Rochester Review

January–February 2017, Volume 79, No. 3

Editor

Scott Hauser

Associate Editors

Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Kathleen McGarvey

Contributors

Adam Fenster, Peter Iglinski, Jim Mandelaro, Bob Marcotte, Melissa Mead, Mark Michaud, Sara Miller, Dennis O’Donnell, Jessica O’Leary, Susanne Pallo, Monique Patenaude, Jennifer Roach, Scott Sabocheck, Lindsey Valich, and Brandon Vick

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

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

ISSN: 0035-7421

Copyright © 2017 University of Rochester

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

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Rochester Review:

Welcoming All in Our Community

By Joel Seligman

president (Photo: John Myers)

We characterize our University’s core values as our commitments to academic excellence, academic freedom, diversity, and our community. We are a values-driven University, and our values are perpetual.

We have long valued diversity and have been committed to creating and maintaining campuses that are welcoming and respectful to all.

Diversity at our University includes not only respect for persons of all races, religions, genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations, but also diversity of viewpoint. We value all individuals who participate here as students, faculty, or staff, regardless of their intellectual beliefs.

In the past 11 years, we have made notable progress in advancing racial and gender diversity and increasing the number of underrepresented faculty, students, and staff. We still have much work to do to achieve a University where all feel supported and respected.

On November 29, 2016, I accepted the principal recommendations of the Final Report of the Presidential Commission on Race and Diversity. The report was the culmination of a process that began in the fall of 2015, when I charged the commission to provide a comprehensive review of University policies and procedures with respect to race and diversity as they affect our students, faculty, and staff.

The principal recommendations of the report address Leadership, Students, Faculty, Staff, Climate, and Community.

Specifically, I have established a Presidential Diversity Council as a centralized committee of senior University leaders from across the University to promote and strengthen the University’s race and diversity commitments. To coordinate implementation of the Presidential Diversity Council’s decisions, I will also establish a Presidential Diversity Council Implementation Committee of leaders from offices throughout the University. The recommendation to establish the Presidential Diversity Council underscores the importance of having at the table those administrative and academic leaders most directly responsible for running the University and allocating resources.

Each school will be expected to clearly articulate its programs for recruiting, retaining, and graduating a diverse student body consistent with our core values and applicable law. In the recent United States Supreme Court case of Fisher v. Texas, a majority of the court reaffirmed, “enrolling a diverse student body promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes, and enables students to better understand persons of different races. Equally important, student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society.”

Each school also will be expected to pursue clearly articulated plans to attract and retain a diverse faculty. Key issues here include the pipeline of outstanding candidates and developing diverse applicant pools for faculty searches.

With respect to staff, our focus in part will be on the senior levels of staff and providing career development programs that offer opportunities for promotion of all employees.

Achieving a University that is welcoming to all is about more than numbers. It also is about climate and culture. There is much to be proud of on our campuses in terms of the extent to which we have become an increasingly diverse—and indeed international—institution in recent decades. But we were reminded throughout the process led by the Commission on Race and Diversity that there remain instances where individuals feel marginalized because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. This is unacceptable. We aspire to be a University that is a magnet for the most talented faculty, students, and staff—quite literally in the world. To fully achieve this, the realities of what kind of community we are profoundly matters.

The final report of the Commission on Race and Diversity is detailed with more than 100 pages and 19 appendices, providing a comprehensive and nuanced view of the state of race and diversity at our University. The report was the culmination of a thorough process of analyzing extensive employment and enrollment data, survey responses, and holding a series of town halls and meetings to solicit input from all constituencies. After the report was circulated, I received valuable input from our community through a series of town hall meetings and confidential email communications.

I am deeply grateful to Paul Burgett and Richard Feldman, both longtime deans and advisors who chaired the commission, and to the entire commission for their hard work over the past year. I am optimistic that the commission’s report and recommendations will enable us to become the welcoming and inclusive community that we aspire to be.

Taking Notes with WRUR

I enjoyed reading the “Radio Days” item (Letters, November-December). It brought back many memories that I had as a result of “working” at WRUR.

My interest in having a weekly one-hour classical music program was that I was able to take long-playing records out from the station and play them in my room at Fauver Stadium. To this day, when I hear certain classical music, it brings me immediately to my room.

Equally and probably more important, having the radio program gave me access to the rolls of discarded Teletype paper that were literally lying on the floor under the Telex printers.

Having survived World War II in Siberia and Uzbekistan, where we were lucky to be able to write in the white space of newspapers, I could not understand why I was the only one using the other side of the Teletype paper to take notes in class in lieu of buying notebooks or reams of white sheets of paper.

Further, these rolls were ideal for memorizing all kinds of dates, formulas, and working out long mathematical problems as I could create a scroll and tape it on the walls of my room to study each part of what I had to learn or memorize.

In those days, I was also a waiter at Todd Union for the evening meal. One of my “colleagues” whose first name was Dave (the last name will hopefully be identified by another reader) was “the” engineer of the station. He spent all of his extracurricular time at WRUR. It is he who “got me the job” for which I am still eternity grateful.

George Landau ’55

Tiburon, California

Finding Intersections

I found the article about physicist Jay Last ’51 (“At the Intersection of Optics and Art,” September-October) particularly meaningful in light of the research by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, neuropsychiatrist and professor of neurobiology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Kandel’s recent book, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, explains that the “distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths.”

Those interested in learning more about the interfacing of art and science can find more about it in Kandel’s highly readable book.

Thank you for this interesting article.

Arlene Eichen Stolnitz ’56

Venice, Florida

Offering Congratulations

Congratulations indeed on the November-December issue, and on the success of “A Campus Transformed” (September- October).

It has been many years since I left that campus for the last time, but I have followed the successes of the University over the years. I feel it is appropriate to express thanks for all the University has done for me.

F. H. Kim Krenz ’41

Lakefield, Ontario

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.

SONG CYCLE

Premiere Performance

fleming (Photo: Dave Jones/Empire West Photo for the Eastman School of Music)

DAYS OF DEBUTS: Grammy Award–winning soprano Renée Fleming ’83E (MM) and the Eastman Philharmonia presented the debut of Letters from Georgia, a song cycle by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Kevin Puts ’94E, ’99E (DMA) during a performance last fall at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. Basing the composition on correspondence from artist Georgia O’Keeffe to her photographer husband Alfred Stieglitz and suffragist Anita Pollitzer, Puts wrote the work specifically for Fleming and the Philharmonia. The Rochester debut was followed by a one-night performance at Lincoln Center in New York City.

‘JOY IN THEIR HEARTS’

90 Years Young

groundbreaking (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

EARTH MOVERS: This spring marks the 90th anniversary of the groundbreaking for the River Campus, a day in 1927 when, historian Arthur May noted, “trustees, faculty, alumni, and townspeople smiled the joy in their hearts.” On May 21 of that year, May writes in A History of the University of Rochester, then President Rush Rhees ceremoniously turned the first spadeful of earth before “a big steam shovel gave a little demonstration of its prowess.” Plans for the campus originally included a dozen buildings. Today, there are close to 60.

DANCE & MOVEMENT

Physical Presence

dance (Photo: Adam Fenster)

SOCIAL SUPPORT: Sarah Bjornland ’17, an optics major from Utica, New York, is lifted during a rehearsal for a late-semester concert presented by the Program of Dance and Movement. Called Confluence, the performances featured students, faculty members, and guest artists. Bjornland, along with Anna Alden ’17, an English major from Canandaigua, New York, and Charlotte Pillow ’19, a biology major from Ridgewood, New Jersey, presented work designed to explore the physicality behind female gender conceptions, the social constructions and cultural expectations that result from those conceptions, and how they influence the lives of women in contemporary society.

CLIMATOLOGY

A Large Seagull . . . with Teeth

Rochester team’s discovery of ancient bird species adds to understanding of climate.

By Lindsey Valich

birdBUILDING A BIRD: New fossil records unearthed in the Canadian Arctic are offering scientists their first look at a prehistoric bird and its much warmer climate. (Photo: Michael Osadciw)

A Rochester team of geologists has discovered a new species of bird in the Canadian Arctic. At approximately 90 million years old, the bird fossils are among the oldest avian records found in the northernmost latitude, and offer further evidence of an intense warming event during the late Cretaceous period.

“The bird would have been a cross between a large seagull and a diving bird like a cormorant, but likely had teeth,” says John Tarduno, professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and leader of the expedition.

Tarduno and his team, which included both undergraduate and graduate students, named the bird Tingmiatornis arctica; “Tingmiat” means “those that fly” in the Inuktitut language spoken in the central and eastern Canadian Arctic (Nunavut territory). The findings, published in Scientific Reports and based on work funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation, add to previous fossil records that Tarduno has uncovered from the same geological time period and location. Taken together, the fossils paint a clearer picture of an ecosystem that would have existed in the Canadian Arctic during the Cretaceous period’s Turonian age, which lasted from approximately 93.9 to 89.8 million years ago.

bird (Photo: Steve Boerner)

“These fossils allow us to flesh out the community and add to our understanding of the community’s composition and how it differed from other places in the world,” says Donald Brinkman, vertebrate paleontologist and director of preservation and research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada.

Building historic climate records further helps scientists determine the effects of climate on communities, ecosystems, and the distribution of species and could help predict the effects of future climatic events.

“Before our fossil, people were suggesting that it was warm, but you still would have had seasonal ice,” Tarduno says. “We’re suggesting that’s not even the case, and that it’s one of these hyper-warm intervals because the bird’s food sources and the whole part of the ecosystem could not have survived in ice.”

From the fossil and sediment records, Tarduno and his team were able to conjecture that the bird’s environment would have been characterized by volcanic activity, a calm freshwater bay, temperatures comparable to those in northern Florida today, and creatures such as turtles, large freshwater fish, and champsosaurs—a now extinct, crocodile-like reptile.

“The fossils tell us what that world could look like, a world without ice at the Arctic,” says Richard Bono, a PhD candidate in earth and environmental sciences and a member of Tarduno’s expedition. “It would have looked very different than today, where you have tundra and fewer animals.”

The fossils were found above basalt lava fields, created from a series of volcanic eruptions. Scientists believe volcanoes pumped carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing a greenhouse effect and a period of extraordinary polar heat. That created an ecosystem allowing large birds, including Tingmiatornis arctica, to thrive.

bird (Photo: Courtesy of John Tarduno)

birdLOCATION LECTURE: The discovery of fossils (top) during an expedition in the Canadian Arctic that geophysicist John Tarduno led with Rochester students (above) suggests the area was once a more volcanically active region. (Photo: Courtesy of John Tarduno)

Tarduno’s team unearthed three bird bones: part of the ulna and portions of the humerus, which, in birds, are located in the wings. From the bones’ features, as well as their thickness and proportions, the team’s paleontologist, Julia Clarke of the University of Texas, was able to determine the evolutionary relationships of the new birds as well as characteristics that indicate whether the animals were likely able to fly or dive.

“These birds are comparatively close cousins of all living birds and they comprise some of the oldest records of fossil birds from North America,” Clarke says. “Details of the upper arm bones tell us about how features of the flightstroke seen in living species came to be.”

Previous fossil discoveries indicate the presence of carnivorous fish such as the half-meter-long bowfin. Birds feeding on the fish would have needed to be large and have teeth, offering additional clues to Tingmiatornis arctica’s characteristics.

Physiological factors, such as a rapid growth and maturation rate, might explain how the line of bird was able to survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event that occurred roughly 66 million years ago and eliminated about three-quarters of the Earth’s plant and animal species.

The physiological characteristics are still conjecture, Tarduno emphasizes, but he says the bird’s environment gives clear indications as to why the bird fossils were found where they were.

“It’s there because everything is right,” he says. “The food supply was there, there was a freshwater environment, and the climate became so warm that all of the background ecological factors were established to make it a great place.”

HAJIM SCHOOL

New Engineering Dean Outlines Her Vision

Wendi Heinzelman, the first woman to serve as dean of the Hajim School, sees engineering as a quest to improve the world.

heinzelmanAPPLYING APPLAUSE: Wendi Heinzelman, dean of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, is applauded after delivering an address to mark her installation as the first woman to lead the school. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Wendi Heinzelman recognizes that some students can find it difficult to imagine themselves as engineers. But, she notes, that’s often because many young people haven’t had the opportunity to learn about engineering and how the field contributes to modern life.

That was not the case for her. Heinzelman credits the example of her parents with sparking her interest in engineering and technology, as well as in expanding the reach of education.

“When I was growing up, engineering was not a subject that was covered in school, and had I not been born into a family where both education and engineering were highly valued, I may never have found my calling in life. My mom was a science teacher, and my dad an engineer,” she recounted during a ceremony to formally mark her appointment as dean of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.

“From my mom I learned the power of education, as she spent most of her career teaching students from an inner city with less privileged backgrounds. My dad worked at Bell Labs in its heyday, and I remember the palpable excitement just in walking into that enormous building, where great minds of the day would be discussing their latest breakthroughs.”

Her father helped develop technology to enable computers to understand spoken language, which was, as she noted, well before Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon rolled out commercial versions of “assistants” you can talk to. “As a kid growing up in the ’80s, this was the coolest technology I could imagine,” she says. “You could actually talk to a computer and it would respond appropriately. This is what ignited my desire to learn about engineering, and in particular, electrical engineering, so that I could one day perhaps make a similar contribution to society.”

Heinzelman’s contributions—both as an electrical engineer and as an educational leader—were recognized during the December ceremony. Presided over by President and CEO Joel Seligman, the event included remarks by Ed Hajim ’58, a chemical engineer who went on to become chair emeritus of the Board of Trustees and the namesake for the school.

They were joined by Peter Lennie, senior vice president and the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences & Engineering. Also giving presentations were Heinzelman’s mentor, Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor and head of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT; and a guest speaker, Alicia Abella, assistant vice president for cloud technologies and services research at AT&T.

—Bob Marcotte

Dean’s Address ‘Diverse Groups Thinking about Problems’

By Wendi Heinzelman

Everyone grows up with the impacts of engineering all around them. But many kids do not have the slightest idea about what an engineer does and could not possibly envision themselves in this profession. This leads to a big portion of our society not being adequately represented in the fields of engineering and applied sciences. Given that the best, most creative, and most efficient solutions have been shown to result from diverse groups thinking about problems, it is vital to the future of not only our school but also our profession that we increase access.

heinzelmanFIRST: Wendi Heinzelman is the first woman to lead engineering. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

To meet this goal, we as a society need to ensure that we do a better job of educating future generations about the field of engineering—the excitement of tackling difficult issues, the satisfaction of solving even a small piece of a problem, the incredible challenge that comes with being able to design the future, and the awesome responsibility to make sure that these solutions lead to positive outcomes, a healthier, happier, and more sustainable world. This is a challenge that we all are tasked with, and I know we will continue to make progress.

The mission of the Hajim School is to advance the highest quality education and research in engineering and applied science through engaging experiences and environments that promote critical thinking, creativity, ethics, and leadership.

It is important that our students have access to opportunities outside of the classroom in three key areas: internships, global education, and research. Internships provide such an opportunity and help students determine directions they would like to take in their careers. It is also crucial that our students understand that we operate in a global world, and engineering must be undertaken within the context of a global society. Stepping out of their comfort zones and experiencing life in a different society, a different culture, perhaps a different language, is an incredible growth opportunity that I hope many of our students can experience. And research is key to developing analytic and creative skills, to understanding the literature and determining how to develop new knowledge, and to fostering critical thinking that will benefit our students in whatever careers they choose.

I also want to ensure that every individual within the Hajim School is respected and valued for the contributions that he or she brings to our academic mission. Although we have made great strides to increase our enrollment of women and underrepresented minority students and faculty, we need to do more to both attract and retain diverse students and faculty in our programs. At the same time, we must challenge ourselves to expand our thinking and our ideas—about the intellectual nature of our fields, the practical applications of our work, and the professional responsibilities that necessarily follow.

I am a strong believer in the benefits of crossdisciplinary thinking. The humanities and social sciences, in particular, have a lot to teach us about critical discourse, and my goal is for our Hajim students to engage in such discourse and to have our students explore opportunities they won’t readily have once they leave the University.

I believe that all educated citizens in the 21st century, regardless of major or intended career, need to have an understanding of technology, of data analysis, system design, and computer systems, and we are currently working on developing new courses and clusters that will hopefully attract non-engineers to become educated in these important skills.

I’ve always loved our school’s motto, Meliora, which means “ever better.” To me, Meliora is about taking time to recognize, appreciate, and really celebrate how far we have come, yet always keeping an eye on where we want to go. I have no doubt that the spirit of Meliora is alive and well in the Hajim School, and I look forward to working with our students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends to achieve ever better research and educational opportunities.

For the full text of Heinzelman’s remarks, visit Rochester.edu/newscenter/heinzelman-address/.

ART, MEET SCIENCE

Computing and Connecting

It may sound odd that Euakarn (Som) Liengtiraphan ’17 uses words like “magic” and “empowerment” in describing computer science, but think of the terms as updates to the “black box” metaphor for the Harry Potter generation.

If you know how to code—if you know how to make that nondescript box do what you want it to do—you have a certain power that’s not widely distributed among the population. And while it may not be the same as wizardry, studying computer science provides an important grounding in how to solve problems and how to approach a wide range of challenges, Liengtiraphan says.

“Computer science is very empowering,” she says. “It’s kind of like knowing magic: you learn the right stuff and how to say it, and out comes an answer that solves a real problem. That’s so cool.”

The senior from Bangkok, Thailand, has been sharing the message of computing as power in her role as the president of the Rochester student group Women in Computing Club. With about 100 members, the group organizes outreach events at Rochester-area schools and local organizations like the Girl Scouts to introduce computing and computer science to young women.

Marty Guenther, the undergraduate coordinator for the Department of Computer Science, says finding ways to engage students, particularly young women, who have not traditionally majored in computer science, is a key initiative of the department and the Hajim School.

Nationally, about 16 percent of computer science students are women. At Rochester, the department expects the Class of 2017 to be about 34 percent women, up from about 30 percent last spring. That’s gratifying to see, Guenther says, because she can remember when “year after year, there would be one woman graduating, or maybe none.”

Guenther says recent changes that allow students to switch to computer science later in their studies has helped bring more students to the major. Women, in particular, seem to discover the major later in their academic careers, she says. The department has seen an increase in double majors. About 50 percent of all computer science students double major, but about 62 percent of women in the department combine the major with something else.

Rochester has also been selected as a partner in BRAID (Building, Recruiting, and Inclusion for Diversity), an initiative of 15 institutions led by the Anita Borg Institute and Harvey Mudd College. In addition to other support, the initiative helps pay travel expenses for Rochester students to attend the annual Grace Hopper Celebration, billed as the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Organized by the Borg Institute and supported by the Association for Computing Machinery, the event is named in honor of pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper. Attendees learn about ideas in computer science and have several opportunities to make professional connections.

Liengtiraphan, who left last fall’s conference with three job interviews, says having the chance to learn from and work with women technologists is important to expanding the field. At Rochester, she and members of the group often organize “Coding Parties,” small gatherings where they share ideas about coding. The sessions are part of an effort to create a sense of community, she says.

“It’s nice to have a place where lots of girls are doing the same thing.”

—Scott Hauser

ART HISTORY

A Story in Pictures

Critic Douglas Crimp offers a snapshot of the art and culture of mid-century New York City.

By Kathleen McGarvey

crimpVIEW FINDER: Crimp depicts an era through text and art, such as this image, “Pier 18: Hands Framing New York Harbor,” by John Baldessari and Shunk-Kender. (Photo: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20)/Courtesy of John Baldessari)

After art critic Douglas Crimp moved to the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in 1969, he became a regular customer at Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and art bar on Park Avenue. Max’s had two rooms, one in front and one in back, and members of Andy Warhol’s Factory could reliably be found in the latter.

As he passed through the front room, Crimp would greet the “artist- regulars” he had come to know during his first two years in the city, but he found himself inexorably pulled to the back, whose “charged atmosphere” he loved.

The divisions between the rooms “mirrored divisions in the art world that were fairly pronounced in those days, divisions between tough-minded Minimal and Conceptual art and the glam performance scene, between real men and swishes, to use Warhol’s word,” writes Crimp in his new book, Before Pictures (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

The Village Voice has called it a “profound, delectably gossipy memoir” while The New Yorker termed it an “exhibition-as-memoir,” with its story significantly relayed through the 150 illustrations that fill it.

But Crimp—the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and a professor of visual and cultural studies—rejects the label of memoir, which he suggests doesn’t capture his narrative method and puts the emphasis on him rather than on the historical moment he depicts.

The book “moves from anecdote to criticism to research, back to anecdote, and so forth, and also from my gay life to my art world life,” he says.

Before Pictures was inspired years before it was written, by Crimp’s realization that many of his fellow activists in ACT UP, an advocacy group formed in response to the AIDS crisis, were decades younger than he and so hadn’t experienced gay life in 1970s New York. Writing about his life in that era would be a means of resisting a “revisionist narrative that was being promulgated: that the 1970s represented gay men’s immaturity and led inevitably to AIDS, which in turn made us grow up and become responsible citizens,” Crimp told Out Magazine in September.

After spending his childhood in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, he went to college “as far away as possible in every respect,” he writes, moving to New Orleans and enrolling at Tulane’s School of Architecture.

He explored local gay culture and also pivoted from architecture to art history. In 1967 he moved to New York, taking up residence first in Spanish Harlem.

“I moved at a time when New York was virtually bankrupt and rents were cheap and I could imagine myself becoming an art critic by simply joining the art world and participating—and I was able to do that,” he says.

The book, structured around Crimp’s changing addresses, tells the story of his life in the city from the late 1960s through much of the ’70s, concluding with his curation of the 1977 exhibition Pictures at the gallery Artists Space.

Crimp first became renowned as a critic of the “Pictures Generation”—a group of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, whose work reflects the media-driven, consumerist world in which they grew up.

“My own life and aesthetic attitudes reflected the ambivalence and fears that were still operative about homosexuality,” he writes, “about whether art could be a manly enough profession and about what kinds of art qualified as most manly.”

He calls the division “between the art world and the queer world” something that he “would negotiate throughout my first decade living in New York City.”

Crimp is the author of five other books, including “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (MIT Press, 2012) and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002). He also edited AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (MIT Press, 1988), a special issue of the art journal October, later republished as a book.

It was the first book-length publication on the cultural meaning of AIDS and propelled Crimp into the AIDS activist movement.

“I first met Douglas through his writing when I was in graduate school,” says Joan Saab, chair of the Department of Art and Art History.

When she came to Rochester 15 years ago, she was intimidated to become his colleague—an apprehension that she says was soon dispelled by his generosity toward fellow faculty and his engagement of students.

Crimp’s book “brings all the warmth and intellectual rigor of his classroom to the printed page,” she says.

“He seamlessly balances his art criticism with his emerging activism, without ever losing his warm and compelling voice. It’s a tour de force.”

Can ‘Supernormals’ Stave off Alzheimer’s?

discover (Photo: Adobe Stock)

Older adults with excellent memories have more efficient connections between specific areas of the brain—a finding that could hold promise for the prevention of dementia and cognitive decline, according to a School of Nursing study.

Although researchers have historically viewed memory deterioration as an inevitable part of the aging process, a small group of older adults—called “supernormals”—are able to maintain their memory capacities much better than their peers. Feng (Vankee) Lin, an assistant professor of nursing, is exploring what can be learned from such individuals.

In a study published in Cortex, Lin and her team explored differences in brain function among three groups of older adults: supernormals, who were defined as having higher than average memory scores for their age, older adults diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment who are at high risk for developing Alzheimer’s, and a healthy control group. The study is the first to compare the brain function of supernormals to those who are at risk for developing Alzheimer’s.

Specifically, Lin and her colleagues measured the functional connectivity—the connections among spatially separated structures of the brain—between the cingulate cortex and other regions. Functional connectivity is measured by observing which parts of the brain are activated at the same time or in rapid succession in response to a stimulus.

“The cingulate cortex acts as a ‘hub’ and receives input from many areas in the brain. Its functioning often deteriorates early in the aging process and in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, so it could play a key role in memory decline,” says Lin. “It’s a vulnerable area that hasn’t been explored in this way before.”

As part of the study, the team analyzed a national data set from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, which collects brain imaging scans and provides them to researchers across the country. The participants also underwent memory, executive function, and other tests to assess their cognitive abilities.

Lin found that individuals who had stronger or more efficient functional connectivity between the cingulate cortex and certain regions of the brain had better memories compared to those who had weaker or less efficient relationships between the same areas. Supernormals also had lower levels of amyloids, groups of proteins that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

But even when amyloids were present, the relationship between better functional connectivity and better memory still remained. The findings indicate that the way the cingulate cortex functions in supernormals may represent exceptional neural reserve—the ability of the mind to resist damage. The neural reserve could protect supernormals against the effects of amyloid plaques and allow their memories to be maintained, researchers say.

—Jessica O’Leary

Better Vision through Brain-Training Video Games

The peripheral vision of children with poor vision improved after only eight hours of training via kid-friendly action video games, according to a study by Rochester and Vanderbilt researchers. Most surprising to the scientists was the range of visual gains the children made, and that the gains were quickly acquired and stable when the children were tested a year later.

Duje Tadin, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, helped design the games used in the study, which was supported by the National Eye Institute and published in Scientific Reports. “Children who have profound visual deficits often expend a disproportionate amount of effort trying to see straight ahead,” he says. “So we devised a kid-friendly game that compels players to pay attention to the entire visual field.”

A total of 24 youths from Tennessee and Oklahoma schools for the blind participated in the study. After eight hours of training, the children made improvements in a range of visual tasks. The researchers say the students were able to better perceive moving objects in the far periphery and were much faster at visual searches, such as finding a stapler on a messy desk.

“We were surprised by the range of improvements, and we were even more surprised when we tested a few of the students a year later and found that the gains they made were stable,” says Jeffrey Nyquist, the study’s lead author who has since founded a company called NeuroTrainer. “Within just a few hours of training, they were able to expand their usable visual field and visual search ability.”

—Monique Patenaude

Antisense Compounds Offer New Weapon Against Influenza

Challenging a long-held convention, University researchers have shown they can inhibit the influenza A virus by targeting its genomic RNA with “antisense” compounds.

The findings, highlighted on the cover of Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, may offer scientists a new way to attack an increasingly drug-resistant pathogen that causes an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year.

The collaboration, involving the labs of Douglas Turner, a professor of chemistry; Luis Martinez-Sobrido, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology; and two researchers in Poland, reported that “antisense” compounds targeting one of the virus’s eight genomic RNA segments caused a 5- to 25-fold reduction of influenza A virus in cell cultures.

“Antisense” compounds are synthesized with nucleotides, the building blocks of nucleic acid. When the compounds—called antisense oligonucleotides—bind to the targeted genomic RNA, they block its ability to replicate.

“That’s a big difference,” Martinez-Sobrido says. “When mice are infected with 10,000 viruses, they all die. However, with 25 times less virus, all animals can survive infection and they don’t even develop symptoms.”

The most effective of the antisense compounds ranged from 11 to 15 nucleotides long, and were not toxic to host cells. To date, influenza viruses have shown a remarkable ability to mutate and become resistant to current antiviral drugs.

—Bob Marcotte

discoverNERVE CENTER: A Medical Center study indicates that a drug currently used to treat patients with multiple sclerosis may help repair damage to peripheral nerves. (Above, a transverse section of a human nerve.) (Photo: Biophoto Associates/Science Source)

Repurposed Drug May Offer Treatment for Nerve Damage

Medical Center researchers may have identified a new means of enhancing the body’s ability to repair its own cells. They hope the finding will lead to better diagnosis and treatment of traumatic nerve injuries, like those sustained in car accidents, sports injuries, or combat. The team showed that a drug previously approved for other purposes can “wake up” damaged peripheral nerves and speed repair and functional recovery after injury.

The study, which appeared in EMBO Molecular Medicine, demonstrates for the first time that 4-aminopyridine (4AP), a drug currently used to treat patients with the chronic nerve disease multiple sclerosis has the unexpected property of promoting recovery from acute nerve damage. The study is the first demonstration of the drug’s benefit in treating acute nerve injury and the first time those benefits have been shown to persist after treatment was stopped.

Study authors John Elfar, associate professor of orthopaedics, and Mark Noble, the Martha M. Freeman, M.D., Professor in Biomedical Genetics, and their team, found that daily treatment with 4AP promotes repair of myelin, the insulating material that normally surrounds nerve fibers, in mice. The findings advance an area of research that has been stagnant for nearly 30 years and may address unmet needs of traumatically injured patients in the future. —Susanne Pallo

Study Refutes Theory about Autism Brain Response

A Medical Center study is challenging the hypothesis that nerve cells in the brains of people with autism spectrum disorders do not reliably and consistently respond to external stimuli.

“Our findings show there is no measurable variation in how individuals with autism respond to repeated visual and tactile stimuli,” says John Foxe, the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Professor in Neuroscience, the chair of the Department of Neuroscience, and the senior author of the study.

Published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the study involved 20 individuals diagnosed with autism and 20 individuals who served as healthy controls. The electrical activity in the participants’ brains was recorded as they were exposed to repeated visual stimuli. No matter how the researchers measured the variability of the responses, brain responses in people with autism were as stable as those of the controls. To make sure that the finding didn’t apply only to the visual system, the team also evaluated tactile inputs—repeated touches to the wrists of participants—and, once again, measures of brainwave responses provided no evidence of increased variability in the individuals with autism.

The work examined an understanding of how the brain responds to stimuli known as the neuronal unreliability theory, which has gained traction in recent years in the wake of a study published in 2012. The theory is based on the assumption that the brain’s response to repetitive stimuli should be steady and consistent. According to the theory, the brain’s response is not constant in people with autism and, consequently, alters their perception of the physical environment and impairs cognitive and social development.

That theory did not ring true with Foxe and his colleagues, based on their decades of studying the brain activity of children with autism spectrum disorders. Furthermore, the original studies that formed the basis for the hypothesis involved functional MRI experiments, work that measures changes in the blood oxygen levels in the brain. While fluctuations in blood flow are important indicators of brain activity, the measures do not precisely correlate to the more rapid electrical activity that occurs in the brain when nerve cells are stimulated.

The authors contend that while the new study essentially demonstrates negative findings, it represents an important contribution in the field of autism, in which much of the understanding of the disease is—to the frustration of patients, families, researchers, and caregivers alike—sometimes long on theory and conjecture but short on solid scientific research.

—Mark Michaud

MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

Museum Launches Media Arts Project

Renowned curator John Hanhardt ’67 will lead an effort to build a collection featuring the aesthetics of film, video, and other technologies.

By Scott Hauser

magBODIES OF ART: The exhibition Bodies in Space was the first presented by John Hanhardt ’67 (left) in his role as senior curator for media arts, a position established by Jonathan Binstock, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the Memorial Art Gallery. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

An initiative of the Memorial Art Gallery is bringing a new type of “moving work” to the museum. Under the direction of John Hanhardt ’67, a former curator for the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has launched a new project to explore the technologies and aesthetics of film as well as the emerging tools and practices of video, computers, virtual reality, the Internet, software, and mobile devices.

Called the Media Arts Watch project, the initiative will feature four exhibitions a year. The inaugural exhibition, Bodies in Space, was opened to the public during Meliora Weekend in October and ran through December.

Internationally recognized as an authority on art involving moving images, Hanhardt began his museum career in the department of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He later established the film program and film study collection at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and he was curator and head of the film and video department at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He was the senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim Museum from 1996 to 2006. He joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s staff in 2006, and was a consulting senior curator of film and media arts there until 2016.

At Rochester, he will serve as consulting senior curator of media arts and will oversee efforts to bring media art into the museum’s permanent collection. Works featured in the Media Arts Watch exhibitions will form the core of the museum’s media art collection.

The first exhibition featured work by Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman, key artists from the early years of video art, alongside more recent work by Sondra Perry and Takeshi Murata, artists in a new generation transforming digital media arts.

ASK THE ARCHIVIST:

Did Shirley Jackson ‘Haunt’ the University’s Halls?

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

ataAUTHOR ID: What may be the first published work by author Shirley Jackson—a matriculated member of the Class of 1938 (above)—appeared in a student-run literary magazine (below). (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

I am working on a biography of the writer Shirley Jackson, who attended Rochester from 1934 to 1936 but did not graduate. The amount of material available online is truly impressive! However, one thing I was not able to find were any course catalogs from those years. Could you let me know if they are available? I would like to determine the names of the courses she took. —Ruth Franklin, biographer and author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright, 2016)

The University Archives are a valuable resource for those researching the accomplishments of our alumni, faculty, and staff. Jackson is best known for her short story “The Lottery,” and the collections held important details about her youth, although it required casting a wide net to find them.

Sharing University history online is part of the work of the Archives: Rochester Review, yearbooks, commencement programs, and the unabridged History of the University of Rochester, 1850–1962, by history professor Arthur May are available at http://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/universityarchives.

For alumni applying for course credit at other institutions, recent Undergraduate Bulletins are also available online. The Bulletin for 1934–35 confirmed that Jackson’s coursework included freshman English, government, music appreciation, psychology, biology, and French.

ata (Photo: University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)

Also in the Archives for this period are student applications for admission. Jackson attended nearby Brighton High School, and in her application to the University she writes: “Our house is always overflowing with books.” A native Californian, she describes how her family chose to travel via the Panama Canal to reach the East Coast and Rochester, where her father took a job with the Stecher-Traung Litho Company.

Jackson anticipated pursuing “law, journalism or literary work” as a career. However, graduation from Rochester was not in the cards: her grades at the end of her sophomore year were deficient, and she withdrew. She received her BA from Syracuse in 1940, and began her “literary work” in earnest; her iconic story “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. She went on to write the novels The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and others.

As is often the case, one answer sparks another inquiry, and Franklin responded:

On p. 98 of the 1934–35 Bulletin, under “Student Activities in the College for Women,” a few publications are listed: The Croceus, which I see online (and in which I found a picture of Shirley Jackson I hadn’t seen before); The Tower Times; and three others: Meliora, a literary magazine; In Medias Res, “a review of campus life and thought”; and The Blue Book, a publication for freshmen. Do you know if copies of any of these still exist?

Need History?

Do you have a question about University history? Email it to rochrev@rochester.edu. Put “Ask the Archivist” in the subject line.

“The Blue Book” was the equivalent of today’s “UR Here,” and provided information about clubs, traditions, activities, and a calendar.

Jackson appears with her classmates at Freshman Camp in the 1936 Croceus. Two brief Tower Times articles in October and November note that some freshman women, including Jackson, were taking horseback riding lessons.

Through the years, a variety of Rochester undergraduate literary magazines have sprouted up: Logos still flourishes, but The Dandelion, The Genesee, and Prologue withered away.

The Cloister, launched in 1921, was replaced by Meliora in 1930, and was itself supplanted by In Medias Res in 1933. When a January 1934 letter to the Tower Times judged that latest effort to be “of the editors, by the editors, and for the editors,” Meliora returned, with the assurance that it would be “representative of the entire college and not to be managed and written by the Scribblers Club alone.”

Shirley Jackson’s arrival at the University coincided with this “ever better” Meliora. A signed, untitled story—only three paragraphs long—appears in the spring 1935 issue, and is believed to be the earliest publication of her work. The text describes the reactions of various audience members at a violin recital, and its significance is interpreted by Franklin in her 2016 biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.

Cathy Minehan ’68 Returns to Board of Trustees

in-briefELECTION RETURNS: Former Boston Federal Reserve Bank CEO Cathy Minehan ’68 was re-elected to the Board of Trustees. (Photo: Provided)

A longtime alumna leader is returning to the Board of Trustees. Cathy Minehan ’68, who served as a trustee from 1995 until she moved to life trustee status in 2015, was re-elected by the board this winter.

A former CEO and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and well-known for her work in national and international payment systems, Minehan has served as dean of the School of Management at Simmons College in Boston, and as managing director of Arlington Advisory Partners, a Boston-based business services provider. Minehan currently chairs Massachusetts General Hospital’s board of trustees. She is the first woman to lead MGH’s governing body in the organization’s 200-year history.

A political science major at Rochester, Minehan has ties to the University that span generations. Her father, Harry Jones, was a 1957 graduate; her son, Brian Minehan, graduated in 2004, and her daughter-in-law, Cherie Minehan, in 2005.

She began service as a trustee in 1995 and was chair of the board’s executive committee from May 2003 to May 2012. She had a consequential role in the board’s audit and risk assessment committee, among other board committees. Minehan also served as a national cochair of The Meliora Challenge, the University’s $1.2 billion comprehensive campaign that concluded in June 2016 and raised more than $1.368 billion. Her leadership helped drive giving from more than 200,000 donors and exceed the campaign goal by more than $168 million.

In 2014, Minehan and her husband, Jerry Corrigan, committed an additional $1 million of support to the Cathy E. Minehan and E. Gerald Corrigan Endowed Scholarship, which they began at the University in 2004. She and her husband additionally established the Corrigan-Minehan Professorship in Political Science in Arts, Sciences & Engineering in 2007. They are charter members of the George Eastman Circle, the University’s leadership annual giving society.

Report Points to Global Growth

The University continues to grow as a global institution.

That’s according to Open Doors 2016, an annual report on international education trends released by the Institute of International Education.

The University ranks 76th among the more than 1,500 institutions surveyed on their total international student enrollment.

With 2,755 international students studying at Rochester in the 2015–16 academic year, international students represent about 25 percent of the total student body.

“International exchange is critical for our position as a leading global institution,” says Jane Gatewood, the vice provost for global engagement, who leads and manages initiatives related to the University’s global activities.

“We want to provide the best educational opportunities for our students and help our faculty foster productive research connections, and increasingly, this means engaging in a sustained and systematic way with other institutions throughout the world. We are working to build strong and strategic partnerships with peer institutions throughout the world,” Gatewood says.

New York is the second leading host state for international students, just behind California. Students coming to New York from international origins bring a positive economic impact of more than $3.8 billion statewide, according to the National Association of International Educators.

The report also highlights the annual trends in U.S. students studying abroad.

According to Open Doors, a total of 370 University students went abroad for an academic program in 2014–15, with most choosing to do so in their junior year.

And in 2015–16, the estimated number is 425, according to data from the University’s Center for Education Abroad. A major expansion of opportunities for Rochester students has created several new exchange partners in the United Kingdom, Asia, and Australia.

The next five years are expected to be a period of increasing international engagement for the University, with the expansion of global partnerships in research and increased opportunities to study and intern abroad.

More connections for research and exchange are being made with major universities globally, and existing partnerships are being strengthened to provide a more comprehensive experience for students.

in-briefPACE OF CHANGE: A Medical Center patient was the first in western New York to receive a new, lightweight pacemaker (right), a device about one-10th the size of a traditional device (left). (Photo: Medtronic)

Cardiologists Offer Smallest Pacemaker

A western New York man who was experiencing dangerously slow heart rates was the first person in the Medical Center’s 19-county service area to receive a pacemaker that’s a 10th of the size of traditional devices.

Electrophysiologists David Huang and Mehmet Aktas implanted the lightweight device directly into the heart of a 67-year-old man during a procedure last fall.

The device, the Micra Transcatheter Pacing System, is considered the most advanced technology available for people with bradycardia, a condition characterized by a slow heart rhythm.

“This new pacemaker provides another tool in our arsenal for treating cardiovascular diseases,” says Huang, director of the Heart and Vascular Electrophysiology Lab at Strong Memorial Hospital. “It is smaller than any other pacemaker available today, and we are excited to offer this for our patients.”

Traditional pacemakers are about the size of a half-dollar coin and about three times as thick. They’re placed in a small “pocket” just under the skin in the chest and have wires that extend from the device to send electrical impulses, when needed, to keep the heart rate from dropping too slow. The new system provides the same level of support, but it is about the size of a large vitamin pill and weighs two grams, the same as a penny.

The heart usually beats about 60 to 100 times per minute. Bradycardia is diagnosed when that rate is abnormally slow, and the heart is unable to pump enough oxygen-rich blood through the body, which causes people to feel dizzy or lightheaded, short of breath, tired or like they are about to pass out. The condition is common in the elderly.

Computer Scientist Recognized for Innovative Research

Rochester computer scientist Ehsan Hoque is earning widespread recognition for his work in the field of human-computer interaction.

In December he was recognized with a World Technology Award from the World Technology Network, and in August, he was named one of “35 innovators under 35” by the editors of MIT Technology Review.

An assistant professor of computer science, Hoque also serves as assistant director for research outreach at the Goergen Institute for Data Science. He applies a computational lens to understand and model the ambiguity that language, facial expressions, gestures, and intonation introduce in human communication.

He has developed a system that allows individuals to practice speaking and social skills and receive feedback in a repeatable, objective, and respectful way. He has also developed systems that help musicians practice singing vowels and provide live feedback to public speakers while they’re engaged with audiences.

Eastman Student Highlights 40th Anniversary Warfield Concert

in-briefSENIOR SCHOLAR: Alicia Rosser is this year’s Warfield Scholar. (Photo: Eastman School of Music)

Mezzo-soprano Alicia Rosser ’17E is the latest Eastman School of Music student chosen to help celebrate the legacy of William Warfield ’42E, ’46E (MM).

A senior in the studio of Grammy Award–winning artist and Professor of Voice Anthony Dean Griffey, Rosser is this year’s Warfield Scholar. As the scholar, she was the featured performer for the 40th annual William Warfield Scholarship Concert in January. Baritone Lawrence Craig, who was mentored by Warfield and has appeared internationally in operas, concerts, and recitals, was a guest performer for the concert. Among others joining them were singer and pianist Thomas Warfield, a nephew of Warfield and founder of PeaceArt International and director of dance at the Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

Since the scholarship was founded in 1977, recipients have included such notable singers as soprano Julia Bullock ’09E, winner of the 2014 W. Naumburg Foundation’s International Vocal Competition; soprano Nicole Cabell ’01E, winner of the 2005 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition; and bass-baritone Jamal Moore ’12E, who was a member of the University’s a cappella group the YellowJackets when the ensemble was featured on the NBC competition The Sing-Off in 2011. He now performs internationally with the a cappella group the Exchange.

Simon Rises in Bloomberg Businessweek Ranking

The Simon Business School moved up six spots to 30th among the leading U.S. business schools in Bloomberg Businessweek’s ranking of top full-time MBA programs.

Simon also was eighth in the U.S. for placement three months after graduation.

Other areas of strength included alumni assessment (17th) and student satisfaction (29th). Simon also moved up three spots to 41st in terms of salary, and the school held steady at 38th in terms of recruiter assessment.

WOMEN’S SOCCER

‘A Team of One’

Members of Rochester’s first national championship teams remember the chemistry that took them to the national title—twice.

Dennis O’Donnell

sportsBACK-TO-BACK: Ranked No. 1 throughout the 1987 season, the women’s soccer team defended its 1986 national title in 1987, allowing only five goals in 18 games. Founded in 1978, the program was the first in Rochester history to win an NCAA Division III national championship. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

As Rochester students, they came together 30 years ago with a simple goal: become a team in the truest sense of the word. They succeeded dramatically, winning the first two NCAA Division III national championships in women’s soccer—in 1986 and repeating in 1987.

Members of those Yellowjacket teams gathered on campus last fall to relive the memories and to catch up with each other.

“The memories are of the relationships we had, the fun we had, working hard together, and playing hard together,” says Mary Martha Winter McKenna ’90. “We had some big personalities on the team, but humble at the same time.”

Maura McGinnity ’87 says it didn’t seem like 30 years had passed. “Everyone immediately and naturally connected, just like we did so many years ago,” she says. “We had a fabulous weekend catching up, laughing, and enjoying quality time together.”

Terry Gurnett ’77, the program’s founding coach, organized the reunion. Stepping down after the 2010 season—his 34th—as one of the winningest coaches in women’s college soccer, Gurnett is now an associate director for athletics advancement. If there’s any one person responsible for the success of the national championship teams, it’s Gurnett, players say.

“With his energy and drive, he molded 26 different personalities into a team of one,” says Maria Budihas Jensen ’87. “He showed wisdom, humor, and heart as he coached us.”

The team’s philosophy on the field echoed Gurnett’s coaching and teaching style. He knew when to push and when a break was needed. Darlene Elia Buenzow ’88 tells of team conditioning runs through Mount Hope Cemetery. Gurnett would lead off, run back to the last group, then finish with the first group. “By pushing himself to be his best, it inspired us to be the best players we could possibly be,” she says.

sportsSOCCER CELEBRATION: Members of the 1986 and 1987 national championship women’s soccer teams were recognized during a celebration last fall: (front row, kneeling) Charlotte Tweedie Byers, Cindi Baker Wight, Jill Keller, Jody Morrow Moore, Cathy McQuiggen, and Liz Breyton Warmerdam; (middle row, crouching) Jill McCabe; (back row, standing) Maria Budihas Jensen, Maura McGinnity, Doreen Byers Falkowski, Jill Decker, Lisa Caracillo Anderson, Diane Perna Dacey, Jo Ann Johnston Allender, Darlene Elia Buenzow, Martha Winter McKenna, Abby Heister Steele, Kelly Gorman Rakowski, Cherise Galasso, and Annie Gaisser Holmok. (Photo: Athletics and Recreation)

Kelly Gorman Rakowski ’90 says there was an “element of fun and balance to the workouts.” “We never took soccer too seriously—academics, campus life, and other priorities mattered,” she says.

That would be a tough sell to the opponents in 1986 and 1987. On the field, the Yellowjackets defended expertly, attacking from the back to keep pressure on opponents. “There were 11 of us on defense, really 12,” says McKenna, “because of [goalkeepers] Doreen [Byers] and JoAnn [Johnston] sharing equal time every game. We were constantly threatening teams out of the back field and catching them man-down.”

Rochester had nine wins and two ties in the first 11 games in 1986. That included a 1–1 result at Cornell. “We realized that we might have something special,” Gurnett says. Two days later, Rochester lost at St. Lawrence, 4–0.

Gurnett calls the loss “sobering and instructive.” McGinnity thinks it was a positive. “That loss reminded us that you cannot take anything for granted. Success takes constant effort, teamwork, and a disciplined focus on a bigger purpose.”

Two wins followed, then a Senior Day loss to Rutgers. In the first round of the playoffs, Rochester won at Smith College in Massachusetts, putting the Yellowjackets into the Final Four against the University of California, San Diego.

The game was at Cortland State in New York’s Finger Lakes region, about two hours from Rochester. “We woke up and there was snow on the ground,” Buenzow says. “We knew San Diego didn’t stand a chance against us tough Northerners.”

A 2–0 win put Rochester into the final against Plymouth State. The winning goal came from a pass by McGinnity to freshman Lisa Caraccilo ’90 for a 1–0 victory.

The tough defense of 1986 was stronger a year later—only five goals allowed in 18 games. Carrying a No. 1 ranking throughout the 1987 season, the Yellowjackets again advanced to the Final Four, winning the title over William Smith College, 1–0, at Fauver Stadium. “Not many teams in sports actually accomplish or fulfill their expectations,” Buenzow says. “We did.”

Sometimes, it does seem like yesterday. “I can still feel the sense of joy when Abby Heister headed in the goal,” Rakowski says of the 1987 final. “I knew that would be it.”

Gurnett puts it in perspective differently. “We made the effort to get ‘good folks’ on the team,” he says. “It’s amazing what you can accomplish with the proper mix of character, talent, and grit.”

“Terry recruited good people who came together with many a personality, but all seemed to click both on and off the field,” says McKenna. “We still do.”

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

Mind over Weather

Strategy isn’t reserved solely for the locker room or the playing field. At the 1986 women’s soccer Final Four in Cortland, New York, as the Yellowjackets were preparing to play their semifinal opponent, the University of California, San Diego, both teams were dining at the same restaurant—at different times—before the game.

Yellowjacket coach Terry Gurnett had an idea of how to get into the heads of the Tritons, new to late fall weather in upstate New York:

“I knew we’d run into them, so I instructed each member of our team not to wear any coats to the dinner. It was about 20 degrees out, and I knew the SD team would be bundled up tight. The SD players looked at us like we were crazy. Their coach saw us—John Leaney, a true coach, gentleman, and a friend to this day—and he said, ‘You bastard. I know exactly what you’re doing—hope you get frostbite!’ We had a great laugh but had drawn first blood.”

When the game was over, the Yellowjackets had two goals and a place in the 1986 championship game. —Dennis O’Donnell

A Higher Grade of Dentistry

The Eastman Institute for Oral Health marks 100 years.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

eiohADVANCING PUBLIC HEALTH: When the Rochester Dental Dispensary opened in 1917 to provide care to area children (below), there was only one other clinic in the nation—Boston’s Forsyth Dental Infirmary—that rivaled its mission and scope. Hans Malmstrom (above), chair of the Advanced Education in General Dentistry program, is a leader in training oral health practitioners for clinical and academic roles. (Photo: Eastman Institute for Oral Health)

When Eli Eliav was a dental student in Jerusalem, one of his classmates achieved a rare distinction: he was accepted to the postgraduate dentistry program at the Eastman Dental Center in Rochester. Located adjacent to the Medical Center, the dental facility was not yet fully integrated with the University, but the clinical training program run collaboratively by the two institutions was world renowned.

“Accepted to Eastman! I envied him so much,” Eliav says. “If anyone told me that I’d be the director of this institution 20 or 25 years later, I would say that’s crazy. But this is a fact.”

Eliav has been the director of the Eastman Institute for Oral Health since 2013. The institute adopted its name in 2009 as a reflection of the full integration of research, education, and clinical care in oral health into a single entity within the Medical Center.

eioh (Photo: Eastman Institute for Oral Health)

The institute, which traces its origins to the opening of the Rochester Dental Dispensary in 1917, turns 100 this year. It’s routinely among the top 10 recipients of grant funding from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Each year, more than a thousand applicants from around the globe compete for roughly 50 spaces in one of the institute’s eight postdoctoral training programs.

Last fall, the American Dental Education Association conferred on the institute its highest honor: the William J. Gies Award for Achievement in Academic Dentistry and Oral Health.

Leading the planning of this year’s centennial celebration is Cyril Meyerowitz ’75D, ’80D (MS). Eliav’s predecessor, Meyerowitz successfully implemented the merger of the Eastman Dental Center with the University in 1997. The highlight of the celebration takes place in June, when clinicians and researchers from around the world, including many distinguished alumni, arrive in Rochester to take part in a two-day symposium on the future of oral health, culminating in a gala celebration.

The Rochester Dental Dispensary was built with funds provided primarily by George Eastman. Eastman’s interest in dental care came from his recognition that dental health was an integral part of overall health. What started as a facility to provide basic care and training grew, in an eventual merger with the University, to become an internationally distinguished center for dentistry built on the three pillars of research, specialized training, and clinical care.

It’s an unusual model in at least two respects. First, there is no program leading to the doctor of dental science (DDS) or doctor of medicine in dentistry (DMD) degrees. Instead, the institute’s educational mission is to provide postgraduate training.

Second, its clinical care is targeted to underserved populations. They’re a diverse group themselves, including people in poverty, geriatric patients, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and others with complex, ongoing medical conditions.

It’s a model that allows the institute to concentrate its resources in areas of strength—strength that helps it maintain itself as the enviable institution that Eliav could scarcely envision himself leading so many years ago as a student in Jerusalem.

Beginnings

When George Eastman was a boy in the 1860s, a budding dental profession served mostly the well-to-do. To a large degree, dental work was considered luxury care. For most people, problems with teeth, usually encountered by early adulthood, were taken care of by a tooth puller—often an itinerant laborer who provided painful extractions with rudimentary tools.

eiohAN EASTMAN TRADITION: Eliav, director of the institute since 2013 and an expert on neuropathic pain, combines accomplishments in research with a commitment to the kind of clinical service the Rochester Dental Dispensary was founded a century ago to deliver. (Photo: Keith Bullis/Eastman Institute for Oral Health)

Change came quickly in the early 1900s. Many physicians and civic leaders began to recognize the broad social consequences of poor public health. Eastman—who had lost all of his teeth by early adulthood—developed an interest in dental care, based on the forward-thinking idea that oral health was integral to general health.

The City of Rochester was an early leader in dental care. As Elizabeth Brayer tells the story in Leading the Way: Eastman and Oral Health (University of Rochester Press), the Rochester Dental Society established what’s believed to be the nation’s first free dental clinic in 1901.

In early 1915, a committee of citizens and dentists met to plan for additional clinics. But Eastman had another idea. He proposed one central clinic instead. He’d been following the development of a large dental infirmary in Boston—what would become the Harvard-affiliated Forsyth Institute. As he wrote to the committee chairman, William Bausch, “I should not care to have anything to do with this affair unless a scheme be devised which will cover the whole field and do the work thoroughly and completely and in the best manner.”

No doubt inspired by Forsyth’s example, Eastman reasoned that a central clinic would be able to train much needed dental hygienists more efficiently. Hygienists would then travel to schools to provide basic cleaning and checking, and refer difficult cases to the central clinic.

With his conditions met, Eastman agreed to finance what became the Rochester Dental Dispensary. It opened in October 1917 in an expansive building at 800 East Main Street, sporting nearly 70 operating units, a research wing, a library, special examination rooms, and a children’s waiting room adorned with whimsical murals and a large birdcage.

A Fortuitous Opportunity

The dispensary flourished in its first years. Preventive care began at birth, as the director, Harvey Burkhart, sent notices to Rochester parents of newborns instructing them to bring their babies to the dispensary at the first sign of teeth. Meanwhile, twice a year, a corps of hygienists fanned out to Rochester schools to provide basic preventive care to children up to 16 years of age.

Eastman might have been satisfied had his contribution to the oral health of the local community ended with the establishment of the dispensary. But in 1920, he was presented with an unexpected opportunity.

As part of a national movement to improve physician training, the John D. Rockefeller Foundation was offering millions of dollars to help establish modern schools of medicine. The University of Rochester seemed a promising destination to the educator leading that movement, Abraham Flexner, who thought that given Eastman’s support for dentistry, he could easily persuade this progressive philanthropist to support a medical school.

Following a meeting with Flexner and then University President Rush Rhees, Eastman offered his support—provided the school be designed to offer both medical and dental education.

What Kind of Dental Education?

“I did not foresee that [the dispensary] might have an opportunity to become a part of a greater project for a higher grade of dental education than had before been attempted,” Eastman wrote to the dispensary trustees in June 1920.

He envisioned a close partnership with the school, whose trained dentists would enable the dispensary to expand the services it offered. But when the school opened in 1925, it was unable to attract candidates in dentistry. Among the reasons was that the school required dental and medical students to take the same coursework in their first two years. Other dental schools required far less of their entering students.

What emerged instead was the University of Rochester Dental Research Fellowship Program. It was consistent with the vision of the school’s first dean, George Whipple, a pathologist and dean at the University of California Medical School who came to Rochester as an unabashed proponent of building a research-oriented institution.

Joining Forces

When the Eastman Dental Center merged with the Medical Center in 1997, then President Thomas Jackson declared, “The question is not why the merger happened, but why it took 70 years.”

The reasons are various, including concern on each side about sacrificing independent control over resources and priorities. But as early as the mid-1960s, both institutions discovered they were less independent of the other than they imagined. The strengths on which they prided themselves could only be maintained in partnership.

In its early years, the dispensary focused on clinical care and training, leaving research to the University. But in the 1950s and 1960s, under the direction of Basil Bibby ’35M (PhD), the dispensary put significant resources into research. It added a new research wing, hired aggressively, and in 1965 changed its name to the Eastman Dental Center, in recognition of a mission that had expanded beyond basic treatment and training.

While the center’s resources were impressive, the University lagged in attracting students and found itself heavily dependent on the center’s resources to win coveted grants from the National Institute of Dental and Cranial Research.

But the center faced challenges, too. Because it was not affiliated with a hospital, its educational programs didn’t meet the standards for approval by the American Dental Association.

As the 1960s drew to a close, both institutions were at a turning point. The next decade would bring a formal affiliation, as well as the Eastman Dental Center’s move from its East Main Street home to a new facility adjacent to the Medical Center. “Dentistry is a specialty in the medical field,” declared the president of the Eastman Dental Center’s board in justifying the move.

Although a merger was still years away, the center’s relocation facilitated the collaborations that would lead eventually to it.

eioh (Photo: Keith Bullis/Eastman Institute for Oral Health)

eiohMEETING PATIENTS WHERE THEY ARE: Institute dentists deliver general and specialized care to underserved and difficult-to-reach populations. Mobile units serve geriatric patients (top); and institute dentists screen children with intellectual and developmental disabilities at a Special Olympics event (above). (Photo: Keith Bullis/Eastman Institute for Oral Health)

The Institute at 100

The merger of the city’s premier dental institution with the region’s major medical center may look inevitable in hindsight. That’s because it reflects the direction in which dentistry had been moving for quite some time.

“What we’ve been doing at the institute is way beyond the basics,” Eliav says. “We’re improving the quality of lives on many levels.”

As advanced dentistry begins its second century in Rochester, it’s clear that dentistry is now more fully integrated into general medicine than ever before, and more integral to medical treatment and research than many laypersons realize. That integration is apparent in the institute’s research, education, and clinical care.

Research

Research takes place throughout the institute, including the Center for Oral Biology—a direct descendent of the Dental Research Fellowship Program that the Medical Center established in 1929.

Housed in the Arthur Kornberg Medical Research Building, the center underscores the way in which dentistry and other areas of medicine are interrelated.

For example, Wei Hsu, who holds the title of Dean’s Professor at the Center for Oral Biology, discovered early in his career that a gene implicated in cancer also played a prominent role in craniofacial development and disease. Recruited to the institute in 2002, he’s conducting pathbreaking research on stem cells and skull deformities.

Catherine Ovitt, an associate professor at the center, has achieved national recognition for her research on the repair and regeneration of the salivary glands—critical for oral health, yet often seriously damaged during treatment of head and neck cancers.

Along with principal investigator Dorota Kopycka-Kedzierawski, an associate professor of dentistry, several more institute researchers are exploring the effects of stress and parenting behaviors on early childhood caries—a significant public health problem that disproportionately affects children in poverty.

The National Institutes of Health has recognized the institute not only by the grants it has awarded, but also by selecting it in 2012 for a leadership role in a $67 million national research initiative to improve clinical care.

Education

“In New York, there are five dental schools and us,” says Eliav. “We train the teachers and leaders of dentistry.”

Among those leaders is Martha Somerman ’78D, ’80M (PhD), who completed institute training in periodontics and a doctorate in pharmacology at the Medical Center, and is the director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.

Institute graduates serve in leadership roles in universities around the world. Most recently, after being approached by a team from Kuwait University, the institute partnered with that university as well as Damman University in Saudi Arabia to train dentists from the two Middle Eastern nations for clinical and research faculty positions in their expanding dental schools.

Eliav—who holds a dental degree as well as a doctorate in neuroscience, and researches neuropathic pain—emphasizes the need for oral health faculty who have degrees in both clinical dentistry and research.

“One of the problems we’ve had in health care,” he says, “is the lack of connection between the clinical work and research. We need more clinicians who are involved in research and more researchers who understand patients’ needs.” Given the scarcity of candidates with substantial research and clinical backgrounds, the institute often recruits faculty from among its top graduates.

The institute also leads in training practitioners to treat specific populations, including patients with complex diseases who have unique needs, older adults, and patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Eliav says there’s a paucity in the medical literature about treating such patients, and institute faculty are developing protocols that will help dentists treat them.

Clinical Care

There are about 180,000 patient visits each year to institute facilities. They include visits from thousands of patients who have no other option for care. Many of these patients are on Medicaid, which institute-affiliated dentists accept, and most private practitioners do not.

Among them are children in poverty who receive care at all Eastman’s locations as well as at a mobile dental unit called the Smilemobile. The first Smilemobile (there are now several in active use) was developed for the Eastman Dental Center in 1967 by the Sybron Corp. and Wegmans Food Markets. It was designed to provide care to targeted underserved populations, which at that time meant primarily central cities and rural areas. Today, the mobile units serve about 8,000 patient visits per year by traveling to schools and day care centers throughout the region, “If it weren’t for the Smilemobile, a lot of our kids would get no dental care at all,” says Darlene Pelow-Sullivan, a social worker at School No. 2 in Rochester. “They would be suffering from abscesses and decay. You can’t learn if your mouth is hurting.”

This year marked the introduction of an additional Smilemobile. Funded through the United Way by the family of Joseph Lobozzo, founder of the Rochester optical design and manufacturing firm JML Optical, it’s the first unit in the fleet to be outfitted especially for patients with physical, developmental, or intellectual disabilities, as well as other medically complex conditions.

But while institute dentists travel to serve patients, many patients travel distances to receive care from them. The institute is a regional destination for specialized oral health care. Patients with a range of birth defects—cleft lip and palate, severe underbites that interfere with speaking as well as eating, to name just two examples—come to the institute to be treated by highly trained specialists.

The University’s new Complex Care Center, opened last spring, is a cutting-edge facility for coordinated treatment of patients with a host of conditions that make dental care a challenge. It’s there that institute students are being trained to treat patients with special needs.

Among the admirers of the institute is Christopher Fox, the executive director of the International Association for Dental Research. Fox, who will be leading a plenary session, along with Eliav and Meyerowitz, at the June symposium, says the institute’s clinical programs are “innovative, and a model for the provision of dental services to the underserved.”

Its research and training, meanwhile, serve as a prototype for “how research will lead to the improvement of oral health worldwide.”

“This is a critical time for the dental profession,” he adds. “We have to make decisions today that will determine the future of the profession, most importantly how we will interact with the larger health care world. [The Eastman Institute for Oral Health] will continue to play a leading role in that planning.”

For more on the centennial celebration of the Eastman Institute for Oral Health, as well as the institute’s history, visit the website “Celebrating 100 Years” at www.urmc.rochester.edu/dentistry/centennial.aspx.

Hidden Passions, Creative Lives

What a fabric artist, an unusual brand of storyteller, and a map collector have in common.

create_introFABRICATIONS: Melissa Matson, principal violist in the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, creates “improvisational” monoprint and screen-printed fabrics. She sells and displays her work at shows and in galleries throughout the region. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Most of us have more than one interest or talent. If we’re lucky, we get to pursue at least one of them as our “day job.”

And what about those other callings? For many of us, they’re hobbies. But for some people, they become something serious—more akin to a second area of expertise.

Since March 2015, the Memorial Art Gallery has been on a mission to discover such people and bring them to the museum to share their pursuits as part of a series called “Hidden Passions: Inspiring Conversations about Hyphenated Lives.”

Jonathan Binstock, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the Memorial Art Gallery, says that what unifies participants in the series is the unique expression of a creative impulse.

He established the series as a first step in a mission to place the museum at the center of a regional conversation about creativity. He calls it “an opportunity for the public to share their visions for a creative world with us and with each other.”

Now in its third season, the program includes presenters from throughout Greater Rochester. Here are a few examples from the University community who have shared their “Hidden Passions.”

For more about the series, visit the museum’s website at http://mag.rochester.edu.

Fabrics with Flow

create_matsonMATERIALS ISSUE: Matson uses materials such as masking tape, glue, or flour paste—and even pine needles—to create visual interest in her fabrics. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

Melissa Matson ’78E, ’80E (MM) has always liked to “make stuff.”

Growing up in northern California, she made forts in the walnut trees on her family’s property. She followed along when TV’s Captain Kangaroo brought out his shoebox full of craft supplies and embarked on a new project using a milk carton or another found object. She learned to sew at a young age, and looked forward to family trips to Britex, a fabric store in San Francisco where she would “bask in all the fabrics.”

Matson is principal violist with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and an associate professor of orchestral repertory at the Eastman School of Music. But she hasn’t stopped making things. These days she finds a creative outlet in making colorful artisan-dyed fabric and garments— something she’s been doing for about 15 years.

Inside the second-floor studio in her Honeoye Falls home hang dyed pieces of many sizes and colors, as well as completed jackets and scarves. She honed her skills at a screen printing workshop with Jane Dunnewold, whose book, Complex Cloth, first got Matson interested in the art. Dunnewold uses ordinary household materials such as masking tape, glue, and flour paste on her screens before dyeing, depending on the desired effect. She calls her method “improvisational,” and it’s an approach Matson has embraced.

“I just keep experimenting and see where it goes. Each piece is unique,” Matson says, proudly. Some are inspired by the rhythm of poetry. Some are the result of experimentation with color and texture. Some have more of a personal touch.

Matson pulls out a jacket and gently fingers screen-printed images of her mother and grandmother as little girls—they are enveloped by the bold, gold pattern covering the piece. She says her mother supported her interests and encouraged her to experiment on her sewing projects as a child.

Her background as a musician sometimes influences her creations. “People say that my fabrics look musical,” she says. “I think that has a lot to do with the flow and emotion that come when I play [music]. The fabrics I’ve made that I like the least are the ones that just sit there and don’t really have any motion.”

She’s found parallels between being a musician and a fabric artist. She says she’s always striving to find a better way to make music—a richer phrase or more interesting color in her playing. She takes the same approach to dyeing fabric.

There are differences, too. For example, playing music with the orchestra is more collaborative than the solo work of dyeing fabrics.

“This is a little freeing, but also adds more responsibility, because it’s all me,” Matson says about screen printing. “If it’s great, it’s me. If it’s ugly, it’s me.

“What’s nice about fabric making is that it frees me from the fear of making mistakes. There are no mistakes when I’m dyeing fabric. If I do something unexpected, it could be a really great discovery or it could be really bad.

“But I can always dye it again. I always say that if at first you don’t succeed, dye, dye again.” —Jennifer Roach

Hidden Passions: The Series

Designed as a way to showcase the creative lives of Rochesterians, the Memorial Art Gallery series “Hidden Passions” highlights the ways in which people in the community pursue their talents and interests. For series organizer Debora McDell-Hernandez, curator of engagement at the Memorial Art Gallery, an important aspect of the series is to inspire others in the Rochester area to think about ways to develop their intellectual, artistic, and cultural passions.

McDell-Hernandez says the museum is the perfect place to host such conversations, part of a larger effort to establish MAG as a hub for creativity in all its manifestations.

“A museum is more than just a place for visitors to view creativity on display,” she says. “With ‘Hidden Passions,’ visitors take center stage. It is our hope that hearing people tell their stories about creativity will nurture people’s creative sides.”

Launched in 2015, the program has hosted a wide range of guests. Here’s a sample:

Catelyn Augustine, a massage therapist who runs a gourmet ice cream business, Eat Me Ice Cream.

John Beck, a professor emeritus of percussion at the Eastman School of Music who has been making wine for more than two decades.

Joe Carney, director of advancement for the Memorial Art Gallery, who teaches in the English department at Monroe Community College.

Emma Lo ’15M (MD) made portraits of people served by a project she launched as a student at the School of Medicine and Dentistry to provide health care to Rochester’s homeless.

Agustin Ramos, a private investigator who also crafts cuatro guitars.

Josh Owen, a professor of industrial design at the Rochester Institute of Technology who sculpts bonsai trees.

Ian Wilson ’99M (MD), ’04M (Res), ’06M (Flw), a Medical Center radiologist who leads a public art program called Wall\Therapy, which aims to transform the urban landscape, inspire, and build community.

Mike DiCaprio, a media strategist who grows carnivorous plants.

Spencer Christiano, an archival film projectionist, is also a playwright whose work has been performed by the University’s International Theatre Program.

Danielle Raymo, an office manager who cofounded Rochester Brainery, a community classroom and event space that offers classes to the community.

Nita Brown, a strategic planner who owns MansaWear, a custom clothing company influenced by Brown’s Ghanaian roots.

Gene Olczak, an optical engineer, makes Karma Sauce— a homemade hot sauce that he sells in stores and online.

Laura Fox, an urban planner who also is a rooftop farmer.

Steven Schwartz, an accountant and beekeeper.

Ramon Ricker, professor emeritus of saxophone at the Eastman School of Music, who restores Jaguar cars.

Andrew Ainslie, dean of the Simon Business School, who is an avid cave diver.

Anne Kress, president of Monroe Community College, who is also a quilter.

Wendell Castle, a renowned sculptor who plays folk guitar.

Jefferson Svengsouk, associate professor of emergency medicine, who is also a Native American flute player.

Bruce Ian Meader, an associate professor of design at Rochester Institute of Technology, who is a Beatles enthusiast.

Rosemary Janofsky, a midwife and clinical assistant in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, who is also an innkeeper.

Omar Soufan ’17, a biomedical engineering student (top), and Ibrahim Mohammad ’17, a mechanical engineering student, who together have organized a rehabilitation center in Lebanon that tends to wounded refugees from the civil war in Syria.

Daniel Hargrove ’17, an international relations student, who has an interest in coral reefs.

Erik Rosenkranz ’18, a mechanical engineering major who crafts long-board skateboards.

Theresa Lou Bowick, a registered nurse who organized a grassroots neighborhood bicycling program.

Nannette Nocon, a financial advisor who is also a children’s book author.

Evan Dawson, the host of Connections, a daily talk show on WXXI public radio in Rochester, who also writes widely about wine.

Aprille Byam ’96, ’97S (MBA), a market researcher who is known as Storychick.

—Jennifer Roach

‘A Story for Everyone’

create_smithREADER MEETS AUTHOR: Karl Smith, a PhD candidate in biophysics who also collects typewriters, creates stories on demand for a mere 10 cents. At the Rochester Public Market, Marilyn Belle-Isle, of Webster, New York, asks Smith to whip up a story for her granddaughters. (Photo: Adam Fenster)

It’s windy and cold at the Rochester Public Market, and the black box that houses Karl Smith’s 1926 Underwood typewriter keeps falling to the pavement. As Smith picks it up, he spots a couple walking past crates of apples, pumpkins, and gourds. They’re among the few customers shopping on this blustery Tuesday morning.

“Would you like a story?” Smith asks with a smile. “Just 10 cents a story.”

The couple looks unsure.

“Or,” he says, “I’ll do it for free.”

Sitting on a folding chair, tapping away on his 90-year-old typewriter, Smith creates stories on demand, for a mere dime. Since September 2013, the 27-year-old has set up shop at the market, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, the Strong Museum of Play, a cocktail lounge in Rochester, and even in Manhattan this past summer while serving as an American Association for the Advancement of Science mass media fellow at Scientific American magazine .

“I can’t describe what I feel when I’m writing,” Smith says. “It does something to me. It’s like I was put here to do this. I want to make the world a stranger, more whimsical place.”

A PhD candidate in biophysics, Smith studies glass filters 10,000 times thinner than a human hair as part of the Nanomembranes Research Group. It’s because of his rigorous academic schedule that he began the 10-cent project. “I wanted something to keep me sane at the end of the day when I left the lab,” he says.

The Pittsburgh native has written more than 900 stories, each roughly 500 words, on half sheets of paper. Strangers give him a prompt, and he pecks away. He’s crafted stories about lost loves, lost dogs, sea lions, flying princesses, and frogs who jump over the moon. Stories about babies, treehouses, aardvarks, and dancing polar bears. Stories about murder.

“It’s dizzying the stories I’ve been told,” he says. There was the woman who asked him to write about being unable to tell a man she loved him. The reason? “I’m married,” she told Smith.

He says “writer’s block is not an option.” And neither is Liquid Paper. If he makes a typo, he backspaces and types over the word with capital X’s.

Smith has long been fascinated by typewriters and began collecting them while studying physics and English at Allegheny College. He found his current one on Craigslist for $30.

“I use a typewriter because it’s impossible to ignore,” he says. “The tapping and the ring of the bell is a draw. And when I’m done, I have a one-and-only physical object.”

He catalogs each story by taking a photo of the finished product on his phone. He posts several each week at 10centstories.com and Facebook.com/10centstories, where he also lists his upcoming appearances.

Why 10 cents? “When my dad was in second grade, his brother told him that he needed to collect dimes,” Smith says. “ ‘Pennies are worthless, nickels are too heavy. Dimes have the best value-to-weight ratio,’ And my dad took it to heart. When he asked my mom to marry him, he paid for the engagement ring with dimes.”

“There really is a story for everyone,” he says. “I don’t know what my future holds, but I know I want to keep doing this. I feel it’s a calling.”

—Jim Mandelaro

A Maven of Maps

create_schwartzTWICE ON THE MAP: Schwartz, a noted surgeon, is also a prominent expert on historical mapmaking. Yet, he observes, the readers of his seminal textbook, Principles of Surgery, “don’t have any idea about my interest in cartography.” (Photo: Adam Fenster)

“Serendipitous” is how Seymour Schwartz ’57M (Res) describes the evolution of his interest in historic maps.

As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, during World War II, he took a typical pre-med curriculum. With the exception of introductory English and a three-credit course on Shakespeare, every class was in science, says Schwartz, who holds the title Distinguished Alumni Professor of Surgery.

“I had no particular interest in history until I saw some maps,” he recalls, sitting beside a reproduction of the first known map to include the Americas, which hangs in his office at the School of Medicine and Dentistry. “Maps provide a palatable way of learning history.”

He acquired his first map—a 1795 map of the state of New York—in 1963. His collection has since grown to become one of the most acclaimed assemblages of rare maps in North America. His holdings focus on the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries—documenting Europe’s earliest contact with, and understanding of, the New World.

“My surgical personality speaks to developing a specialty,” Schwartz says about his decision to focus on a specific region and time period.

As his interest in cartographic history grew, he discovered few examples of scholarship on the mapping of America. So he took on that role. He’s authored seven books on cartography, including the definitive reference work, coauthored with Ralph Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (Abrams, 1980). He has served on the boards of the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution and the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress.

Schwartz has donated parts of his collection over the years. In 2008, he bequeathed more than 200 of his rare maps to the University of Virginia. In 2010, he donated some of the earliest maps and drawings of western New York to the River Campus Libraries’ Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation. The Schwartz collection at Rochester includes the first map printed in the colony of New York, dated 1733, as well as the earliest known drawing of the region, a circa 1768 etching of the Upper Falls of the Genesee River.

For Schwartz, maps not only offer a means of learning history; they also have aesthetic value. “Maps should be considered works of art,” he says, adding that a true collector should never sell his items for profit.

Since joining the Rochester faculty in 1957, Schwartz has written numerous medical texts, including the authoritative textbook Principles of Surgery, now in its 10th edition under the title Schwartz’s Principles of Surgery (McGraw-Hill). He’s also authored more than 300 scientific papers and edited several of the most respected journals on surgery.

He’s received numerous accolades during his long career. Many have recognized his accomplishments as a surgeon; others have honored his contributions to cartography.

“In the books I’ve written on cartography, the audience generally doesn’t know that I’m a surgeon,” he says. “In contradistinction, the readers of [Principles of Surgery] don’t have any idea about my interest in cartography.”

Two of his honorary degrees—one from the University of Madrid and one from the University of Wisconsin—were awarded for his contributions to both surgery and cartography.

“And that pleases me,” he says.

—Jennifer Roach

How Do We Relate?

Psychologist Harry Reis puts human relationships under the microscope.

By Kathleen McGarvey/Illustrations by Michael Osadciw

reis (Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Relationships—with partners and friends, coworkers and siblings, roommates and neighbors—can bring moments of pure delight. But they can also take you on a bumpy ride. And often the last thing it all feels like is something systematic.

But there are patterns underlying the day-to-day drama, and it’s the life’s work of psychologist Harry Reis to understand them. Since joining the faculty in 1974, he has contributed prominently to creating the field of relationship science.

When Reis was an undergraduate at City College of New York in the 1960s, the study of interpersonal relationships wasn’t an area of formal research—even though such influential figures as Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson had indicated their belief that relationships are important in shaping personality.

But an early-1980s conference in Madison, Wisconsin, brought together about 100 young researchers who were interested in scrutinizing relationships scientifically. Reis remembers it as a “visceral experience. The energy and electricity at that conference were off the charts.”

What a collection of academic renegades brought forth is now a well-established field, with the usual apparatus of scholarly standing: an international society, semiannual meetings, and research journals. And Reis has been there from the very beginning.

“It was the light bulb going off,” Reis says of the Madison conference. “I’ve been studying it ever since.”

In 2012, the International Association for Relationship Research presented Reis with its Distinguished Career Award, the association’s most significant honor. And in 2015, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology gave him its annual Career Contribution Award.

“He has been a true pioneer in the field for four decades,” said Andrew Elliot, a professor of psychology at Rochester, when the award was announced. In December, Gloria Culver, dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, appointed Reis to a Dean’s Professorship, the highest honor a dean can bestow on a faculty member.

Reis helped transform social psychology research as one of the Rochester investigators who developed the use of daily experience records, a now widely adopted technique that’s still known as the Rochester Interaction Record. Researchers value the method because it lessens the impact of flawed recollections and other forms of bias on reports people provide of their own behavior.

New directions for research have opened since Reis began his work. His and other researchers’ findings about men and women’s interactions “need to be investigated in non-heterosexual couples, and that’s an exciting area for research,” he says—but adds that indications so far are that the psychological processes of committed, monogamous relationships are fundamentally alike for all couples.

“The experience of being in a same-sex couple in the U.S. is very different than being part of a heterosexual couple. But issues of intimacy and commitment, and what people fight about—that’s the same,” he says. “We need to understand and appreciate the differences, but what’s striking is the similarity.”

For the last 25 years, Reis has been zeroing in on the issue of “responsiveness” in relationships. “It’s the idea that your partner ‘gets’ you, that they understand you in a fairly deep way, and that they appreciate the person they understand. It’s a combination of understanding and what we call ‘validation’—but appreciation is just as good a word for it.”

Responsiveness is a theme that comes up repeatedly in Reis’s research, but his career has been characterized, as much as anything, by a wide-ranging curiosity. “I don’t follow the model of ‘take one thing and stay with it until you’ve beaten it into the ground,’ ” he says. “That’s not my approach at all.”

Probing friendship, examining marriage’s effects on health, investigating what social benefits men and women accrue from physical appearance: it’s all fallen under Reis’s scrutiny.

As Margaret Clark, a professor of psychology at Yale, noted in her nominating letter for his career award in 2012: “If you look at his vita, you’ll see that his contributions in recent years are actually speeding up, not slowing down.”

“This guy,” she wrote, “is amazing.”

Looking for a partner? Try online dating—but don’t mistake it for science

reis (Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Reis has turned his researcher’s eye toward the phenomenon of online dating, which by 2012 had surpassed all forms of matchmaking in the United States other than meeting through friends.

His team found that online dating has lost the stigma once attached to personal ads, and it provides convenient access to potential partners. But they also found that despite the insistence of some of the biggest players in the online dating industry that their algorithmic matching offers a “science-based” approach to dating, such claims haven’t been substantiated and should be given little credence.

“The Internet holds great promise for helping adults form healthy and supportive romantic partnerships, and those relationships are one of the best predictors of emotional and physical health,” Reis said when the study was published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

But the researchers also concluded that online dating can promote a “shopping” mentality—people can become judgmental and picky, focusing exclusively on factors like attractiveness or interests. And corresponding by computer for weeks or months before meeting face to face has been shown to create unrealistic expectations, he says.

They further found that men and women behave differently online—men look at more profiles than women do and are more likely to initiate contact.

The researchers cautioned that online sites can encourage search for a “soul mate,” convincing would-be daters that a partnership is “meant to be.” People driven by such a conviction are especially likely to bail on a relationship when problems arise and to become vengeful in response to partner aggression when they feel insecure in the relationship, Reis and his colleagues found.

Relationship problems? Don’t blame gender differences

No matter how inscrutable men and women sometimes seem to each other, odds are that gender difference is only a small part of the picture.

“‘Boy or girl?’ is the first question parents are asked about their newborn, and sex persists through life as the most pervasive characteristic used to distinguish categories among humans,” Reis says.

But in a 2013 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he held up for statistical scrutiny 122 different characteristics—from empathy and sexual attitudes to science inclination and extroversion—in men and women. And he found that the sexes, by and large, don’t fall into categorically distinct groups.

Reis and his collaborators—including lead author and then doctoral student Bobbi Carothers ’03 (PhD)—reanalyzed data from studies that had shown significant sex differences. They also collected their own data on a range of psychological indicators. And they reopened studies of the “big five” personality traits: extroversion, openness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness. In all that they examined, they looked for evidence of attributes that could reliably categorize a person as male or female.

The pickings were slim. Although men and women differ on average in many ways, it’s not that men are one way and women are another. People differ, and gender is only one of many factors that contribute to the differences. And it’s a relatively small one, at that.

“When something goes wrong between partners, people often blame the other partner’s gender immediately,” says Reis. That reaction prevents people from seeing their partners as individuals with their own proclivities and idiosyncrasies.

“When psychological and intellectual tendencies are seen as defining characteristics, they’re more likely to be assumed to be innate and immutable. Why bother to try to change?” Reis says.

Gay and lesbian couples, he adds, “have much the same problems relating to each other that heterosexual couples do. Clearly, it’s not so much sex but human character that causes difficulties.”

reis (Illustration: Michael Osadciw)

Make lots of friends, then make good friends . . . and then reap the benefits

It turns out that those college friendships bring bonuses years later—even if you never attend a reunion.

Reis coauthored a study released in 2015 that tracked college students for 30 years, beginning in the 1970s. He and his team assessed social activity at ages 20 and 30 and psychosocial outcomes—social integration, friendship quality, loneliness, depression, and psychological well-being—at age 50.

They found that the quantity of social interactions people have at age 20, and the quality of social relationships they have at age 30, can benefit health later in life. And it’s not just psychological health that’s involved—having few social connections has been shown to be as detrimental to health as tobacco use.

The researchers—including study leader Cheryl Carmichael ’11 (PhD), then a doctoral student—hypothesize that frequent social interactions at age 20 help to build a social toolkit that can be drawn on later. As 20-year-olds, people figure out who they are and how to manage differences from others.

The study—published in the journal Psychology and Aging—additionally showed that a high number of social interactions at age 30 had no later psychosocial benefits. But 30-year-olds who reported having intimate and satisfying relationships also reported high levels of well-being at midlife. In fact, meaningful social engagement was beneficial at any age, but more so at 30 than 20.

Understanding and appreciation are key to rekindling desire

When a relationship has passed a few anniversaries and the spark seems to be flickering, responsiveness could be a pivotal factor in renewing desire, says Reis.

A study he published with Gurit Birnbaum, who completed postdoctoral work at Rochester and is now a psychology professor at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel, suggests that responsiveness in even mundane interactions may reignite sexual desire. The study appeared in a 2016 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Their research began as an inquiry into what psychologists call the “intimacy-desire paradox”: while people strive for intimacy in their relationships, such familiarity doesn’t seem to foster desire.

“Adjusting to married life is a challenge, and many newlyweds don’t do it particularly well,” says Reis. “Here you’ve been dating, and that’s all exciting—but now you’ve got dirty socks to contend with.” And as the years tick by, those piles of dirty socks don’t add to the mystery.

Previous studies hadn’t established whether emotional intimacy promotes or undermines sexual desire. Now Reis and Birnbaum’s research suggests that, at least in certain circumstances, there may not be a paradox at all.

What they found is that intimacy itself doesn’t fuel or hamper desire—instead, it’s what the intimacy signals that matters.

Responsive couples are willing to invest in their relationships, and they show a deep understanding of a partner. Responsiveness is actually a kind of intimacy—and likely it encourages desire because it conveys the impression that a partner is worth pursuing.

When men and women perceive their partners as responsive, they feel special and think of the partner as valuable, which boosts sexual desirability, the researchers found. They also found that women’s perceptions of themselves and others were even more strongly affected by responsiveness than men’s—an effect that translated into higher levels of desire for the responsive partner.

Marriage is good for your heart—and a happy marriage brings women big benefits

reis (Photo: Michael Osadciw)

A bad relationship can cause heartache—but a good one can literally help your heart keep ticking.

A 2011 study by Reis and Kathleen King, a professor emerita at the School of Nursing, showed that happily married people who underwent coronary bypass surgery were more than three times as likely to be alive 15 years later as unmarried counterparts.

The effect of marital satisfaction is “every bit as important to survival after bypass surgery as more traditional risk factors like tobacco use, obesity, and high blood pressure,” says Reis. The research was published in the journal Health Psychology.

“A good marriage gets under your skin, whether you are male or female,” he says.

But the marriage advantage plays out differently for men and women. For men, marriage in general is linked to higher survival rates—and the more satisfying the marriage, the higher the rate of survival.

But for women, the quality of the relationship is even more important. While unhappy marriages don’t add much to longevity for the women who’ve had bypass surgery, happy ones increase women’s survival rate almost fourfold, the study found.

“Wives need to feel satisfied in their relationships to reap a health dividend,” says Reis. “But the payoff for marital bliss is even greater for women than for men.”

What’s behind the benefit? The study adjusted for age, sex, education, depressed mood, tobacco use, and other factors known to affect survival rates for cardiovascular disease.

Supportive spouses most likely help by encouraging healthy behavior, such as increased exercise or smoking cessation, which are critical to long-term survival of heart disease. And a nurturing marriage also provides people with motivation to care for themselves and stay around to prolong a happy partnership, the researchers say.

Share and share alike

reis (Photo: Michael Osadciw)

They say you can’t buy happiness. But researchers have shown that when you are buying something, you’re more likely to feel happy about spending your money on experiences than on material possessions.

Why? It seems to hinge on the fact that experiences are more likely to be shared with others than material goods are.

In a 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Reis and fellow investigators set out to learn why recent research had shown that spending discretionary money on acquiring life experiences made people happier than buying tangible objects.

They found that social spending was favored over solitary spending, but experiences otherwise weren’t favored over material goods. In other words, it’s the sharing that seems to matter.

Appearance matters for more than first impressions

It’s well established that people’s attractiveness significantly influences the first impression that they make. But what about beauty’s role in ongoing relationships? After all, most of our social encounters are with people whom we’ve met before.

In a study published in 1982 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Reis and his collaborators asked another question, too: why does physical attractiveness influence social participation? It was the first study to document connections between social competence and people’s actual social experiences in everyday life, thanks to the team’s use of the Rochester Interaction Record, a diary technique for gathering data that Reis helped develop.

They asked senior college students to record information about every social contact they had lasting 10 minutes or more. And they asked a class of psychology students at another university to view photographs of the study’s subjects and rate their attractiveness on a scale of one to seven.

Here’s what Reis and his team found:

Attractive men had more social interactions—and in particular, more social interactions with women—than unattractive men.

There was no difference in the quantity of interactions for attractive and unattractive women.

Pretty people of both sexes had better social interactions—longer, more intimate, and more pleasant.

Attractive men were more socially assertive and less worried about rejection by women. But attractive women were less assertive and less trusting of men. They were more likely to wait to be approached by others.

For both sexes, assertiveness led to more and better social participation.

The researchers wrote in their report that appearance had “diametrically opposite” consequences for social assertiveness for men and women. Attractive men had higher social self-esteem than unattractive men, but attractive women had lower social self-esteem than unattractive women.

Their results suggest that physical attractiveness is just as socially consequential for men as it is for women, at least in terms of the amount and type of social interaction they experience. “It’s a finding that contradicts common notions that beauty matters only for women—a point that’s now axiomatic in the literature,” says Reis.

Why doesn’t attractiveness affect the quantity of relationships women have? Researchers didn’t arrive at a definitive answer, but hypothesized that attractive females may be more likely to wait to be approached by others—and most males, who don’t earn “attractive” status, are leery of rejection. And they speculated that because attractive women tend to wait for others to come to them, they don’t cultivate the social skills that less attractive women do.

A few tips

Reis offers the following suggestions as you navigate your relationships, romantic and otherwise.

Always make time for your relationship, no matter what else is going on.

Celebrate each other’s successes, little and large.

Listen first, resolve later.

Own your feelings (”when you do behavior X, I feel Y”).

Remember that understanding happens only when your partner feels understood, so always try to be accepting, reassuring, and encouraging.

For the Love of a Mollusk

Heidi Knoblauch ’08 opens a fashionable oyster bar in New York state’s Capital Region.

By Alan Wechsler

knoblauchTHE NEW OYSTER CULT: Knoblauch (above) brings the contemporary oyster craze to the Capital District of New York state. The Plumb Oyster Bar, which opened in December, adds to the rejuvenation of downtown Troy. A December menu (below) features seven oyster varieties. (Photo: Jessica Hill/AP Images for Rochester Review)

Heidi Knoblauch ’08 had her academic career all set. The Phi Beta Kappa graduate had earned multiple fellowships, three master’s degrees, and a PhD in history from Yale. In 2015, she accepted a teaching position at Bard College.

And then she gave it all up. For oysters.

In December Knoblauch opened Plumb, a raw oyster bar and restaurant located in an up-and-coming section of downtown Troy, New York.

“I had a reckoning with myself,” she says.

“What drew me to academia was the research,” she said. “Starting (a restaurant) is one big research question.”

In truth, Knoblauch always had an entrepreneurial bent. When she was 12, she sold water bottles to visitors at an antique festival near her home in Round Lake, New York. Then she graduated from the prestigious Emma Willard School in Troy and enrolled at Rochester, where she set upon her academic path.

“I fell in love with history at the University of Rochester,” she says.

She wrote a senior thesis on the long campaign for national health care that began in the United States in 1945. She later published her research in the American Journal of Public Health.

knoblauch (Photo: Jessica Hill/AP Images for Rochester Review)

During her brief stint at Bard, Knoblauch ran the school’s program in experimental humanities, looking at ways to use digital technology to teach public history.

At the time, Knoblauch was living with her wife, Kelly McNamee ’05, in nearby Beacon. Knoblauch commuted north to Bard while McNamee, a lawyer, would head south to New York City. When Knoblauch came to the city, McNamee would drag her to her favorite oyster bars. “I like to think I played a small role in getting her interested,” she says.

When McNamee got a job in Troy, the couple moved there together—and Knoblauch decided she wanted to work there, too.

Troy, home to around 50,000 people, is one of the three population centers, along with Albany and Schenectady, of the region known as the Capital District of New York. At its height, Troy was a major hub for the manufacturing of shirt collars. More recently, it’s been known for its blight. But it’s also a city of rare beauty, with street after street of historic brownstone facades. Many period movies, including Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, as well as Ironweed, were filmed here.

While poverty persists, the city’s architecture and affordability have helped turn downtown into a trendy place, with coffee shops, a wine bar, a gastropub, and a popular Saturday farmer’s market. It was this hipster atmosphere that attracted Knoblauch. It helped that a former flower shop became available, in the first floor of a building owned by her mother, Arlene Nock.

“I had no hesitation at all about her doing the bar,” says Nock, a psychiatrist at the Stratton VA Hospital in Albany. “She just is one of those few people that you know will put a lot of thought into it, and she’ll work really, really hard until it’s done.”

And Knoblauch did.

True to her research background, she wrote up a 35-page business plan. In the fall, she undertook a massive refurbishment of the space, adding two bars and a new ceiling, replacing wall-to-wall carpet with new floors, updating the cooler, and building custom-made tables for the 49-seat restaurant.

“This is by far the scariest thing I’ve done,” she admits.

Based on opening night, she shouldn’t lose too much sleep.

The restaurant was packed with friends, well-wishers, and oyster aficionados. She served multiple oyster varieties, including Kusshi, Mystic, Kumamoto, and Shooting Point Salts. Two shuckers worked full-time releasing the briny treats from their shells and serving them on ice-covered trays.

And what’s so special about oysters? According to Knoblauch, apart from their legendary (but unproven) status as an aphrodisiac, they are said to take on the flavor of the sea around them. Thus the oysters of one region taste different from those of another, and come in different sizes and textures as well.

For Knoblauch, Plumb also offers community. She encourages her diners to discuss the oysters, the way wine connoisseurs discuss a vintage. And on opening night, there was plenty to talk about.

“Oysters for me are a point of human contact,” Knoblauch says. “Oysters bring people together.”

Tantalized by Tessellations

Mathematician Doris Schattschneider ’61 explores the complex geometry of artist M. C. Escher.

By Lindsey Valich

schattschneiderMATHEMATICAL ILLUSIONS: Escher explored the concepts of infinity and “impossible drawing.” His work Relativity (top) depicts three staircases with people climbing or descending; while Fish/Bird No. 121 uses geometric translation to create a tessellation with two-color symmetry. (Photo: All M.C. Escher works © 2016 The M.C. Escher Company—the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com)

Most people who view the works of 20th-century artist M. C. Escher see patterned drawings. Doris Wood Schattschneider ’61, a mathematician, sees a complex combination of art and math.

Schattschneider is an authority on geometry in the work of Escher, a Dutch artist best known for creating spatial illusions and tessellations—the tiling of a plane with one or more geometric shapes without gaps or overlaps. She visited Rochester in November to speak in the Department of Mathematics as well as at the Memorial Art Gallery, in conjunction with the exhibit M. C. Escher: Reality and Illusion.

schattschneider (Photo: All M.C. Escher works © 2016 The M.C. Escher Company—the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com)

Schattschneider notes that many of Escher’s tessellations incorporate the geometric concepts of symmetry, foreground, and background, as well as the moving of shapes using translation, reflection, and rotation. While Escher consulted mathematicians and scientific publications, he denied he had any mathematical aptitude. To him, math was what he encountered in his schoolwork, and consisted of manipulating complicated algebraic formulas and numbers.

The general public often interprets math in the same way.

“Most people think math is numbers, formulas, equations, or algorithms,” Schattschneider says. “They are unaware that the majority of mathematics is not that, and in fact, these days, most of that has been relegated to computers. Mathematics is really thinking through problems, posing problems, trying to find patterns.”

It’s a message that Michael Gage, the professor of mathematics who invited Schattschneider to Rochester last fall, is eager to spread.

“Once I heard that an Escher exhibit was coming to the gallery, the idea of bringing [Doris] in to talk about it in a Wing lecture was obvious,” says Gage, referring to the department’s George Milton Wing lecture series. “I find her interesting because she’s been able to show how people who don’t think they are looking at or doing mathematics, are doing mathematics.”

As a student at Rochester in the late 1950s, Schattschneider took many studio art classes, but majored in mathematics because she enjoyed the challenge of solving problems and devising proofs.

She went on to earn a PhD in mathematics at Yale and was the first female editor of Mathematics Magazine from 1981 to 1985. At Moravian College in Pennsylvania, where she taught for 34 years and is now a professor emerita, she combined her interests early on by designing a course on the mathematics of decorative art. That’s when she encountered Escher’s work for the first time.

One of the books she chose for the class was by crystallographer Carolina MacGillavry, who had collaborated with Escher to use his works to teach geology students about crystallographic patterns. The book’s preface mentioned the artist’s notebooks, and Schattschneider was intrigued to learn more about how Escher, who had little mathematical training, was able to create art that incorporated so many geometric principles.

During a trip to The Hague in the Netherlands in 1976, she spent time photographing Escher’s notebooks. She first presented her photographs at a 1985 conference in Italy, but encountered a shortage of literature regarding the mathematical depth of Escher’s works.

“There were some wonderful books about Escher’s graphic works and about his life, but the symmetry work was barely mentioned,” she says. “I finally figured out that if someone was going to write the book, it had to be me.”

She received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and took a sabbatical from 1988 to 1989 to study Escher’s works at museums in the Netherlands, Washington, D.C, and Connecticut. In 1990, she published M. C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry (W. H. Freeman & Co.). A second edition was released by Harry N. Abrams in 2004.

Schattschneider continues to lecture extensively about the complexity of Escher’s works.

“It’s very unique art, and it’s the kind of art that you can’t just look at cursorily. You need to go back again and again and look closely,” she says. “If you look at some of the works really closely, you’ll just be amazed at what he was doing and how he did it.”

M. C. Escher: Reality and Illusion at the Memorial Art Gallery runs through January 29, 2017. Schattschneider lectured in the Department of Mathematics as part of the G. Milton Wing lecture series. For more information about Wing and the series, visit http://web.math.rochester.edu/news-events/wing-lectures/.

Design Your Own Tessellation

schattschneider_sideBird No. 74 (detail, left), is based on a parallelogram. Beetle No. 91 (detail, right), is based on a rhombus. (Photo: All M.C. Escher works © 2016 The M.C. Escher Company—the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com)

Schattschneider offers several tessellation “recipes,” similar to those that Escher discovered after much investigation. In general, tessellations are created either by taking a simple shape and modifying it through geometric translation (moving corresponding endpoints of opposite sides by the same distance and in the same direction); or by modifying a shape through translation and reflection (the creation of a mirror image).

Follow these recipes to create your own tessellations, manually or with software programs such as The Geometer’s Sketchpad, GeoGebra, Cabri, or TesselManaic.

Using translation

Parallelogram

Replace two adjacent sides (a and b above) with any series of lines or curves that connect the endpoints of the sides.

Translate the new lines or curves to their opposite sides.

Par-hexagon

Replace three adjacent sides (a, b, and c above) with curves that connect the endpoints of the sides.

Translate the new lines or curves to their opposite sides.

To tile the plane, translate the tile so that opposite edges match.

Using reflection and translation

Begin with a rhombus to create a tile with reflection symmetry.

Replace one side of the rhombus with a curve that connects the endpoints of the side (side a above).

Reflect that curve in a diagonal of the rhombus that meets one of those endpoints (reflect to replace side b above).

Translate the two curves to their opposite sides.

To tile the plane, simply translate the tile so that opposite edges match.

ESSAY

The Social Work of Music

Jazz composer and pianist Darrell Grant ’84E measures his success not only by how his music sounds, but also by what it does.

By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

grantVALUE(S)-ADDED: In a variety of projects, Grant seeks to integrate his music with his values. (Photo: Hiroshi Iwaya)

Darrell Grant ’84E has been a celebrated jazz composer and pianist since early in his career, when his first solo project, Black Art (Criss Cross), was named by the New York Times as one of the top 10 jazz recordings of 1994.

In 1997, he took an unusual step for a rising jazz artist. He moved out of New York City to Portland, Oregon, a place much less known for its jazz scene.

Grant and his wife, Anne McFall ’85E, who studied viola at Eastman, were eager to start a new life there. Yet it was also a place Grant felt would allow him, to a far greater extent than in New York City, to form meaningful connections with audiences and with his community.

“One of the things I was interested in was the idea of doing well by doing good,” says Grant, who teaches at Portland State University. “If you’re going to create something, you get to determine the measures for success. And something I always wanted to figure out was ways to connect my musical projects to something broader in the community.”

This past fall, Grant contributed an essay for a special edition of Chamber Music magazine (see “A Musician’s Path to Change”). In it, he reflects on his own experience crafting a mission-driven musical practice. Artists have a unique means to “communicate, inspire, provoke, inform, and to move others to transform society and themselves,” he writes, in articulating his own mission statement.

His projects have benefitted numerous Portland-area organizations. They’ve also explored deeply divisive areas of American life such as racial and regional conflict. In all cases, he says, music has the power to appeal to our common humanity.

But can drawing on our common humanity always achieve social transformation?

“That’s the dilemma that everybody is grappling with,” he says. “I don’t have an answer.” At the same time, he knows what his own approach will continue to be.

“There are individuals who will be able to make confrontational, powerful, combative art. I’m not one of those people. I’m probably always going to be one of those people with my hand open, rather than clenched.”

A Musician’s Path to Change

By Darrell Grant ’84E

A few years ago, the jazz pianist Herbie Hancock spoke with students in the music program at Portland State University, where I teach. In between questions about his musical history and his wide-ranging experiences, he shared some nuggets of his personal philosophy. I’ll never forget his response to one student’s question about the role of music in his life: “Music is important,” he answered simply. “But I am a human being first and a musician second.”

With its beauty, immediacy, and wonderful diversity, as well as its foundation in collaboration and deep listening, small ensemble music is a powerful vehicle for celebrating our shared humanity. A life in chamber music affords countless opportunities to build deep and meaningful interpersonal connections, and for nearly all of us engaged in the field—whether as performers, composers, or presenters—those connections sustain us in our professional endeavors.

That very capacity for community building, however, also compels us to look outward. How might we address the suffering of the people around us and offer a source of hope?

As a young African American growing up in the late 1960s, I was inspired by trailblazing performers like André Watts, Natalie Hinderas, and Leontyne Price, who were breaking new ground in the classical field; by jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, who served as cultural ambassadors around the globe; by the social engagement of artists like Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Harry Belafonte, and Nina Simone in the movement toward civil rights; and that of African artists like trumpeter Hugh Masekela and vocalist Miriam Makeba, who used art as a vehicle for empowerment and a voice against injustice.

It made me wonder: Is there something unique about those who use their art as a platform for engaging with the wider world? Or does the possibility of artistically centered leadership lie in reach of all of us? If so, what does it take for us to lead?

One day in the summer of 2004, I sat in the audience for a lecture by the South African minister Peter Story, who spoke about his experience in the historic struggle for justice and healing in South Africa. At the time, I was searching for inspiration and an organizing concept for my next recording. His stories of compassion, honesty, and courage in the face of unspeakable pain would become the inspiration for my 2007 album, Truth and Reconciliation (Origin Records). His talk also galvanized my own vision to use music as a tool for positive change. Shortly after that lecture I wrote the following personal mission statement:

I choose to believe in the power of humans to change the world. Art is the substance of our dreams and the medium through which resonates our most fervent hopes, highest aspirations, deepest truths, and most profound experiences. Those who create art possess a consequent extraordinary power to communicate, inspire, provoke, inform, and to move others to transform society and themselves, and we bear the responsibility to use this power to affect positive change in our communities and the world.

Linking my artistic practice to a mission challenges me to integrate my artistic choices and my personal values. In a culture in which economic bottom lines are often seen as the most significant measure of success, it provides a different barometer.

A few years ago, I created a course at Portland State entitled Artistry in Action. It provides an opportunity for students of all artistic disciplines to explore the ideas of mission and purpose in their artistic practices. In a section of the class focusing on community engagement, we do a game in which I hand out sections of the local newspaper and challenge the students to come up with an artistic project that addresses something they read there. The “game” is really an exercise in asking the most basic question: How can I help?

Today, the doors to engagement—by which I mean the opportunities to connect art with the issues affecting people’s lives, and confronting the thorniest challenges facing our society—have never been as wide open.

And every action, however small, counts.

This essay is adapted from “The Path to Change” in “Art in Action: Social Change through Music,” the fall 2016 special edition of Chamber Music magazine. Reprinted with permission.

‘Leading Global Thinkers’ Advance Maternal Health Care

in-the-newsHoffman (Moka) Lantum (left), and Lynne Davidson (Photo: Brady Dillsworth for University Advancement (Lantum); University Communications (Davidson))

Hoffman (Moka) Lantum ’03M (PhD) and Lynne Davidson ’01 (PhD) were named to Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2016.

Lantum, an executive and consultant in health care delivery and management, and Davidson, a political scientist with expertise on poverty and microfinance, are the founder and executive director, respectively, of 2020 MicroClinic Initiative. The initiative, which Lantum founded in Rochester in 2011, works to improve maternal and newborn health care in underserved areas of the globe. Its program, Operation Karibu, has provided clothes, emergency transportation, birth preparation, training in infant care, and safe deliveries to thousands of mothers in rural Kenya.

Prior to their work on the initiative, Lantum and Davidson played multiple roles in the University and Greater Rochester communities. In addition to serving as director of medical services at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, Lantum, a native of Cameroon, founded the Baobab Cultural Center in Rochester’s Neighborhood of the Arts. Davidson is a former assistant professor of health services research at Rochester, as well as former deputy to the University president and vice provost for faculty development and diversity.

Two other members of the University community have made Foreign Policy’s list in the past few years. Brian Grimberg ’96, an assistant professor of international health at Case Western Reserve University, was named to the list in 2014 in recognition of his work on rapid malaria detection devices; and Narayana Kocherlakota, who joined Rochester’s faculty as the Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics in January 2016, was named to the list in 2012. Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is a leading scholar and public intellectual on monetary and financial economics.

Grammy Nomination Roundup

The 59th Grammy Awards will take place on February 12 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Nominees, who were announced in early December, include several Eastman School of Music alumni:

Steve Gadd ’68E, Steve Gadd Band, Way Back Home: Live from Rochester, NY (BFM Jazz): Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.

Geoff Saunders ’09E, bassist, as part of the O’Connor Band with Mark O’Connor, Coming Home (Rounder Records): Best Bluegrass Album.

Bob Ludwig ’66E, ’01E (MM), mastering engineer for Andrew Bird, Are You Serious (Loma Vista Recordings): Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

Sean Connors ’04E, percussionist with Third Coast Percussion, Steve Reich (Cedille Records): Best Chamber Music Performance.

Kristian Bezuidenhout ’01E, ’04E (MM), Mozart Keyboard Music, Vols. 8 & 9 (Harmonia Mundi): Best Classical Instrumental Solo.

Gene Scheer ’81E, ’82E (MM), librettist for the opera Cold Mountain (Pentatone Music) and Christopher Theofanidis ’92E (MM), Theofanidis: Bassoon Concerto (Estonian Record Production): Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

MILESTONES

Honoring a Defining Leader

clinton‘A MAN OF CONSEQUENCE’: Clinton is celebrated at his retirement gala at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. (Photo: )

In the fall of 2015, a cover story in Penn Law Journal, the magazine of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, announced “The Close of the Clinton Era.”

As anyone around the school would know, they were, of course, talking about Gary Clinton ’73, the dean of students, who was on the cusp of retirement after 25 years in the role and 40 years of work at the school. Elite law schools are not often known as sites of copious warmth and affection, but the Journal couldn’t help but run “a valedictory valentine to a man of consequence.”

One alumnus recalled Clinton’s advice, at a critical moment, “to never forget the reasons why I chose law and justice.” Another recalled his dogged pursuit of a space for private prayer for Muslim students. Yet another told of Clinton’s counsel as he was constructing a new identity as an openly gay man—and how Clinton and his husband, Don Millinger ’76, together a regular presence at law school events, became friends and role models for how to approach life as part of a married couple.

A community spirit is what Clinton brought to the school, many students and faculty say. Among the tools he brought to his job were a master’s degree in divinity, as well as natural gifts of insight and empathy, according to his admirers. He oversaw a notable expansion in the numbers of student organizations, part of a concerted effort to encourage more face-to-face interaction among students in the digital age.

During his tenure, the school maintained, and even slightly improved, its place among the nation’s top 10 law schools, according to several rankings. A welcoming environment, it turns out, is not only compatible with rigorous professional training, but also part of what defines it. As Clinton sees it, participation in a rich community life is an important part of a lawyer’s education.

“For many students, this is where they begin the process of becoming professionals,” he told a school publication in 2010. “As opposed to simply taking classes and then going into the world, they learn how to build relationships with colleagues, how to engage in civil discourse even with those they diametrically oppose. At the end of the day, that’s really what being a lawyer is about.”

—Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

REUNION REDUX

Young Alumni Leaders

youngalumni (Photo: Provided)

Members of the Young Alumni Council met for breakfast last October during Meliora Weekend. With representatives in 12 cities around the United States, the council works with the Office of Alumni Relations to help recent alumni stay connected to the University, and to connect to one another. In addition to organizing and hosting happy hours, network receptions, and community service outings, the council helps with signature events such as the George Eastman birthday celebrations held each July, and hosts the Zero Year Reunion for recent alumni each Meliora Weekend.

Pictured are:

Back row: Chris Young ’11, John Kreckel ’09, Eric Weissmann ’10, Nazmia Alqadi Comrie ’08, Caitlin Olfano ’12, Caroline Jacobs ’09, Lauren Forbes ’12, ’13M (MS), Lauren Bradley ’11W (MS) (associate director of reunion and class programs), Zach Armstrong ’12.

Middle row: Laura Zimmermann ’11, Kelsey Griswold ’11, Jon LoTempio ’14, Kathryn Nave ’06, Susan Talbot ’16.

Front row: Alyson Manning ’14, Matt Hershfield ’15, Samantha Lish ’16, Jessica Rose ’16, Dan Gorman ’14, Kayleigh Nutting Stampfler ’08, Abby Zabrodsky ’14, Scott Lamm ’16, and Alvin Lomibao ’09, ’13 (MS).

KUDOS

Celebrating the Marimba Masters

marimbamastersREUNITED: Pictured from left to right are Joel Thome ’60, John Beck ’55, ’62 (MM), John Galm ’60, ’61 (MM), Peter Tanner ’58, ’59 (MM), Jeff Calissi (festival lecturer), Gordon Peters ’56, ’62 (MM), Ronald Barnett ’60, Norman Fickett ’61, ’64 (MM), and Stanley Leonard ’54. Also in attendance, but not pictured, was Vivian Emery Speca ’59. (Photo: )

The 2016 “Celebrate Marimba” festival at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania—home to the Center for Mallet Percussion Research and the nation’s largest collection of rare marimbas, xylophones, and vibraphones—honored the 1950s Eastman School of Music ensemble, the Marimba Masters. Nine original members appeared for a reunion performance and a panel discussion last November.

The Eastman Percussion Ensemble, directed by percussion professor Michael Burritt, also performed at the event.

The Marimba Masters formed at Eastman in 1954. Bill Cahn ’68E, associate professor of percussion at Eastman and a member of the percussion group Nexus, offered an overview of the ensemble and the festival.

The group “included the most advanced percussion students from the studio of William Street,” writes Cahn, adding that in the latter half of the 1950s, they gained widespread recognition through performances on national radio and television programs, including Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and the Ed Sullivan Show.

The performances at the festival consisted primarily of transcriptions of orchestral classics arranged for marimba by Gordon Peters ’56E, ’62E (MM). Peters, who was a percussionist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for more than 40 years, “also organized and arranged much of the music for the original Marimba Masters,” Cahn writes.

REMEMBRANCE

From Keyboard to Farm, and Back Again

fuyuumeRELOCATED: Two years after he was relocated to an internment camp, Fuyuume relocated of his own accord to the Eastman School of Music. (Photo: )

John Fuyuume ’48E, ’50E (MM) arrived at the Eastman School of Music in 1944 by way of the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona, an internment camp for Japanese-Americans.

Fuyuume, who died in September at age 91, was allowed to leave the camp for Rochester under the sponsorship of the Presbyterian Church. His family had been relocated from Los Angeles in 1942, and he had played the organ in the camp’s church but hadn’t had lessons in more than two years when he arrived at Eastman. He earned two degrees and planned to pursue a doctorate. But then Charles Seabrook, founder of Seabrook Farms, one of the world’s largest frozen food companies, urged him to begin a career at Seabrook in southern New Jersey instead.

Fuyuume’s parents were among the nearly 500 Japanese- American families who accepted Seabrook’s offer of work and a place to live after being released from the camps in 1944. They were joined by thousands of refugees from other countries, all of whom worked on the 20,000-acre complex before the company’s demise in the 1970s.

“We were a multicultural community long before those words were used,” said Fuyuume in an interview with Rochester Review in 2004.

He rose through the executive ranks and traveled the world. After retiring, he and his wife, Setsuko Hada, established the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center in Upper Deerfield Township, New Jersey. In 2011, the Japanese government recognized him with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, for his efforts to preserve the history and culture of the Japanese-American community at Seabrook.

Fuyuume and his family never moved back to California, where his parents had been forced to give up their small grocery store. And the $20,000 in reparations Congress authorized to internees in 1988 was not enough, he once noted, even to buy back the Steinway piano that as a boy he had to leave behind.

He eventually returned to his own musical roots, serving on the Eastman School’s board of managers. And to help others pianists achieve their own aspirations, he and his wife created the Setsuko and John Fuyuume Piano Endowment Fund at Eastman.

In his final years, he lived at a retirement home in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where—with fellow alumni Horace (Hap) Apgar ’49E and Alice Pillischer Kujala ’48E, and after many years away from the keyboard—he began to play and perform once again.

Books & Recordings

Books

Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India

By Llerena Guiu Searle

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Searle, an assistant professor of anthropology at Rochester, presents an ethnographic study of the urbanization of contemporary India. Through fieldwork among investors, developers, real estate agents, and others, she shows the process and consequences of the transformation of India’s land from a national agricultural and industrial asset to a global financial resource.

The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

By Jennifer Lynn Stoever

New York University Press, 2016

Stoever challenges the notion that race has been defined in American culture primarily in visual terms by exploring the role that sounds—spoken and musical— have played in developing ideologies of white supremacy. An associate professor of English at Binghamton University and cofounder and editor-in-chief of Sounding Out: The Sound Studies Blog, Stoever was a predoctoral fellow at the University’s Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies in the 2005–06 year.

An Introduction to the Theory of Wave Maps and Related Geometric Problems

By Dan-Andrei Geba and Manoussos Grillakis

World Scientific Publishing, 2006

Geba, an associate professor of mathematics at Rochester, coauthors an up-to-date overview of wave maps for advanced graduate students and scholars in mathematics and theoretical physics.

Lights Out: A Cuban Memoir of Betrayal and Survival

By Dania Nasca

CreateSpace, 2016

Nasca tells a story of Cuba before and after Fidel Castro took control of the island nation in a 1959 coup. A financial counselor at the Medical Center, Nasca was born in Cuba in 1958 and arrived as a refugee in the United States in 1970 by way of the Freedom Flight program initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

Time: A Vocabulary of the Present

Edited by Joel Burges and Amy Elias

New York University Press, 2016

Burges, an assistant professor of English at Rochester, coedits a collection of essays that reflect a wholesale rethinking of the concept of time that has taken place within humanities disciplines in the post-millennial period.

Non-Neoplastic Liver Pathology: A Pathologist’s Survival Guide

By Raul Gonzalez and Kay Washington

Springer, 2016

Gonzalez, an assistant professor of pathology at the Medical Center, coauthors a guide to simplifying the task of interpreting medical liver samples.

Music Theater and Popular Nationalism in Spain, 1880–1930

By Clinton Young ’98

Louisiana State University Press, 2016

Young, an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Monticello, explores the ways in which popular musical theater helped audiences in Spain articulate a national identity amid the rapid modernization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Blackbody Radiation: A History of Thermal Radiation Computational Aids and Numerical Methods

By Sean Stewart and R. Barry Johnson ’72 (MS)

CRC Press, 2016

Johnson, a senior research professor at Alabama A&M University, coauthors a history of blackbody radiation that includes an account of its discovery, its mathematical description by Max Planck, and its contribution to the development of quantum mechanics.

Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman

By Stephen Rush ’85E (DMA)

Routledge, 2016

Rush, a professor of music at the University of Michigan, explores harmolodics, a system of improvisation developed by jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman and inspired by the civil rights movement.

Statistical Methodologies with Medical Applications

By Poduri Rao

Wiley, 2016

Rao, a professor of mathematics at Rochester and director of the statistics program, presents a textbook on statistical methodologies for graduate students in statistics and biostatistics and for medical researchers.

Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven

By Martin Nedbal ’09E (PhD)

Routledge, 2016

Nedbal, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Kansas, explores the theater as a moral institution, and as a shaper of German national identity, in 18th- and early 19th-century Vienna.

Peripheral Neuropathy: What It Is and What You Can Do to Feel Better

By Janice Wiesman ’80, ’84M (MS)

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016

Wiesman, an associate clinical professor of neurology at New York University’s medical school, offers a patient’s guide to nerve damage. The book includes personal stories, tips to keeping nerves healthy, an overview of nerve anatomy and function, and a discussion of the causes of nerve damage.

Succeed the Sandler Way: 14 Personal and Professional Breakthroughs

By Karl Scheible ’04S (MBA) and Adam Boyd

Sandler Training, 2016

Scheible coauthors a guide to selling based on the Sandler Selling System. Scheible is the president of the Austin, Texas, company Market Sense and the former president of the Rochester company Flower City Printing.

Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception

By Aaron Hughes

Equinox, 2016

Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in Judaic Studies at Rochester, offers a critique of contemporary Islamic studies. He argues that the desire among scholars to combat prejudice against Islam has led to an emphasis in the discipline on normative pronouncements at the expense of historical and critical scholarship about the religion.

Barry Baskerville’s Blue Bicycle

By Richard Kellogg ’70W (EdD)

Airship 27, 2016

Kellogg, a professor emeritus of psychology at Alfred State College, presents the fifth book in his Sherlock Holmes– inspired mystery series for children.

The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?

By John Marciano ’62

Monthly Review Press, 2016

Marciano, a professor emeritus at SUNY Cortland, analyzes efforts to commemorate U.S. participation in the Vietnam War 50 years after the entry of American combat troops. He argues that an ongoing public relations campaign by American political and military figures has obscured war crimes committed by the United States.

Caribou Hunt: Hunting in British Columbia

By Patrick Simning ’81, ’82

Smashwords, 2015

Simning tells the story of his 10-day adventure hunting caribou in a remote camp in British Columbia.

Recordings

American Romantics: Premiere Recordings of Turn-of-the-Century Works for String Orchestra

By Reuben Blundell ’10E (DMA) and Gowanus Arts Ensemble

New Focus Recordings, 2016

Blundell conducts the all-volunteer New York City string orchestra in a performance of premiere recordings of scores he discovered in the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in the Free Library of Philadelphia. Works include those by Horatio Parker, Arthur Foote, and Frederick Shepherd Converse.

Live N’ Bernin’

By Bernie Dresel ’83E

Monster Music, 2016

Big band drummer Dresel leads a 16-piece Los Angeles jazz orchestra, The BBB, in a recording featuring 12 live tracks. In addition to drums, the orchestra, formed in 2014, includes four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, an electric guitar, and an upright acoustic slap bass.

Symphoniacs

By the Symphoniacs

Polydor Records, 2016

The electro-classical crossover ensemble, which includes cellist Colin Stokes ’10E, presents its debut recording. The ensemble includes two pianists, two cellists, and three violinists.

Ange Flégier: Mélodies for Bass Voice and Piano

By Jared Schwartz ’06E (MM)

Toccata Classics, 2016

Schwartz performs a series of the late 19th- and early 20th-century French composer Flégier’s melodies for bass voice, accompanied by pianist Mary Dibbern. Well known in his time, Flégier is much less known today. Several of the pieces receive their premiere recording, or premiere modern recording, on the CD.

Spheres: Music of Robert Paterson

By the Claremont Trio

American Modern Recordings, 2016

The Claremont Trio performs three compositions by Robert Paterson ’95E. The works, written for the ensemble, explore the theme of celestial bodies.

Sunshine and Sorrow

By Chesley Kahmann ’52

Orbiting Clef Productions, 2016

Kahmann, on piano, performs 12 new songs with her singing group, the Interludes, and her son, Ames Parsons, on trumpet.

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.

Rethinking Restructuring

An influential scholar tells why layoffs often add to costs— and why some businesses have over-relied on them.

Interview by Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

I was drafted into the military right after finishing a master’s degree. I kept thinking about how the military really transforms people, and what powerful effects organizations can have on people. I’d studied experimental psychology at Emory. I started to think I’d love to do research on organizations and the people working in them. I wrote to one of my professors, and he recommended that I write to Bernie Bass, who led what was then the Management Research Center at Rochester. The rest is history.

masterclass (Illustration: David Cowles for Rochester Review)

I wrote an article in 1993 called “Downsizing: What Do We Know? What Have We Learned?” Managers had been seeing people as costs to be cut, rather than as assets to be developed. I argued this was all wrong. If all they did was cut people, and didn’t change anything else, it didn’t pay off in terms of financial outcomes. I wrote that article out of passion; and it won the best article award [for the Academy of Management Executive] the following year.

The economic logic of layoffs is pretty straightforward. If you cut costs, other things being equal, your earnings should go up. But I’ve spent my career showing that other things are not always equal. People always talk about direct costs—things like severance pay, legal fees, pension and benefit costs. But they fail to anticipate the longer-term costs that are not always so obvious.

One unexpected cost comes from the loss of institutional knowledge. And we now have a lot of empirical evidence to show that the really scary thing is voluntary turnover among those who survive. In the year following a round of layoffs, whatever your turnover rate was—let’s say it was 10 percent a year—you can expect it to be 15 percent the next year. And the people who are leaving are the ones who are the most marketable.

Wayne Cascio ’74 (PhD)

Industrial psychologist; Robert H. Reynolds Distinguished Chair in Global Leadership, University of Colorado Denver Business School; author, Responsible Restructuring: Creative and Profitable Alternatives to Layoffs (2002), and multiple other books on human resources.

Latest career highlight: 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award, World Federation of People Management Organizations.

On studying organizational psychology at Rochester: “I took courses in the business school as well as in the psychology department, and it really gave me the crossdisciplinary exposure that I needed to be effective as an industrial and organizational psychologist. It was an ideal setting.”

On Rochester professor Edward Deci, founder of self-determination theory: “I was Ed’s first PhD student. He had just come out of graduate school. We were like the odd couple. I was straight out of the military, with my short haircut. Ed had his long hair. We got along famously. He was a wonderful mentor and remains so.”

When business is bad, the first question to ask is, is this just part of the business cycle? Or is this a structural change in our industry? If it’s part of the business cycle, and therefore temporary, then alternatives to layoffs make good sense. These include things like cutting temporary staff, eliminating overtime, offering voluntary retirements, and instituting salary and hiring freezes.

In 1995, I traveled around the country on a Department of Labor grant interviewing senior executives and workers at lots of companies. It took about five to 10 minutes for senior executives to sort themselves into one of two camps. The first one was the downsizers. Their philosophy was, what’s the smallest number of people we need to run this place? And I would say that was probably 90 percent of the executives I interviewed.

The second group said, “How can we take the people we already have and use them even more effectively?” I called them the responsible restructurers. I wrote a guide for the Department of Labor on responsible restructuring and then published the book Responsible Restructuring a few years later, based on that research.

It’s a myth that companies only lay people off in bad times. The American Management Association surveyed companies over about a 10-year period in the 1990s and early 2000s. They found that in any given year, about 80 percent of the companies that had layoffs were profitable. A lot of them were trying to meet a quarterly goal, or anticipating changes that might be on the horizon.

Attitudes have started to change. The Society for Human Resource Management found that during the Great Recession, for example, about 60 percent of companies tried to implement at least one alternative before they implemented layoffs. A lot of the evidence is anecdotal; but it is happening.

VETERANS DAY

Ceremonial Salute

backcover (Photo: Adam Fenster)

RANKING RECOGNITION: Vice President Paul Burgett ’68E, ’76E (PhD) receives a University pin in recognition of his service in the Army Reserves from Tony Kinslow, associate vice president for human resources, during a ceremony last fall. A retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Air National Guard, Kinslow established the annual ceremony to recognize faculty, students, and staff who have served in the armed forces. More than 30 veterans received pins during this year’s event.