The language of a poem creates a repeatable event, the experience the poem offers reborn with every reading. How it does so is what James Longenbach, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, calls “my preoccupation.”

In 2018, the poet and critic published How Poems Get Made (W. W. Norton), taking readers behind the scenes to explain how poets construct poetry. Poems, Longenbach says, are dramatic experiences of sound and time, the two intermixed as a poem gradually unspools. In the book, he carefully examines constituent elements of poems in the English language to show some of the ways poets make that happen.

Now Longenbach is back with a new book, The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020), a volume that casts a more historical eye on poetry. His focus is lyric poems, comparatively short poems that focus on a speaker’s emotions. The lyric poem “has strategies for staging its own immediacy, as if the poem were written in the time it takes to be read,” he writes.

He profiles the lives and work of 13 poets and musicians from the 20th and 21st centuries who wrote in pursuit of “newness.” Among them are Marianne Moore—whom he regards as arguably the finest poet of the 20th century—T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Jorie Graham, Virgil Thomson, and Patti Smith.

Read more here.

Two researchers in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences are being honored with a celebrated award for their contributions to and leadership in the scientific community.

Martina Poletti and Manuel Gomez-Ramirez, both assistant professors of brain and cognitive sciences and of neuroscience, are among this year’s recipients of Sloan Research Fellowships.

Awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955, the fellowships recognize young scientists for their independent research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become leaders in the scientific community. Each fellowship carries a $75,000, two-year award. This year, 128 scientists across the US and Canada were awarded fellowships. Gomez-Ramirez and Poletti are the University’s fourth and fifth Sloan fellows in the last three years.

Poletti, together with Michele Rucci, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, runs the Active Perception Lab. Her research focuses on how humans perceive the world by taking in visual information through a combination of sensory processing, motor behavior, and attention. In particular, she studies the foveola—a small region of the retina that is essential for high-resolution vision—and how the foveola works in tandem with microscopic eye movements and attention to enable vision.

Gomez-Ramirez leads the Haptic Perception Lab. His research focuses on the mechanisms that enable our hands to perceive, grab, and manipulate objects. The research is important in optimizing brain-computer interfaces and developing neuroprosthetics that integrate brain signals with prosthetic devices in order to control the devices.

Read more here.

The Medical Center is launching a new center to study the relationship between emotional well-being and dementia-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

The Network for Emotional Well-Being (NEW) and Brain Aging is a collaboration between researchers from the School of Nursing, the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, the Department of Psychiatry, the UR Aging Institute, and their colleagues at other universities across the country. It is one of five networks funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to examine the topic from different angles.

The NEW Brain Aging Center at URMC will focus on clarifying two separate mechanistic relationships:

• the impact of an aging brain on emotional well-being in older adults
• the influence of emotional well-being on brain function and cognitive aging

“People have been studying aspects of emotional well-being, such as how to be happy or finding a purpose in life, for hundreds of years. But in terms of understanding how emotional well-being is linked to aging and dementia pathologies, this is really new. Nobody has studied it in this way,” says Feng Vankee Lin, the Marie C. Wilson and Joseph C. Wilson Professor in Nursing and associate professor of nursing, neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and brain and cognitive sciences, who is the principal investigator on the grant.

“Fully 30 percent of the patients we see in our system, in inpatient and ambulatory settings, are older adults. They are the fastest growing segment of the population and the most frequent consumers of health care,” says Yeates Conwell, professor of psychiatry, who is a lead investigator on the grant. “The UR Aging Institute, now with the addition of NEW Brain Aging, will help meet the challenge of assuring not only that the health care needs of our older patients are met, but that the quality of life is optimized as well.”

Read more here.

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, The National Institutes of Health has extended the funding deadlines for numerous proposal submissions to assist recipients of NIH funding to continue their research.

Here are important links for researchers:

• The University’s COVID-19 Resource Center for important updates and guidance on working, teaching, and learning remotely
• University of Rochester Medical Center website for restrictions, resources, and news
• The University’s COVID-19 “Restart and Recovery” web page

PLEASE NOTE that the University’s COVID-19 Dashboard is updated daily and dashboard numbers may reflect additional cases confirmed later in the day. When a new case is known, the contact-tracing process begins immediately with the Monroe County Health Department, with confirmed exposures being contacted and required to quarantine. Remember:

• A temperature of 100 °F (37.8 °C) or higher
• Chills
• Muscle or body aches
• Severe fatigue
• Headache
• Congestion or runny nose
• Sore throat
• Loss of taste, smell, or appetite
• Cough, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing
• Nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea