The Warner School graduate built a career advocating for shoppers—then turned her attention to helping future educators thrive.

Mary Ellen Burris ’68W (EdM) likes to say that her graduate degree from the Ģ����ý’s is her secret ingredient. “What I learned at Warner I put to work at Wegmans,” she says.

Equipped with a master’s in educational psychology (now human development), Burris joined Wegmans in 1971. She quickly became the company’s “voice of the customer,” pioneering a consumer affairs department at a time when few retailers even considered such a role. As she puts it, “If there was one word that would capture what I did, it was to listen—and then to share that information where it would be heard.”

Her listening led to change. Burris launched consumer columns, spearheaded food safety programs, and introduced the Strive for Five campaign encouraging shoppers to eat more fruits and vegetables. Over nearly five decades, she became a trusted voice for thousands of customers and a key architect of Wegmans’ reputation for care and quality.

At the same time, she never lost sight of her roots as an educator. For more than 20 years, Burris has been a dedicated advisor and supporter of the Warner School, helping to shape programs, mentor leaders, and invest in the next generation of educators. She credits the school as the place where her values, and the importance of education, came into focus: “Warner helped me to bring all of that together,” she says.

In 2023, she deepened her commitment to the Warner School with an extraordinary gift: an endowed deanship, professorship, and scholarship—the largest in the school’s history. Yet Burris is quick to center the impact, not the milestone. She views it as a way to ensure that others, like her, can turn education into action.

More recently, Burris established a newly endowed professorship at Warner to provide vital, ongoing support for early-career faculty. Burris says the decision to give now was intentional. “I believe in giving while living,” she says. “Supporting Warner like this is my way of giving back to a place that gave so much to me.”

From her start as a Warner graduate to her legacy as a champion of both customers and students, Burris has built a career—and a life—on listening, learning, and giving back.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on September 3, 2025. It was updated on October 31 to reflect Burris’s recent gift to the Warner School as part of For Ever Better: The Campaign for the Ģ����ý.

Meliora Weekend 2024 hosted more than 10,000 registered attendees—including students and families, alumni, community members, faculty and staff, and distinguished guests—on the Ģ����ý’s campuses. The traditional fall event, which took place September 26–29 this year, combines homecoming, reunion, and parents and family weekend into a unique opportunity for members of the Yellowjacket family to celebrate, reunite, reminisce, socialize, and learn together.

Enjoy this look back at the festivities!

A YELLOWJACKET’S-EYE VIEW: Wilson Quadrangle, transformed into Meliora Village, is where much of the Meliora Weekend magic happened.

RIDING IN STYLE: Attendees enjoyed ferris wheel rides on the Wilson Quad.

MAKING MOVES: Performers and student groups, including Free Flow, performed on one of several stages set up in Meliora Village on the Wilson Quad.

STREET EATS AND BEATS: Revelers gathered outside of the Eastman School of Music for a block party—complete with food trucks and performances by Eastman School student musicians.

NORAH THE EXPLORER: Veteran newscaster and Emmy Award–winning journalist Norah O’Donnell, who is one of only three women in history to solo anchor a network evening news broadcast, delivered the weekend’s keynote address in the Palestra.

“Fear and self-doubt is your constant companion. And that may sound daunting, but the key is to turn that fear into fuel and that doubt into determination,” she told a rapt audience. “I wouldn’t be sitting in Walter Cronkite’s chair today,” O’Donnell recalled, if she had let others’ doubts about her determine her future.

DIALOGUE ON DEMOCRACY: A panel of experts on politics and international relations discussed democracy and elections worldwide during the University Symposium in Strong Auditorium. Among the speakers was City of Rochester Mayor Malik Evans ’02 (second from left), who noted that “Most of the folks in our country, not even just in the city of Rochester or Monroe County, they want solutions to their problems, but they’re turned off from the far right and far left. And that’s dangerous because then they won’t participate in the democratic process.”

THREE’S (GOOD) COMPANY: Valeria Lopez Aldaco ’14, Conor McNamara ’13, and Zamantha Lopez ’13 made the most of their reunion.

CHECK IT OUT NOW: Oversized lawn games could be found throughout Meliora Village.

INSIDE OUT: Shankar Vedantam, the host and executive editor of the Hidden Brain podcast and radio show, talked about the psychological keys to success during his presentation in Strong Auditorium. “Part of the reason for our endurance and resilience is that we’ve had a number of people looking out for us … helping other people transforms the way we think about ourselves. The act of helping other people makes us feel better about ourselves,” he said. “If you want to make your life better, spend more time looking outward instead of inward.”

BIG WEEKEND WIN: The Yellowjackets triumphed over the visiting University of New England by a during the homecoming game on Saturday afternoon. Rochester’s 4–0 start to the season is the first for the program since 2000. Go, Jackets!

PROUD PARENTS: Lily and Prince Nuamah cheered on the Yellowjackets during the big game, including their son Samuel Nuamah, #8.

GEARLY BELOVED: Meliora Weekend is the only time and place for undergraduates in the College to pick up their limited-edition Rochester Traditions™️ giveaway item. This year’s seniors (not to mention a skateboard) snagged—and showed off—their vintage “R” sweatshirts.

DO OR DONUT. THERE IS NO TRY: Ģ����ý–themed baked goods? We’ll take a dozen.

BRINGING THE LOLZ: Actor, comedian, and television host Joel McHale brought his signature brand of comedy to the guests at the Palestra on Saturday night.

WHEN WE SAY ‘EVER’, YOU SAY ‘BETTER’: It wouldn’t be a proper Meliora Weekend without performances by the Yellowjackets and other student a cappella groups.

I LIVE FOR THE APPLAUSE: You could say the a cappella jam in the Meliora Village was in tents.

LIGHT MY FIRE: Intermittent rain couldn’t dampen the spirits of the Strong Jugglers during the group’s 11th annual fire show.

DO IT FOR THE GRAM: Gretchen Friedhaber Badami ’99 and Ashirwaad Badami ’99 were among the many guests who posed for a selfie together on the Eastman Quad.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN: Alumni were taken on guided tours of the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO: And that’s a wrap on Meliora Weekend 2024. Can’t wait to see you next year, Yellowjackets!

They’re here—and we couldn’t be more thrilled. The newest members of the Ģ����ý student body—including more than 1,400 undergraduate students and nearly 1,600 graduate students—kicked off their academic journeys. In the week or so before classes officially begin, our campuses saw renewed activity as the incoming students moved in, got oriented, and experienced several Rochester traditions.

Welcome home, Yellowjackets!

We like to move in, move in…

 
Over the course of two days—and with the help of family members, friends, current students, administrators, staff, and faculty—members of the incoming class set up their new homes away from home in the campus residence halls.

Harrison Candelario, a jazz vocal performance major from Floral Park, New York, was one of the more than 140 new first-year undergraduates who moved into the Student Living Center at the Eastman School of Music.

Room with a stadium view

Genesee Hall on the River Campus boasts some of the best seats in the house for views of Fauver Stadium, where several of the Division III varsity teams practice and compete. Many of the returning student-athletes moved back to campus earlier in the month.

All hands on deck

The giant boulder in front of Susan B. Anthony Halls is painted anew each year to greet our rock star students when they arrive on the River Campus at Rochester.

A presidential welcome

The Convocation ceremony marks the start of the academic year for our incoming and transfer students. “I am confident you will find many moments of joy in your time at the URochester,” President Sarah Mangelsdorf told the audience of new students who were joined by family, friends, and supporters.

On a (class) roll

After Convocation, more than 1,200 undergraduate students from the College signed the class roll, a Rochester tradition since 1996. The document is preserved in Rush Rhees Library and displayed at Commencement and class reunions.

A fitting start

The first-year students at the URochester School of Medicine and Dentistry marked their entry into the medical profession with the symbolic act of donning a new white coat during the 19th annual Robert L. & Lillian H. Brent White Coat Ceremony.

• Read more about the .

It’s (candle)lit

The annual Candlelight Ceremony convenes the incoming class on the Eastman Quadrangle in the evening to learn about the Ģ����ý’s history and traditions.

Eastman Quad City DJs

That is indeed Vice President for Student Life John Blackshear—joined by Courtney Thomas ’18—on the turntables during the Candlelight Ceremony afterparty. “I love DJing parties and events on campus,” Blackshear told us earlier this year in a Q&A for the alumni magazine.

• Get to know Blackshear.

Community connections

For more than 30 years, the annual Wilson Day of Engagement has provided our newest students with the chance to get to know the Rochester community through service. Incoming students joined local artist Shawn Dunwoody of Hinge Neighbors in preparing sites for artists to add murals to Bohrer Alley, and worked at the urban farm along St. Paul Boulevard with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Monroe County.

Framing frenzy

As part of MBA orientation, the Simon Business School’s Class of 2026 grabbed hammers and nails and then teamed up with Habitat for Humanity volunteers to construct the frames for homes that will be built in the Rochester community.

All the world’s on stage

First-year students from the College and the Eastman School of Music came together in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre to celebrate the Ģ����ý’s global community in an evening of music, dance, and poetry. Among the student groups that took the stage was Rangoli, a Bollywood fusion performance group.

R is for Rochester ready

The Class of 2028 and incoming transfer students for the School of Arts & Sciences and the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences posed for a photo on the Wilson Quadrangle—another time-honored tradition marking the start of the new academic year.

Since the laser was invented in the 1960s, scientists have been working to increase lasers’ peak power and to design machines producing coherent light at progressively shorter wavelengths that can improve image resolution and enable probing of quantum nuclear states.

Progress has been made with regard to peak power, most notably with the invention of chirped pulse amplification by Ģ����ý researchers in the 1980s, a breakthrough that garnered the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018. However, developing lasers that produce very-high-energy light, such as gamma rays, has remained elusive. That’s in part because “coherent” light waves are in sync with each other, creating a stronger effect in combination. This effect is harder to achieve at higher-photon energies. And while lasers can now produce coherent light in the visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, doing so beyond the x-ray range—which is where gamma rays exist—remains a challenge.

To overcome this obstacle, Rochester researchers secured in collaboration with colleagues from in the Czech Republic to investigate the coherence properties of the radiation emitted when dense bunches of electrons collide with a strong laser field. In doing so, the researchers aim to understand how to produce coherent gamma rays and use these new radiation sources for research and applications to create antimatter, study nuclear processes, and image dense objects or materials, such as scanning shipping containers.

“The ability to make coherent gamma rays would be a scientific revolution in creating new kinds of light sources, similar to how the discovery and development of visible light and x-ray sources changed our fundamental understanding of the atomic world,” says , a professor of at the URochester and a distinguished scientist at the University’s , who is the lead investigator on the NSF grant.

US–Europe connections facilitate laser science advancements

The project combines the theoretical expertise of Rochester scientists with the theoretical and experimental capabilities of ELI Beamlines in the Czech Republic, strengthening ties between the US and Europe in the field of high-intensity lasers.

The scientists will use complex theories and high-tech experiments to study how fast-moving electrons interact with the laser to emit high-energy light. They’ll start by looking at simpler cases, such as how one or two electrons emit light, before moving on to more complicated scenarios with many electrons, to produce coherent gamma rays. Such a result builds on the work of scientists who have created coherent x-rays, including the teams at , , and .

“We are not the first scientists who have tried creating gamma rays in this way,” says Di Piazza. “But we are doing so using a fully quantum theory—quantum electrodynamics—which is an advanced approach to addressing this problem.”

If successful, this project could lead to the creation of a gamma-ray free electron laser, a major goal in the scientific community, according to Di Piazza. “Of course,” he says, “step one is to show that the science is possible before building such a device.”

This work will also contribute to advancing the science case for a potential future NSF OPAL high-power laser user facility at the URochester, another NSF-funded project on which Di Piazza is a co-principal investigator, and which has the potential to be a unique open-access resource for the global scientific community. NSF OPAL is part of , an international network of networks studying extreme light in intensity, time, and space formed to address the grand challenge questions defined at the frontiers of laser-matter coherent interactions at the shortest distances, highest intensities, and fastest times.

Black holes and neutron stars are among the densest known objects in the universe. Within and around these extreme astrophysical environments exist plasmas, the fourth fundamental state of matter alongside solids, liquids, and gases. Specifically, the plasmas at these extreme conditions are known as relativistic electron-positron pair plasmas because they comprise a collection of electrons and positrons—all flying around at nearly the speed of light.

While such plasmas are ubiquitous in deep space conditions, producing them in a laboratory setting has proved challenging.

Now, for the first time, an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Ģ����ý’s (LLE), has experimentally generated high-density relativistic electron-positron pair-plasma beams by producing two to three orders of magnitude more pairs than previously reported. The appear in Nature Communications.

The breakthrough opens the doors to follow-up experiments that could yield fundamental discoveries about how the universe works.

“The laboratory generation of plasma ‘fireballs’ composed of matter, antimatter, and photons is a research goal at the forefront of high-energy-density science,” says lead author Charles Arrowsmith, a physicist from the University of Oxford who is joining LLE in the fall. “But the experimental difficulty of producing electron-positron pairs in sufficiently high numbers has, to this point, limited our understanding to purely theoretical studies.”

Rochester researchers , the division director for plasma and ultrafast laser science and engineering at LLE, and , a staff scientist at LLE, collaborated with Arrowsmith and other scientists to design a novel experiment harnessing the at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

That experiment generated extremely high yields of quasi-neutral electron-positron pair beams using more than 100 billion protons from the SPS accelerator. Each proton carries a kinetic energy that is 440 times larger than its resting energy. Because of such large momentum, when the proton smashes an atom, it has sufficient energy to release its internal constituents—quarks and gluons—which then immediately recombine to produce a shower that ultimately decays into electrons and positrons.

In other words, the beam they generated in the lab had enough particles to start behaving like a true astrophysical plasma.

“This opens up an entirely new frontier in laboratory astrophysics by making it possible to experimentally probe the microphysics of gamma-ray bursts or blazar jets,” Arrowsmith says.

The team has also developed techniques to modify the emittance of pair beams, making it possible to perform controlled studies of plasma interactions in scaled analogues of astrophysical systems.

“Satellite and ground telescopes are not able to see the smallest details of those distant objects and so far we could only rely on numerical simulations. Our laboratory work will enable us to test those predictions obtained from very sophisticated calculations and validate how cosmic fireballs are affected by the tenuous interstellar plasma,” says coauthor Gianluca Gregori, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford.

Moreover, he adds, “The achievement highlights the importance of exchange and collaboration between experimental facilities around the world, especially as they break new ground in accessing increasingly extreme physical regimes.”

In addition to LLE, University of Oxford, and , collaborating institutions on this research include the Science and Technology Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (STFC RAL), the University of Strathclyde, the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the UK, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, the University of Iceland, and the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal.

The �ٱ𲹳�’s findings come amid ongoing efforts to advance plasma science by colliding ultrahigh-intensity lasers, an avenue of research that will be explored using the .

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation program under Grant Agreement No 101057511 (EURO-LABS).