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Mabel the Mobile Table

The robotic server came to life as an exercise in computer science research for a team of undergraduates and ended up taking top honors in her category in a national conference on artificial intelligence in 2002.

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Neutrinos

The modern understanding of matter at its most basic level would be incomplete without the work of Rochester scientists who have focused their sights on the most elusive of subatomic particles.

Koshiba

Masatoshi Koshiba ’55 (PhD)—who developed an underground laboratory in Japan to detect neutrinos as they streamed otherwise unnoticeably from the sun—received a share of the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work.

And two years ago, Kevin McFarland, associate professor of physics and astronomy, led a 40-person team at Fermilab that uncovered a discrepancy in the standard theoretical model that describes the way neutrinos interact with one another and with other particles.

O

Optics: A Quantum Leap

More than half of all degrees that have been granted in optics in the United States have “Rochester” inscribed on them. That’s a testament to the legacy of the Institute of Optics in a discipline that did not exist in a programmatic way until 1929, when the Institute was founded.

While Rochester researchers have been instrumental in the development of the laser and fiber optics, perhaps their most influential innovation has been the invention of quantum optics, a field that focuses on the intersection of light and physics and that holds potential as the basis for new communications and computer technologies.

Rochester Nobel Laureate Steven Chu ’70 received a share of the 1997 prize in physics for developing a method to trap and slow atoms using laser light, a milestone in quantum optics.

Launched as a partnership between Rochester and local companies, the Institute has long played an important part in economic development, contributing to commercial products as well as serving as the birthplace of startup and spinoff companies.

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‘Positive’ Political Science

Riker

The sense that Rochester was embarking on a new intellectual adventure in political science began the day William Riker arrived in 1962 with the ambition to transform the field.

“He brought a real sense of mission to the department and to the discipline,” says Richard F. Fenno Jr., the William J. Kenan Professor of Political Science who was a member of the faculty then. “We realized that we were doing something new and important in political science.”

Riker’s emphasis on the use of quantitative methodologies and empirical analysis has had such wide influence in the field that the approach has become known as the “Rochester School of Political Science.”

Q

Quest

Questions, questions, questions.

They lie at the heart of the scholarly life as curious faculty set off to explore and experiment to find the answers to questions that intrigue them. Scholars search not because they are worried about a grade, but because they enjoy the intellectual satisfaction that a life of learning brings.

Instilling that spirit in students is the premise behind Rochester’s Quest courses. Introduced in 1995, the courses are small, research-oriented classes designed to initiate first- and second-year students into the life of scholarship. Students are encouraged to conduct original research as they collaborate with like-minded students and engage in vigorous discussion with faculty members and classmates.

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‘Rochester Conference’ on High-Energy Physics

LAUREATE LODE: Nobel Prize–winning attendees of the 10th Annual International Conference on High Energy Physics included (left to right) Emilio Segre, Chen Ning Yang, Owen Chamberlain, Tsung Dao Lee, E. M. McMillan, Carl D. Anderson, I. I. Rabi, and Werner Heisenberg.

In August 1960, eight Nobel laureates assembled on the steps of the Delta Kappa Epsilon house on the fraternity quad and posed for a photograph, a souvenir of the innovative role Rochester has played in the history of physics.

Gathered for the Tenth Annual Conference on High Energy Nuclear Physics, the group symbolized the level of brainpower that gathered each year at Rochester to share and discuss their work, a testament to the international standing Rochester has achieved in physics since 1934, when President Rush Rhees hired Lee DuBridge to create an internationally recognized department. Home to one of the nation’s first cyclotrons, Rochester has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of subatomic particles. And in 1950, under the stewardship of then department chairman Robert Marshak, the River Campus became the host site for annual conferences that brought a previously unheard of spirit of international collaboration to the world of physics.

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Surfactants: Healthy Preemies

The survival rate for the tiniest of premature babies—babies so small that their arms can slip through an adult’s wedding band—has improved dramatically during the past 30 years, and Rochester work is a big part of the reason why.

As recently as the early 1960s, about 90 percent of infants who weighed less than 1,250 grams—about 1.5 pounds—died, often from respiratory distress caused by the inability of their immature lungs to function properly.

Today, roughly 90 percent of preemies live. Contributing to the difference was the successful development at Rochester of lung surfactant, a drug that jump-starts normal lung function.

“In the 1950s, prematurity at that level was often a death sentence,” says Robert Notter, professor of medicine who is one of three scientists credited with developing the drug. “That has turned around dramatically, and surfactant was a real advance in that process.”

Researchers at the Medical Center are continuing to explore ways that surfactants can treat other lung-damaging diseases.

Says William Maniscalco, chief of neonatology at the Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong: “The surfactant story isn’t over yet.”

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