August 10, 2010
Left to right: Marylou Ingram, Beth Olivares, and Louise Slaughter — three remarkable women who have contributed greatly to our University and the Hajim School.
Dear members of the Hajim School community,
Last week, President Sarah Mangelsdorf reinforced the importance for all of us at the University – students, faculty, and staff–to act in accordance with University public health guidelines and directives from our state and local officials regarding COVID-19. Our ability to safely reopen the campus for the fall semester depends on this.
“We know that following guidelines for wearing masks and keeping our physical distance will not be easy, but for us to continue to fulfill our mission of teaching, research, and patient care, we need the entire community to do their part,” President Mangelsdorf wrote. “I firmly believe safety is a shared responsibility and the guidelines we put forward are the best way to keep the entire University community, and our Rochester neighbors, safe. . . When you see me out and about, I will be wearing a mask and keeping my distance. This helps me feel safe and hopefully it helps you feel safe, too.” Please take our President’s message to heart. You can read it in its entirety here.
And please keep up on the latest developments at the University’s Coronavirus Update website. Visit the University FAQ webpage for answers to commonly asked questions about our reopening, or submit a question of your own.
We continue our Celebration 2020 observance by highlighting three women who have contributed greatly to engineering and computer science at our University.
Marylou Ingram ’47MD paved the way for future generations of women researchers—with her innovative work in cytometry, radiation biology, cellular biology, and immunology, and with her generous endowments that support students and scientists following in her footsteps. The Marylou Ingram fellowships for graduate students in the Department of Biomedical Engineering are an example. So was the installation of Laurel Carney as the Marylou Ingram Professor of Biomedical Engineering in 2015, two years after Marylou’s death. Read more about Marylou’s remarkable career here.
Beth Olivares, the Kearns Center’s executive director and the University’s dean for diversity in Arts, Sciences & Engineering, was a first generation college student who overcame daunting hardships early in life. She is passionate about making universities “actively inclusive for all” and has translated that passion into incredibly successful programs including Upward Bound, the McNair Scholars program, and summer research programs that have benefited many of our first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color. They have also provided opportunities for our woman undergraduates to gain research experiences. Read more here.
The late Louise Slaughter was 42 when she “came out of the kitchen” as a stay-at-home mom in 1971 to fight for open spaces in her Upstate New York community. Louise failed in her efforts to save a local woodland from development. But instead of retreating back to the kitchen, the Kentucky native embarked on a remarkable, pioneering career in politics. As our longtime congresswoman, she co-authored and championed landmark legislation in support of women, and was a tireless advocate for programs of importance to our University and our school. Read more here.
An array of solar panels activated this year atop the Goergen Athletic Center will not only provide renewable energy on sunny days, but serve as an open, public demonstration of how solar energy can be stored for cloudy days as well. “We want to make available the data on how much energy the solar array is producing and how the battery is storing it, so members of the public can improve their understanding of what grid-scale energy storage of solar production looks like,” says Douglas Kelley, associate professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator of the $1 million project. You can visit this public website to monitor “real time” energy production by the array. And you can read more about this exciting project here.
The Project Imagine committee has gathered nearly 1,000 ideas from the Rochester community for how the University might change the way it operates in order to remain competitive in a post-COVID-19 world. To help arrive at those ideas, the committee has identified 11 broad themes that represent the most popular areas submitted by the community. The University community is invited to provide further feedback on any or all of these themes by this Friday, August 14 at Rochester.edu/project-imagine. If you have already submitted a specific idea, you do not need to resubmit it. It will be included in the analysis moving forward.
Have great week!
Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman
