Tributes
As the great niece of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, it’s fitting that Dwyer also would break down gender barriers. In 1952, she became principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a position she would hold for four decades. She was only the second woman to hold a principal chair in a major American orchestra, following Helen Kotas, who became principal horn of the Chicago Symphony in 1941.
“I was never harassed,” Dwyer once told the Boston Globe, “though of course the men (in the orchestra) played jokes on me. One of them turned a live lobster loose in my dressing room. And sometimes when I would talk to the conductor, they would imitate my voice on their violins.”
Dwyer persisted, even accompanying the orchestra on a tour of Russia in the late 1950s, as the Cold War was intensifying.
She recorded countless works before retiring from the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1990. A 1992 Symphony magazine list included her among 50 who made a difference in the past century.
Dwyer continued performing as a soloist with orchestras and quartets around the country—Leonard Bernstein was among the prominent composers who wrote works for her—and also taught music as an adjunct professor at Boston University and with private lessons. She died of natural causes in March in Lawrence, Kansas.
She was 98.
A professor in the University’s political science department for nearly 50 years, Fenno is best known for breaking new ground as a scholar of Congress and the legislative process. In the course of 19 books, he provided a previously unseen view of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as close-up looks at particular individuals, including Dan Quayle, a Republican senator from Indiana, who was George HW Bush’s vice president, and former
Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter.
Fenno called his research strategy “soaking and poking”—soaking up information and poking into details. He did this by visiting his subjects not just in Washington, DC, but also in their home districts. “Home, not Washington, is the place where most House member-constituent contact occurs,” he wrote, “and the place where judgment is ultimately rendered.”Fenno also wanted his students to be close to the action, and in 1968 he created the Washington Semester, allowing one Rochester student to work in a political sphere in the nation’s capital while earning credit. One of those students, Heather Higginbottom ’94, later became a deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama. “The Washington Semester Program was brilliant in its simplicity,” Higginbottom told the New York Times. “Fenno understood that to truly understand how policy is made—the dynamics that contribute to decision making—you need to be up close and personal.”
Fenno was a Massachusetts native who served in the Navy during World War II, earned his undergraduate from Amherst College and his PhD from Harvard in 1956. His dissertation, titled “The President’s Cabinet,” later became his first book. He joined the Rochester faculty in 1957 and remained until his retirement in 2003.
Fenno died in April in Rye, New York, at 93. Survivors include Nancy, his wife of 72 years.
Real estate developer. Philanthropist. University life trustee. Presidential appointee.
Those were some of the hats worn by Flaum, who died in August at 67.
The New Jersey native founded Flaum Management Company in 1986, focusing on the development of retail shopping centers, office buildings, call centers, and high technology facilities. He took pride in turning empty spaces into vibrant commerce centers.
“The University of Rochester and the City of Rochester have lost a great champion,” said University President Sarah Mangelsdorf. “David Flaum built relationships as much as he built buildings, and he leaves an indelible legacy in this community and well beyond.”
Flaum grew up in Lakewood, New Jersey, and earned a wrestling scholarship to Syracuse University in 1971 after winning a state championship. He met his wife, Ilene, at Syracuse and they eventually settled down in her hometown of Rochester.
Flaum joined the University’s Board of Trustees in 2007 and became a life trustee in 2017. During his tenure, he served on the health affairs, facilities, and strategic, and financial planning committees. In 2006, the Flaums established an endowed fund to support the University’s Eye Institute—renamed the David and Ilene Flaum Eye Institute in 2009.
The son of Holocaust survivors, Flaum received three presidential appointments: two by George W. Bush as a member of the Holocaust Memorial Museum Council and one by Donald Trump as member of the governing body of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Flaum also served as national chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
He is survived by Ilene and their three children, among others.
From his faculty and administrative positions at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, Frank earned national recognition as a practic-ing urologist, pioneering researcher, and educational leader. He died in October.
Considered one of the most influential urologists in the last half-century, he was a president of the American Urological Associa-tion, a founding member and past president of the New York State Urological Society, and a past president of the Northeastern Section of the national association. After serving in the Navy, he earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees from Rochester. He made his aca-demic and medical home at the University, serving for six decades in senior positions in the medical school, Strong Memorial Hospi-tal, and the Medical Center.
As a young pediatric nurse, Kitzman was struck by the disparities she encountered with socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers and their children.
She became an early leader in the development of the nurse practitioner’s role, and her lifetime of work in pediatrics reshaped how health care is provided to young mothers and their children. She developed, designed, and implemented a nurse-home visitation program that became the basis for the Nurse-Family Partnership, which sends specially trained nurses to regularly visit first-time moms-to-be and follows them from early pregnancy through the child’s second birthday. The program was federally funded in 1996 and serves more than 38,000 families per year across 41 states.
Most of her 60-plus year career was spent at the School of Nursing. She joined the staff in 1967 and five years later was named the school’s first clinical chief of pediatric nursing and served as a professor and senior associate dean for research.
In 2014, Kitzman was presented with the Charles Force Hutchison and Marjorie Hutchison Medal, the University’s highest recognition of alumni achievement and service. She was presented with the Dean’s Medal, the School of Nursing’s highest honor, late in 2019.
Kitzman died in March in Pittsford, New York. She was 82.
Koshiba helped solve one of the great mysteries of 20th-century physics: detecting and measuring neutrinos, subatomic particles that are a byproduct of interstellar nuclear reactors such as the sun.
Among the most abundant particles in the universe, neutrinos are sometimes referred to as “ghost particles” because, compared to other known subatomic particles, neutrinos rarely interact with atoms.
Koshiba, who died in November, shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for leading an effort to build an apparatus to detect neutrinos. Located in an abandoned mine in Japan, the observatory detected neutrinos from a supernova explosion in 1987 and a year later observed neutrinos from the sun. That facility, Kamiokande detector, was later superseded by other observatories in Japan that determined neutrinos have mass.
In addition to his many international honors, Koshiba received a Distinguished Scholar Medal from the University in 2000.
As director of the College’s Center for Study Abroad from 1983 to 2015, Levine helped build a program that sent thousands of students around the world for educational experiences that stretched beyond the classroom.
“She worked tirelessly behind the scenes when programs didn’t go according to plan, when there were emergencies abroad, and when there was bureaucracy to cut through,” says former coworker Eric Phamdo ’11, ’17S (MBA).
“I believe she knew in her heart that students truly grew most when they were on their own, out in the world.”
Levine also served as assistant dean and director of special projects from 2016 to 2020, working to enhance study abroad and other experiential opportunities for students in collaboration with alumni. In 2016, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for the International Education of Students.
Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1951, Levine followed an educational journey that took her from Monroe Community College in Rochester to the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Nice, France, where her love of the French language blossomed. She received her master’s degree in French from the Rochester in 1984.
Her passions included cooking and travel. She was a sous chef at Chez Jean Pierre, the first French restaurant in Rochester, and she met John Borek, her husband of 44 years, while working at the Village Green bookstore he co-owned in Rochester. Levine died in May in Rochester. She was 68.
Nelson was a man of many interests—woodworking, photography, reading science fiction, and playing the keyboard. But nothing stirred his passions more than his students at the University, where he taught computer science for 32 years.
“Randal Nelson was the best advisor and mentor a student or engineer could hope for,” said Morgan Sinko ’16. “There were plenty of faculty who would throw praise on students, but when Randal did it, you knew that person had done something extraordinary.”
Nelson grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, where he enjoyed climbing mountains and developed a lifelong love of nature. He earned degrees in physics and mathematics at the University of Wyoming, then switched to computer science and completed his PhD at the University of Maryland in 1988. He joined the Rochester faculty that same year and was an associate professor at the time of his death in April.
“His death is a huge loss, not just to the computer science department but to our entire community,” said Wendi Heinzelman, dean of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.
Nelson’s research interests included machine vision and robotics. He led the UR Robotics group for years and taught a course on robot construction. In his spare time, he played keyboard with a small group of other computer scientists in a band called the Algo-Rhythms.
Nelson was 61. Survivors include his wife of 33 years, Gwen, and three children.
Schwartz literally wrote the book on surgery. He was the founding editor of the 1,800-age surgery textbook Schwartz’s Principals of Surgery, first published in 1969, that became something of a bible for medical students. He also served as president of the Society of Clinical Surgery, the American Surgical Association, and the American College of Surgeons at different points in his life, and edited several medical journals.
In 1950, Schwartz began a one-year internship in surgery at Rochester, joined the US Navy a year later during the Korean War, and served in the Mediterranean for 18 months before returning to Rochester. In 1956, he was promoted to chief resident and became the first doctor in the world to treat bleeding esophageal varices with intravenous vasopressin.
His late wife, Ruth Schwartz ’52M (Res)—herself a pioneer in obstetrics and gynecology—suggested in the 1960s that he find a hobby to relieve the stress of his job. He turned to map collecting and cartography, explaining “Maps provide a palatable way of learning history.” His first acquisition was a 1795 map of New York State, and he built an acclaimed collection of rare maps from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries in North America. In 1981, he purchased one of only two known manuscript maps drawn by a young George Washington. Many of Schwartz’s maps reside in the Dr. Ruth W. Schwartz and Dr. Seymour I. Schwartz Collection in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation on the River Campus.
Known to friends as “Sy,” he continued his work as a surgeon until retiring at 72. But he continued to teach, write, and lecture. “I was happiest in the operating room,” he told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 2018. “I have ego. I felt I could operate as well, if not better than, most of the surgeons I was around.”
Schwartz was 92 when he died in August in St. Louis, where he had been visiting his son. Schwartz had lived in Rochester and been affiliated with the University since 1950.
Stark was already well known in sports circles when he became Rochester’s head football coach in 1969. A polio survivor at age 11, he scored 78 points in a 1949 basketball game for Syracuse Vocational High School—third-highest in New York State history—and was named Associated Press and United Press International All-East quarterback for Syracuse University in 1952 and 1953, when he led the Orangemen to the 1953 Orange Bowl. He also played on the Syracuse men’s basketball team.
Drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the second round of the 1954 National Football League, he chose instead to enlist in the US Army. He joined Syracuse’s football coaching staff two years later and helped the Orangemen win the 1959 Division I national championship. He served on the coaching staffs at Rhode Island and Harvard before taking the head spot at Rochester in 1969.
It was at Harvard that Stark achieved perhaps his greatest accomplishment, running a Crimson offense that scored two touchdowns and two two-point conversions in the final 42 seconds to forge a 29-29 tie with heavily favored Yale. It has been called the most famous football game in Ivy League history. The headline in the Harvard school paper said it all: Harvard Defeats Yale, 29–29.
At Rochester, Stark guided the Yellowjackets to a No. 1 ranking in the East for Division III schools in 1970. When he retired in 1983, his 69 career wins ranked second in program history. Stark continued working at Rochester as assistant athletic director and helped create the Athletic Hall of Fame in 1992. He was inducted himself in 2000 and retired from the University five years later.
He died in June in Walworth, New York, at age 90. Survivors include Catherine Stark, his wife of 66 years.
After graduating from Michigan State, Starkweather and his wife, Joyce, moved to Rochester in 1961 so that he could join Bausch & Lomb. After several of his colleagues were laid off, he joined upstart Xerox Corporation. He was working as a junior engineer at Xerox Corporation in Rochester in 1964, when an idea hit him like—well, like a laser. What if information could be transferred between two distant photo copiers, so that one person could scan a document and send a copy to someone else? Starkweather decided using the precision of a laser to print more refined images was the best plan.
His bosses at Xerox were less impressed, wanting him to focus on existing copiers, and told him to stop. But Starkweather coordinated a move to the company’s new research lab in Palo Alto, California, and in 1971 built the first working laser printer. By the 1990s, it was in offices around the world and today is a staple in countless homes. “A 60-page document could be printed in the time you spent walking to the printer to get it,” Alan Kay, a researcher who helped design the fonts used by the printer, told the New York Times. “No one had ever experienced that before.”
As Starkweather developed his printer, his colleagues built a personal computer that could drive it. It was called the Alto, and it eventually paved the way for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows PCs. After leaving Xerox, Starkweather went on to work at Apple and Microsoft.
He died in December 2019 in Orlando, Florida, at age 81. In addition to Joyce, he is survived by two children and four grandchildren.
