, a political scientist at the whose research focuses on how people form opinions and how that translates into political and social phenomena, has been elected a member of the .

Membership in the National Academy of Sciences is awarded to scholars in recognition of distinguished and continual achievements in original research. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the scientific community, and Druckman is among 120 members and 25 international members elected in 2026.

“I’m extremely honored and appreciative of all the opportunities I have had throughout my career,” says Druckman, the Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science. “It is special to receive the honor, too, while at URochester, which has long had a department at the forefront of advances in political science.”

Druckman, a renowned expert in political polarization and American democracy, has published seven books and more than 200 articles and book chapters in political science, communication, economics, sciences, and psychology journals.

He is involved in several prominent initiatives including sitting on the boards of , the , the , and the board of trustees for the . He is also a principal investigator for the .

The National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit institution, was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Along with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine, it provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Druckman joins a prestigious list of current selected to the academy in past years, including , the Tracy H. Harris Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus; , the Charles Frederick Houghton Professor of Chemistry; , the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics; and , the William G. Allyn Professor of Medical Optics.

The ’s (MHFC) has received a $1.7 million grant from to improve health outcomes for expecting parents and infants across the county.

The new funding from the Monroe County Department of Public Health will allow MHFC to launch the Building Healthy Communities (BHComm) initiative, an expansion of their nationally recognized Building Healthy Children program. All pregnant women, new parents, and infants within the system will have access to enhanced screening, outreach, and home-based services—making access to early support more universal, equitable, and responsive to family needs.

“Mt. Hope Family Center has been in partnership with the Monroe County Department of Human Services for decades, but this award from the county will expand our reach and evidence-based services to a whole new level at a time when it is needed most,” says , executive director of the Mt. Hope Family Center. “I am deeply grateful to County Executive Adam Bello for his leadership and support and to Congressman Joe Morelle and Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand for making this program expansion possible.”

She continues, “We are thrilled to share this award with our long-time colleagues in the at , whose enduring partnership now offers new avenues to prevent child abuse, improve maternal and infant outcomes, and meet the mental health needs of more families than we have ever reached before.”

The Social Work Division at Strong Memorial Hospital and is excited to expand its reach by bringing much needed support and resources to patients in our community through our partnership with Mt. Hope Family Center, says Mardy Sandler, director of the Social Work Division.

“BHComm offers broad outreach to an underserved, perinatal population at a time when patients are most inclined to seek help and support as they prepare to deliver and receive a new baby,” Sandler says. “This critical timing of service integrated with the healthcare team has potential to optimally impact maternal and newborn outcomes, secure essential resources for a safe and nurturing environment and respond effectively to perinatal behavioral health conditions.”

Ģ����ý the Building Healthy Communities program

The BHComm program is a free pregnancy support program for expecting parents in Monroe County. Through a partnership with the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, BHComm coordinates referrals with URMC’s and URMC’s to screen, evaluate, and provide various levels of service to pregnant women and new families within the URMC system and beyond.

BHComm is positioned to focus additional outreach and services in high-need zip codes to address persistent disparities in maternal and infant health and mortality across the community. Along with direct services, BHComm will launch community-wide awareness and prevention efforts designed for parents, healthcare providers, practitioners, and the general public. These campaigns will promote healthy parenting, early help-seeking, and stronger connections between families and local resources.

Elected officials praise BHComm

Elected officials applaud the initiative to improve maternal, infant, and community health outcomes.

Monroe County Executive Adam Bello: “Nothing is more fundamental to a community’s well-being than the health of our families. For years, the Mt. Hope Family Center has been a lifeline for thousands of parents, meeting new moms and dads where they are and delivering comprehensive, wraparound support both before and after pregnancy. This proven model has changed Monroe County families for the better, and we are proud to invest American Rescue Plan funding to expand its reach and impact across our community.”

Congressman Joe Morelle: “Every mother deserves access to quality care, and every child deserves a healthy start in life. I’m proud to have secured this federal funding to help ensure more mothers and babies in our community get the support they need to thrive. I’m grateful to all our partners in this effort, including URMC and the Mt. Home Family Center, and I look forward to our continued work together.”

US Senator Charles Schumer: “Mt. Hope Family Center and UR Medicine are doing the kind of smart, community-based work that helps mothers and babies get healthier starts and helps families get stronger support when they need it most. That is why I fought to deliver funding through the American Rescue Plan so Monroe County’s leading health institutions could expand programs that improve maternal and infant health outcomes and help close longstanding disparities in care. This $1.7 million investment will help Mt. Hope Family Center’s Building Healthy Communities program build on Ģ����ý’s vital clinical and community partnerships to expand outreach, strengthen care connections, and better support expecting parents, new mothers, and infants across Monroe County.”

US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: “Mt. Hope Family Center has long been recognized for their evidence-based interventions to support child development and families, and I’m pleased to have helped secure funding through the American Rescue Plan Act to allow MFHC to launch the Building Healthy Communities (BHComm) program. In partnership with Monroe County, BHComm will address maternal health disparities across Monroe County through a community-based program that meets new mothers and families during the critical time before infant delivery. I’m grateful for the work of Mt. Hope Family Center and Monroe County to lead transformative efforts to improve maternal health outcomes.”

When cultural anthropologist traveled to the port city of Veracruz to conduct research, she intended to study Black people in Mexico. Instead, her research became an exploration of a city with people who may not necessarily identify as Afro-Mexican, but who were nonetheless knowledgeable and, in some instances, deeply connected to Mexican Blackness.

Frierson’s book (University of California Press, 2025) is the culmination of two years of research. Prior to joining the Ģ����ý’s in 2024, she spent nearly a decade visiting and living in Veracruz, located on the coast of east-central Mexico.

The book examines how Veracruzanos—natives or residents of the city—reckon with the Afro-Caribbean roots of their history, traditions, and culture. The Afro-Mexican population, which has struggled for recognition, was in the Mexican census for the first time in 2020.

“Local color is an homage to the people who have been on the receiving end of a new-to-them narrative about Mexico’s Blackness and what they did with that narrative,” says Frierson.

Public spaces offer lessons on Afro-Mexican heritage

From 2014 to 2016, Frierson conducted research on African heritage and influence in Mexico—a legacy Mexican residents refer to as “the third root,” the first two being their Indigenous and Spanish origins.

While immersing herself in the region’s communities, she observed various local affinity groups that cohered around the places and practices associated with jarocho (pronounced ha-RO-cho) legacy and traditions. (During the colonial era, the Spanish word jarocho referred to people of mixed Indigenous and African ancestry; since the 20th century, it has been used throughout Mexico to mean people from Veracruz more broadly.) In the book, Frierson refers to the affinity groups she focused on as jarocho publics.

Frierson studied local musical traditions and attended talks, among other activities, to build rapport and gain understanding. Her participation in local life broke the ice and made locals comfortable opening up about their heritage.

“They knew I was there to study the third root,” she says. “I spent that time sitting with people, dancing with people, playing music, drinking coffee with people, and understanding their lives and how Blackness is incorporated into their lives.”

Frierson’s interest in learning more about the African legacy in Mexico was sparked while living in California after earning an undergraduate degree and working for an education nonprofit before graduate school. In 2009, after viewing the exhibition The African Presence in México: From Yanga to the Present at the Oakland Museum of California, she left with the impression that the Gulf State of Veracruz had a rich history. And yet she wondered about its Black present.

Expanding what it means to be Black in Mexico—and around the world

Before conducting fieldwork in Veracruz, Frierson found that many scholars who had traveled to the port city concluded that Black residents in Veracruz were in denial about their Afro-Mexican roots. Upon her own arrival in Veracruz, Frierson quickly understood why these previous researchers came to that conclusion.

Frierson recalls initial conversations with locals during which she inquired about the Black Mexican population in Veracruz and was told, “There are no Black people here anymore.” Or, Frierson says, it was not uncommon to encounter someone in Veracruz who says, “I am not Black,” even though in the United States, they would be characterized as such.

Yet once Frierson engaged in more sit-down talks and participated in community activities, the discussion shifted. In time, the Veracruzanos she interviewed would voluntarily acknowledge their connections to Afro-Mexican heritage, clarifying that “this thing I do is Caribbean.”

“I don’t think of that as denial,” Frierson says. “Just because they might not self-recognize as the political subject of being Black Mexican or Afro-Mexican doesn’t mean they are denying Blackness.” In fact, she argues, by misguidedly privileging self-recognition or self-identification as Black, “we are going to miss the broader impacts of the African diaspora not only in the Americans specifically, but also in the world more broadly.”

Frierson hopes academics and a general audience take many things away from Local Color. Perhaps most importantly, the book functions as a call for nuanced definitions about what constitutes Blackness in the world, beyond the narrowness of physical bodies and skin color.

“I want people to think more expansively about Blackness and its generative possibilities—world-making, place-making,” she says. “And if we think more expansively, we can get to a more productive understanding of why it matters.”

The has awarded the Ģ����ý a $1.3 million grant for research at the forefront of how light and matter interact. The project, titled “Quantum Electrodynamics for Selective Transformations,” aims to create new chemistry using quantum light. The ambitious project has the potential to unlock new opportunities for chemical and material synthesis.

“We are thrilled to receive support from the W. M. Keck Foundation that will allow us to pursue high-risk, high-reward research that we hope will open up new frontiers at the intersection of chemistry, photonics, and quantum science,” says , the Jay Last Professor in Arts, Sciences & Engineering in the and the .

Krauss leads a team of researchers that includes , the Dean and Laura Marvin Endowed Professor in Physical Chemistry and an associate professor of optics; Dan Weix at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (and former faculty member at Ģ����ý), and Rachel Bangle at North Carolina A&T State University.

“The work of Professor Krauss and his team is an example of Rochester’s long tradition of working across cutting-edge disciplines to advance science and improve our understanding of the physical world,” says University President Sarah Mangelsdorf. “We’re grateful for the support of the W. M. Keck Foundation in recognizing the enormous potential in this research.”

Using quantum light to create new chemistry

A grand challenge in the field of chemistry is controlling chemical bond formation at any stage in a reaction.

Chemistry is governed by an established set of rules that dictate how simple molecules react with each other to form new, more complex molecules. These rules are related to how electrons are distributed in the molecules and underpin the field of synthetic chemistry. The constraints imposed by these rules have a direct impact on society because they can limit access to potential new drugs or materials. In the past, chemists have used temperature, pressure, light, and other ways to control and perform chemistry.

For the newly funded project, Ģ����ý researchers and their colleagues at other institutions seek to discover if it is possible to use the quantum light of an optical cavity to bend or break these fundamental rules of reactivity by changing how electrons are distributed. To test the idea, researchers will couple light inside an optical cavity to the electronic states of molecules, forming a hybrid light-matter state called an electron-polariton.

While polariton chemistry has the potential to alter the fundamental rules of chemical reactivity, verifying this new concept experimentally has been challenging because of the varied expertise required. To overcome that hurdle, Krauss has assembled just such a diverse team, including synthetic organic chemists, materials scientists, spectroscopists, and theoreticians, who will work to help establish this new field of research.

Krauss notes, “It isn’t often that one has the chance to discover a new set of rules that govern the makeup of matter in the universe.”

Ģ����ý the Keck Foundation

The W. M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 in Los Angeles by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Company. One of the nation’s largest philanthropic organizations, the W. M. Keck Foundation supports outstanding science, engineering, and medical research. The foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a program within Southern California to support arts and culture, education, health, and community service projects.

There is a long-standing debate in the field of music cognition about the impact of musical training and whether formal training is needed to pick up higher-order tonal structures—the overarching harmonic framework of a piece of music.

New research from the Ģ����ý, published in , offers fresh insight into that discussion. The findings suggest that nonmusicians have a surprisingly sophisticated ear when it comes to music.

“Formal training in music—including music theory—fine-tunes the ear to pick up tonal patterns in music, like tonic, dominant, and cadences,” says , an assistant professor in the Departments of and and the senior author of the study. “But it turns out that with zero training, people are actually picking up on those structures just from listening to music over the lifespan.”

Music’s hidden structure

Like language, music is organized hierarchically into notes, phrases, and sections. But until now, relatively little was known about how expert performers and complete novices process these layers.

The study team—co-led by Riesa Cassano-Coleman, a PhD candidate in brain and cognitive sciences, and Sarah Izen, a former postdoc in brain and cognitive sciences—used a novel method to scramble music at different timescales to provide participants with different amounts of tonal context.

Context is crucial in daily life and decision-making. In music, it’s especially critical—in film soundtracks, for example, the build-up of context creates a strong sense of suspense, or romantic anticipation.

When asked to perform tasks that required them to use context, such as predicting upcoming notes or remembering previously heard notes, it appeared nonmusicians were using music theory knowledge, but fully unconsciously.

“Across a variety of tasks,” says Piazza, “nonmusicians performed similarly to musicians.”

Putting context to the test 

The study consisted of four experiments—memory, prediction, event segmentation, and categorization—in which participants responded to scrambled music from Tchaikovsky’s collection of piano pieces Album for the Young.

In the prediction experiment, for example, participants listened to context prompts scrambled at three timescales: 8B (eight bars, or measures, of intact context), 2B (scrambled every two bars), and 1B (scrambled every bar). After each sequence, they were asked to predict which measure should come next.

The results from this experiment suggest that musicians and nonmusicians integrate increasing amounts of context at similar rates to enhance prediction. Both groups became more accurate as the information about the tonal structures increased. And the amount of musical training did not predict better overall performance.

Where music meets language

The Ģ����ý study is analogous to a recent line of  that investigates the neural mechanisms of scrambled language, in which words, sentences, or paragraphs are reordered to test how much context the brain can process.

We know from cognitive science that context helps the brain forecast upcoming events, informing our next action. For instance, prediction helps us catch a ball, navigate around people in front of us on the sidewalk, or finish a friend’s sentence.

“In the neuroscience of language, there are different brain areas in charge of considering context that is either very short or very long,” says Piazza. “This is an exciting new field that has potential for revealing how context processing changes across the lifespan and how it might interact with aging and cognitive decline.”

The Ģ����ý study is one of the first to investigate this phenomenon in music. Together, the findings raise new questions about how the brain integrates and deploys context—not only during listening, but amid the complex motor and memory demands of performance.

“I think there is a lot of potential to look at, for example, how highly trained musicians are doing this while they play,” Piazza says. “A lot of musicians feel like they hold their memory of a piece in their fingers. What are the motor processes for having that whole context stored up as they play? This research could have broader implications about how the brain uses this sort of context.”

Lectures presented by Professor center on collaboration, not recitation.

“Instead of seeing myself as a messenger of knowledge, I consider teaching as an interactive process where students and I figure out things together,” says Clark, a professor of instruction in the ’s . “I want students to be engaged with the material. Ideally, they should be constantly asking questions. And I want them to think like scientists. That’s my major goal.”

Clark’s interactive approach to instruction, which includes in-class discussions, workshops, and frequent office hours, earned the biologist this year’s Goergen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Nominations for the Goergen Award come from students, faculty, staff members, and administrators.

“Despite the enormous size of his classes, the students report a deep, personal connection to him,” wrote the Department of Biology’s Awards Committee in its recommendation.  “He makes it very comfortable for them to ask questions, his passion rubs off on them, and he seems to have an endless supply of energy, time, and patience to devote to his students. Michael’s impact on UR undergraduates has been broad and deep.”

Inspiring curiosity in every student

Annie Ganem ’26 took high school biology over Zoom and was nervous about walking into Clark’s 8 a.m. biology class as a first-year student at URochester. Ganem sat in the last row of the packed auditorium that day, bracing for the worst.

But, Ganem recalls, “from the moment Professor Clark started his lecture, I was engaged. He made me excited to learn. His ability to explain complex, scientific concepts in a simple and digestible way is unmatched. You can feel Professor Clark’s love of biology through his lectures as well as office hours. It is also evident that he has a passion for teaching.”

Clark, who enjoys teaching large classes, has 300 students this semester in his Biology 110 courses. As is often the case, students’ experience with science varies from those who have taken several science courses to those who are taking their very first course.

“I try to make my lectures understandable to a very broad group and still challenge students who already know a lot of the material we’re covering,” says Clark. “I want them to leave my classes more excited about biology and science in general.”

Jervon Cole ’27 says many students have benefited from Clark’s enthusiasm for course content, engaging workshop problems, and plentiful office hours.

“Dr. Clark does an excellent job of explaining content in more than one way, often with visual aids, mnemonics, or physical representations like a rope with different colors of tape to represent protein foldings,” says Cole, who took Clark’s BIO 110 course in 2023. “Dr. Clark is the reason that I switched from a psychology major to a biology major, and I have not looked back since.”

From the lab to the lecture hall

For Clark, standing in front of hundreds of students in a lecture hall isn’t where he thought he would be when he secured his first postdoctoral research associate position in 1998 at the University of Chicago and his second in 2004 at URochester.

Back then, his goal was to run his own lab at a university. Yet by the time he felt comfortably qualified to do so, he realized running a lab was no longer what he wanted to do. With some hesitancy about leaving behind research, he decided to forge a new path.

Then, in what turned out to be fortuitous timing, an instructor position became available in the biology department in 2011. Clark was encouraged to apply and did so.

“In hindsight, that was the best decision I ever made,” says Clark. “I love teaching far more than I ever could have imagined.”

What Ģ����ý students say about Michael Clark

“Dr. Clark is very accessible and willing to offer his invaluable support. He has office hours available every day from Monday to Friday and we as students find them very helpful not only to get our questions answered, but also to connect and interact with the professor. To his students, he always says, ‘if my door is open, you are always welcome to knock and come in to chat, even if it’s not my office hours times.’”
—Christina Wang ’26

“During my four years as an undergraduate student at the URochester, I never met an instructor so dedicated, caring about his students, and passionate about biology. In fact, if I hadn’t met him, I would not have chosen to pursue biology at all. Due to his influence, I am now working in a surgery and immunology research lab at the Duke University School of Medicine.”
—Angela Park ’22

“Having Dr. Clark for one of the first classes I ever took at Ģ����ý set the scene for the academic rigor that I would expect for the next few years but also what it means to have an outstanding professor.”
—Alyssa Adela Cisneros ’26

, a lecturer in dance production and lighting design at the Ģ����ý, is being remembered for the excitement, organization, and creativity they brought to the world of dance.

Sirico died in an accident at , a national historic festival, training, and archival center for dance in Becket, Massachusetts, where they worked as a production manager.

“Whether the dance artists they worked with were well-known professionals in the field, faculty, or students, Kat was just as excited about the creative process, about the experimentation, and about making the dances come to life in multi-dimensional ways,” says , the director of Rochester’s . “Their lighting designs and production support were filled with that love and care, and they were equally as passionate about designing a dance production curriculum for our students that would prepare them for a career in dance.”

Sirico joined the University in December 2024 as a lecturer. Previously, Sirico was a production manager at the Fisher Center at Bard College and collaborated with dance companies including Winifred Haun & Dancers and Khecari Dance.

, an associate professor in the dance program, recalls Sirico’s passion for dance and commitment to students.

“Kat’s love of dance was palpable; they had so much they wanted to share with our students and faculty,” says Wilcox. “I saw from the very beginning how much they respected the students and cared about making their experiences meaningful and exciting.”

A memorial gathering for Sirico will be planned when students return to campus, according to Smith.

“I am grateful for the time we had getting to know Kat and for the trust they gave me as a colleague and friend,” says Smith. “I am heartbroken about what could have been and grateful for Kat’s thoughtful approach to developing systems for production planning that we will continue to utilize.”

The Ģ����ý will join the prestigious ranks of of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, elevating its work to uncover biological mechanisms of aging and finding answers to leading longer, healthier lives.

The National Institutes of Health awarded Rochester a five-year grant to establish the Upstate NY Comparative Biology of Aging Nathan Shock Center. Rochester will receive nearly $1 million annually beginning in 2025 to fund the center.

Nathan Shock Centers provide a collaborative environment for the pursuit of basic research in the biology of aging. The Upstate NY Comparative Biology of Aging Nathan Shock Center will be one of only eight such centers in the United States. The core team of the new center includes faculty members from the River Campus and the , with areas of expertise in veterinary biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics, mass spectrometry, and bioinformatics.

“There are only eight centers like this in the country, so receiving this grant really puts us on the map in a more prominent way,” says , the Doris Johns Cherry Professor in the and currently co-director of the , which will officially become the Upstate NY Comparative Biology of Aging Nathan Shock Center. Gorbunova will be the director of the center.

“Comparative biology is something we are known for, but now we are nationally recognized by the NIH,” she says. “This is a very important distinction because this positions us to continue advancing in this field and to attract students and new talent to Rochester.”

The Upstate NY Comparative Biology of Aging Center will provide researchers with access to cells, biological samples, and data from more than 50 species of mammals with lifespans ranging from 2 to more than 200 years.

The creation of large data sets will be a key area of focus. According to Gorbunova, researchers will investigate biological data from animals that are short- and long-lived, studying the factors that are related to longer life.

Another important aspect of the grant is the potential to work with investigators from across the country. Scientists nationwide can propose innovative research ideas in the field of comparative biology to the center.

“That will really foster a lot of cooperation,” says Gorbunova.

The Upstate NY Comparative Biology of Aging Nathan Shock Center could bring breakthroughs in the studies of aging and longevity, moving humanity closer to a major goal of aging research, Gorbunova says: “It is about making people healthier overall.”

And, she adds, “it really is about preventing all diseases.”