Class Notes

1957 Walter Cooper (PhD) was honored at a private ceremony in October by Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he completed his undergraduate studies. The college dedicated the renovated former Beau Hall in honor of Walter to recognize his standing as a noted research scientist, steward of education, and advocate for civil rights. Cooper Hall occupies a prominent location on campus and is home to first-year students. Walter is recognized as the first Black student to earn a PhD in physical chemistry at Rochester. He spent 30 years at Kodak and holds three patents for his inventions. He is one of the founding members of the Rochester chapter of the National Urban League and Action for a Better Community and a New York State regent emeritus.

1966 Gary Starkweather (MS), who is credited as the inventor of the laser printer, died last December. Beginning his career at Xerox, Gary began work on the idea at the Webster, New York, campus before transferring to the company’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he perfected a prototype for the printer. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted Gary in 2012, Xerox’s 9700 laser printer became one of the company’s best-selling products and the most profitable commercial product developed at Xerox PARC.

1967 Sarah Hubler Johnston (PhD) writes, “My debut fictional novel, Mostly on Sunday (Covenant Books), captures the enduring relationship of two women born long before iPhones and Google replaced imagination, instinct, and tea leaf readers.” The novel is set in the Allegheny Mountain and Susquehanna River regions of central Pennsylvania.

1970 Joseph Amato (PhD), a professor emeritus at Southwest Minnesota State University, has written and published a book of poetry on aging, Towers of Aging (Crossing Press), his fourth book of poetry. He has previously published books on European intellectual and cultural history as well as family, local, rural, and regional history and two memoirs.

1971 K. Bradley Paxton (PhD) has published a second edition of Pictures, Pop Bottles and Pills: Kodak Electronics Technology That Made a Better World But Didn’t Save the Day (Fossil Press). The new edition follows Kodak’s transformation through 2019 and includes information about projects that have been declassified since the book was first published in 2013. Bradley retired from Kodak in 1992 after a 32-year career. His company, Advanced Document Imaging, has done systems software testing for the 2020 Census.

1974 Gary Kinsland (PhD) (see ’69 College).

1979 Stephen Fantone (PhD) (see ’87). . . . Burns Fisher (MS) (see ’72 College).

1987 Suzanne Schnittman (PhD) published Provocative Mothers and Their Precocious Daughters: 19th Century Women’s Rights Leaders (Atlantic Publishing) in August. Suzanne sends memories of her studies at Rochester and her life afterward: “I received my PhD from the U of R in 1987 in American history. I worked under the advisement of Stan Engerman. The entire department, under the chairmanship of Christopher Lasch, was very supportive of ‘nontraditional’ students, of which I was [one of only a] few. I went on to teach history at SUNY Oswego, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Wells College, and SUNY Brockport. I have lived in Rochester all my adult life, supported the U of R financially and emotionally, and am proud to say its training always inspired me on a nontraditional path that included jobs in nonprofits that worked for justice.” About her book, she writes, “My passion for women and families intersected perfectly with my research interest in women’s rights leaders. Finding the niche to present them in families rather than only from the podium gives this work a unique twist.” . . . Susan Houde-Walter (PhD), cofounder and CEO of LMD Power of Light Corp., received the Optical Society’s 2020 Stephen D. Fantone Distinguished Service Award in recognition of outstanding service to the society. An OSA fellow, she has served in several advisory and leadership roles, including 2005 president, board of directors member, and chair of the Optics & Photonics News editorial advisory committee. The award is named in honor of Stephen Fantone ’79 (PhD), founder and president of Optikos and the OSA’s incumbent president.

1992 Andreas Arvanitoyeorgos (PhD) writes to say that he was promoted to full professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Patras, Greece. . . . Jenny Lloyd (PhD) describes the pleasures and perils of daily expatriate life as the wife of a corporate executive and as a teacher in international schools in the 1970s in her 2019 book Expatriation: A Corporate Wife in Italy and Mexico (Self-published). She is an associate professor emerita in the Department of History at the College at SUNY Brockport and a former director of the women and gender studies program there.

1995 Nancy Dunham writes that her husband, Wayne Dunham (PhD), died suddenly in December 2019 in Alexandria, Virginia, where they lived. They met at the University, she continues, so it held a special meaning for them. Wayne was an economist in the antitrust division of the US Department of Justice. He was a key participant in high-profile cases, including the 1998 US v. Microsoft case. He also served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. He was the primary author of Chapter 10 of the 2006 Economic Report of the President, on economic issues related to intellectual property. In his free time, Wayne enjoyed studying history, specifically the American Revolution and George Washington, and space exploration. Other interests included photography, cats, politics, and music. He was a lifelong fan of the prog-rock band Jethro Tull. . . . Kristen Kulinowski (PhD) assumed duties in May 2020 as director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit corporation that operates three federally funded research and development centers. Since 2015, Kristen has been a Senate-confirmed member of the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, and she served as the board’s interim executive authority for the last two years. . . .Emanuel Waddell (MS) (see ’18).

1996 Edward Ashton (PhD), vice president for oncology imaging at BioTel Research, a division of BioTelemetry Inc., writes science fiction in his spare time. Warner Brothers has acquired rights to Mickey7, a science fiction novel by Edward that will be published in 2021. . . . Carl Bonner (PhD) (see ’18). . . . Jim Cain (PhD), the author of 20 books focused on team- and community-building activities, has published his first novel, Rise Again: The Story of the Mary Ellen Carter (self-published). Jim writes that he came to Rochester in 1983, where he joined a folk music club and discovered the powerful songs of Canadian folk legend Stan Rogers. For the past 37 years Jim had dreamed of turning Rogers’s four-minute song, “The Mary Ellen Carter” into a full-length novel. Set in the Canadian Maritimes through Nova Scotia and on to western Newfoundland, the novel, he says, “starts off at the U of R in the Hopeman Engineering Building.”

1999 Jeffrey Jackson (PhD), an expert on European history and culture who teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, has published Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Algonquin Books). The book offers a fresh look at the World War II resistance through the lives of Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, two gender-norm-defying artists who lived on the British Channel Island of Jersey throughout the Nazi occupation.

2000 Chris Swanson (MS) (see ’99 College).

2002 Darby English (PhD), the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History and the director of the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago, was selected to receive the 2020 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association for his 2019 book To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (Yale University Press).

2003 Mary Henold (PhD), the John R. Turbyfill Professor of History at Roanoke College in Virginia, has published The Laywoman Project: Remaking Catholic Womanhood in the Vatican II Era (University of North Carolina Press).

2005 Nathan Nobis (PhD), an associate professor of philosophy at Morehouse College, has coauthored with Kristina Grob, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina Sumter, Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong and Why All Abortions Should Be Legal (Open Philosophy Press).

2010 Erica Gelb (MS) (see ’09 College).

2011 Alexandra Mairs-Kessler (MA) contributed to the book Prudent Rebels: Bermudians and the First Age of Revolution (National Museum of Bermuda Press in partnership with the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs, Government of Bermuda).

2014 Douglas Flowe (PhD), an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, has published Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (University of North Carolina Press).

2015 Jonathan McLinn (MS) (see ’12 College).

2016 Lloyd Munjanja (PhD) (see ’18).

2017 Antonio Tinoco Valencia (MS), a PhD student in chemistry, has accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Emily Balskus at Harvard University. Last November, he was recognized with an outstanding graduate student award by the chemistry department. He is the founding president of the Rochester chapter of Alliance for Diversity in Science & Engineering.

2018 Shukree Abdul-Rashed (MS), a Rochester PhD candidate with Frontier Research Group, attended the convention of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) with Liz Daniele ’13W (MS), the assistant director for graduate diversity in the University’s David T. Kearns Center for Leadership and Diversity. While there, they met with Emanuel Waddell ’95 (MS), the organization’s president. Pictured are (left to right) Emanuel, Shukree, Chandra Ade-Brown ’13, a PhD candidate at Kumari Lab at the University of Cincinnati, Lloyd Munjanja ’16 (PhD), and Carl Bonner ’96 (PhD).