Members of the Ģ����ý community lend their voices to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., reflecting the power of his message more than fifty years after his death.

In her address, Sanders framed Martin Luther King Jr. as a “revolutionary radical,” particularly after the passage of the 1965 voting rights act, when he became more outspoken about controversial issues like his opposition to the Vietnam War. He also began to expand his social justice causes toward the poverty that affected not just black Americans, but Americans of all races, alienating some who preferred a singular fight for racial equality.

In addition to her work on CNN, Sanders is a regular contributor to the Crooked Media network of podcasts. She has been featured on NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, and BET and has been profiled in the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Essence magazine, and Elle. At 25, she was youngest press secretary for a presidential candidate in history and earned a spot on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of 16 young Americans shaping the election.

Here are just some of the stories we covered on video in 2016 at the URochester.

From the amazing properties of shape memory polymers to 90-million-year-old bird fossils leading to a new species of bird being named, we covered research stories from every corner of campus.

We also celebrated student achievements and traditions, from the amazing last second play by , to , Wilson Day and the 166th commencement.

We saw , Noam Chomsky present to a packed Interfaith Chapel, an , hundreds line up to place their “I voted sticker” on Susan B. Anthony’s grave on Election Day, and Renée Fleming take the stage with the Eastman Philharmonia, among many other amazing events that reached around campus, our community and throughout the world.

Our students joined with residents of a retirement community Faculty developed new cloaking technology and new ways to communicate with robots. We produced operas. We got down and dirty building and racing a Baja vehicle. We re-envisioned ultrasound technology. We explored the Great Lakes. We helped kids with vision impairment to better experience the world around them.

All of this, and much more, happened here at the URochester in 2016. Here’s to ever better things in the year ahead!

When NBA superstar Magic Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis to the world 25 years ago, the virus was considered an imminent death sentence. But progress in the treatment of HIV/AIDS has been remarkable by any measure. Johnson is not only alive today, but at 57, leading a full life that includes work as an activist for HIV research, prevention, and treatment.

According to LaRon Nelson, an assistant professor at the School of Nursing, Johnson helped “increase people’s awareness that there was treatment available, and that people that we look up to were people who were also diagnosed with HIV.”

Nelson, who earned both is undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the School of Nursing, is currently the Dean’s Endowed Fellow in Health Disparities and a noted expert on HIV/AIDS disparities in both treatment and prevention. In 2011, when he was an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, the Canadian government named him one of 19 Rising Stars in Global Health. Earlier this year, the Ontario HIV Treatment Network chose him as its inaugural research chair in HIV program science for African, Caribbean, and black communities.

Nelson says that in spite of Johnson’s highly publicized work, HIV still carries a stigma in many communities and cultures. That stigma is among the most stubborn barriers to accessing HIV treatment. “Because of stigma, many times people won’t walk through the [health clinic] door,” Nelson says.

In an effort to reduce the fears of stigmatization and offer more access to information and care, Nelson is studying the use of mobile apps that offer resources outside traditional clinical systems.

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It began a few years back, as a walk in the park—literally. When Eastman graduates Dan Ketter and Emlyn Johnson found themselves surrounded by the sounds and the beauty of nature, standing in the middle of Letchworth State Park, they started to imagine what it might be like to play music there.

To their surprise, they couldn’t find anything like it having been done before. With the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, it seemed like the perfect time to remedy that. So they started contacting national parks to gauge their interest in having a group of musicians come play concerts and make recordings on site. It was an unusual request, but it was met with enough support and enthusiasm that they decided to turn it into a tour that would take them across the country.

A project of Eastman School of Music students and alumni is bringing newly composed works to majestic locations during the National Park Service’s centennial year celebrations.

They contacted some of their other Eastman connections to work on composing all new music, and then other musicians to perform with them. From there, things just started to fall into place.

With these new compositions, inspired by nature and the parks themselves, they set out on a journey that took them from caverns to mountain tops, and all sorts of other places in between. With seven musicians, playing the work of eleven composers in ten different parks from the east coast to the west, it became a unique way to draw in new audiences, and to experience the beauty of the natural world around them, along with the music that it inspired.

You can learn more about their tour, and see photos and videos from the national park performances on the group’s Facebook page:

World Population day () is an annual event, observed on July 11 every year, which seeks to raise awareness of global population issues. The event was established by the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme in 1989. This year’s theme is “Investing in Teenage Girls.”

Catherine Cerulli, director of the Susan B. Anthony Center, the Laboratory of Interpersonal Violence and Victimization and associate professor of psychiatry at the URochester, offers her insights on the human rights issues that young women face today and what can be done to address these challenges.

Further reading on the topics discussed in this video can be found at the following links: