Recent NASA missions to asteroids have gathered important data about the early evolution of our Solar System, planet formation, and how life may have originated on Earth. These missions also provide crucial information about how to deflect asteroids that could hit Earth.

Researchers from the University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, including Alice Quillen, a professor of physics and astronomy, and Esteban Wright, a graduate student in Quillen’s lab, conducted lab experiments before the quarantine lockdown in March to determine what happens when explorers and other objects touch down on complex, granular surfaces in low-gravity environments. Their research, published in the journal Icarus, provides important information in improving the accuracy of data collection on asteroids.

“Controlling the robotic explorer is paramount to mission success,” Wright says. “We want to avoid a situation where the lander is stuck in its own landing site or potentially bounces off the surface and goes in an unintended direction. It may also be desirable for the explorer to skip across the surface to travel long distances.”

The researchers used sand to represent an asteroid’s surface in the lab. They then used marbles to measure how objects impact the sandy surfaces at different angles, and filmed the marbles with high-speed video in order to track the marbles’ trajectories and spin during impact with the sand.

Collaborating with members of Rochester’s Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Computer Science, the researchers constructed a mathematical model that includes the Froude number, a dimensionless ratio that depends on gravity, speed, and size. By scaling the model with the Froude number, the researchers were able to apply the knowledge gained from their experiments with the marbles to low-gravity environments, such as those found on asteroid surfaces. Read more here.

With the start of classes just weeks away, the University is preparing to embark on a historic semester, President Sarah Mangelsdorf says, a situation made possible by the remarkable dedication of campus experts in health, safety, academics, and student life over the past several months. But in a message to the University community, she’s reminding everyone that the safety of campus and the success of reopening depend on each person’s commitment to following established guidelines to protect themselves and those around them.

“All of us at the University—students, faculty, and staff—need to verify our commitment to act in accordance with University public health guidelines and directives from our state and local officials,” she says. “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. 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.” Read the full message.

The Project Imagine committee has gathered nearly 1,000 ideas from the University of Rochester community for how the University might change the way it operates in order to remain competitive in a post COVID-19 world. The project’s charge is to propose 10 big, bold ideas for transforming the University. To help us arrive at those ideas, the committee has identified 11 broad themes that represent the most popular areas submitted by the community.

Now, the team would like additional input from the University community to further refine these themes into truly transformational ideas that can be acted upon.

“We’ve heard you loud and clear,” says Julia Maddox, the committee’s facilitator and director of the Barbara J. Burger iZone at the University of Rochester Libraries. “This is where the community’s interest is coalescing; this is where our North Stars lie.”

The 11 themes are:

• Embrace and advance the social justice mission of the University.
• Recognize that the histories and futures of the University and the City of Rochester are intertwined.
• Become a radically sustainable campus.
• Become the employer of choice in Rochester and beyond.
• Prepare students to be changemakers.
• Become a vibrant, year-round campus.
• Make the UR the healthiest campus in the world in mind, body and spirit.
• Create a student- and faculty-designed multipurpose riverfront.
• Any student, anywhere: making UR education opportunities accessible to life-long learners.
• Reduce and redirect University costs.
• Any patient, anywhere: novel ways to reach patients in their homes and communities.

The 1,000 ideas were primarily sourced from the public input form, interviews with University of Rochester community members and from pre-existing reports, petitions, and brainstorming efforts.

The University community is invited to provide further feedback on any or all of these themes by August 14 at https://www.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 process moving forward. Read more about the project here.

As the coronavirus pandemic began to disrupt life in the US, feelings of depression increased across the country—though much less so in Florida.

Younger adults aged 18 to 35, females, and consumers in coastal states were more likely to ask people to stop hoarding.

And college students, overwhelmingly, were not happy about having to learn remotely.

Such snapshots of public attitudes during the opening phases of the COVID-19 pandemic were “mined” from Twitter messages by the research group of Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science. After an initial study on the use and implications of controversial terms like “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus,” the group also:

• compared how college students responded differently from the general public to the pandemic
• monitored increasing feelings of depression as COVID-19 spread
• studied consumer hoarding behaviors resulting from the pandemic

Read more here.

Health care clinicians sometimes face a quandary during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some patients request medical exemptions to state and municipal mandates that require masks, even though facial coverings are considered crucial in preventing the spread of coronavirus.

How can health care providers navigate the balance between the safety of the general public and the medical needs of individual patients?

That’s one of the questions University health policy historian and physician Mical Raz and Doron Dorfman, an associate professor of law at Syracuse University, explore in an analysis designed to guide health care professionals in the “new frontier” of mask mandates. Read more here.

The National Research Mentoring Network has launched its inaugural asynchronous My Course:  Unconscious Bias.

The course is in 5 modules that can be taken all at once or individually. The modules introduce you to unconscious bias, walk you through microaggressions, provide a solutions toolkit, develop your self-awareness, and finally, display how unconscious bias affects everyone in regard to medicine and healthcare.

This course is available now for any individual NRMN members.  Additionally, the network is also working with organizations and institutions to enroll their groups in the course, whether it’s something they want to recommend or require for their participants.

Go to the Unconscious Bias Course:  https://my.nrmnet.net/program/p/UnconsciousBiasCourse

Here are important links for researchers:

• University’s COVID-19 website for important updates and guidance on working, teaching, and learning remotely
• University of Rochester Medical Center website for restrictions, resources, and news
• Office of Research and Project Administration (ORPA) site on Coronavirus 2019 resources related to sponsored programs
• University’s COVID-19 “Restart and Recovery” web page.
• The Rochester Restart weekly newsletter for a summary of updates.

River Campus Libraries find innovative approaches to social distancing: Have you ever wondered how many people are in the library before hiking over to find your favorite study spots are full? That kind of question takes on new importance in a time when maintaining physical distance is a matter of health and safety.

Thanks to a project at Rush Rhees Library, you will soon be able to check remotely to see how many people are using the library at any one time. Staff at Rush Rhees are experimenting with a system designed to monitor the presence and movement of people as a way to share information about the real-time population density in important spaces.

The project is just one of the ways that River Campus Libraries is exploring innovative ideas for a campus coming back to life during a time of physical distancing and online learning.

In late June, a reconfigured Barbara J. Burger iZone was one of the first campus spaces that reopened to students.

And the libraries’ Digital Scholarship Lab has organized a series of workshops and courses for faculty and other educators to hone the skills they need to lead successful virtual classrooms.

New medical residents welcomed: While the COVID pandemic has required the University of Rochester to make many changes, one certainty remains: the mission to learn and make the world ever better continues. With this in mind, the Medical Center’s Graduate Medical Education (GME) Office had to satisfy both the demands to protect the health and safety of residents while enabling them to have a both high-value education and welcoming experience.

In June and July, more than 300 new residents arrived at the Medical Center to begin the next phase of their medical training.

In past years, the Offices of GME, Employee Health, Human Resources, Employee Assistance, and Total Rewards greeted new residents warmly in Flaum Atrium with smiles, handshakes, and in-person assistance to help them acclimate to the URMC community. Many of those connections were made virtually this year to respect social distance guidelines.

This year’s orientation sessions also emphasized the new world of health care, including caring for COVID patients, personal protective equipment (PPE) training, and resident safety. Read more here.