To the University of Rochester Community:
For those of you new to the campus, welcome! For those who are returning, welcome back! We are looking ahead to an exceptionally exciting year, building on the increasing momentum of the last few years. There is much to celebrate.
College Town is now largely open. In addition to a Barnes & Noble bookstore, it includes a Hilton Garden Inn with restaurant, Constantino’s grocery store, the Corner Bakery, Insomnia Cookies, the Beer Market, Canandaigua National Bank, TIAA-CREF, with more venues to open in the next few months.
The University will play a key role in a consortium that won a national competition to advance the ever more important field of photonics. The new American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics) will be headquartered in Rochester. University of Rochester faculty, researchers, and technology transfer programs were pivotal to the successful partnership that won the federal $110 million grant establishing the Institute. We are especially grateful to Governor Cuomo and the State of New York for providing matching funds of $250 million that will help to revitalize our city and our region.
Construction on Wegmans Hall and the new science and engineering quad began over the summer. The 58,000-square-foot, four-story building will be home to the Goergen Institute for Data Science and will be dedicated next fall.
We’ve begun work on the Frederick Douglass Building to improve dining facilities, enhance space for student organization, and house the Paul J. Burgett Intercultural Center. Work will be completed next summer.
A few days ago we broke ground for a new 90,000-square-foot, three-story imaging sciences building on East River Road. The new site will provide the region’s first outpatient interventional radiology clinic. The upper floor of building will serve as the site of the William and Mildred Levine Autism Clinic.
And we were delighted earlier this summer to open the Golisano Children’s Hospital. The eight-story, $145 million hospital is the largest capital project in the University’s history. For the first time, the hospital will feature only private rooms and specialized technology, including the first integrated PET/MRI in a children’s hospital in the nation.
In New York City, Simon Business School will be offering classes and events this fall at the Tribeca campus of New York Law School. This new location will allow students to take advantage of classrooms, library, meeting, and event spaces as well as provide them with direct access to Wall Street and the City’s civic center and tech corridor.
Our role as superintendent of East High School officially began on July 1. Warner School leaders will carry out an ambitious plan aimed at improving East High’s structure, management, and operations to provide education of the highest quality and to improve student performance.
Several noted faculty have recently joined the University, including alumnus and Grammy-winning tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, who will join the Eastman School of Music; John Foxe, a nationally regarded scientist in the field of neurobiology, who will become the research director of the Del Monte Neuromedicine Institute and the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the School of Medicine and Dentistry in October; and Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and a leading scholar of monetary and financial economics, who has been appointed as the inaugural Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics.
Elizabeth Stauderman has joined us as vice president for communications. Formerly Yale University’s chief communications officer, she is an experienced leader in external relations, institutional positioning, and issues management.
Gloria Culver, our new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, hit the ground running by announcing our new Humanities Center and our new Institute for Performing Arts. The Humanities Center will launch a lecture series and several other programs this fall, and the Institute for Performing Arts will extend the University’s traditional strength in the performing and visual arts through enhanced collaborations among the College, the Eastman School of Music, the Memorial Art Gallery, and other departments around campus.
An interdisciplinary Humanities Project in October will celebrate the Eastman School of Music’s Italian baroque organ, installed 10 years ago at the Memorial Art Gallery. We will celebrate the organ’s anniversary by featuring projects from the College’s Departments of History, Art and Art History, Religion and Classics, as well as the Eastman School and Memorial Art Gallery.
Joe Testani, who joined the University this summer as assistant dean and the new director of the Gwen M. Greene Career and Internship Center, is putting in place new programs for students that will improve their searches for internships and jobs.
The School of Nursing has just launched a new master’s program in nursing education to help address the shortage of nursing faculty nationwide.
The Laboratory for Laser Energetics has received a two-year, $3.8 million award from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to partner with Sandia National Laboratories on efforts to produce controlled fusion reactions.
The Eastman Institute for Oral Health is in the initial stages of planning for a yearlong celebration of its extraordinary commitment since 1917 to caring for the dental health of our region.
We are looking forward to Meliora Weekend from October 8 through 11. This year’s keynote guests include author Walter Isaacson, comedian Aasif Mandvi, and Tony and Emmy Award-winning performer Kristin Chenoweth. Our Presidential Symposium on October 10 will focus on “The Crisis in K-12 Education.”
This year will be a “race to the finish” to conclude our successful Meliora Challenge Campaign by June 30, 2016. In March we reached our initial $1.2 billion goal, 15 months ahead of schedule. We expect to exceed our goal by 10 to 20 percent by the scheduled conclusion of the Campaign.
We have much to celebrate and anticipate in the coming year. I offer each of you best wishes for a successful school year, and I hope you will enjoy being part of a University that is moving ahead to the next level.