Thanks to a $12 million challenge fund from University of Rochester life trustee James C. Wyant ’67 (MS), ’69 (PhD) and his wife, Tammy, the Institute of Optics will have an opportunity to increase its faculty by 50 percent as it prepares for its 100th anniversary celebration in 2029.

The challenge will create 10 endowed professorships—five distinguished professorships for renowned faculty and five professorships for early-career faculty. The first distinguished professorship will recognize Nobel Prize recipient Donna Strickland, one of the most notable alumni of the institute, with Optica (formerly OSA), a leading society in optics and photonics, providing matching funds.

“Jim’s and Tammy’s generosity is truly transformational,” says Sarah Mangelsdorf, president and G. Robert Witmer, Jr. University Professor. “Their vision and partnership will help us recruit leading scholars in optics and photonics in an increasingly competitive environment, help us strengthen our position as a top-tier private research university, and fuel the incredible research being done by our faculty scholars. The fact that Optica has already come on board is a testament to the important work being done here.”

The 10-year challenge fund—the largest gift in the institute’s history—will allow the institute to increase the number of its full-time faculty members from 20 to 30.

There will be a focus on hiring new faculty with expertise in laser science, integrated photonics, and quantum optics, says Thomas Brown, director of the institute. While the new faculty will have primary appointments in optics, many will also have secondary appointments in other science and engineering units across the University, including the Medical Center and the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, benefiting those programs and helping the University build upon its signature strengths in those areas.

The increase will help meet an increasing demand, both in the Rochester area and nationwide, for trained optics graduates.  Learn more.

A study of school children by Medical Center researchers finds that most children with asthma also reported having allergic rhinitis, or hay fever. Symptoms of hay fever include runny nose, sneezing, congestion, and sinus pressure, and can contribute to asthma. The study, led by Jessica Stern, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Division of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology, found that children with both asthma and hay fever had worse asthma outcomes.

Data from three NIH-funded trials led by Jill Halterman, professor in the Department of Pediatrics, showed that a subgroup of Rochester school children with asthma did not improve when they received their medications.

“Through our study, we found that many of the children who did not report improved symptoms had allergic rhinitis in addition to asthma, and these children had more asthma symptoms, used their rescue medication more, and missed more school days compared to those without allergic rhinitis,” says Stern.

Importantly, less than half of the children with hay fever were receiving proper treatment for their symptoms, including nasal sprays and recommended anti-histamines; nor had they been seen by asthma or allergy specialists.

“This is critical because it highlights gaps in care and needed treatments, which may contribute to the disparities in asthma outcomes that we see in children who primarily identify as Black or Latino, or are from low resourced communities,” says Stern. Learn more.

Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience have found that children who experience even a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) have more emotional and behavioral problems than those who do not.

“These hits to the head are hard to study because much of it depends on recall of an injury since the impacts do not all require a visit to a doctor,” says Daniel Lopez, a Ph.D. candidate in the Epidemiology Program and first author of the study in NeuroImage. “But being able to analyze longitudinal data from a large cohort and ask important questions like this gives us valuable information into how a TBI, even a mild one, impacts a developing brain.”​

Researchers used MRI and behavioral data collected from thousands of children who participated in the Adolescence Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. They revealed children with a mild TBI experienced a 15-percent increased risk of an emotional or behavioral problem. The risk was the highest in children around 10 years old. Researchers found that even children who had a significant hit to the head but did not meet diagnostic criteria for a mild TBI also had an increased risk of these behavioral and emotional problems.  Learn more.

This illustration by Benjamin Storer shows oceanic currents from satellite data overlaid with large scale circulation currents (gold lines) which can be extracted with a coarse graining technique developed in the lab of Hussein Aluie. Note the most energetic of these currents— the Antarctic Circumpolar Current—at lower left.

For the first time University researchers have quantified the energy of ocean currents larger than 1,000 kilometers. In the process, they and their collaborators have discovered that the most energetic is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, some 9,000 kilometers in diameter.

The team, led by Hussein Aluie, associate professor of mechanical engineering, used the same coarse-graining technique developed by his lab to previously document energy transfer at the other end of the scale, during the “eddy-killing” that occurs when wind interacts with temporary, circular currents of water less than 260 kilometers in size.

The new results, reported in Nature Communications, show how the coarse-graining technique can provide a new window for understanding oceanic circulation in all its multiscale complexity, says lead author Benjamin Storer, a research associate in Aluie’s Turbulence and Complex Flow Group. This gives researchers an opportunity to better understand how ocean currents function as a key moderator of the Earth’s climate system. Learn more.

Huiying Wang, health services research and policy, 1 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022 via zoom.
“Trend in Opioid Administration and Fall Related Injuries Among Veterans with Dementia Residing in Department of Veterans Affairs’ Nursing Homes.”
Advisor: Orna Intrator.

Current topics in Bioinformatics Research is an interactive course that has open sessions for faculty, postdocs and students who are interested in deepening their understanding of bioinformatics methods.

The open sessions will provide opportunities to interact with researchers working on data-intensive projects.

The first session, The Bioinformatics of RNA Structure: How Modeling Observations Now Informs Vaccine Design, will be presented by Dave Mathews, the Lynne E. Maquat Distinguished Professor in biochemistry and biophysics, from 4-5 p.m., Monday, September 26 in 1-7619 Adolph (Lower) Auditorium at the Medical Center.

Are you looking for a new career in clinical research? Learn how a mentor can help your clinical research career at a webinar from 10-11 a.m. October 5 hosted by the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Three mentor-mentee teams from the Wilmot Cancer Institute will share their experiences on mentorship, and how mentoring helps new clinical trialists. Please register and submit questions during the registration process.