Sandra (San) Cannon’s job is to help the University make better use of the mountains of data generated by hundreds of individual clinics, research labs, academic departments, and administrative offices.

“There are lots of places around the University where data live, where data should live, where data don’t live. People are really struggling to figure out how to do better with what we have—in keeping with Meliora—but not really understanding how all the pieces fit together in the data landscape,” says Cannon, the University’s first chief data officer and associate vice provost for data governance.

A trained economist, Cannon sees the challenges as an optimization problem: “Everyone is doing a fantastic job in their own part of the University, optimizing their local problem, doing what’s best for the function they’re charged with fulfilling, not realizing that those local optima are not necessarily contributing to a global optimum.

“That’s why this new role of chief data officer is really important. I’m charged with connecting the dots, figuring out how we can coordinate data management in a way that actually allows the larger University to make better use of its data—in short, helping people to understand the bigger picture.”

Cannon’s work is anticipated to result in:

• Better decision making at all levels. “We seem to have a lot of places where people are doing the best they can, making decisions with the data that they have, but not understanding that there are other data in the University and in the outside world that could contribute to that.”
• Greater consistency in how data is defined, and greater efficiencies in how it is gathered.
• Broader depth of analysis. “We need the dashboards and the charts and tables that keep the University running, but once we actually get all of the data organized and understood, there will be a capacity for using data science and predictive analytics to go beyond that, to doing analysis and making predictions we’re not able to do now because we don’t have the data shaped in a way that would support that.”

The magnitude of this task, you might think, will leave Cannon little time to worry about the plight of the individual research coordinator or administrative assistant, toiling to manually update outdated spreadsheets because they don’t know where else to turn.

Think again.

“I want to hear from the people who are actually struggling with this data, day to day,” says Cannon, “Who are the people who have built those spread sheets because they had no other choice? What would be helpful for you? These are the pain points I need to understand.”

The data governance page at the Provost Office website has just been updated to make it easier to provide this kind of feedback.

Cannon says she can’t promise to make everybody’s experience with data management better. But she’s a firm believer in a concept called Pareto improvement, named after an Italian engineer and economist.

“If I can make one person better off, without making anybody else worse off, then it’s a net gain to the University.”

Read more here.

After great uncertainty this past year about federal support for the University’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), the final FY 2019 Energy and Water bill that was just passed by the U.S. Congress includes $80 million for the LLE, a $5 million increase over FY 2018 and the highest level of federal funding ever appropriated to the LLE in the University’s history.

The President is expected to sign the bill into law shortly. The bill also includes $545 million for the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program at the National Nuclear Security Administration.  The ICF program supports three major, world-leading research facilities: the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Z Facility at Sandia National Laboratory, and the OMEGA Laser Facility at the LLE. About 80 percent of ICF’s experiments are conducted at the LLE.  In addition, the LLE is the National Nuclear Security Administration’s largest university program, providing a critical scientific pipeline.

This past February, the Trump Administration proposed a $30 million cut to the LLE, a $126 million cut to the ICF program, and closing the LLE in three years.  However, thanks to strong, bipartisan Congressional support led by Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and members of the House delegation, as well as outcry from the scientific community, these devastating cuts and proposal to shutter the LLE were reversed.

University President Richard Feldman issued the following statement as part of the recent announcement from senators Schumer and Gillibrand:

“On behalf of the University of Rochester and the 500 scientists, engineers, staff, and students at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, I want to extend my sincere gratitude to Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand and the members of the New York State delegation in the House of Representatives for rejecting the proposed cut and closure of this state-of-the art-facility.  This was a seminal moment in the 48-year history of the LLE and it is thanks to their leadership and strong, bipartisan support from Congress, that the LLE will continue to make significant contributions to the advancement of science, help enhance our national security and maintain our global competitiveness, and drive economic growth and technological innovation across New York State.  With this funding, I am proud to say that the LLE will continue to serve as the largest university-based U.S. Department of Energy program in the nation and home to the largest and most powerful laser systems found at any academic institution in the entire world.” Read more here.

Kristin Doughty, associate professor of anthropology, has been named director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She began her new role on July 1, succeeding Nora Rubel, who led the institute for four years.

“I got involved with the Susan B. Anthony Institute as soon as I arrived on campus six years ago,” says Doughty, who has served for the past three years on the institute’s steering committee. “I’m excited to now work more directly with the faculty, students, and staff in carrying out our mission and expanding the intellectual community.”

The institute sponsors faculty research seminars, conferences, mentorship seminars, and annual public lecture series, along with offering undergraduate majors, minors, and clusters in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies in both the humanities and the social sciences.

Doughty sees opportunities to build on the institute’s past accomplishments and to expand the university’s research and teaching footprint related to issues of gender and sexuality, power, and equity. “The AS&E administration has publicly indicated their eagerness to build on the legacies of Susan B. Anthony, as well as Frederick Douglass, and I look forward to working with them in these endeavors,” she says. Read more here.

A new center at the Warner School of Education will provide the resources to help schools and organizations better capitalize on digital technology in K-12 and higher education settings, as well as across the lifespan in a variety of non-traditional settings..

“The center will provide a go-to location for educators and educational institutions interested in enhancing their teaching practices and effectiveness through the use of digital technology,” says Warner School Dean Raffaella Borasi, who will serve as director of the new center.

The need for one centralized place that bridges research and practice was the catalyst behind the launch of the new center this summer. The center is uniquely positioned to meet this need because it is founded on years of work around issues related to online and digitally-rich learning at the Warner School.

The center will build on the Warner School’s graduate programs and courses in online teaching and K-12 Digitally-Rich Teaching, as well as grants recently awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a total of $7 million. The projects include:

• a $2.8 million NSF-funded grant to provide teachers in rural school districts access to innovative online professional learning experiences in mathematics.
• a $1.2 million NSF Noyce grant providing 26 full tuition scholarships over the next five years to prepare future math and science teachers for digitally-rich classrooms, in partnership with the College as well as with East Irondequoit School District and East Upper and Lower Schools.
• a $3 million NSF grant that will allow the Center for Professional Development and Education Reform, in collaboration with the Center for Learning in the Digital Age, to further its work supporting teachers in leading K-12 school districts through new digital conversion initiatives.

The Center for Learning in the Digital Age will have implications for other initiatives, including a unique five-year partnership with the East Irondequoit Central School District that promotes the adoption of a digital conversion model in area K-12 schools. This collaboration led to the creation of a K-12 Digital Conversion Consortium in which nearly two-dozen participating districts across the state are collaborating and sharing ideas and resources.

The Warner School will launch a new website for the center in the coming months. For more information contact Raffaella Borasi at rborasi@warner.rochester.edu. Read more here.

Medical Center researchers are launching a new, $3.6 million study in partnership with the Rochester City School District to help children with chronic, persistent asthma receive specialized care through a combination of school-based treatment and telemedicine visits with asthma specialists. Asthma affects 1 in 10 children in the United States, making it the most common chronic disease of childhood. Children living in poverty are doubly disadvantaged: they are more likely to suffer from the disease and less likely to ever see an asthma specialist to help manage their condition.

The study continues a nearly two decades-long partnership between Medical Center researchers and the district, which have worked together to provide asthma care and evaluate outcomes for Rochester children. Past approaches have included both school-based preventive medicine delivery and telemedicine visits.

The new study expands on these techniques and specifically targets children ages 4-12 with moderate to severe asthma, who often require a specialist to optimally manage their condition in addition to the child’s primary care provider. Once enrolled, these youths will be linked to specialist asthma providers in the community for three appointments: an evaluation and two follow-ups. The appointments will be set up using telemedicine at school to link child and provider, which reduces the burden on the family.

“We know that children with more severe asthma often need additional care, but we also know that it can be really hard for families to take time off work, arrange transportation, and so forth in order to bring their child in to see an asthma specialist,” says Jill Halterman, professor of pediatrics and the study’s lead researcher.

After a child is assessed and a treatment plan is established, school nurses will administer the child’s daily preventive asthma medication, which Halterman’s past research has shown to be effective in helping children manage their symptoms. Meanwhile, the pediatric asthma specialist will coordinate with the child’s primary care provider to ensure proper continuing care.

“This program is designed to reduce disparities in care, and if it proves effective, it’s our hope that this can be used as a model for other programs nationally,” says Halterman.

• Peter Christensen, an assistant professor of art and art history, who has won a New York State Council on the Arts Award, to support a book about the historical lessons of Buffalo called Currents: Buffalo at the Crossroads.
• David Dodell-Feder, an assistant professor of psychology, who will receive the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation’s NARSAD Young Investigator award for his project “Improving Social Dysfunction in Schizophrenia with Neurofeedback Through Real-Time Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.”
• Nigel Maister, the Russell and Ruth Peck Artistic Director of the International Theatre Program, who has been awarded the MacDowell Colony Award Fellowship for residency at Peterbourough, New Hampshire, in the winter 2018.
• Chad Post, director of Open Letter Books and managing editor of Three Percent, who will receive the 2018 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.
• Cary Adams (formerly Cary Peppermint), an associate professor of art, environment, and emerging practices, and Leila Nadir, an assistant professor of environmental humanities and the director of the environmental humanities program. They have received two National Endowment for the Arts awards—one to support their 2018–19 work with the Sanctuary for Independent Media and the NATURE lab in Troy, New York, and the other to fund “Ecoventions Breckenridge,” a project with Breckenridge Creative Arts in Breckenridge, Colorado.
• Jennifer Kyker, an associate professor of music in the Department of Music and associate professor of ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, who is the recipient of a 2018 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her project “Sekuru’s Stories,”a digital public humanities project that explores the musical life of  Zimbabwean mbira dzavadzimu player Sekuru Tute Chigamba.
• Sean Regan, a senior scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, who is the recipient of a Leadership Award from Fusion Power Associates for his leadership in the inertial confinement fusion effort, his scientific contributions to the experimental program on the OMEGA laser facility, and his leadership to the national program as cochair of the National Implosion Stagnation Physics Working Group.

Ash Asudeh joins the Department of Linguistics as a professor, and also becomes the director of the Center for Language Sciences, an umbrella organization that brings together faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students as they research human language. Asudeh previously served as professor of semantics in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics at Oxford University and simultaneously as a professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University.

Asudeh’s research focuses on the relationship between meaning and structure as it relates to semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. With a background in the fields of cognitive science and theoretical linguistics, Asudeh works to break down complex language systems into smaller subsystems in order to study their properties and relationships. At Rochester, he will use that experience to support the interdisciplinary environment that exists among the Departments of Linguistics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Computer Science and the Goergen Institute for Data Science.

He has published two books and more than 50 other works in publications such as The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar, Natural Language and Lingusitics Theory, Semantics and Pragmatics, and the Journal of Language Modelling. He is working on a monograph (with Gianluca Giorgolo) entitled Enriched Meanings: Natural Language Semantics with Category Theory. Asudeh has received numerous honors, including the Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Innovation in Ontario, a Research Award from Carleton University, and the Recognition of Distinction from Oxford University.

He received his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 2004.

University and RIT faculty members working in augmented and virtual reality are encouraged to attend a day-long meeting October 1 to share interests and identify collaborations and partnerships.

The meeting, hosted by the University of Rochester’s AR/VR Initiative, will be held from 8:30 a.m. to  3 p.m. at the Larry and Cindy Bloch Alumni and Advancement Center. Click here for the agenda.

The morning will be devoted to short (5 minute with 3 minute Q&A) pilot project presentations. Break-out group discussions will be held during the afternoon.

A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided.  Register for the event here no later than Monday, September 24. Faculty members should also indicate if they are interested in making a short presentation.

There has been an increase in the number and scope of use of 3-D printers in research as well as office or shop locations.

Environmental Health and Safety has reviewed the use of bench-top FDM/FFF (filament) 3-D printers and has made recommendations for safe setup and use.

If any new type of 3-D printer or novel uses with potential hazards is being considered, contact Environmental Health and Safety at 275-3241 for an assessment prior to use.

Initial abstracts are due November 12 for the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s Scientific Advisory Committee’s (SAC) Incubator Program.

The program aims to foster the establishment of extramurally funded, nationally recognized interdisciplinary research collaborations in biomedical research with the potential to generate new strategic directions for the School of Medicine and Dentistry and the University.

The award has a maximum funding level of $125,000 per year for each of two years beginning July 1, 2019. See details and application instructions. Contact Anne Reed for more information.

Collaborative teams are invited to apply for support to write a Synergy Paper, funded by the Center for Leading Innovation & Collaboration (CLIC).

Cross-network translational research Synergy Papers are designed to focus on substantial challenges in clinical and translational research, intended to present new or transformed assessments and perspectives, build collaboration within and external to the CTSA Program consortium and meet the academic needs of co-authors to produce high-quality scientific publications.

CLIC, housed at the University, is the coordinating center for the Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program (CTSA Program), which supports a network of more than 50 of the nation’s top biomedical research institutions.

The selected team will receive one year of assistance from CLIC for developing and publishing a Synergy Paper. Questions can be directed to synergy_papers@clic-ctsa.org.

The deadline to submit an application is Monday, November 5. Click here for the RFA.

The Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) will host its first symposium of the academic year from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. today in Wegmans 1400.

Thomas Weber from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences will demonstrate the use of statistical mapping methods for estimating global oceanic methane emissions. Harry Stern from CIRC will discuss GPU computing on BlueHive including the Nvidia Tesla Volta V100 GPU.

Lunch will be served.

Today: Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) symposium. 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., Wegmans 1400. Thomas Weber, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, will demonstrate the use of statistical mapping methods for estimating global oceanic methane emissions. Harry Stern from CIRC will highlight GPU computing on BlueHive including the Nvidia Tesla Volta V100 GPU. Lunch will be served.

Today: Deadline for faculty affiliates of the Humanities Center to submit ideas for next year’s theme to Joan Shelley Rubin, the center’s Ani & Mark Gabrellian Director.

Sept. 24: Deadline to apply for Novel Biostatistical and Epidemiologic Methods awards to overcome specific analytic limitations and significantly enhance the validity and accuracy, scope, or speed of clinical or translational research. A maximum of $35,000 will be awarded for a one-year period. View the request for applications (RFA).

Sept. 27: Workshop on Developmental Programming of Disease, focusing on current understanding of mechanisms that underlie early life programming. 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Class of ’62 Auditorium. Offered by the Department of Environmental Medicine and the University’s Environmental Health Science Center. Free and open to all. Registration is requested for ordering refreshments. Read more here.

Sept. 27: 8th annual Dr. Bernard Guyer Lecture in Public Health: “A Vaccine Meets a Strategy: Eliminating Epidemic Meningitis From Sub-Saharan Africa.” Presented by Marc LaForce, who directed the Meningitis Vaccine Project from 2001 to 2012. Noon. Helen Wood Hall Auditorium.

Sept. 30: Deadline for Medical Center tenure track faculty and their chairpersons to apply for up to $75,000 in bridge funding during a hiatus in research support. All questions and applications should be directed to Anne Reed. For more information, click here.

Oct. 1: Letters of intent due by 5 p.m. to apply for the KL2 Career Development program of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, designed to support the early research career development of clinical and translational scientists via two years of funding. Click here to view the full RFA.

Oct. 1: AR/VR Initiative joint meeting of University and RIT faculty members to identify possible collaborations and partnerships. Faculty working in this area are encouraged to participate. 8:30 a.m.  to 3 p.m., Larry and Cindy Bloch Alumni and Advancement Center. Click here for the agenda. Register here no later than September 24.

Oct. 1: Panel discussion: Current developmental and regenerative neuroscience research at the University with expert panelists Amy Kiernan (Ophthalmology and Biomedical Genetics), Patricia White (Neuroscience), and Margot Mayer-Pröschel (Biomedical Genetics).  PONS Luncheon Roundtable Series. Noon to 1 p.m., Medical Center Specialty Room 2-7536. Refreshments will be provided.  For more information on PONS, visit http://blogs.rochester.edu/pons/

Oct. 8: Deadline to register for “Career Engagement, Revitalization, and Transition: A Curriculum for Mid-Late Career Academic Faculty,” a course designed to help associate professors and professors identify additional resources and skills as they advance and transition through the phases of their academic careers. The course will be held 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, October 29 and Tuesday, October 30, location TBD. For additional information, contact Faculty Development, Ronnie Guillet, or Janine Shapiro.

Oct. 11: Pediatric Research Celebration Day. Lecture by Paul A. Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases; an expert on vaccines, immunology, and virology; and co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine. Noon to 1 p.m., Class of ’62 Auditorium. Scientific poster session 11 a.m.  to noon and 1 to 2 p.m., Flaum Atrium.

Oct. 15: Deadline to submit letters of intent to apply for Center for AIDS Research funding to facilitate the design, conduct and completion of clinical trials aimed at preventing HPV-related cancers in HIV-infected individuals. Click here for more information.

Oct. 15: Pre-proposals due for University Technology Development Fund awards of up to $100,000 for development of a technology to a commercial endpoint. Open to all faculty, staff, and students.  Submit to omar.bakht@rochester.edu. More information can be found at Rochester.edu/tdf.

Oct. 15: Deadline to apply for AS&E PumpPrimer II awards for innovative and high-risk research projects. Click here for guidelines. Faculty in Arts & Sciences should refer questions to debra.haring@rochester.edu and those in engineering to cindy.gary@rochester.edu. PumpPrimer I and Research Mobility funds are also available and applications are accepted any time.

Oct. 26: Deadline to apply for the 2018 World Universities Network (WUN) Research Development Fund. If you are interested in leading a proposal effort, contact the University’s WUN coordinator, Ruth Levenkron.

Oct. 29: “The Future is Today: Transforming the Care of Childhood Onset Chronic Health Conditions.” UR Complex Care Center’s Second Annual Conference, co-sponsored by UR CTSI’s UNYTE Translational Research Network. 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Class of ’62 Auditorium. Click here to register.

Nov. 5: Deadline for collaborative biomedical research teams to apply to the Center for Leading Innovation & Collaboration for funding to write a Synergy Paper. Questions can be directed to synergy_papers@clic-ctsa.org. Click here for the RFA.

Nov. 12: Initial abstracts due for the School of Medicine and Dentistry’s Scientific Advisory Committee’s (SAC) Incubator Program. See details and application instructions. Contact Anne Reed for more information.