey, ice hockey, fencing, tennis, golf, and others.

In the pool, Bailey, a chemical engineering major from Ossining, New York, was named the Liberty League Women’s Swimmer of the Year for three straight years. In her last two seasons, she earned All-America honors in six events at the NCAA championships—four as a junior, two as a senior.

Widra, from Washington, D.C., became the first women’s rower to earn Academic All-America honors from CoSIDA. She graduated with a triple major—English literature, anthropology, and psychology. As a junior, she was named to the All-America team by the College Rowing Coaches Association. She was a member of the Undergraduate English Council, serving as its secretary. She was also a teaching assistant for anthropology.

Pacheck’s selection followed a family tradition. His brother, Adam ’14, was named last year. Ethan, a chemical engineering major from Baldwinsvile, New York, ran cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track over his career, earning a total of nine varsity letters.

This past winter, he ran on the distance medley relay team that broke the school record, posting one of Division III’s top 25 times. He earned six medals in New York state competition and three more at the ECAC championships. A member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, and a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, he was a teaching assistant for five classes—one in music, four in chemistry.

All five seniors (Swanger, Drake, Bailey, Widra, Pacheck) were elected to Phi Beta Kappa and four (Bailey, Drake, Swanger, Widra) were named Garnish Scholar-Athletes last fall. Since the first selection in 1976, a total of 92 Rochester students have earned Academic All-America honors. Thirty-seven have come in the last 10 years.

In 2014–15, Division III schools nominated 5,061 athletes to be Academic All-Americans; 466 were selected.

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

Select Citations

Every academic year, Rochester faculty members earn recognition from their colleagues around the country and the world for their research, scholarship, and teaching, as well as for their service to their disciplines and their students.

Such honors include recognition from national and international academic societies, induction into prestigious organizations, and recognition from peer institutions. Similarly, Rochester students are selected each year for recognition by some of the most competitive and prestigious honors programs available to undergraduates and graduate students in the United States.

Here’s a small sample of honorees from the 2014–15 year.

National Faculty Awards

Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education

Board of Directors

Diane Hartmann, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology; Senior Associate Dean, Graduate Medical Education

Acoustical Society of America

William and Christine Hartmann Prize in Auditory Neuroscience

Laurel Carney, Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Sloan Research Fellow

Michael Neidig, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Alzheimer’s Association

International Research Award

Feng Vankee Lin, Assistant Professor of Nursing

American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine

Fellow

Ronald Epstein, Professor of Family Medicine Psychiatry, Oncology, and Nursing; Director, Center for Communication and Disparities Research

American Academy of Neurology

Mitchell B. Max Award for Neuropathic Pain

Robert Dworkin, Professor of Anesthesiology, Neurology, and Psychiatry

American Academy of Nursing

Fellow

Mary Carey, Associate Professor of Nursing

Daryl Sharp, Professor of Clinical Nursing

American Association for Dental Research

Irwin D. Mandel Distinguished Mentoring Award

William Bowen, Professor Emeritus, Eastman Institute for Oral Health, Microbiology and Immunology, Environmental Medicine

American College of Physicians

Mastership Recognition

Robert McCann, Professor of Medicine; Chief of Medicine, Highland Hospital

American College of Surgeons

Fellow

Guilherme Christiano, Assistant Professor of Surgery and Plastic Surgery

Rachel Farkas, Assistant Professor of Surgery and Oncology

American Council of Learned Societies

Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship

John Osburg, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Collaborative Research Fellowship

Joshua Dubler, Assistant Professor of Religion and Classics

Fellowship

Supritha Rajan, Assistant Professor of English

Rachel Haidu, Associate Professor of Art and Art History

American Dance Therapy Association

Excellence in Education Award

Danielle Fraenkel, Instructor, Program of Dance and Movement

American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering

Fellow

Hani Awad, Professor of Biomedical Engineering

James McGrath, Professor of Biomedical Engineering

American Jewish Archives

Bernard and Audre Rapoport Fellow

Aaron Hughes, Philip S. Bernstein Professor in Judaic Studies in the Department of Religion and Classics

American Mathematical Society

Fellow

Allan Greenleaf, Professor of Mathematics

American Musicological Society

Einstein Award

Melina Esse, Associate Professor of Musicology

American Neurotology Society

Nicolas Torok Vestibular Award

Benjamin Crane, Associate Professor of Otolaryngology

American Political Science Association

Virginia Gray Best Book Award

Lynda Powell, Professor of Political Science

Best Paper Award

Gerald Gamm, Associate Professor of Political Science and History

Leon Weaver Award

G. Bingham Powell Jr., Marie C. Wilson and Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Political Science

Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award

Hein Goemans, Associate Professor of Political Science

American Prosthodontics Society

Golden Medallion Award

Gerald Graser, Professor of Prosthodontics, Eastman Institute for Oral Health

American Society of Bone and Mineral Research

Council Member

Laura Calvi, Professor of Medicine; Codirector, Multidiscliplinary Neuroendocrine Clinic

American Society for Clinical Investigation

Member

Jennifer Anolik, Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Rheumatology

American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers

2014 Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award

Michael Alan Anderson, Associate Professor of Musicology

American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

Fellow

Vivek Kaul, Segal-Watson Professor of Medicine; Chief, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology

American University Professors of Ophthalmology

Executive Vice President

Steven Feldon, Professor of Ophthalmology; Director, Flaum Eye Institute

Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons and the Orthopaedic Research Society

Richard A. Brand Award for Outstanding Research

Christopher Beck, Associate Professor of Orthopaedics

John Daiss, Research Associate Professor of Orthopaedics

Stephen Kates, Hansjörg Wyss Professor, Department of Orthopaedics

Kohei Nishitani, Postdoctoral Fellow in Orthopaedics

Alexander Rosenberg, Research Assistant Professor of Medicine, Allergy, and Immunology and Rheumatology; Director, Bioinformatics

Edward Schwarz, Richard and Margaret Burton Distinguished Professor in Orthopaedics; Director, Center for Musculoskeletal Research

Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors

Gold Program Directors Recognition Award

Stephen Schultz, Associate Professor of Family Medicine

Association for Women in Mathematics

Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize

Sema Salur, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel

Stephen Schottenfeld, Assistant Professor of English

Chicago Tribune

Best Suspense Novel

Joanna Scott, Roswell S. Burrows Professor of English

Chinese American Pathology Association

President-elect (2017–18)

Ping Tang, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

CIES Fulbright

Fulbright Grant to Brazil

Daniel Reichman, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Fulbright Visiting Scholar

Martin Lynch, Associate Professor of Counseling and Human Development

Conference on College Composition and Communication

Outstanding Book Award

David Bleich, Professor of English

Council of Academic Family Medicine

Chair

Thomas Campbell, William Rocktaschel Chair in Family Medicine and Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry

Cunniff-Dixon Foundation

Senior Physician Award

David Korones, Professor of Pediatrics, Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, and Hospice and Palliative Care

Dermatology Foundation

Research Career Development Award

Anna DeBenedetto, Instructor in Dermatology

Dreyfus Foundation

Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award

Daniel Weix, Associate Professor of Chemistry

Eastern Nursing Research Society

Top 20 Sustained Leaders Award

Margaret Kearney, Professor of Nursing; Vice Provost and University Dean of Graduate Studies

Elsevier

Young Investigator Award

Duje Tadin, Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Forbes

“30 Under 30 in Science”

Elika Bergelson, Research Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Gairdner Awards (Canada)

2015 Gairdner International Award

Lynne Maquat, J. Lowell Orbison Distinguished Service Alumni Professor and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics

Geological Society of America

Outstanding Publication Award

John Tarduno, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Gerontological Society of America

Fellow

Yeates Conwell, Professor of Psychiatry

Christopher Seplaki, Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences

Holocaust Education Foundation

Summer Institute Fellowship

June Hwang, Associate Professor of German

Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research

Research Fellow

Dan Lu, Assistant Professor of Economics

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

Technical Excellence Award

Greg Gdowski, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Executive Director, Center for Medical Technology and Innovation

IEEE Photonics Society

2014 Quantum Electronics Award

Robert Boyd, Professor of Optics

Jagiellonian University

Merentibus Medal

Ralph Jozefowicz, Professor of Neurology and Medicine

John A. Hartford Foundation

Center of Excellence Scholars Award

Tim Holahan, Clinical Instructor of Medicine

Sarah Howd, Instructor of Medicine

Adina Jucan, Assistant Professor of Clinical Dentistry

Allison Magnuson, Senior Instructor of Medicine

Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation

Faculty Scholar

Sarah Peyre, Associate Professor of Surgery

Kosciuszko Foundation Collegium of Eminent Scientists

Distinguished Fellow

Roman Sobolewski, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Senior Scientist, Laboratory for Laser Energetics

Kyoto University, Japan

Fulbright Award in Palliative Care/Global Health

Robert Gramling, Associate Professor of Family Medicine

Lichtenberg Kolleg, University of Göttingen

Senior Research Fellowship

Dorinda Outram, Franklin W. and Gladys I. Clark Professor of History

Machinima Expo

Grand Prize

Sarah Higley, Professor of English

Marketing Science Institute

Young Scholar

Mitch Lovett, Assistant Professor of Marketing

Medieval Academy

2015 Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies

Russell Peck, John H. Deane Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and Poetry

Fellow

Richard Kaeuper, Professor of History

Myotonic Dystrophy Foundation

Outstanding Research Achievement Award

Richard Moxley, Helen Aresty Fine and Irving Fine Professor in Neurology

Charles Thornton, Saunders Family Distinguished Professor in Neuromuscular Research, Department of Neurology

National Academies of Practice

Distinguished Practitioner and Fellow

Tobie Olsan, Professor of Clinical Nursing

National Academy of Sciences

U.S. Kavli Frontiers of Sciences Fellow

John Kessler, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

National Institutes of Health

Early Independence Award

Elika Bergelson, Research Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

NIH Director’s New Innovators Award

Michelle Janelsins-Benton, Assistant Professor of Surgery

National Science Foundation

Faculty Early Career Development Award

Antonio Badolato, Assistant Professor of Physics

Danielle Benoit, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering

Michael Neidig, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

CRII (Pre-CAREER) Award

Ehsan Hoque, Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies

Fellow

Harry Reis, Professor of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology

North American Chinese Clinical Chemists Association

President

Victoria Zhang, Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Novartis

Early Career Award in Organic Chemistry

Daniel Weix, Associate Professor of Chemistry

Optical Society of America

Esther Hoffman Beller Medal

Govind Agrawal, Dr. James C. Wyant Professor in Optics

Fellow

Christophe Dorrer, Senior Scientist, Laboratory for Laser Energetics

John Howell, Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Todd Krauss, Professor of Chemistry

2014 Nick Holonyak Jr. Award

Ching Tang, Professor of Chemical Engineering

RE:Gender (National Council for Research on Women)

Community Innovations Fellowship

Angela Clark-Taylor, Program Manager, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies

St. Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies

Donald Bullough Fellow

Richard Kaeuper, Professor of History

Simons Foundation

Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics

Eric Blackman, Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Fellowship

Allan Greenleaf, Professor of Mathematics

Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences

Ben Hayden, Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine

Hilary E. C. Millar Award for Innovative Approaches to Adolescent Health Care

Suzanne Piotrowski, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine; Director, Teen Health and Success Partnership

Fellow

Kim Urbach, Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing; Manager, School-Based Health Centers Program

Society of Behavioral Medicine

Citation Award

Michelle Janelsins-Benton, Assistant Professor of Surgery

Society of Breast Imaging

Fellow

Avice O’Connell, Professor of Clinical Imaging Sciences; Director, Women’s Imaging

Society for Experimental Social Psychology

Member

Jeremy Jamieson, Assistant Professor of Clinical and Social Sciences

Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco

President

Deborah Ossip, Professor of Public Health Sciences and Oncology

Society of Toxicology

2014 Special Recognition Award, 2015 Merit Award

Gunter Oberdörster, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Medicine

Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Distinguished Scholar Award

Edward Deci, Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences, Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology

Templeton Foundation

Fellowship

Ben Hayden, Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Thomson Reuters

Citation Laureate

Stephen Jacobs, Professor of Optics; Senior Scientist, Laboratory for Laser Energetics

University of California San Francisco

150th Anniversary Alumni Excellence Award

Margaret Kearney, Professor of Nursing; Vice Provost and University Dean of Graduate Studies

University of KwaZulu-Natal

Honorary Professor

John Tarduno, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

University Teaching Awards

Goergen Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Julie Bentley, Associate Professor of Optics

Jeffrey Tucker, Associate Professor of English

Jonathan Pakianathan, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Eisenhart Award For Excellence In Teaching

Eastman School of Music (2013–14)

Jonathan Baldo Professor of English

(2014–15)

Steven Daigle Professor of Opera

Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

William FitzPatrick, Gideon Webster Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy

G. Graydon ’58 and Jane W. Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching Excellence

Nickolas Vamivakas, Assistant Professor of Optics and Physics

Lifetime Achievement Award in Graduate Education

Ralph Locke, Professor of Musicology

William H. Riker University Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching

Randall Stone, Professor of Political Science

National Student Awards

Acoustical Society of America

Robert W. Young Award for Undergraduate Student Research in Acoustics

Jonathan Macoskey ’15, Pittsburgh; Biomedical Engineering

Academic All-American Honors

CoSIDA Capital One Academic All-America Team

Lauren Bailey ’15, Ossining, N.Y.; Chemical Engineering, Swimming (First Team)

Griffin Drake ’15, Indianapolis; Political Science and Philosophy, Soccer (Third Team)

Matt Mender ’16, Glens Falls, N.Y.; Biomedical Engineering, Football (Second Team)

Alex Swanger ’15, Penfield, N.Y.; Financial Economics, Soccer (Second Team)

Emily Widra ’15 Washington, D.C.; English, Anthropology, and Psychology,, Rowing (Third Team)

All-American Honors

Lauren Bailey ’15, Ossining, N.Y.; Chemical Engineering, Swimming (Honorable Mention)

Neil Cordell ’16, York, United Kingdom; Political Science, Squash (Second Team)

Boubacar Diallo ’16, Bignona, Senegal; Mechanical Engineering, Track and Field

Tomotaka Endo ’18, Kawasaki, Japan; Molecular Genetics, Squash (Second Team)

Brittany Grage ’15, Pittsford, N.Y.; Business, Softball (First Team)

Ryosei Kobayashi ’17, Yokohama, Japan; Business, Squash (First Team)

Tara Lamberti ’16, Penfield, N.Y.; Psychology, Field Hockey (Second Team)

Alexandra Leslie ’18, Lancaster, Pa.; Psychology, Basketball (Honorable Mention)

Vicky Luan ’16, Surrey, Canada; Chemistry, Swimming (Honorable Mention)

Michelle Relin ’16, Lititz, Pa.; Optics, Field Hockey (Second Team)

Emily Simon ’17, Olean, N.Y.; Biology, Swimming (Honorable Mention)

Khamai Simpson ’17, Cutler Bay, Fla.; Health, Behavior, and Society, Swimming, (Honorable Mention)

Mario Yanez Tapia ’17, Aguascalientes, Mexico; Business, Squash (First Team)

American Brain Tumor Association

Young Investigators Award

Michael Feldman, Fellow, School of Medicine and Dentistry

American Educational Studies Association

Taylor and Francis Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award

Tomás Boatwright, Doctoral Student, Warner School of Education

American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Foundation

2015 Morton Gould Young Composer Award

Erin Graham ’17, Lewisburg, Pa.; Composition and Percussion, Eastman School of Music

Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Doctoral Student, Composition, Eastman School of Music

Amgen Scholars Program

Scholar

Justin Delafontaine ’16, Rye Brook, N.Y.; Biomedical Engineering

Arthur Poister National Organ Scholarship Competition

First Prize

Brian Glikes, Doctoral Student, Organ, Eastman School of Music

Association for the Study of Higher Education

Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award

Amalia Dache-Gerbino, Doctoral Student, Warner School of Education

Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship

Nathalia Botero ’16, Spring Hill, Fla.; Molecular Genetics

Eric Chen ’16, Hackensack, N.J.; Molecular Genetics

Claude Galette ’16, Eagle Lake, Fla.; Psychology

Angel Huang ’16, Fresh Meadows, N.Y.; Psychology

Charlotte Humes ’16, Bardstown, Ky.; Mathematics

Jenna Register ’16, Buffalo; Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Matthew Sisto ’16, Rochester; History and Japanese

Victoria Stepanova ’15, Brooklyn; Health, Behavior, and Society

Cinthia E. Welch ’15, Fairport, N.Y.; Japanese and Health, Behavior, and Society

Boren Scholarship

Christian Wooddell ’17, Farmington, Mo.; Anthropology

Critical Language Scholarship

Aaron Schaffer ’16, Rochester; International Relations

DAAD-RISE Scholarship

Luke Daily ’16, Lake Grove, N.Y.; Biomedical Engineering

Claire Kaiser ’17, Lake Forest Park, Wash.; Biomedical Engineering

Tianyi (Linda) Liu ’16, Haikou, China; Mechanical Engineering

Zhaoyu Nie ’17, Wuhan, China; Optics

Nathaniel Potrepka ’17, Silver Spring, Md.; Computer Science and Audio and Music Engineering

Zhenzhi (Jane) Xia ’16, Wuxi, China; Optical Engineering

So Han Florence Yip ’17, Hong Kong, China; Mechanical Engineering

DownBeat Student Music Awards

Undergraduate College Original Composition, Small Ensemble

Garret Reynolds ’16, Moorpark, Calif.; Jazz Trumpet, Eastman School of Music

Undergraduate College Outstanding Arrangement

Brendan Lanighan ’15, Williamsville, N.Y., Jazz Trombone and Music Education, Eastman School of Music

Graduate College Outstanding Ensemble Arrangement

Gabe Condon, Graduate Student, Jazz Writing, Eastman School of Music

Julian Tanaka, Graduate Student, Jazz Writing, Eastman School of Music

Empire State Competition

First Prize Collegiate Category

Tim Padget ’17, St. Louis; Percussion, Eastman School of Music

Goldwater Scholarship

Brian McDonald ’16, Carmel, Ind.; Mathematics

Steven Torrisi ’16, Tivoli, N.Y.; Physics and Mathematics

Great Lakes Guitar Festival and Competition

First Prize

Austin Wahl ’15, Minneapolis; Guitar, Eastman School of Music

Second Prize

Charles Pfeifer ’16, North Granby, Conn.; Guitar, Eastman School of Music

Grieg Festival Young Artist Competition

First Prize

Daniel Baer, Doctoral Student, Piano, Eastman School of Music

Handel Society

Handel Research Prize

Regina Compton, Doctoral Student, Musicology, Eastman School of Music

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Janelia Research Fellows Program

Benjamin Cocanougher, Fellow, School of Medicine, and Dentistry

IEEE Power and Energy Society

Astronaut Scholarship Foundation Award

William Green ’16, Baiting Hollow, N.Y.; Mechanical Engineering

International Saxophone Symposium and Competition

First Prize

Katherine Weintraub, Doctoral Student, Saxophone, Eastman School of Music

MedTech Association

Engineering World Health Summer Institute Scholarship

Lisa Benison Graduate Student, Biomedical Engineering

NASA

Scholarship Plus Initiative Award

Aaron Lim ’17, Jamesville, N.Y.; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Jeremy Warner ’15, Riverhead, N.Y.; Electrical and Computer Engineering

National Association of Women’s Studies

Cochair of the Mentoring Project

Angela Clark-Taylor, Doctoral Student, Warner School of Education

National Trumpet Competition

First Place, Graduate Division

Steven Felix, Graduate Student, Trumpet, Eastman School of Music

New York Business Plan Competition

Finalists

Seth Reining ’15 (MS) Graduate Student, Technical Entrepreneurship and Management

Anthony Yee ’15 (MS), Doctoral Student, Optics

Xiangzhi Yu, Doctoral Student, Mechanical Engineering

Yang Zhao, Doctoral Student, Optics

Brian Ayers, Graduate Student, Simon Business School

Eryn Fennig, Doctoral Student, Optics

Sarah Walters ’15 (MS), Doctoral Student, Optics

North Atlantic Region Association for Counselor Education and Supervision

Incoming Chair, Research Interest Network

Atiya Smith, Doctoral Student, Warner School of Education

2014 Emerging Leaders Fellow

Hennessey Lustica, Doctoral Student, Warner School of Education

Princeton in Asia

Fellow

Ben Van Son, Graduate Student, Warner School of Education

SMART (Science, Mathematics, and Research Transformation) Scholarship

Ian Gabalski ’16, Webster, N.Y.; Physics

Sydney Australia International Organ Competition

First Prize

Thomas Gaynor, Doctoral Student, Organ, Eastman School of Music

Vandoren Emerging Artist Competition

First Prize

Tyler Wiessner ’15, Ellicott City, Md.; Saxophone and Music Education, Eastman School of Music

West Chester International Organ Competition

First Place

Käthe Wright Kaufman ’16, Evanston, Ill.; Applied Music, Eastman School of Music

Whitaker International Fellowship

Michael Silverstein ’15, Sharon, Mass.; Biomedical Engineering

Namita Sarraf ’15, Pittsford, N.Y.; Biomedical Engineering

Wilson Center Guitar Competition

First Place

Gabriel Condon, Graduate Student, Jazz Guitar, Eastman School of Music

World Health Organization

Research Fellowship Program

Stacy Salerno, Fellow, School of Medicine and Dentistry

Student Teaching Awards

2015 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student

Stephen Burger, Doctoral Student, English

Esteban Buz, Doctoral Student, Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Matthew Johnson, Doctoral Student, Biology

Aaron James, Doctoral Student, Eastman School of Music

Dev Ashish Khaitan, Doctoral Student, Physics

Patrick Papadopulos, Doctoral Student, Mathematics

Brian Sheldon, Doctoral Student, Chemistry

Grayson Sipe, Doctoral Student, Neuroscience

Michael Skibo, Doctoral Student, Developmental Psychology

David Slichter, Doctoral Student, Economics

U.S. PRESIDENTIAL AWARDS

Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring

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Beth Olivares, dean for diversity initiatives in Arts, Sciences & Engineering, was selected to receive a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.

Olivares, who joined the Rochester staff in 1994 and is also director of the David T. Kearns Center for Leadership and Diversity and a faculty development and diversity officer, received the award in June at a ceremony at the White House. She was one of 14 educators, along with an organization, selected for the award, which was presented “to recognize the crucial role that mentoring plays in the academic and personal development of students studying science and engineering—particularly those who belong to groups that are underrepresented in these fields.”

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‘Champions of Change’

Medical Center neurologist Ray Dorsey (top) and Warner School of Education graduate student Anibal Soler Jr. (bottom) were honored at the White House as “Champions of Change” for working to improve the lives of the people they serve.

Dorsey, the David M. Levy Professor in Neurology, was recognized as a leading advocate for better research programs and treatments for Parkinson’s disease. Soler, the principal of East High School in Rochester, was honored for helping to lead efforts to improve the academic success of the school’s students. In July, the University and the Warner School began serving as the superintendent of East High. The honorees are chosen through a presidential program designed to recognize ordinary Americans who, according to the White House, “are doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

SPECIAL SECTION

American Psychological Association

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Susan McDaniel, the Dr. Laurie Sands Distinguished Professor of Families and Health and associate chair of the Department of Family Medicine, was elected the 2016 president of the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization representing psychology in the United States.

A family psychologist, she has spent much of her career working to expand integrative care at UR Medicine. As director of the Institute for the Family, she oversees faculty and fellows working in epilepsy, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, family medicine, geriatrics, and surgery. Residents in those areas learn to address mental health issues as they treat their patients’ physical ailments, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, infertility, and others.

Over the course of 2015, McDaniel has been laying the groundwork for initiatives that she plans to undertake as APA president. Her main focus will be furthering the integration of psychology into areas of health care, eliminating the distinction between mental and physical care.

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National Women’s Hall of Fame

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Barbara Iglewski, professor emeritus in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, was selected for induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, an honor that puts her alongside women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, former first lady Betty Ford, and founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Nancy Brinker.

One of 10 inductees named for 2015, Iglewski was selected for her research on how bacteria cause infections. Her laboratory was the first to discover that bacteria use a communication system—a type of chemical language—to coordinate attacks on human cells and initiate disease. Her work launched an entire field of study into how the system works in many types of bacteria. Several drugs designed to interrupt that communication process and prevent infection are being developed based on her work.

The National Women’s Hall of Fame is the nation’s oldest organization dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the achievements of American women. It was created in 1969 by a group of community members in Seneca Falls, New York, considered the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement and where the first-known women’s rights convention was held in 1848.

Every two years, the hall honors a group of women nominated by the public and chosen by a national panel of experts. This year’s induction ceremony will take place October 3.

Loretta Ford, founding dean of the School of Nursing, was inducted into the hall in 2011, and Judith Pipher, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy, was inducted in 2007.

SPECIAL SECTION

American Association for the Advancement of Science

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Research led by Maiken Nedergaard, the Frank P. Smith Professor of Neurosurgery, received one of the top awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Nedergaard, the codirector of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine, was recognized with the association’s Newcomb Cleveland Prize for a study that has transformed scientists’ understanding of the brain and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Titled “Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain,” the study appeared in the October 2013 edition of the journal Science.

Building on earlier work by researchers at the Medical Center that showed the brain possesses its own unique waste-removal system, dubbed the glymphatic system, the 2013 paper reported that the glymphatic system is highly active during sleep, clearing away toxins responsible for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders. The research may explain the biological purpose of sleep by showing that the brain must devote its finite energy to either a state of wakefulness, during which it is alert and processing information, or to a state of sleep, during which it is actively clearing waste.

The association’s oldest honor, the prize annually recognizes the author or authors of an outstanding paper published in Science.

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Grammy Award

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Paul O’Dette, professor of lute at the Eastman School of Music, won a Grammy Award as a conductor for his work on the album Charpentier: La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers, which was named Best Opera Recording at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards this year.

O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, who together serve as artistic directors of the Boston Early Music Festival, conducted the album, which also features Christel Thielmann, assistant professor of conducting, Avi Stein ’97E, and Zachary Wilder ’06E. It was the second Grammy for O’Dette, who won in 1996.

Charpentier: La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers was also named an Editor’s Choice by Gramophone magazine and was chosen as a recording of the month by Musicweb International. O’Dette and Thielmann also won the 2015 Thomas Binkley Award from Early Music America, a national, member-based organization for early music.

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Fulbright Awards

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Five students will pursue advanced studies, conduct research, and teach English in host countries around the world after receiving grants from the highly competitive Fulbright international educational exchange program. They were among about 1,900 American university and college students who applied under the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.

Jacek (Jack) Blaszkiewicz, a doctoral student in musicology at the Eastman School of Music, received a grant to study in France, while Lauren Kee ’15, an economics major from Newton Center, Massachusetts, was awarded a grant to conduct research on higher education in the Philippines.

Melissa Zgouridi ’15 (T5), an applied music major at Eastman and a Take Five Scholar from Fullerton, California, received an arts study grant to pursue her voice studies and teach English in Austria.

Benjamin Landwersiek ’15, a double major in Spanish and neuroscience from Phoenix, New York, was selected for an English teaching assistantship (ETA) grant to teach in Spain, and Samantha Whalen ’15, an anthropology major from Wilton, New York, received a grant to teach in Malaysia.

A sixth student, Kathryn (Kaight) Conheady ’15, a history major from Rochester, was offered a Fulbright ETA to Germany, but she declined it to participate in a separate program in Austria.

SPECIAL SECTION

Music Teachers National Association

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The East End Saxophone Quartet—an Eastman School of Music ensemble featuring graduate students Matthew Amedio, Myles Boothroyd, Timothy Harris, and Jonathan Wintringham—won first prize in the chamber music winds category at the annual conference of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA). Members of the studio of Chien-Kwan Lin ’07E (DMA), associate professor of saxophone, the ensemble also won first prize at the 30th Annual Competition for Emerging Professional Ensembles, an annual competition sponsored by Chamber Music Yellow Springs.

Separately, Boothroyd also won first prize in the woodwinds category at MTNA’s national competition.

SPECIAL SECTION

National Science Foundation

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Four PhD students received National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, a federally sponsored program that provides up to three years of support for students pursing doctoral or research-based master’s degrees. Of the more than 16,500 applicants, only 2,000 were awarded fellowships.

This year’s recipients were Keywan Johnson and Tessa Woodruff, both studying for their PhDs in the Department of Chemistry. Johnson completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Delaware, and Woodruff completed hers at Miami University. Emily Greenwood, a PhD student in psychology, received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago, and Evan Ranken, a doctoral student in physics, received his bachelor’s degree at Colorado College.

SPECIAL SECTION

Davis Project for Peace

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A team of Rochester students will undertake a project to explore educational alternatives for children who are forced to work as beggars in Senegal. The effort is part of a highly competitive national program to promote peace, resolve conflicts, and build connections across cultures. Funded through Davis Projects for Peace, a program created by philanthropist Kathryn W. Davis that provides support for student-initiated projects that advance the cause of peace, the team is led by Rose Mbaye ’16 (far right), a biomedical engineering major from Dakar, Senegal.

The group’s project, titled “New Beginnings for Child Beggars: Fostering Understanding and Stopping Abuse,” was selected by a campus committee as the University’s primary submission to the national competition. Joining Mbaye will be (left to right) Zanga Ben Ouattara ’16, a computer science major from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Mame Coumba Mbodji ’17, a business major also from Dakar; and Eyram Adedze ’17, an economics and psychology major from Accra, Ghana.

Our Town

College Town brings together the University and the community in a newly vibrant neighborhood.

By Kathleen McGarvey

collegetownOUT ON THE TOWN: College Town has a deliberately urban feel, with wide sidewalks and large storefront windows. The development brings students and faculty into the Mt. Hope Avenue area in greater numbers and was designed to provide desired amenities to the surrounding neighborhood. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

In the 1950s, there was a motel: the Towne House Motor Inn. It opened in 1958, one of the first motels in Rochester. Nearby on Mt. Hope Avenue stood a Wegmans grocery store from the same era. The store came down in 2003, and two years ago, demolition of the Towne House—purchased by the University in 1982 and used for offices and student housing—began.

Today in their place is a brand-new development, College Town, which celebrated the grand opening of its retail establishments in April.

“I was impressed when the buildings started taking shape, to go to the site and see how large it was,” says Ronald Paprocki ’69, ’86S (MBA), senior vice president for administration and finance. He has overseen the project, helping shepherd it from an idea in the University’s Campus Master Plan to a brick-and-mortar reality.

College Town is extensive—a mixed-use development on more than 14 acres of land owned by the University between Elmwood Avenue and Crittenden Boulevard. Anchored by a Barnes & Noble bookstore on the corner of Elmwood and Mt. Hope avenues, it also features a Hilton Garden Inn Hotel, restaurants, coffee shops, a bakery that will deliver warm cookies to students studying into the wee hours, a yoga studio, a grocery store, other shops, a parking garage, and 152 apartments. The project involves nearly one million square feet of space—space that recently had been largely surface parking lots.

“There’s so much more there now than there was before,” says Dan Hurley, president of the Upper Mt. Hope Neighborhood Association. “We’re excited to connect with more people, and for more people to move here and get involved.”

The project “took a largely underutilized site and brought vibrancy back to the neighborhood,” says Matthew McCarthy, senior economic development specialist in the City of Rochester’s Department of Neighborhood and Business Development.

Such efforts are a strategically important aspect of the University’s plans for the future. In “The Next Level,” a white paper released earlier this year, President and CEO Joel Seligman outlines four major areas that the University will make priorities for the next five years. One of those is revitalization of the community. “The stronger our community is, the stronger the University will be,” Seligman wrote, noting that while Rochester’s suburbs are generally doing well, the city struggles with the highest rate of extreme poverty of any comparably sized city in the country, and the city’s school district “perennially has graduation rates below 50 percent.” The University works through a wide range of programs—of which the College Town project is just one piece—to help strengthen the community.

In building the development, the University is also taking part in a larger movement of urban universities looking to help shape the environments around them and to work in partnership with their neighbors in creating spaces everyone can enjoy.

“There’s a trend to create developments of this sort for purposes of economic development, neighborhood stabilization, and neighborhood enhancement,” Paprocki says. “Vibrant neighborhoods are important for universities, especially those in urban areas.”

collegetownCHANGING TIMES: Once home to the Towne House motor lodge, the College Town location was ripe for reinvention. Neighborhood groups and the City of Rochester joined the University in planning the development, which offers retail, restaurants, apartments, a hotel, the University bookstore, and other attractions. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The University of Pennsylvania has emerged as a model for such efforts. Shortly after Seligman’s appointment as president, a University group organized by the Office of Government and Community Relations visited Philadelphia to see what Penn had done. The delegation, which included representatives from the City of Rochester and Monroe County, was just one set of visitors among more than 100—representing governors, mayors, think tanks, and universities such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago—to make the trip since 2000.

Penn’s actions were spurred by tragedy: the 1994 robbery and murder of a graduate student outside his apartment. Incidents of armed robberies in the neighborhood surrounding the campus soared in the mid ’90s. What happened in 1994 was a “watershed moment” that allowed Penn to catalyze its community to change, says Craig Carnaroli, executive vice president of the university. Penn’s president at the time, Judith Rodin, and the institution’s trustees made transforming the neighborhood a top priority.

“The model of what we did is a very holistic approach and strategy,” Carnaroli says. “We started with the clean-and-safe model, but with elements around housing, public education, infill and amenities, retail and support. And then, finally, the fifth leg: economic inclusion—employment opportunities for local residents. It’s all of those together that has worked over time.”

Because businesses were leery of moving into the area, Penn put its own money behind the effort—against the protests of some who insisted that the funds should be reserved for the university’s core academic mission. “That was a paradigm shift in how the institution saw itself,” says Anthony Sorrentino, executive director of Carnaroli’s office. Today the developments are self-sustaining, crime is down dramatically, and retailers are eager to open stores in the university’s neighborhood.

While the College Town project did not emerge in response to a social context like that which Penn faced, in some respects the process of reinvention was similar. Smoothing the path for Rochester was a vision, largely shared by the University, the city, and neighborhood groups, that emerged in the 1990s. Community members who became actively involved in the revitalization of the area at that time developed a concept called the Strong Neighborhood Plan.

By 2008, representatives from the neighborhood, the University, and the City of Rochester were actively engaged in developing a more comprehensive plan. The city convened a group known as the Mount Hope Task Force, which brought together business people, community members, and city and University leaders to reimagine the area.

Out of that process, the city agreed to rezone the district encompassing what is now College Town, paving the way for several infrastructure improvements. In a plan approved by the Board of Trustees in 2008, the University outlined the goal of developing the area in a way that would provide students, faculty, staff, and visitors with a broader set of amenities and that would establish stronger ties with the surrounding community.

“There was a lot of enthusiasm on the part of the Mt. Hope area. Residents and businesses were really eager to see something like this happen,” Paprocki says. “That’s not always the case. We were very fortunate to have the city facilitate this and have very supportive neighborhood groups, both residents and businesses.”

Added to the city’s interest was support from federal, state, and county agencies and elected officials. Altogether, more than $57 million in publicly financed resources—from grants to tax credits to infrastructure improvements—went into the overall initiative. That broad support was critical, says Josh Farrelman, associate vice president for government and community relations, because each level of government and community engagement helped enhance the support provided from other sources.

For example, the City of Rochester pitched in its own financial support to reconstruct stretches of Mt. Hope and Elmwood avenues, but did so in a way that complemented the broader ideas for College Town. As part of an agreement with Fairmount Properties of Cleveland, Ohio, which had experience in putting together complex financing and public-private partnerships, a federally sponsored loan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the City of Rochester and support from a Monroe County economic development agency helped provide the necessary financing. That was important because while the project is located on University-owned land, it does not involve University financing.

And the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council, an initiative launched by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also recognized the project early on, as did federal initiatives to improve public and alternative transportation and to support the establishment of a grocery store in the complex.

“It was a nice marriage of all the stakeholders,” Farrelman says. “Everybody worked together on this for what is a real signature development for Rochester.”

collegetownCROSSROADS: College Town has proven attractive to retailers with its location at the busy intersection of Mt. Hope and Elmwood avenues. A new grocery store, Constantino’s (above), opened this spring. Convenient for University employees, a grocery store was a priority for representatives from neighborhood groups. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

But while the city moved ahead with the improved Mt. Hope Avenue, the economic downturn of 2008 led the University to shelve its plans temporarily. By 2010, “we decided that things were improving enough—let’s give it a try. Let’s see if there’s interest,” Paprocki says. “We had objectives we wanted to fulfill, but we wanted the market to tell us what was feasible.

“There were certain things we desired, like a hotel with conference facilities, retail, restaurants, places where students could go. The neighborhood no longer had a grocery store, and we said that would be very beneficial. So we threw those ideas out, but we let the developers come back with a vision.”

As College Town began to take shape, businesses on the other side of the road—on land not owned by the University, but zoned as part of the College Town area—took notice, and new buildings and businesses have sprouted up there as well.

“What we wanted to do was add vibrancy to our surrounding neighborhoods, and I think College Town will do that,” says Paprocki. In recognition of his efforts in bringing College Town into being, the space in front of the bookstore is named Paprocki Plaza.

The end result is the kind of development that the community had in mind, “and that was because they got us involved,” says Richard Rowe, owner of Rowe Photo, Audio, and Video. He’s the founder of the Mt. Hope Business Association and has played an active role in the development process, including serving on the original Mount Hope Task Force. The group became an important instrument in crafting College Town’s plans, bringing together representatives from the city, neighborhood groups, and the University to hash out issues face to face.

It was a “hard process, but we had all the key stakeholders involved. That is the key, and we were very fortunate that we had a great team,” says current Mt. Hope Business Association president Melanie Warren. “At times it was contentious, but we always could come back and compromise and talk about it.”

She’s been in the neighborhood for 40 years. Now, she says, there’s a new energy, and it’s contagious. “People are thinking about painting, about new facades,” she says.

And with the creation of College Town, the thinking goes, students from the River Campus will have a greater presence on Mt. Hope, as will medical and nursing students and hospital visitors.

“I was really excited for it as an undergrad. As a medical student, I’m even closer than most of the undergrads,” says Leah Dauphin ’13, who completed her second year in the School of Medicine and Dentistry this year. She says she’d like to live in one of the apartments, adding that several members of her class are already moving in.

One notable issue for River Campus students is the relocation of the campus bookstore from the Frederick Douglass Building, beside Wilson Commons, to College Town. “In general students were confused and worried it would be inconvenient, but now that it’s set up and looks so great, they feel like they have something they were missing,” says Antoinette Esce ’15, who was last year’s president of the Students’ Association in the College. The store offers a textbook delivery service to campus, and the new location means that Douglass can change for the better, too.

collegetownROCHESTER PRIDE: Students Chris Marsh ’15, Joe Bailey ’15, and Som Liengtiraphan ’17 tour the Barnes & Noble Bookstore at College Town, where the bookstores for the River Campus and the School of Medicine and Dentistry have relocated. A shuttle bus makes frequent loops to College Town, and the bookstore offers a textbook delivery service. (Photo: Brandon Vick)

“People saw this as an opportunity to do something interesting with Douglass. So there’s a major renovation that we’re planning: all the dining areas and some student spaces as well,” says Paprocki. The building will also house the Paul J. Burgett Intercultural Center.

Because College Town is not adjacent to the River Campus, transportation for undergraduates is important, Esce says. A shuttle bus runs regularly between campus and College Town, and a new bike lane will also be created to foster quick travel.

“College Town is still a work in progress. It’s exciting to see each store open up, and to see it all coming to fruition after seeing it on paper for so long,” says Warren. She calls Constantino’s Market, a grocery store that opened in April as part of the development, the “crowning jewel” for neighbors, who had felt the lack of a grocery for more than a decade.

The city’s McCarthy says that College Town “gives an urban alternative to the malls” and is “a destination point to attract people outside the area.” A director of promotion and events has been hired to oversee a farmers market, seasonal celebrations, musical performances, family events, and other happenings.

The development not only serves as a gateway to the University, giving the institution a greater visibility than it has had in the adjoining neighborhood, but also serves as a showcase for the city and the region.

One immediate effect, Paprocki says, will be seen in recruitment and retention of students and faculty. That’s something Penn has noted as well, according to Carnaroli. “It just changed the dynamic where you would automatically show [prospective faculty] the suburbs,” he says. “Now people are more attuned to being around the campus.”

Rowe credits the University with looking beyond the confines of the University and acting on a vision for the larger area. “They understand that whatever happens in the community directly affects their facilities, their employees, their patients, their students, their educators, and the value of their property,” he says. “I’ve been here 45 years—and why I’m so excited and encouraged after 45 years is I see that we’ve only really scratched the potential of what the businesses, the University, and the residents can do together.”

‘With High Distinction’

Ronald Paprocki’s life at Rochester

paprockiMAN ABOUT TOWN: College Town caps Paprocki’s nearly 50-year career at Rochester, where he has looked after the finances and many facilities operations. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

When Ronald Paprocki ’69, ’86S (MBA) came to the University as an undergraduate in 1966, elm trees still lined Eastman Quadrangle. When they were blighted by Dutch elm disease, the University planted young oak trees in their place.

“The caliper was only about this big—” Paprocki says, extending his hands about eight inches. Today, the trees are broad-trunked and wide-canopied.

“I’ve watched the oak trees mature over the years, as I’ve matured over the years.”

When Paprocki retires in January, he will put the final punctuation on a half-century at Rochester and a career that has spanned the administrations of five Rochester presidents.

He earned his bachelor’s degree with high distinction from the University in 1969, and in 1986, an MBA from the Simon Business School. He began his career at the University just after graduation, serving in academic support and counseling positions at the College, and later advancing to budgeting and planning work.

“I’ve seen the University from all these different perspectives,” he says. “From the student perspective, the junior staff perspective, the faculty perspective, and the senior administrator perspective.”

He calls the time he spent working in the dean’s office of the College “one of the most rewarding parts of my career here.” There, he worked with “Bill Riker, Gene Genovese, Tony Hecht—some of the legends of the University. I knew and dealt with a lot of the giants. For a young person growing up in that environment, that was very formative.”

Paprocki joined the central administration in 1986 and was named the University’s vice president for budgets and financial planning in 1992. Six years later, he became senior vice president for financial affairs and planning. In 2000, he was named senior vice president for administration and finance and chief financial officer for the University.

“Ron has been a remarkable partner for the schools and their faculties,” says Peter Lennie, provost and the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences & Engineering. “His early career in the College equipped him with an unusually deep understanding of the academic enterprise and the needs of the faculty and students, and we have benefitted enormously from this and his many powerful insights about how to make the University a better place for all of us.”

As CFO during the recession in 2008, Paprocki effectively navigated the University through the challenging financial crisis with his strategic planning and guidance, as well as his fiscal discipline. In part due to his financial leadership during the recession, the University was able to avoid the disruption and steep layoffs seen at some peer institutions. In 2008, the Rochester Business Journal named him its firstever Financial Executive of the Year for large nonprofit organizations in the Rochester area.

In the same year, Paprocki presented the University’s Campus Master Plan to provide a 20-year framework for the development of lands and facilities, specifically designed to meet the pattern of University growth and the need for increased classroom, meeting, office, research, residential, and clinical spaces.

Paprocki has always emphasized the need for a sustainable and reliable utility infrastructure for the University’s campuses. As part of that commitment, he supported a chilled water plant expansion and upgrade of 8,000 tons of chilling capacity—an improvement of fundamental importance to a utility system supporting health care, research, education, and residential life activities.

“Most people think of me as the money guy,” Paprocki says, but “some of the most important things that I do really aren’t related to finances. They’re related to maintaining a safe environment and continuity of operations.” He’s been concerned with student, faculty, and staff safety, from overseeing the public safety department to installing sprinklers in all of the residence halls.

Most recently, Paprocki and his team were principal players in negotiating every aspect of the College Town development agreement and the ground lease for the University’s land, including careful attention to financing, legal requirements, the design plan and overall construction details, and environmental issues. He helped establish multiple key partnerships at the city, state, and federal levels, and helped ensure that Mt. Hope community members and business leaders were engaged at every phase of the development.

Pursuing agreement has been a central part of Paprocki’s work. “Very generally speaking, this institution isn’t a hierarchical institution,” he says. “In our decentralized way of managing things, we’re very consensus driven. You really need to bring a lot of people along before you make a final decision. It’s something that adds a certain flavor to the work we do.”

In May 2013, Paprocki was honored at the College Town groundbreaking for the role he played in making the project a reality. At the groundbreaking, President and CEO Joel Seligman—who has called Paprocki “an anchor of our University”—announced on behalf of the Board of Trustees that a new plaza within College Town would be named for Paprocki. Last October, Paprocki Plaza was dedicated at the crossroads of College Town with a plaque placed outside of the Barnes & Noble bookstore.

Paprocki was also instrumental in the development of Brooks Crossing, a hotel, retail, business center, and student residential development joined to the University by a footbridge over the Genesee River. Paprocki initiated ways to leverage the University’s employee and student populations to be an anchor tenant, resulting in the development of more than $63 million in housing, hotel, office, and retail space.

He introduced the University Home Ownership Incentive Program, giving employees an added incentive for living in the historic 19th Ward and Plymouth Exchange city neighborhoods. In 2008, the University teamed up with the City of Rochester and several banks and credit unions to offer regular full-time and part-time faculty and staff mortgage grants toward the purchase of a primary residence in the city neighborhoods closest to the River Campus and the Medical Center. Since the program’s founding, $972,000 in financial incentives have helped University employees become home owners.

In his well-deserved retirement, Paprocki looks forward to spending time with his family, including his four grandchildren, and tending to the Vermont home he and his wife, Cathy, have owned for several years.

But when he steps down, Paprocki won’t really be leaving Rochester behind; he and the University are too intertwined for that. He says that what he’ll miss most is “being on all the time—this is a 24-hour-a-day job—and being engaged in almost every part of the University. This hasn’t just been the job—it’s been, essentially, my life. I’ve grown up in this environment.”

It’s a fact for which he can see the most tangible evidence every time he stands in the shade cast by the tall trees on Eastman Quad.

—Kathleen McGarvey

Additional reporting by Sara Miller.

An Active Year

Is student activism on the rise?

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

activism_introFLEXING THEIR MUSCLES: Rochester students join local fast-food workers and other members of the Greater Rochester community on a “Fight for $15” march from the Eastman Quadrangle to College Town. (Photo: Annette Dragon)

A blogger for The Nation pointed to “a national youth groundswell” on college campuses in the past year. A writer for The Atlantic declared a “renaissance of student activism.”

Whether or not colleges are entering a new era of student political engagement is difficult to say. But it’s been an active year.

It was hard to miss the campus protests and vigils in the aftermath of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of law enforcement.

Or the image of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, lugging her mattress around in a performance piece called “Carry That Weight”—a metaphorical display of the burden borne by sexual assault survivors, which inspired “solidarity carries” around the nation.

These were only among the most visible and widespread initiatives. If you consider student activism as collective efforts by college students to foster social change, then activists have traditionally worked on behalf of a wide array of causes, from the local to the global.

Activists are rarely large in number on any campus, but they don’t have to be numerous to have a noticeable effect—sometimes on policies, and often, on attitudes.

Rochester has generally been “a quiet campus,” says Richard Feldman, dean of the College. But this year, “not so much.”

In the past year, Rochester students led protests and vigils against police brutality; initiated a campaign, by students and for students, to tackle the problem of sexual assault; and forged an alliance with the movement for a $15 minimum wage and a union for fast-food workers. “That’s part of college,” Feldman says. “I like to see students engaged.”

If activist groups have ever seen one another as competitors for attention or support, there’s little sense of that among this generation. Lizzie Seltz ’16, a microbiology major from Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, was a key organizer of an “equality symposium” in spring 2013. Leaders from the Black Students’ Union, the Pride Network, the Douglass Leadership House, Active Minds, the Spanish and Latin Students’ Association (SALSA), Liberty in North Korea (LINK), and other groups convened to share stories and build alliances.

“The main point was to open up a dialogue among the activist groups,” says Seltz, a member of the Survivor Empowerment Group, or SEGway. “It would be nice to create a community of support within the activist and awareness groups on campus.”

FROM FERGUSON TO ROCHESTER

‘We Realized the Power College Students Have’

activism_blackBLACK LIVES MATTER: “It’s important that we talk about our experiences, and why this matters,” says Green, an organizer of the November 25 march (above) who traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, last fall. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Amber Baldie ’15 remembers exactly where she was when she heard the news that Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

“I was in the IT Center,” she says. It was just after 9 p.m. on the Monday evening before Thanksgiving, and a small gathering of students stood by the flat screen television affixed to the Gleason Library wall, scrolling on smartphones, waiting for the grand jury decision, which had been expected for days.

“When the announcement came,” Baldie says, “I just broke down and started crying.”

It had been a long and anxious wait. Baldie, a statistics major from Gates, New York, and several of her friends had spent the weekend making signs, in anticipation of a decision they feared wouldn’t go the way they wanted. So when St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch rose to the podium to announce the grand jury decision, the news was not entirely a surprise. And yet still, it was a shock. Reflecting on that moment, several months later, from the living room of the Douglass Leadership House on the River Campus Fraternity Quad, Baldie confides, “We still did have a little bit of hope.”

When Baldie walked out of the IT Center, and onto the platform where students gather to await buses and shuttles, she carried a sign with the words “Hands Up. Don’t Shoot.” As she and her friends stood with their signs, they were joined by others, and within a short period of time, a crowd had gathered. The demonstrators stood in a circle, holding hands, as Natajah Roberts ’14 came forward and began leading the group in chants. The participants in the spontaneous gathering marched across the River Campus. Then they headed up Elmwood Avenue to College Town. “That’s when we felt this momentum,” Baldie says.

The momentum was felt nationally. That same moment, protests were erupting in more than 180 cities, and on college and university campuses, around the nation. The demonstrations on the evening of November 24 had been so swift, so coordinated, and so national in scope that mainstream news media outlets began referring not merely to the Ferguson protests, but to a movement—a new civil rights movement, reacting to police violence against black Americans and organized around a simple declaration: Black Lives Matter.

But November 24 was less the beginning of a movement than a turning point, both nationally and in Rochester, where students and recent alumni had already launched a new community organization, BLACK: Building Leadership and Community Knowledge.

The previous August, when news broke of the fatal shooting of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager with no criminal record, protests erupted immediately in Ferguson. And Baldie, Makia Green ’14, and Anansa Benbow ’15 started texting.

“Our hearts were heavy,” says Green, a psychology major from New York City who was returning to campus for her final semester. They’d been following events closely on Twitter. News outlets told one story, while people on the ground in Ferguson told another. “We started hearing their stories,” Green says of Ferguson residents. “And it was affecting us. About that time, Anansa, Amber, and I had a conversation about what we could do.”

Baldie, Benbow, and Green, who graduated this academic year, had been friends from their first days in Rochester. They’d held the presidency of the Douglass Leadership House, the Black Students’ Union, and the Minority Students Advisory Board, respectively. Green and Baldie were active in theater. Benbow was part of Students for a Democratic Society. All three women had won major awards for their contributions to the campus community. And they’d reached beyond the campus as well, joining local community groups such as Metro Justice.

When they arrived back on campus, they met with Roberts, then an organizer for the Service Employees International Union, and Adrian Elim ’13, a native of Rochester’s 19th Ward, and a cofounder of the Rochester multimedia design and production company Brothahood Productions. The week before school started, the friends tapped into their local networks, calling for a meeting to be held at the Flying Squirrel Community Space on Clarissa Street.

The site was significant. “Clarissa Street used to be a very prominent black area before Urban Renewal,” Elim says, referring to the federally subsidized demolition of many city neighborhoods, throughout the United States in the 1960s. Clarissa Street was the heart of black Rochester, with a bustling mix of stores, clubs, and doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. Today, though it’s home to three churches, it’s otherwise a sparse mixture mostly of garden apartments. “We really wanted to pay homage to that energy that used to be there.”

About 60 people turned up at the Flying Squirrel on the evening of September 12. It wasn’t immediately clear what would grow out of it. “We were all emotional,” recalls Roberts. “It really was a major moment of mourning in the black community.” But as Roberts, Baldie, Benbow, Elim, and Green facilitated the gathering, it became clear, says Roberts, that more was at stake than combatting police violence against people of color. “We were a group of a lot of young people of color, gathered in a room, who cared about the black community. And there wasn’t already a group like us.”

Rosemary Rivera, a local activist, met the five young leaders for the first time that night. “They captured the attention of many of us who have been doing this for ages, way before Mike Brown,” she says. The city’s activist community had aged. “When you’d go to rallies, you’d see the same people.” They needed new and younger energy. Rivera recalls feeling “overjoyed.”

Out of the meeting came BLACK. The name is both a clear statement of racial pride and identity, and an acronym for Building Leadership and Community Knowledge, a phrase that sums up the aims of the group, whose members refer to it as a grassroots collective. In the 10 months since Baldie, Benbow, Elim, Green, and Roberts founded BLACK, the group has established a reading group; held film screenings; developed a program for volunteers to walk children to school; established an after-school tutoring program at the Monroe County Public Library branch on Arnett Boulevard; planted the Causing Effects community garden; established an ongoing social media campaign featuring local, black-owned businesses; held a black-owned business workshop; and passed out T-shirts and buttons such that, on any given day, walking down the tree-lined streets of the 19th Ward, you might see someone affiliated with the group.

When BLACK got under way last fall, one of its first initiatives was to send its own delegates to Ferguson for a four-day “national call to action.” In early autumn, Ferguson was emerging as a training ground for community organizers. Rivera and another local activist, Ricardo Adams, traveled to Ferguson shortly after the founding of BLACK, and when they returned, strongly urged the young Rochester leaders to make a trip there as well. Through BLACK, Green, Benbow, Elim, and Roberts launched a crowd-funding campaign to finance their trip. And over a long weekend—one that Benbow notes fortuitously coincided with Arts, Sciences & Engineering’s fall break—they drove 13 hours to Ferguson to participate in the series of demonstrations known as Ferguson October.

Benbow, a linguistics major from Troy, New York, and Green prepared for the trip as though it were a high-stakes exam. “Makia and I had been watching the livestream every night for two weeks straight. We had been finding people on Twitter to follow, and reading a lot of articles,” Benbow says. Rivera and Adams put them in contact with Ferguson activists who agreed to be their hosts. For four days, they participated in sit-ins and marches. They saw the military tanks, helicopters, and riot gear. They got arrested on the charge of unlawful assembly, and they were jailed along with protesters, many of them also college students, from around the country.

“We realized the power that college students have,” says Benbow, noting the national media spotlight that shone on Ferguson during the four-day event. Benbow and Green both say they were subjected to excessive force—struck by fists and clubs, and pulled by their hair. But Benbow thinks things would have been worse had they not been college students, and from out of town.

“Being college students and not being from there, I think we were treated differently. It would have been different if we were all just black people from Ferguson.”

Benbow is forthright when she says Ferguson was “like a war zone.” But beneath that, she found community roots that she believes are stronger than many people outside Ferguson realize. “What I think a lot of people miss about the community down there is the foundation of love. It caught me off guard a bit.”

Benbow, Elim, Green, and Roberts left Ferguson prepared to bring their stories back to Rochester, and to put what they’d learned about community organization into action.

For Benbow and Green, the transition back to campus was difficult. They were bruised, emotionally as well as physically, and talking about the experience could be disheartening. Green recalls conversations on social media, in particular, in which she and her friends were deemed “overdramatic,” and “a nuisance.” But they were persistent. They drew strength and support from friends, including staff members at the Paul J. Burgett Intercultural Center and the Office of Minority Student Affairs. The week before the grand jury announcement, Green, Benbow, Baldie, and Alexandra Poindexter ’15, a political science major from Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and then president of the Black Students’ Union, held a die-in in Wilson Commons.

“It was nerve-wracking,” says Benbow. On a Friday afternoon, a time of heavy traffic in the student center, they put up caution tape and lay on the ground. They’d arranged for speakers, including a slam poet. Benbow recalls people gathering, on the balcony and on the stairs, watching, and listening.

The next week was a turning point. The day after the grand jury announcement, the students organized a demonstration at the entrance to the River Campus on Elmwood Avenue. Publicizing the event on campus and through BLACK, they drew students, faculty, staff, administrators, and members of the community.

It was an organizational feat, and one in which Green, Benbow, Roberts, and Elim drew heavily on their experience in Ferguson. With Baldie, Poindexter, and others, they worked in concert with the University’s Department of Public Safety. They dispersed throughout the crowd to keep it focused, peaceful, and on message. They traded turns leading the group in chants. Green served as spokesperson, taking interviews with local news outlets, explaining what the demonstration was about, and what protesters meant by the deceptively simple slogan Black Lives Matter.

Through BLACK, the leaders were establishing a presence around the city. The group organized a downtown rally that attracted some 500 people. In the weeks and months ahead, students, including members of BLACK, held events on the River Campus every Friday—“Ferguson Fridays”—organized around the theme Black Lives Matter.

During all this time, BLACK continued to build itself up in the 19th Ward, and to flesh out its programming and philosophy.

The 19th Ward, just across the Genesee River from the University’s main campus, is a neighborhood in which middle class, working class, and poor residents intermingle. But many of the people who call the 19th Ward home, especially its predominantly black youth, Elim says, have absorbed negative images about black life and culture. In July, the group will launch a new initiative called “I Define Myself.” Elim paraphrases a quote from Audre Lorde. “She said, ‘If I do not define myself for myself, I’ll be crushed into other people’s fantasies of me and be eaten alive.’ And that’s a really important point for our youth.”

Elim claims among his heroes not only Lorde, but James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, two black activists who were also, like Lorde, gay. He does it to underscore a central tenet of Black Lives Matter. Elim stresses that all black lives matter.

“When we say Black Lives Matter, we mean black LGBT lives matter, the lives of black women matter. We have to come together as a community and take a look at all the nuances of what it means to be black.”

BLACK, he says, is “a lifestyle. It’s not a job or an extracurricular activity. We’re talking about changing habits.”

Since the beginning of BLACK, Elim says, he’s changed a few of his own habits. He pays attention to where he spends his time and his money, supporting black artists and black businesses. The group is rooted in a long tradition of black community uplift, stretching back a century, to Marcus Garvey, and to the 1960s, with Malcolm X. The founders of BLACK have added their own twist.

On Facebook, BLACK declares itself “rooted in the minds and spirits of the U of R and the 19th Ward.” BLACK is Meliora brought to bear on the tradition of black empowerment and community self-reliance.

“We want to build a self-sustaining structure,” Elim writes in a Facebook message. “We are here for the long haul.”﻿

FIGHTING SEXUAL ASSAULT

‘It’s Important That the Students and the Administration Help One Another’

activism_sexualassaultWALK A MILE: Rochester students march against sexual violence in an event titled “Walk A Mile in Her Shoes.” As part of the annual spring event, carried out at colleges and other sites around the nation, men as well as women are encouraged to walk the mile-long route in high heels. (Photo: Alyssa Arre)

Alisa Jimenez ’14 and Emily Sumner ’15 were both students at Rochester when they met in a therapy group for survivors of sexual assault. They came from different communities—Jimenez from Syracuse, and Sumner from the Boston suburb of Bedford—and they had different circles of friends. But when it came to sexual assault, Jimenez says, “We could understand each other in ways that I’ve never really been able to relate to anyone before.”

The two women became friends outside of the group. In the summer of 2013, Jimenez had just returned from study abroad in Belgium when she received an email from Sumner. “She wrote, ‘We have all this energy,’ ” Jimenez recalls. It was time to turn it into something of value.

“We’re both very proactive people,” says Sumner. “We wanted an outlet where we could bring our anger” about sexual assault “into something positive. And Alisa and I didn’t really see an outlet like that on campus.”

Sexual assault, which includes any nonconsensual sexual activity, has long been a problem on college campuses. Last fall, the Justice Department confirmed what advocates for victims—many of whom prefer to call themselves survivors—have long claimed: campus sexual assaults are vastly underreported.

When Jimenez and Sumner returned to Rochester, they scheduled a meeting with Morgan Levy, the University’s Title IX coordinator. Levy met with them and put them in touch with Melissa Kelley, a health educator at University Health Service.

“We didn’t know where to start,” says Jimenez, frankly. But in conversations with Kelley and Levy, their plans started to take shape. By the end of the semester, they’d launched the Survivor Empowerment Group, or SEGway.

As their name suggests, SEGway members serve as ambassadors, reaching out to students to make them aware of sources of help, and putting students who have been sexually assaulted in touch with sources of help on campus that they might not know about, or that they might be hesitant to approach. Kelley says SEGway’s contribution to students is invaluable.

“Just because I sit in this office doesn’t mean anyone knows I’m actually here,” she says. Nor, she adds, would a student who has been assaulted “just trust any random person who says ‘I can help you.’ ”

Kelley serves as an advocate for students who have been sexually assaulted. She’s “a confidential resource,” she says, stressing that she lays out the options for students and, if a student decides to make a formal report, whether on campus, to the police, or both, to offer assistance.

On her own initiative, Kelley has become the go-to resource for students who’ve been sexually assaulted. “This is not part of my job description,” says the health educator, whose primary work is to teach undergraduate courses and run workshops for students on topics such as drugs, alcohol, and sexual health. But, she says, “My personal and professional interests tend to be in sexual health and women’s health.” She began her career as a community educator at Planned Parenthood and as a volunteer rape crisis counselor. Shortly after she came to the University six years ago, she approached staff members in the Office of the Dean of Students, including Kyle Orton, director of the Center for Student Conflict Management. “We talked things over, and I said, ‘I think I can be helpful.’ ”

She has been, according to Orton, who works closely with both Kelley and Levy in his role as facilitator of sexual assault judicial proceedings on campus. But she’s been able to better support students since the advent of SEGway. Students started “just showing up” at her office. “I’ve had students stand in my doorway and say, ‘Hi, I heard you can help me,’ ” she says.

“It’s important that students and the administration help each other,” Sumner says. “A student is more likely to go to another student than to someone in administration to talk about an experience they’ve had. And they aren’t going to immediately call Public Safety. They’re going to want to go to their friend, or they’re going to want to stay in their room, and they’re going to want to hide.”

Both Jimenez and Sumner have now graduated. Jimenez, who majored in anthropology and international relations, works for a Midtown Manhattan law firm, in its office for global diversity and social responsibility. Sumner, who graduated this spring with a degree in brain and cognitive sciences, is headed to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine.

But since they founded SEGway, it has become a well-established group. Its membership of rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors have helped spread the word about the campus sexual assault policy. They’ve educated students about sexual consent through programs such as “Stop, Ask, Clarify,” which Kelley was preparing when she first met Jimenez and Sumner. In the next year, they plan to have the policy translated into multiple languages for the increasingly global student population. And they’ve held discussions on social and cultural factors that perpetuate sexual violence.

Orton calls SEGway’s form of collaborative activism “groundbreaking.” He works closely with male students, who are coming to realize that men have a key role to play in preventing sexual assault.

In the spring of 2014, Orton and professional colleagues in Residential Life, the University Counseling Center, Fraternity and Sorority Affairs, and the Department of Athletics and Recreation, held an open conversation for men about sexual assault. Years ago, a group of male students had formed an organization called Men Against Sexual Assault, or MASA. But as the members graduated, the group fizzled out.

Orton thought it was time for male students once again to play a greater role in prevention. After that conversation, Jacob Gusman ’16, David Markakis ’15, ’16 (T5), and Michael Silverstein ’15 approached Orton. Gusman and Silverstein are fraternity brothers in Sigma Phi Epsilon. “Jake and I talked about it a lot,” Silverstein says about sexism and sexual assault. “It frustrated us, because we were cognizant of it, and we saw plenty examples of it not being recognized.” Markakis, a mutual friend, was a leader in College Feminists. They told Orton they were ready to step forward to revive a role for male students.

Over the summer, the four men began to meet over Skype and FaceTime. In the fall, Gusman, Markakis, and Silverstein founded Men Opposing Violence Everywhere, or MOVE.

The group offers a space for men to discuss topics related to sexual assault and masculinity openly. They reach out to fraternities and sports teams, and sometimes, the groups come to them.

MOVE is a small group, with only five or six active members. It asks a lot of its members, who write discussion programs themselves. Gusman, a biomedical engineering major from Newton, Massachusetts, says the group addresses both sexual assault and the broader issue of cultural constructions of masculinity. Last spring, for example, MOVE held a panel discussion called “Man Up: What Does It Mean to Be a Man?” “It’s something people don’t talk about that much,” Gusman says regarding notions of manhood, adding that men lack a “healthy guide” on what it means to be a man.

Silverstein, who graduated in the spring with a degree in biomedical engineering, emphasizes that MOVE’s approach is not to preach, but to initiate dialogue.

“You can’t go into a situation being accusatory, like, ‘You guys are idiots. How are you not thinking of these things?’ It’s important to ask questions, like, ‘What makes you feel that way?’ ”

The atmosphere on campus is broadly supportive of SEGway and MOVE. The College Feminists have partnered with SEGway and MOVE on multiple initiatives. When the Students’ Association announced its participation in the national, White House– initiated “It’s On Us” campaign against campus sexual assault, President Antoinette Esce ’15 and Vice President David Stark ’16 said, “We are proud of the work our student organizations do to spread awareness and understanding about the issue of sexual assault.”

Orton says reports of sexual assault at Rochester have risen recently, following national trends. In 2011, there were two reported incidents of forcible sex offenses on all undergraduate campuses, including the Eastman School, according to statistics collected in accordance with the federal mandate known as the Clery Act. In 2012, that number rose to five, and in 2013, it was 10.

But he believes it’s not because the numbers of incidents themselves are rising. “It reflects people feeling more comfortable reporting and feeling confident that the University will look for the truth and support what the truth is,” he says.

Adjudicating sexual assaults on campus is not easy. Several prominent universities have stumbled, and in May, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights informed the University that it is investigating a student’s complaint about the handling of her sexual assault case. The office has opened investigations at more than 100 colleges and universities around the country.

Orton and Levy will be spending much time assisting the Office of Civil Rights in gathering information. In the meantime, Orton says, students have been critical in the fight against sexual assault, and have made progress that has benefitted the entire campus.

“We wouldn’t be as safe a campus as we are now without SEGway and MOVE.”

For complete information on the University’s sexual misconduct policy and resources, see the website at Rochester.edu/sexualmisconduct.

FIGHT FOR $15

‘Slowly but Surely, the Attitude Has Been Shifting’

activism_fightfor15LABOR-INTENSIVE: “I’m interested in labor in general. Labor really gets at the root of a lot of problems in the country,” says Meth, a member of Students for a Democratic Society, on his involvement in the Fight for $15 movement. “Just having people earning a living wage—that’s the base to start from.” (Photo: Annette Dragon)

Miles Meth ’16 is amazed at the progress made by the Fight for $15 movement since its inception in the fall of 2012.

“Two or three years ago, a $15 minimum wage was like a bad joke in a board room,” says the anthropology major from Newton, Massachusetts. “But now, it’s a legitimate demand.” He cites a May 6 op-ed in the New York Times by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, “Fast-Food Workers Deserve a Raise,” in which the governor outlined an executive action that’s expected to bring the state’s minimum wage close to $15 an hour. “Two, three years ago,” says Meth, “he just wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Fight for $15 is a nationwide campaign, spearheaded by the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, which, according to the campaign’s website, demands “a $15 an hour” wage for fast-food workers “and the right to form a union without retaliation.”

The movement has been gathering steam, with cities such as Seattle, Oakland, Chicago, and Los Angeles, all adopting plans to raise the minimum wage for businesses operating in their borders to levels approaching, or at, $15 an hour.

Meth, a member of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, began working on the Fight for $15 campaign locally last fall, as an intern with the activist group Metro Justice. Working with the group’s organizing director, Colin O’Malley, Meth helped instruct fast-food workers in their legal rights and in political organization, and educate the broader public on the campaign within the context of the American labor movement.

Meth’s work with Metro Justice convinced him that Fight for $15 belonged at the top of SDS’s agenda. Accordingly, he adopted the role as official liaison between Metro Justice and Rochester’s SDS.

SDS, which is a national organization, has become one of the best-known student activist groups since its founding by University of Michigan students in the early 1960s. But the organization fizzled out in the late 1960s, and was revived as a chapter-based organization only in 2006.

At Rochester, SDS has been focused mostly on campus service workers. Over the past year, the group has supported an effort to include the ideas surrounding the Fight for $15 campaign in talks between some employees and the University’s administration.

Natajah Roberts ’14, who was a member of SDS as a student at Rochester, went on to become an organizer for SEIU after graduation.

Through the fall, she played a major role in the Fight for $15 campaign locally, as well as in the founding of BLACK, or Building Leadership and Community Knowledge (see article, p. 44). Roberts, now a community organizer for Citizen Action of New York, says her work for economic justice is inseparable from her work for racial justice, and vice versa.

“Racial injustice is tied to economic inequality, and more devastating even than income inequality for black people is wealth inequality,” she says.

Wealth refers to long-term investments such as homes, or funds to pay for college. Low-wage employment fuels both income and wealth inequality, but, Roberts notes, wealth inequality affects future generations, placing blacks ever further behind white counterparts.

In the days leading up to the Fight for $15’s nationwide strike day last December, SDS and Metro Justice worked together to expand the local base of support. In the spring, Metro Justice added another SDS member, Jordan Polcyn-Evans ’17, as liaison.

“This is an issue that very much affects the city,” says Polcyn- Evans, who grew up in Rochester.

And, he emphasizes, it affects the University’s own neighborhood. Fast-food establishments line Mt. Hope Avenue, including in College Town.

“We are so close to this issue. Literally, physically, so close,” he says.

On a second nationwide strike day, held on April 15, Polcyn-Evans addressed a rally of students, workers, and community supporters on the Eastman Quadrangle. In the days and weeks before, he and other members of SDS had secured the support of multiple campus organizations, including College Feminists, the Black Students’ Union, the Douglass Leadership House, and the Pride Network, and helped rally off-campus religious and community groups as well. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle estimated the crowd in the “hundreds.”

To be sure, not everyone on campus agrees with the movement’s goal. “I certainly butt heads with some students,” Meth says. “But overall, I’d say slowly but surely, the attitude has been shifting.”

Saxophone Heaven

Eastman’s saxophonists are earning exceptional accolades under the guidance of Chien-Kwan Lin ’07E (DMA).

By Kathleen McGarvey

saxophoneLEADING LIGHT: Chien-Kwan Lin, associate professor of saxophone, is taking Eastman’s classical saxophone program to international prominence. (Photo: Matt Wittmeyer/AP Images for Rochester Review)

When members of the saxophone quartet Finja learned they had won first place nationally for wind chamber music performance in the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) competition in 2014, the musicians had already decamped Chicago for the University of Illinois. There, they were performing with the Eastman Saxophone Project at the North American Saxophone Alliance conference. Informed of their MTNA victory, the quartet members— Ainsley Kilgo ’15E, Dan Stenziano ’15E, Tyler Wiessner ’15E, and Jiaqi (Kevin) Zhao ’15E—piled into a car and drove 150 miles north to Chicago to perform in the association’s Winners Concert.

As they drove, Kilgo remembers, they practiced their music yet again, singing their respective parts of Thierry Escaich’s “Tango Virtuoso” and moving their fingers over imaginary saxophone keys.

Such tireless preparation—in Finja’s case that year, under the coaching of doctoral student Phil Pierick—is the hallmark of the Eastman School of Music’s Saxophone Studio, led by Chien-Kwan Lin ’07E (DMA), associate professor of saxophone. In the last 10 MTNA chamber music national competitions for winds—which include musicians on any wind instrument, not only saxophone—Lin’s students have won the title five times. No other studio is represented twice in that list. Under Lin’s leadership, Eastman has rapidly become one of the premier schools at which to study the classical saxophone.

“Chien-Kwan has built one of the most high-octane saxophone studios in the country,” says Doug O’Connor ’08E (MM), ’12E (DMA), now a member of the U.S. Naval Academy Band at Annapolis and an adjunct faculty member at Towson University.

The studio’s standing is borne out—and fed—by the recognition Lin’s students earn in national and international competitions. Since 2006, performing as soloists and in quartets, they have won more competitions than members of any other studio in the country. Those results are “proof of the training [students] are receiving here,” says Marie Rolf ’77E (PhD), senior associate dean of graduate studies at Eastman and a professor of music theory.

“They’re thoroughly committed to technical perfection,” says Griffin Campbell, who holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Saxophone at Louisiana State University and who has judged some of Lin’s students in competition. “They have a drive for that and the ability to achieve it. That’s really necessary to advance in competitive circles. You have to have the technique. But they also have a level of artistry, and that combination of artistry and technical skill, that’s what they have that sends them to the top of the heap.”

Rolf sums it up succinctly: “Eastman is known as saxophone heaven, and that’s all due to Chien-Kwan.”

saxophonePLAYING BY HEART: Lin works with his students at a rehearsal of the Eastman Saxophone Project in Kilbourn Hall. (Photo: Matt Wittmeyer/AP Images for Rochester Review)

In the world of instruments, the saxophone is a relative youth, the only widely played, nonelectric instrument invented in more than a century and a half. Developed in Paris in the 1840s by instrument maker Adolphe Sax, the saxophone “has a woodwind sound, but the power of a brass instrument,” says Lin.

Strongly associated with jazz in the United States, the saxophone was first taken up by French military bands. By the beginning of the 20th century, composers were beginning to write for the instrument, and since the 1960s, “classical” saxophone—a term Lin eschews, preferring simply “saxophone”—has taken hold in this country.

An important part of what sets Lin’s studio apart, Rolf says—and it’s an observation widely made by his colleagues and students—is Lin’s training as a violinist. Born in 1972, in Singapore, he began playing at the age of four. He has never truly left the instrument behind, winning top prizes for violin four consecutive times in Singapore’s National Music Competition, playing second violin with the Singapore Symphony, appearing as an orchestral violinist, and working for a time as a jazz violinist.

In high school, he joined the school concert band, playing the flute. When the saxophonists graduated, he volunteered to take up the instrument at age 16. “This sounds superficial, but I was drawn to the instrument because it looks beautiful. It really is a gorgeous-looking instrument, and I liked the sound of it. That’s all.”

His offhand comment belies his stature. “He is one of the leading saxophonists in the world today,” says Jamal Rossi ’87E (DMA), the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School of Music.

Lin’s teaching and performance bring the worlds of saxophone and violin together. When Rossi—himself a graduate of Eastman’s saxophone program—first met him, Lin was performing his recitals from memory. “Violinists, pianists, and vocalists have been performing from memory for centuries, but it’s not the standard for wind instruments,” says Rossi. “He was performing Rachmaninoff cello sonatas and Bach chaconnes, and he performed in such a way that you never felt this was somehow compromising the music and the instrument for which it was written.”

Wind instruments don’t have the same tradition of virtuosity that string instruments and the piano do, says Lin—they’re less agile in producing notes. But he has worked to bring a version of that virtuosity to the saxophone, perhaps nowhere more notably than in the Eastman Saxophone Project (ESP), a group he established in 2010, as a “chamber music–like ensemble.” The group performed in April at the Kennedy Center.

When members of ESP take the stage— filing out, one after another after another—the ensemble is alone with the audience. No conductor is positioned before them. No music stands are, either; Lin calls the stands “just small pieces of furniture, but a barrier” that would separate the musicians from each other and their listeners. Project members—all the students in Lin’s studio, from freshmen to doctoral candidates—play their music entirely from memory. A 20-member ensemble is large, and to coordinate so many musicians without a conductor is no easy undertaking—nor is their commitment of music to memory. “The Eastman Saxophone Project memorizes tremendously complicated music—and a lot of it,” Rossi says. “That’s an amazing feat, and they’re doing it without a conductor, so it’s up to them to communicate with each other. The result is beyond impressive.”

saxophoneSHOW AND GUIDE: Students praise Lin’s teaching style, which is heavily influenced by his violin training and emphasizes development of their own musical voices. (Photo: Matt Wittmeyer/AP Images for Rochester Review)

He compares Lin and his students to Olympic athletes. “Their Olympic sport isn’t necessarily new, but every once in a while someone will come along—like sprinter Usain Bolt—and keep setting new records and doing it better. They’re inspiring the entire school. They perform two concerts a year [at Eastman], and if you don’t show up 45 minutes early, you won’t get a seat.”

The ensemble’s performances are posted on YouTube, and that exposure, combined with Lin’s recruitment efforts as he performs nationally and internationally, draws saxophonists to Eastman. “It’s extremely competitive. He’s got a wait list that other people would die for, and what that means is we can bring to Eastman the very best of the best,” Rolf says.

Many people “resisted and argued about the practicalities” when Lin introduced the idea of memorization, says O’Connor, a founding member of ESP. “But the truth is you just live and breathe and own the music better when you memorize it. And now it’s just part of the culture,” he says.

While memorization for saxophone is less unusual than it used to be, “it’s still pretty unusual,” says Campbell. “The level that goes on in that studio is extraordinary.” And, he adds, the students aren’t just memorizing the notes. “They’re memorizing the structure, the flow of the piece. There’s a lot more going on than knowing the notes.”

“Playing in the Eastman Saxophone Project was probably the most intimidating part of my freshman year—coming in and hearing 19 other saxophone players, most of whom are older and better than you,” says Kilgo, who graduated in May with a double major in saxophone performance and music education and is staying on for a semester of student teaching. “It’s very much built around the entire studio pushing each other to be better and play with more finesse, especially at the beginning.”

The project’s repertoire “is unique to them because those arrangements are done in-house,” says Campbell. “There isn’t a repertoire for a saxophone group that large.”

As a result, the ensemble in large part plays music originally written for orchestra or string ensemble but transcribed for saxophone by Lin’s students. When Kilgo would receive a transcription, she would annotate it to show which instrument’s part she was playing on her saxophone in any given passage: “I might play flute for a few bars, trumpet for a few bars, then violin.” Playing music originally written for other instruments can be challenging. “String players have a very easy time articulating lots of notes because it’s a movement of the bow, but for the saxophone, it’s the movement of the tongue,” she says. “You do something called ‘double tongue’ to imitate the strings. It uses the tongue muscle and the muscles of the throat, and there’s only so much you can do.”

“There are very few places in the country—if any—that are doing things at the level that the Eastman Saxophone Project is doing them,” says Campbell.

Lin, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music at the New England Conservatory, studied under Ramon Ricker ’73E (DMA) at Eastman for his doctor of musical arts degree. Initially hired part-time to teach clarinet, Ricker became the school’s first full-time saxophone teacher, building a studio for students interested in all saxophone music, jazz and classical.

“Ray is one of the few saxophonists in the world who can bridge classical and jazz saxophone and do both exceptionally well,” says Rossi. But in 2002, Ricker, now professor emeritus, cut back on his teaching as he moved full time into the position of director of Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership. It took two people to fill the position he had held: Ricker was the “trunk of the tree” that then split into two limbs, jazz and “non-jazz” studios, says Lin.

Charles Pillow ’84E (MM), a jazz saxophonist in New York City, was hired part time to teach the jazz part of the program. He’s now an assistant professor of jazz saxophone. Lin was hired while still a graduate student to lead the classical branch. “Chien-Kwan was proving immediately that his was a very special talent, and he was ultimately hired into a tenure-track position,” says Rossi.

saxophoneALONE TOGETHER: “There are very few places in the country—if any—doing things at the level that the Eastman Saxophone Project is doing them,” says LSU’s Griffin Campbell. (Photo: Matt Wittmeyer/AP Images for Rochester Review)

When Lin first began teaching at Eastman, students who didn’t want to play jazz music didn’t tend to think of the school as the place for them to study saxophone. “So my first task was to establish ourselves as one of the viable names. And there’s no quicker way to establish a reputation than to have students stand on the stage and say, ‘I’ve just won first prize. We’re really good. Look at us.’ So that’s the approach I’ve taken to building the reputation of the studio. We have within Eastman a sort of ethic that we’ve taken upon ourselves that we need to be at the very top of our field, whatever you play here. We didn’t separate ourselves from that culture.”

Lin’s view of competitions is deeply practical. “We think of them as a project for us to work toward, and whatever the results, we are happy because obviously the most important thing is to push ourselves to the max. I don’t think there’s any sort of teaching behind it that allows our students to do better. It’s just hard work.”

That hard work pays off. “It seems like I’m writing a congratulatory note to a saxophone player about every week,” says Rolf.

LSU’s Campbell lays much of the credit at Lin’s door. “The Eastman School of Music has always been, since its founding, one of the great institutions of higher learning in the United States, and perhaps the world, for music. As good as Ray Ricker was and the band programs were, the classical saxophone program hadn’t come to the point where the other programs were. But Chien-Kwan has, in the time he’s been there, brought the program to a level where it stands at the same peak” as the very best classical saxophone programs in the country—the University of Michigan, Northwestern, Indiana University. “The competition for the very top students is very high, and Chien-Kwan is able to attract those students to Eastman,” says Campbell. “And it’s Eastman, so that makes it doubly fantastic [for the students]. It’s a little difficult to be in competition with him, I have to say.”

Students praise Lin’s supportiveness as much as his drive. “I always felt he’d work his tail off to help me do what I needed to do,” says O’Connor, who trained with Ricker and Lin and who has won top prizes in many solo competitions. “He challenged me. He also helped me with the emotional rigors of going after a musical career, which is brutally competitive sometimes.”

In contrast, students call the atmosphere of Lin’s studio familial. In many studios, the only time students see other studio members is in a weekly class, but the Eastman Saxophone Project means Lin’s students are constantly working together, says Myles Boothroyd ’15E (MM), who has been a member of the studio for the last two years and will begin doctoral study with Lin in the fall. He won national first prize this year in the Music Teachers National Association Young Artist Competition, as did O’Connor in 2007. Boothroyd also took first prize last year in the North American Saxophone Alliance Collegiate Solo Competition.

“Trying to become a great musician is all about control,” says O’Connor, who at Eastman was soprano saxophonist with the Red Line Sax Quartet, which won gold medals at the Fischoff and Plowman chamber competitions. “You’re in the practice room. You’re in the competition. You’re doing everything you can to control the outcome, but that’s a difficult psychological place to be because you don’t really know what the judges are looking for. Chien-Kwan helped me not just to see that, but to feel it.”

Ultimately, competitions are “incentive to practice hard,” he says, adding that while competition can lend dimensions of sport to music making, “it’s an art, and Chien-Kwan never loses sight of that.”

Lin doesn’t play the saxophone when he teaches, so that students will develop their own sound rather than imitate him. “His way is to show and guide, show and guide,” says Kilgo. “A lot of times he’s using his voice to show you phrasing and the pacing of things.” Her first year of study with him was devoted to technique. “I was required to do a lot of scale patterns and études. It was a technical workout. He challenges your fingers and mind and concentration. He listens to every little bit of that; he doesn’t assign a graduate student to do it.”

“He clearly loves what he does, and he is visionary,” says Rolf. “He’s at the top of his game, and there’s nothing more compelling than that if you’re a young student. That’s who you want to work with. That’s inspirational.”

At the Top

sax_sideRED LINE SAXOPHONE QUARTET: Qun Gai ’10E, Doug O’Connor ’12E (DMA), Brandon Kies ’10E, and Quinn Lewis ’10E (Photo: Adam Fenster)

The reputation of Lin’s saxophone studio is driven in part by the honors and awards his students earn in competition.

Astral Artists National Auditions

Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet
Winners, 2015
Dannel Espinoza, Matthew Amedio, Michael Sawzin, Matthew Evans

Jonathan Wintringham
Winner, 2013

Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition

East End Saxophone Quartet
1st Prize, 2015
Jonathan Wintringham, Myles Boothroyd, Matthew Amedio, Timothy Harris

Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition

Red Line Saxophone Quartet
First Prize and Gold Medal, 2010
Doug O’Connor, Brandon Kies, Gai Qun, Quinn Lewis

Coleman Chamber Music Competition

Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet
Coleman–Saunderson Prize (First Prize for Woodwinds and Brass), 2012
Dannel Espinoza, Matthew Amedio, Michael Sawzin, Matthew Evans

Red Line Saxophone Quartet
Alice Coleman Prize (Grand Prize), 2010
Doug O’Connor, Brandon Kies, Gai Qun, Quinn Lewis

Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition

Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet
Gold Medal (Senior Wind Division), 2013
Dannel Espinoza, Matthew Amedio, Michael Sawzin, Matthew Evans

Red Line Saxophone Quartet
Gold Medal (Senior Wind Division), 2009
Doug O’Connor, Brandon Kies, Gai Qun, Quinn Lewis

ViM Saxophone Quartet
Gold Medal (Senior Wind Division), 2006
Kristin Rarick, Michael Matlock, Dimitrios Kostaras, Rich Miserendino

International Saxophone Symposium and Competition

Katherine Weintraub
First Prize, 2014

Phil Pierick
Third Prize, 2012

J. C. Arriaga Chamber Music Competition

Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet
Second Prize, 2012
Dannel Espinoza, Matthew Amedio, Michael Sawzin, Matthew Evans

Jean-Marie Londeix International Saxophone Competition

Phil Pierick
Third Prize, 2014

Doug O’Connor
Second Prize, 2008

Music Teachers National Association (Chamber Music Competition)

East End Saxophone Quartet
National First Prize, 2015
Jonathan Wintringham, Myles Boothroyd, Matthew Amedio, Timothy Harris

Finja Saxophone Quartet
National First Prize, 2014
Jiaqi (Kevin) Zhao, Ainsley Kilgo, Tyler Wiessner, Dan Stenziano

Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet
National First Prize, 2013
Dannel Espinoza, Matthew Amedio, Michael Sawzin, Matthew Evans

Red Line Saxophone Quartet
National First Prize, 2009
Doug O’Connor, Brandon Kies, Gai Qun, Quinn Lewis

ViM Saxophone Quartet
National First Prize, 2006
Kristin Rarick, Michael Matlock, Dimitrios Kostaras, Rich Miserendino

Music Teachers National Association (Young Artist Competition)

Myles Boothroyd
National First Prize, 2015

Jonathan Wintringham
National First Prize, 2013

Matt Evans
National Second Prize, 2012

Quinn Lewis
National Third Prize, 2009

Doug O’Connor
National First Prize, 2007

North American Saxophone Alliance (Collegiate Solo Competition)

Myles Boothroyd
First Prize, 2014

Jonathan Wintringham
Third Prize, 2014

Doug O’Connor
Second Prize, 2008

North American Saxophone Alliance (Quartet Competition)

Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet
Second Prize, 2012
Dannel Espinoza, Matthew Amedio, Michael Sawzin, Matthew Evans

Red Line Saxophone Quartet
First Prize, 2010
Doug O’Connor, Brandon Kies, Gai Qun, Quinn Lewis

Plowman Chamber Music Competition

Project Fusion Saxophone Quartet
Grand Prize and Audience Award, 2013
Dannel Espinoza, Matthew Amedio, Michael Sawzin, Matthew Evans

Red Line Saxophone Quartet
First Prize (Winds Division), 2010
Doug O’Connor, Brandon Kies, Gai Qun, Quinn Lewis

Vandoren Emerging Artist Competition

Tyler Wiessner
First Prize, 2015

Myles Boothroyd
Second Prize, 2014

Matthew Amedio
First Prize, 2012

Rachel Perry
Third Prize, 2012

William C. Byrd International Young Artist Competition

Katherine Weintraub
First Prize, 2013

Homage to Obsolescence

sadtler (Photo: Courtesy of Sam Sadtler ’12)

The eerie and refined images of Sam Sadtler ’12, you could say, honor the dead. A mechanical engineer and an artist who works in the media of photography, sculpture, and video, Sadtler explores the world of outmoded and discarded household electronics.

“I’m interested in objects that were created and almost immediately were obsolete,” he says. “I want to give these objects a presentation in a way that they never really had, as a way to honor them. It sounds a little strange, but I’m in many ways personifying these objects. What is the send-off that something that we created and tossed away almost immediately deserves? And how do we need to document them in order for them to be remembered?”

From 2012 to 2014, a series of photographs by Sadtler called “Automation Abomination” traveled the United States. This year, two images from the series, including this one—a 29” x 20” digital scan called “The Elegance of a Knife”—have been on display in the home of Greta Holtz, U.S. ambassador to Oman, as part of the Art in Embassies program, sponsored by the State Department.

Sadtler is a graduate student in the interactive telecommunications program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Pitbull(’s) Lawyer

zigelRULES OF LAW . . . AND JAZZ: “I view my job in negotiating deals as very analogous to jazz improvisation,” says Zigel, a one-time jazz musician who is now a leading entertainment lawyer. (Photo: Daniel Azoulay for Rochester Review)

With multimillionaire international pop superstar Pitbull as a client, Leslie Zigel ’85 travels a couple times a year on the musician’s private jet.

“There’s music, vodka, and great conversations about life and business,” says Zigel, named last year by Billboard Magazine as one of the top music lawyers in the United States.

The jazz bass player-turned-lawyer is principal of Ziglaw, one of the country’s premier multimedia entertainment law practices. He started the Miami-based firm—specializing in talent and endorsement deal negotiations, music publishing, film and television production counsel, and other areas—in 2006.

“I view my job in negotiating deals as very analogous to jazz improvisation,” he says. “You have rules, but there’s a lot of flexibility within those rules as to how you get to the end result.”

At Rochester, Zigel played bass in the River Campus Jazz Ensemble, was a jazz deejay for three years at WRUR, and served briefly as business manager of the Eastman Jazz Ensemble.

He designed his own interdisciplinary major on the sociological study of the music industry, and wrote an honors thesis exploring bebop’s revolutionary impact on the music scene as it fought racism during the 1940s and 1950s.

Zigel thought of the major his sophomore year, after deciding he wanted to become a jazz festival producer and work for Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein. He secured an internship with Wein’s company three months after graduation, then got hired and ran numerous festivals for six years before heading to law school.

Although rubbing elbows with celebrities is an exciting part of his job, Zigel says it’s only a small part of being an entertainment lawyer.

“People think that being an entertainment lawyer is all glamour, all the time. Yes, I’ve gotten to be in jets and party and go backstage, but it’s a lot of very, very hard work, and it takes a lot of thoughtfulness to do it well.”

For those embarking on careers in the arts or entertainment industries, Zigel offers some tips that apply to a broad range of roles:

Do your research. When interviewing to work for BMG, one of the world’s largest music publishers, Zigel studied transcripts from Senate testimony his interviewer had given years before on record industry copyrights. “I was able to speak with him intelligently about that,” he recalls. “Researching the person you’re meeting with shows you care and are willing to go the extra mile to get the job done.”

Be honorable. If Zigel notices an opposing lawyer’s mistake in a document—a mistake in favor of Zigel’s client—he will phone the lawyer to request a correction. As his mother used to say, and as he tells his two sons, ages 16 and 12: “The best thing about telling the truth is you never have to remember what you said.”

Know what you want, then go out there and do it. Many people, especially new artists, worry too much about photo shoots and other things that have little effect on overall success. Instead, focus on the work. For example, “I tell musicians to get a gig, perform, and get fans one by one,” he says. “The rest will come.”

Have fun. Work feels like play for Zigel. “Be diligent and focused, but smile a lot,” he says. “That infectious energy goes a long way in building long-lasting professional and personal relationships.” —Robin L. Flanigan.

HONORS & AWARDS

Alumni, Guests Honored at Commencement

The University recognized alumni, faculty, and special guests at this spring’s commencement ceremonies. Recognized for their teaching, scholarship, achievements, and service were:

Arts, Sciences & Engineering

G. Graydon Curtis ’58 and Jane W. Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching Excellence

Nickolas (Nick) Vamivakas, assistant professor of quantum optics and quantum physics

Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

William FitzPatrick, the Gideon Webster Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy

Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters

Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation

Honorary Doctor of Laws

Robert Duffy, president and chief executive officer of the Rochester Business Alliance

Honorary Doctor of Science

Richard Rashid ’80 (PhD), chief technology officer of Microsoft’s Applications and Services Division

Doctoral Ceremony

William H. Riker University Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching

Randall Stone, professor of political science

Lifetime Achievement in Graduate Education

Ralph Locke, professor of musicology at the Eastman School of Music

Rochester Distinguished Scholar Medal

Stephen Fantone ’79 (PhD), president and founder of Optikos Corporation

School of Medicine and Dentistry

Honorary Doctor of Science

Porter Anderson, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and Dentistry

Charles Force Hutchison and Marjorie Smith Hutchison Medal

Harvey Alter ’56, ’60M (MD), a distinguished National Institutes of Health investigator

Joseph Cunningham ’67 (MA), principal attorney for Cunningham & Associates

Eastman Medal

E. Philip Saunders, entrepreneur and business leader

Blossoming in D.C.

blossom (Photo: Provided)

A spirited group of Washington, D.C., young alumni showed up at the 103rd Cherry Blossom Festival this spring. Posing against the backdrop of the Potomac River and the Jefferson Memorial are (back row, left to right) Brandon Podyma ’12, Aaron Rusheen ’14, Jonathan Johnson ’14, Mike Labanowski ’11, Nathan Novosel ’12, Adam Bossert ’13, Roshal Patel ’13, Jacob Epstein ’09, Sean Virgile ’10, Nazmia Alqadi Comrie ’08, Drew Comrie ’08, Eric Weissmann ’10; (front row, left to right) Laura Zimmermann ’11, Ruth Ann Scoles ’09, Jiore Craig ’13, David Nager-Sadoff ’10, ’11W (MS), Evan Siegel ’10, ’11W (MS), Chelsea Virgile ’12, and Colleen Fauerbach.

EASTMAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC

Honoring Achievement and Service

The University celebrated the lives and careers of notable alumni and friends during ceremonies this spring.

Distinguished Alumni Award

servicePaul Burgett (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Paul Burgett ’68E, ’72E (MA), ’76E (PhD), whose connection of more than 50 years began as a student at the Eastman School of Music and continues in his roles as vice president, senior advisor to the president, and University dean, received the Distinguished Alumni Award at Eastman’s commencement ceremony.

Burgett has served in several academic, student life, and administrative roles at Eastman and for the University, acting as a principal liaison among students, alumni, and community organizations and programs. In October 2014, the Paul J. Burgett Intercultural Center was named in recognition of his leadership and service to the University.

Burgett is cochair of the faculty-and-staff initiative for The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester. He and his wife, Catherine Valentine, are charter members of the George Eastman Circle, the University’s leadership annual giving society, and founding members of the Wilson Society, which recognizes people who have made a planned gift to the University.

Distinguished Alumni Award

serviceJon Engberg (Photo: Eastman School of Music)

Noted cellist and music educator Jon Engberg ’54E, ’56E (MM), ’70E (DMA), who was an academic leader at Eastman for two decades, received the Distinguished Alumni Award at a special April event honoring Robert Freeman, a former director of the school. As a founder of the American Arts Trio, Engberg performed around the world. After a tenure on the faculty of West Virginia University, he returned to Eastman in 1975, serving as associate director of academic affairs and associate dean of graduate studies. He and his wife, Judith, are charter members of the George Eastman Circle.

Luminary Award

serviceSalvatore Signorelli (Photo: Eastman School of Music)

Salvatore Signorelli, the owner of String Instruments Ltd., a downtown Rochester business that’s regarded for its dedication to serving both professional musicians and students, received the Luminary Award during a March concert in his honor at the Eastman School. After a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy, the Rochester native established himself as a musician, music educator, and luthier on Long Island. There, he was a violinist for and associate conductor of the Great Neck Symphony and founded the Young Artists Chamber Symphony and the Virtuoso Ensemble. He also started String Instruments, where he repaired, restored, and made instruments.

Signorelli returned to Rochester in 1982 and opened his business in the cultural district. Shortly after, he donated a significant collection from standard orchestral works to Eastman’s Ensemble Library, and earlier this year, he donated his entire inventory of printed music—almost 6,000 scores of solo and ensemble music for strings, as well as pedagogical materials—to Sibley Music Library.

FOOTBALL ALUMNI

‘Dinner with the Coach’ Celebrates 10th Anniversary

coachDINNER GUESTS: (first row) Phil Chrys ’75, Mark McAnaney ’75, Erv Chambliss ’76, Coach Stark, Mike Roulan ’71, Roger Watts ’72, Bill Hammond ’73; (second row) Dave McNelis ’74, Dave Cidale ’71, Sam Guerrieri ’87, Tony Cipolla ’81, Mike Garritano ’76, Jim Juraska ’73, Brian Pasley ’76, Brian Miga ’71; (third row) Dick Rasmussen ’72, ’79W (MS) ’97W (EdD), Don Barber ’79, Jim Dunnigan ’73, Herm Nied ’76, Ray Kampff ’74, John Cogar ’71, Ralph Gebhardt ’76, Joe Novek ’73; (fourth row) Kevin Maier ’78, Jim Mazur ’78, Rene Piccarreto ’71, Rick Magere ’72, Denny Hennigan ’75, Paul Caputo ’73, Greg Conrad ’72; (fifth row) Len Champion ’73, Ed Heffernan ’76, Gary Miller ’84, John Badowski ’77, Quentin Call ’76, Tony Daniele ’71. (Photo: Keith Walters for Rochester Review)

Former Yellowjacket football players celebrated their 10th “Dinner with the Coach” this spring, an annual event to recognize the achievements of iconic coach Pat Stark. In all, 35 football alumni attended the April 30 event at Perlo’s Restaurant in East Rochester, traveling from throughout New York and Pennsylvania.

A Rochester and Syracuse University Hall of Famer, Coach Stark significantly elevated the stature of the Yellowjacket football program during his coaching tenure at Rochester from 1969 to 1983. Those participating in this year’s dinner were members that encompassed all his teams at Rochester—including some who played during the school record 13 straight victories and No. 1 ranking in the East for Division III.

It was a diverse group, with families from a variety of backgrounds and hometowns, and including former captains, hall of famers, and role players alike, who have since become entrepreneurs and professionals in the military, commerce, industry, education, medicine, and law.

—Phil Chrys ’75

TRIBUTE

John States ’46: Pioneer in Automobile Safety

statesLIFESAVER: States’s research and advocacy led to the nation’s first mandatory seatbelt law. (Photo: Medical Center)

By his own admission, John States’s primary interest was cars. Growing up in Rochester, he was fascinated by engines. As chair of the orthopaedics department at Rochester General Hospital, he would come roaring into the car park of the doctor’s office building in his Ferrari.

John’s love of cars and medicine would lead him to become a pioneer of automobile safety. His work as track physician at the Watkins Glen International race course, as well as his unique combination of understanding both the structure of cars and the human body, gave him unparalleled insight into the injury pattern brought on by collision. With a scientist’s keen power of observation, and painstaking collection and analysis of injury data, he found ways to prevent and reduce injuries. He had the personality and political acumen to form a coalition of doctors, legal experts, public health officials, politicians, car manufacturers, and interested members of the public to improve car safety. His research and advocacy was a major force behind passage of the nation’s first mandatory seat belt law, in New York state, in 1984. Today, 49 states have a similar law.

John had a kind and gentle personality that was soothing to his patients. He made them feel good. When he faced detractors—like the man in Binghamton who, upon passage of the New York seat belt law, started to write John hate mail, year upon year—he just chuckled and smiled. Although he suffered from chest pains, despite multiple coronary bypass surgeries, he never grumbled.

John became a faculty member at the Medical Center in 1960, where he supervised resident rotations and medical student clerkships. Legions of medical students and young orthopaedic residents rotating through Rochester benefitted from his tutelage and encouragement. I was one of them. John was my teacher and gave me my first job. In fact, he provided everything down to his father’s examination couch, without ever asking anything in return.

John, who became professor emeritus of orthopaedics in 1990, never did give up his love of cars. The last time we spoke was by telephone. We spoke for more than 10 minutes, on his health and on the weather. Then when I started describing for him my neighbor’s car collection, he got excited. I heard “wow” and “gee whiz” from the other end of the line. I could almost see the gleam in his eyes.

John died in March at age 89. How would I sum up his achievements? Immaculate scholarship with a patrician delivery. Goodbye, my dear friend, and thank you for all the lives you have saved.

—Julian Chang ’83M (Res)

Chang is an orthopaedic surgeon in Hong Kong, honorary medical advisor to the Sports Federation and Olympic Committee of Hong Kong, China, and chief medical officer for the Hong Kong Olympic Team. He was an assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery at Rochester from 1985 to 1987.

TRIBUTE

Jesse T. Moore Jr.: Supported Students ‘From All Walks of Life’

mooreGRAND MARSHAL: A longtime professor of history and College administrator, Moore was also a fixture at commencement from 1990 to 2014, having served as University marshal, and later grand marshal. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

I met Jesse Moore in the early 1970s when, as a young doctoral student at the Eastman School, I set my sights set on doing research about the music of black Americans, something about which I knew very little. I made my way to Jesse’s office in the history department, on the River Campus. The only African-American faculty member at that time, he welcomed me warmly and initiated a long and productive mentor-student relationship. He introduced me to essential literature in history and philosophy that helped shape my research and, with assistance and direction from my Eastman School faculty mentors, I produced a dissertation entitled The Aesthetics of the Music of Black Americans: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Selected Black Scholars with Implications for Black Studies in Music.

As outside reader for the dissertation, Jesse chaired my defense committee. At the conclusion of the defense, I was excused from the exam room for the committee to deliberate my fate. I shall always remember the moment when he emerged, beaming, extending his hand and exclaiming, “Congratulations, Dr. Burgett, and welcome to the community of learned scholars.” With certainty I can attest that there are legions of Rochester students who felt Jesse’s warm support, generosity of spirit, and unyielding constancy, as he helped them pursue their academic passions under his watchful eye.

In later years, Jesse turned to administrative roles, serving as associate dean of the College for much of the 1990s, and in the office of the University Dean of Graduate Studies. In both roles, he worked to recruit undergraduates and graduate students from underrepresented minority groups, and to secure support for those who ultimately enrolled.

His personal and professional dedication to diversity and mission to support students from all walks of life helped mold the University that stands today. Jesse died in April at the age of 82. He leaves behind a legacy of teaching, scholarship, mentorship, and service that is intergenerational in breadth and effectiveness.

A professor emeritus of history, longtime University grand marshal, teacher, scholar, and friend for more than 40 years, Jesse will be greatly missed. His remains are interred in the University’s burial plot in Mount Hope Cemetery.

There, he rests in peace directly behind the grave of Martin Brewer Anderson, the University’s first president.

It is a notable and worthy eternal association, one with which I think Professor Moore would be greatly pleased.

—Paul Burgett ’68E, ’72E (MA), 76E (PhD)

Burgett is vice president, senior advisor to the president, and University dean at Rochester.

Books & Recordings

Books

The Anatomist, the Barber-Surgeon, and the King: How the Accidental Death of Henry II of France Changed the World

By Seymour Schwartz ’57M (Res)

Prometheus, 2015

Combining details of the history, politics, and medicine of Renaissance Europe, Schwartz, who holds the title of Distin- guished Alumni Professor of Surgery at Rochester, tells the story of the freak jousting accident that killed Henry II of France, his physicians’ efforts to save him, and the political fallout following his demise.

Wages of Sin

By Dave Ewans ’13 (MA)

Ravenswood Publishing, 2015

Ewans presents his debut novel, “a sprawling urban fantasy that couples explorations of identity in modern-day America with the preternatural power struggles of comic book fantasy.”

Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media

Edited by David Roh, Betsy Huang ’94 (PhD), and Greta Niu

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Roh, Huang, and Niu present a collection of essays exploring the ways in which Asia and Asians are depicted in relation to technology in literature, film, and new media. The collection “critically examin[es] the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive.”

Antiracist Teaching

By Robert Amico ’87 (PhD)

Paradigm Publishers, 2015

Based on his 14 years of experience in the classroom, Amico explores ways to open discussions of race and privilege, especially among white students. Amico is a professor of philosophy at St. Bonaventure University, where he chairs the university’s Diversity Action Committee and the Council on Discrimination and Harassment.

Corita Kent: Art and Soul

By April Dammann ’69 (MA)

Angel City Press, 2015

Dammann, a Los Angeles author and theatrical producer, tells the life story of the California artist and radical nun Sister Mary Corita, who rose to prominence in the 1960s.

Dreamhouse

By Penny Drue Baird ’73

Monacelli Press, 2015

Baird, named a Top 100 interior designer by Architectural Digest, presents a photographic exploration of her work, including luxury Manhattan apartments, Tuscan-inspired villas in California, and family homes in the Northeast. The book includes an introduction by interior decorator Mario Buatta.

The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

By Richard Feinman ’63

NMS Press, 2015

Feinman, a professor of cell biology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and an expert in nutrition and metabolism, offers an accessible guide to the science of nutrition, as well as the story of “the first low-carbohydrate revolution . . . what killed it, and why another one is happening.”

A Winning Ticket on Queens Boulevard

By Janet Linder ’78

Blurb, 2015

Linder’s children’s picture book tells a story of Depression-era Queens. The book is illustrated by Eli Portman.

The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of Southern Chinese Martial Arts

By Benjamin Judkins ’98 and Jon Nielson

SUNY Press, 2015

Judkins, a political scientist and martial arts expert, explores how and why certain martial arts developed in southern China, and why they’ve become popular worldwide.

Old Is Not a Four-Letter Word

By Susan Towle ’63, ’63N

Ward Street Press, 2015

Towle, a nurse with more than 20 years of experience working in elder care, presents a guide to aging that serves as “a clarion call to change our paradigm from dread and denial of aging to embracing, planning, and preparing for our elder years.”

Lair of the Jade (Revised Trilogy)

By Dalia Woodliff ’62

Amazon Digital Services, 2014

Woodliff offers a revised edition of the trilogy Lair of the Jade, Threads of the Jade, and Torn from the Lair, downloadable as a single, Amazon Kindle e-book. The stories, which begin with “a returning nightmare, a drowning, a witness, and a lost jade stone,” are inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s quest motif, as well as by Woodliff’s father’s memoir about the family’s escape from Lithuania during World War II.

Chemical Information for Chemists: A Primer

By Judith Currano ’98

Royal Society of Chemistry, 2014

Currano, head of the chemistry library at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a guide to retrieving and evaluating the vast and diverse body of chemical literature, designed for chemists who lack access to a chemical information professional.

One Step from Normal

By Susan Davis ’64

North Country Books, 2015

Davis presents a historical novel for middle graders set during the 1955 Boston-area polio epidemic.

Building Resistance to Stress and Aging: The Toughness Model

By Richard Dienstbier ’69 (PhD)

Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015

Dienstbier describes how regular physical exercise and mental stimulation activate genes that modify neurochemistry and enhance certain brain structures. Among the results are greater stress tolerance, emotional stability, energy, and memory capacity. Dienstbier is past chair of the psychology department at the University of Nebraska.

Jonas Salk: A Life

By Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs ’68

Oxford University Press, 2015

Drawing on her access to Salk’s sealed archive as well as hundreds of personal interviews, Jacobs reveals details of Salk’s role in developing the first influenza vaccine, his pioneering AIDS research, and his alienation from much of the scientific community in the aftermath of his signature achievement, development of the polio vaccine. Jacobs is the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Professor of Medicine Emerita at Stanford.

An Unexpected Outcome

By Roderick Cyr ’01S (MBA)

CreateSpace, 2015

Cyr’s novel, in which a newlywed husband must choose between faithfulness and temptation, tells a story of “love, broken vows, second chances, and relationship redemption.”

Pediatric Urology for the Primary Care Physician

Edited by Ronald Rabinowitz, William Hulbert ’79M (MD), ’85M (Res), and Robert Mevorach ’85M (MD), ’91M (Res)

Springer, 2015

Rabinowitz, Hulbert, and Mevorach—pediatric urologists at the Medical Center and Golisano Children’s Hospital— offer one of the few guides to pediatric urology intended to help primary care physicians recognize common congenital and acquired urologic problems.

Lake Sammamish through Time

By Kate Thibodeau ’01

Arcadia Publishing, 2015

Thibodeau, a local historian in Washington state, presents a photographic history of Lake Sammamish, once an important center of the Pacific Northwest logging industry, and now a site for recreation and tourism.

Recordings

Capriccio

By Jeremy Gill ’96E

Innova Recordings, 2015

Composer Gill explores the wide-ranging “technical, expressive, and textural possibilities of the string quartet,” through compositions performed by the Grammy Award–winning Parker Quartet. The recording was funded through a New Music USA project grant.

Through the Mist

By Pamela Marshall ’76E

Ravello Records, 2015

Composer Marshall presents a recording of chamber music for winds and strings, performed by chamber groups in the Boston area, and inspired by “visits to the Costa Rican rainforest, a New Hampshire lake, and imaginary primordial landscapes.”

Another Thing

By Joshua Hatcher ’08, ’09 (KEY)

Self-published, 2014

In his second album, Hatcher, performing on vocals, guitar, and keyboards, explores “feelings of solitude and loss that accompany significant life changes.”

Haunted America Suite

By Jim ’90E (DMA) and Celeste Shearer

Summit Records, 2015

The husband-and-wife duo, based in New Mexico, present music for horn, tuba, and piano, inspired by Mexico and the American Southwest.

Eastern Standard Time

By Chris Vadala ’70E

Art of Life Records, 2015

Saxophonist Vadala performs a selection of originals as well as songs by Sonny Rollins, Duke Ellington, Chuck Mangione ’63E, and others, with a quartet that includes Rick Whitehead (guitar), Barry Hart (drums), and John Previti (acoustic bass.) Vadala is a professor of saxophone, director of jazz studies, and holds the title of Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland at College Park.

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.

The Modern Roots of ‘Ancient’ Martial Arts

Chinese martial arts—popular among Americans and prized for their ancient roots— owe much to modern conflicts in China, says Ben Judkins ’98.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

I grew up in the 1980s, when we had the Karate Kid and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The martial arts were a big part of popular culture. I started taking tae kwon do in middle school, and began my first semester of college at the University of Toyama in Japan. While there, I was introduced to some kendo.

judkins (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

When I came back from Japan and started at Rochester, I started to study political science. I was very influenced by professors John Mueller and Randy Stone, who inspired my interest in international relations. In graduate school at Columbia, I studied global political economy and got interested in the social stresses that occur during periods of rapid globalization. While writing a paper on the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising against foreign influence in China around the turn of the 20th century, I learned how the conflict involved martial artists. And as I thought about this, I realized that the social stresses of globalization were very much implicated in the development of the modern Chinese martial arts.

Benjamin Judkins ’98

Author, with Jon Nielson, of The Creation of Wing Chun: A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts (SUNY Press); founder and coeditor of the journal Martial Arts Studies; editor of the blog Kung Fu Tea.

Home: Ithaca, New York

On why many martial arts enthusiasts have never heard of wing chun: “Wing chun is just one of the many styles found within the Chinese martial arts. If you’ve ever seen Bruce Lee, then you’ve already seen some wing chun. Yet even if you run across someone who teaches or studies wing chun, you might not know it. Often they’ll just say, ‘Well, I do kung fu.’ Not everyone stops to explain in excruciating detail what it is that they do on their Tuesday evenings.”

People always tell you how ancient the Chinese martial arts are. But as we practice and understand them today, they really originated during the period of China’s integration into the global economy. A lot of Chinese martial arts developed in the Pearl River Delta during the late 19th century, where port cities like Guangzhou, and the regional manufacturing center Foshan, were growing and changing because of international trade.

Globalization caused social tensions and conflict, and one of the ways that manifested itself was in the reimagination of what the martial arts meant, from a skill that could help you earn a living, to an expression of Chinese nationalism. Chinese martial arts had long been a means of making a living as a guard or as part of a militia. But by the 20th century, they came to be reimagined by reformers and teachers as ways to preserve Chinese culture, or to strengthen the Chinese nation against foreign oppression. The martial arts increasingly became a nationalized project that had state backing.

Bruce Lee brought the Chinese martial arts into Western popular culture in the 1970s. When he appeared in the 1973 movie Enter the Dragon, it changed everything. This was the first kung fu film that most Americans had ever encountered. Lee was on the big screen fighting in a way that few people had ever seen before. And every martial arts class from the USA to the UK filled up overnight.

Obviously, the rise of the Chinese martial arts in the United States in the 1970s wasn’t associated with Chinese nationalism. But it was associated with questions of identity. A lot of kids were undergoing a process of self-creation that coincided with the explosion in popularity of Hong Kong martial arts films. I was talking with another American martial arts expert, and he recalled that after watching Enter the Dragon, he and every other kid in his school got busy making nunchuks in shop class. One can only imagine what it would have been like to be a teacher facing a schoolyard of increasingly wellarmed, Bruce Lee–obsessed teenagers in 1973.

STUDENT LIFE

Meridian Merriment

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Signs of Spring: An energetic group of Rochester juniors and seniors celebrate the end of the academic year with a photo at the Meridian Marker on the Eastman Quadrangle during Graduation Week in May. Photograph by Adam Fenster