James Longenbach had been reading, writing, and teaching poetry for nearly 40 years when, in January 2016, he received an unexpected diagnosis of incurable kidney cancer.

“It seems like the simplest truth in the world, this understanding that our lives are finite,” he says. “I thought I had grappled with that—but turns out I had not.”

For Longenbach, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English, poetry generally—and lyric poetry specifically—proved the necessary medium for contemplating mortality in the years after his diagnosis. The result is Forever (W. W. Norton), Longenbach’s sixth book of poetry, which was published in June. The collection is divided into three parts, with each part featuring five lyric poems, comparatively short poems usually written in the first person that focus on the speaker’s emotions.

“The knowledge we derive from our repeated experience of a poem is ultimately the knowledge of our own mortality—the sense not only that we will be but also that we will have been,” Longenbach writes in his latest book of literary criticism, The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020). According to the poet and professor, composing the individual poems and then compiling Forever helped him to better appreciate “how the ending of some things makes possible the beginning and the middle of others.”

Experiencing the poems in the book, he hopes, will allow his readers to do the same. Learn more.

• Competition between parties linked to social well-being

Today, the two major political parties are often blamed for a plethora of problems in American governance. But for most of the last century and a half, political party competition has had positive effects on the welfare of Americans.

That’s according to new research by Gerald Gamm, a professor of political science and history, and Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego.

The pair conducted a historical analysis spanning all 50 states for the period 1880–2010. In the study—“Life, Literacy, and the Pursuit of Prosperity: Party Competition and Policy Outcomes in 50 States,” published in the American Political Science Review—they present two related findings:

• A direct link between party competition and increased spending on human capital and infrastructure
• A direct link between this spending and measurable improvements in public welfare

“Competition between parties is not just healthy for a political system but for the life prospects of the population,” says Gamm, whose research focuses on Congress, state legislatures, urban politics, and modern party politics. Learn more.

• Why do poor voters favor candidates on the right?

Political parties and candidates who focus on the poor tend to be found on the left of the political spectrum. Yet, right-wing parties frequently win elections in developing countries despite the fact that a vast majority of the electorate lives in poverty.

Rochester political scientists explain the apparent contradiction in a recent paper published in the American Journal of Political Science.

Anderson Frey, an assistant professor of political science, and Zuheir Desai, who earned his PhD from Rochester in 2020 and is now an assistant professor of political science at Madrid-based IE University’s School of Global and Public Affairs, find that right-wing parties rely successfully on so-called “descriptive representation” to win elections.

Descriptive representation—in which candidates present themselves as sharing certain qualities with large segments of their electorates—is based on the idea that a group is more likely to elect a candidate whose characteristics mirror some of the more typical experiences and outward markers of the group.

In the case of municipal elections in Brazil the candidates need to appear less wealthy, less educated, less privileged to convince a majority of prospective working- or lower-class voters.

Frey and Desai caution that they can’t speak to whether the same evidence-based causal relationship exists for the 2016 US general election. Frey, however, observes that despite Donald Trump’s elite background, he was able to connect with working-class voters by emphasizing his position as a “Washington outsider” and by “speaking their language,” adding that President Biden also appeals to his working-class roots in an attempt to win over those same voters. Learn more.

Photo by J. Adam Fenster/University of Rochester

By merging two or more sources of light, interferometers create interference patterns that can provide remarkably detailed information about everything they illuminate, from a tiny flaw on a mirror, to the dispersion of pollutants in the atmosphere, to gravitational patterns in far reaches of the Universe.

“If you want to measure something with very high precision, you almost always use an optical interferometer, because light makes for a very precise ruler,” says Jaime Cardenas, assistant professor of optics.

Now, the Cardenas Lab has created a way to make these optical workhorses even more useful and sensitive. Meiting Song, a PhD student, has for the first time packaged an experimental way of amplifying interferometric signals—without a corresponding increase in extraneous, unwanted input, or “noise”—on a 2 mm by 2 mm integrated photonic chip. The breakthrough is described in Nature Communications.

Next steps will include adapting the device for coherent communications and quantum applications using squeezed or entangled photons to enable devices such as quantum gyroscopes. Learn more.

Juliette McGregor, assistant professor of ophthalmology, leads one of three new projects funded by the National Eye Institute’s Audacious Goals Initiative (AGI).

The NEI awarded $3.7 million per year for five years for each of the projects, “to develop models that can gauge the survival and integration of regenerated cells, including light-sensing photoreceptors and retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which carry visual signals from the retina to the brain,” according to a press release from NEI.

McGregor will work with a team locally using imaging technology developed at Rochester to ablate photoreceptors and evaluate restored retinal activity in vivo.

Her team will collaborate with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin and University of California Berkeley to transplant replacement photoreceptors into damaged retina as microaggregates and in scaffolds designed to promote integration, as well as examine the impact of photoreceptor loss and restoration of photoreceptor signaling on existing retinal circuitry. Learn more.

Sultan Abdul Wadood, a PhD student in optics, who is one the winners of the Emil Wolf Outstanding Paper Competition for his presentation “Propagation of Partially Coherent Beams in Longitudinally Modulated Graded-index Fibers” at last month’s 2021 Frontiers in Optics+Laser Science (FiO LS) conference. The competition was established in 2008 to honor Emil Wolf, one of the most recognized optical scientists of his generation and The Wilson Professor of Optical Physics at Rochester. Wadood’s research may have applications in fiber-based imaging systems.

Funding novel, high-risk research is critical to advance science. Since 2015, the pilot program at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience has awarded more than $3.5 million in funding to research that opens new doors of understanding of the brain and central nervous system.

The 2021 pilot program made history at the institute awarding the most funding ever–nearly $900,000–to 20 researchers from eight different departments across the University of Rochester and the Medical Center. This program is maintained by philanthropic support, and it has generated more than $37 million in external research support to date.

Learn more and see a list of recipients and their projects here.

The Educational IT Committee, a part of University of Rochester IT Governance, is offering Innovation Grants to support faculty and staff in adopting new technologies to their teaching.

This program will also include mentorship, support, and connection to existing resources in the institution. Project funding ranges from $5,000-$7,000 per project.

Proposals for the first round of awards are due Friday, December 17. Learn more.

University departments can now sponsor the training of their research coordinators through a training program managed by the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI).

Once hired, the trainee will complete a three-month intensive training program after which they will be ready to work in their sponsor departments.

Departments must commit to sponsoring the trainee for at least one year and trainees must be supervised by a human subject coordinator II or a senior human subject coordinator within the department after the training period.

More details regarding the cost to sponsor a trainee, the training curriculum and how the program works can be obtained by emailing ResearchHelp@urmc.rochester.edu.The deadline for committing to sponsorship is January 1, 2022.