As a dual degree student majoring in mathematics and violin performance, ’08, ’08E was used to challenging coursework. But no class at Ģ����ý impacted or challenged him more than his weekly violin lessons with the late , an internationally acclaimed soloist and violin professor at Eastman.

“Each week, you’re one-on-one with this luminary violinist, and your self-esteem rides on her mood that day,” says Stewart, a seven-time violinist and composer and a professor at the Juilliard School in New York. “My hands would be trembling before every session.”

Stewart says Blakeslee, who died in 2015, wasn’t shy about expressing her feelings. “If she didn’t like it, she told you. But if she loved it, she’d get very excited. She thrived on improvisation. One time, I suggested I couldn’t be that creative. She looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Don’t ever say that about yourself. You can do whatever you want.’”

Soon after, Stewart performed a version of an Astor Piazzolla tango instead of the usual classical piece. “Blakeslee loved it,” he says. “It was the most excited I ever saw her get.” Stewart says the weekly sessions made him a better musician and teacher. “The searing feedback made me practice harder, but it also sometimes made me play worse, because I was so afraid. In my own teaching, I try to be as honest as I can while making sure the student doesn’t want to run away. It’s a balancing act.”

Stewart has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center and serves as artistic director of the . He was also the featured speaker—and a performer—at in May. “Talk about surreal,” he says. “I was playing at convocation, and all of my old teachers were sitting behind me.”

His message to graduates mirrored Blakeslee’s advice years before: Never sell yourself short. “I applied to so many things in college,” he says, “and didn’t get a lot of them. But that didn’t define me. I feel like my career is meaningful. No matter what you feel [now], your future is in front of you. You came from a great school, and you can build a meaningful career as well.”

This story appears in the fall 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

Jackie Hsiao ’27 took a stab at fencing during a summer camp before she entered eighth grade. She hated it. “It was hot and sweaty, and I didn’t know what I was doing,” the Milford, Connecticut, native says. “All the kids were beating me.”

Reluctantly, she stuck with the sport when school started that fall. Her older brother, Timothy, was on the school team, so Jackie joined to make car pickup easier for her parents. “The environment was so much better than at camp,” she recalls. “The team became my family, and I fell in love with the sport.”

Fencing is a combat sport featuring sword fighting, where competitors try to score points by landing their sword on the opponent’s “target area.” It requires patience, balance, mental toughness, and physical stamina.

Hsiao (pronounced like the first syllable of “shower”) says her skills improved greatly thanks to the coaches at Hopkins School, a college preparatory school in New Haven, Connecticut, and a personal coach. She improved so much that this past February, she was invited to compete at the in Charlotte, North Carolina. While she didn’t approach the winner’s circle, it was a major accomplishment for someone whose sporting career was nearly derailed toward the end of her senior year of high school.

Hsiao was leading her opponent by one point in the waning seconds of a state championship match, and the opponent was desperate. “Her coach told her to charge at me, and I tried to back up defensively,” she says. “I planted my right knee at the wrong angle and tore my ACL (anterior cruciate ligament).”

Hsiao won the match but lost nearly a year of competitive fencing. By the time she was cleared to compete, she was a first-year student at URochester, where she majors in anthropology and takes vocal lessons at Eastman. She joined the , attended practices, and eventually competed for the team. Last spring, Hsiao was elected club president and led a full men’s and women’s team to the in State College, Pennsylvania—a first for the organization.

Hsiao is a student of the game. Her mother records all of her matches so that she can watch them and learn from her mistakes. She’s interested in a career in medical law and believes fencing offers life lessons that have prepared her for the arduous journey ahead. “In fencing, you’ve got to be ready for anything, because every opponent has a different style and mentality.”

While at the Junior Olympics, she met two fencing idols: three-time Olympic women’s foil gold medalist and college All-American of Princeton University. This summer, Hsiao competed at the in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Again, she didn’t chase gold, but the experience whetted her appetite for the future.

“Persistence is the key, and losing is one of the best ways to learn,” she says. “My goal is to earn a rating from the . To do that, I’ll need to achieve victories in their competitions. I’ve set my mind to it.” Allez!

This story appears in the fall 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

Professor of Guitar ’s 10th album—recorded entirely at the —features a rich collection of mostly solo works by 20th- and 21st-century composers from around the globe, including , a professor emeritus of jazz studies and contemporary media at Eastman. (PARMA Recordings)

Assistant Professor of Black Studies examines how Veracruzanos both internalize and externalize the centrality of Blackness in a place where it is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. (University of California Press)

, an assistant professor of instruction in Chinese who teaches Chinese literature, presents a full English translation of one of China’s first works of science fiction, written by late Qing author Wu Jianren. (Columbia University Press)

Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional, and aesthetic parameters of plastic surgery. (Ģ����ý Press/Boydell & Brewer)

Compiled and edited by Eastman School historian and Professor Emeritus of Piano ’60E, ’62E (MA) from manuscript sources, the book provides valuable insight into the life and work of an important American composer, conductor, and educator. (Meliora Press)

The Arthur R. Miller Professor Emeritus of History unveils the inner lives of one of the most important political families of the 19th century. The book, centered on William Henry Seward, draws from recently discovered correspondence as well as by generations of Ģ����ý students. (Three Hills)

Shedding new light on the invention of Senate floor leadership, Professor of Political Science and of History has coauthored the first-ever study to examine the development of the chamber’s main governing institutions. This includes how the position of floor leader was invented in 1890 and strengthened over time. (Cambridge University Press)

Subtitled “an invitation to the theory of relativity for anyone who is now, or has ever been, an inquisitive high school student,” economics professor ’s latest book illuminates and demystifies the theory through repeated analogies with familiar everyday experience. (World Scientific)

This story appears in the fall 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

Transdisciplinary research is more than academic jargon—it’s arguably Ģ����ý’s superpower. With world-class resources across the River Campus, the , the , and the —and a community of faculty and students committed to solving humanity’s most complex challenges—Ģ����ý is uniquely positioned to foster innovation and collaboration that can not only reshape existing fields but also create entirely new ones.

To make this vision a reality, in April 2024 the provost’s office launched a first-of-its-kind process to identify teams to receive multi-year funding to establish fully realized transdisciplinary centers. After an anonymous faculty committee selected 10 out of 42 proposals to receive one‑year planning grants, a total of 13 teams submitted comprehensive proposals to be evaluated by faculty, administrators, and more than 60 external reviewers.

Out of this rigorous process emerged four new centers with transformative potential—and a combined $8.5 million investment that drew admiration from the external reviewers themselves. “I can’t overstate what a wonderful idea this is,” said John Aldrich ’75 (PhD), the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University, when the awardees were announced in June. “The courage and commitment of the leadership team to do something bold in research right now is inspiring.”

SoundSpace
Award: $4 million over five years

By combining strengths across multiple fields, SoundSpace aims to put Ģ����ý
at the frontier of music and technology. Its team—drawn from biomedical and chemical engineering, composition, digital media studies, computer engineering, musicology, and more—will focus on developing a best-in-class hub for research, education, performance, and public engagement. “We have advantages no one else has,” says the center’s lead, ’84 (PhD), a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Center for Extended Reality
Award: $2 million over five years

CXR seeks to awaken the potential of AR/VR by focusing on how we perceive and experience the world. This involves pulling from optics, engineering, natural sciences, humanities, and medicine to develop platforms that create a seamless connection between hardware and user. “The idea is that the person isn’t using the device as much as the device becomes part of the user,” says CXR co-lead , the Marie C. Wilson and Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Optical Physics. “I don’t know of any other places this is being done.”

Ģ����ý Resilience Research Center
Award: $2 million over five years

Why doesn’t stress, trauma, and adversity affect everyone the same? Why are some people able to bounce back faster than others? ����³��’s mission is to identify the factors that perpetuate stress-related health issues to develop ways to prevent and even reverse them. “We’re injecting hope,” says , a professor of psychology and ����³�� co-lead. “We’d like to build on existing research to provide optimism and sustainability that hasn’t previously been available to communities facing dire circumstances or families with generations of adversity or trauma.”

Center for Coherence and Quantum Science
Award: $500,000 over two years

Ģ����ý is the birthplace of quantum optics and key elements of quantum coherence. Soon, it may also become the birthplace of the first circuit boards for quantum computers. Combining experts in physics, optics, chemistry, and more, CCQS intends to make the University a major national player in this space. “This is a win-win proposition,” says team lead and Associate Professor of Physics . “The research we’re proposing will have major implications for both understanding how the universe works and harnessing this knowledge for useful technology.”

A version of this story appears in the fall 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

Varsity baseball coach celebrated the 500th victory of his illustrious career this spring, at a game when the . All have come with the Yellowjackets, making Reina the winningest coach in program history.

“I’ve really never thought about the amount of wins” he says. “I’ve always focused on how do we win this game? It’s about the student-athletes and what they mean to me. I love all of them.”

The Rochester native was named the 18th head coach in Ģ����ý history in 2002.
His teams have gone 505–390 (.564 winning percentage) and made three trips to the NCAA Division III Tournament. Two of his players have been selected in the Major League Baseball draft—pitchers ’24 and ’24. Ghyzel was drafted after the 2017 season and pitched professionally through 2021. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Ģ����ý in 2024.

“All of that success has been great,” Reina says. “But what I’ll remember most are the bus conversations, phone calls, and texts with players and watching these young men grow into leaders in the workforce and become great husbands and dads.”

Reina’s milestone win came in the same game that infielder ’24, ’25S (MS) broke a team record by collecting his 202nd career hit. The California native played five seasons under Reina and finished with 221 hits. “Having Jackson accomplish that feat made the day truly special,” Reina says. “It’s been great watching him turn into the player he is.”

When the milestone game ended, Reina congratulated Reed and flipped him the game ball. Reed caught it, then reached into his back pocket and pulled out another ball. He handed it to his mentor and said, “Right back at you, Coach! Congrats on win number 500!”

Reina says he has no plans to retire any time soon. “I love meeting families during the recruiting process, I love practice time and watching the kids get better, and I stink at golf. I love this school, and I love my boss (athletic director ). So, as they say, ‘If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life!’ As long as that holds true, I’ll keep trying to win the next game.”

This story appears in the fall 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

PFAS, so-called “forever chemicals,” are as pervasive as they are persistent, raising urgent concerns about our health and environment. At the Ģ����ý, researchers across disciplines strive to clarify how PFAS affect immunity, brain development, the economy, and even our daily decisions. Here, three experts share their insight on risks, solutions, and advocacy.

, assistant professor, :

“Many people think PFAS are the devil. Of course they’re harmful—but they’re also everywhere, from laptops and lubricants to catheters, car engines, and cell phones. PFAS compounds have an exceptional resistance to water, oil, heat, grease, and stains thanks to the extreme stability of their carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds, which makes them highly useful yet difficult to destroy. I envision a more circular PFAS economy in which we use them when they’re necessary, then find safe ways to destroy them. focuses on scalable, cost-effective PFAS destruction—driven by renewable energy. Our platform achieves complete defluorination of many PFAS molecules, using industrial nickel-iron alloys instead of costly boron-doped diamond, incineration, or other ‘brute-force’ methods to break the C-F bonds. This technology can be deployed at the source of contamination and sites of discharge: industrial runoff, production sites, or airports that use PFAS-containing ‘firefighting foam.’ This gives us the potential to revolutionize remediation, generate economic opportunities, and improve public health.”

, professor of microbiology and immunology; director, and the :

“In studying the environment’s influence on our immune system, I grew interested in why some people become sicker than others after exposure to a virus, for example. Genetics are not enough to explain it; could PFAS exposure play a role? When mice get the flu, they recover; their immune systems learn and remember how to fight it. When they’re exposed to PFAS, though, it dampens that protective immune response. We’re using mice models to hone in on how PFAS may scramble the immune system and its ability to ‘remember’ an invader. I’m also working with [associate professor and co-leader of the research pillar at the Institute for Human Health and the Environment] to track T-cell development in newborns. has found that levels of PFAS exposure in pregnancy may weaken the development of specialized T-cells in newborns that fight infections later in life. My advice is to really think about the products you buy and use. Don’t panic, but do take steps to limit PFAS exposure in the ways we know how. For example: Avoid heating food in any kind of plastic container; use glass. Buy pots and pans that do not have a Teflon coating or a label of ‘heat-resistant’ or ‘non-stick.’ Stainless steel is best. And finally, drink plenty of water but use reusable, refillable receptacles. That way, you minimize exposure to the PFAS coating in kitchenware, plastic bottles, and other vessels.”

, associate professor, :

“Most people are exposed to multiple PFAS—and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals—throughout their lives. We know these compounds can enter the brain, even during fetal development. Because they repel oils and water, they can have effects on immune and lipid-dependent brain development. We study the developing fetus to understand the influence of PFAS on brain and behavioral function, as well as on postpartum depression in mothers. also examines how PFAS can interfere with hormones, which are critical for both development and mental health. We need to study the ‘curated chemical cocktails’ that mimic real-life exposure to learn how to buffer or mitigate the effects of PFAS. We also need to support the institutions that help regulate both products and the environment, so that the burden shifts away from the individual. As in other areas, our environmental health data can inform public policy with dramatic impact.”

This story appears in the fall 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

“We found something.”

A gastroenterologist stood over Jess Delaney-Sloper in the recovery room as she awoke from a colonoscopy. “It most certainly is cancer,” the doctor said.

Delaney-Sloper struggled to make sense of the words. She was a healthy, fit 42-year-old, an avid runner and nurse practitioner. A single bout of rectal bleeding had triggered a small precautionary procedure. Now she lay alone on a hospital bed. It was January 2021, the height of COVID-19, and her husband was waiting in the parking lot to take her home.

Follow-up tests proved the doctor right—only worse: She had stage IV colon cancer. It had spread to her liver. Doctors told her she had two years to live.

The prognosis did not jibe with who Delaney-Sloper knew herself to be. “I thought I was the picture of health,” she says. “I saw my primary care doctor regularly. I worked out every day.” What’s more, she had exhibited none of the other common signs of cancer—weight loss, night sweats, abdominal pain. Just that one minor episode of rectal bleeding.

The doctors encouraged her to make peace with the prognosis. Go live your life, they told her. You don’t want to spend the time you have left in and out of the hospital.

Make peace? Delaney-Sloper had three daughters, ages 7, 9, and 11. She couldn’t accept what amounted to a palliative approach. “I had to be there for them,” she says. “First kisses, puberty, all the things that girls go through—I just couldn’t imagine not being there for that. I couldn’t sit back and accept that diagnosis.”

So she and her husband, Ryan, got to work. They made calls, flew to visit top hospitals, and sought expert opinions across the country in California, New York, and Illinois. Again and again, they heard variations of the same thing: Sorry, there’s nothing we can do.

Finally, a doctor they visited in Boston mentioned an option that might just provide a solution. He connected her with , chief of the at the . The regimen was relatively new—and complicated. The procedure entailed transplanting part of the liver of a living donor. Unlike most transplants, a living donation can be scheduled. This allows doctors to perform the transplant at the optimal moment for cancer patients. And because of Delaney-Sloper’s grim prognosis, she likely would not have qualified for one from a deceased donor anyway.

Hernandez had been building a reputation among his peers for groundbreaking procedures on some of the most desperate of patients—particularly those with colon cancer that had metastasized and spread to the liver. He told Delaney-Sloper that she was an excellent candidate for living donor liver transplant surgery. In tandem with colon surgery, the regimen could potentially remove all traces of cancer from her body and eliminate the need for future chemotherapy.

Hernandez did not sugarcoat the many challenges ahead, but he also promised he would help her meet those obstacles with methodical determination. “I always try to have a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C,” Hernandez says of his approach to every case.

For perhaps the first time since the diagnosis, Delaney-Sloper felt a real sense of possibility. “There had been a lot of doors shut in our faces,” she says. “But Dr. Hernandez opened the door.”

The story of Delaney-Sloper and Hernandez is one of resilience, persistence, and extraordinary medical achievement. It also reflects something deeper: the power of the larger systems that a modern research university can bring to bear to make the extraordinary possible. Hernandez’s vision is leveraged by a team and an institution built to enable bold ideas and complex treatments. But it’s also the most human kind of story—a hybrid of science and deep care.

Seventy volunteers, two livers

Over the course of the next several months, Delaney-Sloper endured a punishing 12-round regimen of chemotherapy to stabilize her cancer and prevent it from spreading further. In August 2021, she traveled to Rochester and spent a week in the hospital for the first surgery: the removal of a portion of her colon and surrounding lymph nodes, performed by colorectal surgeon and division chief .

The next step was to find a compatible donor, one willing to donate about two-thirds of their liver for Delaney-Sloper’s transplant. She and Ryan gathered dozens of people on a Zoom call to share their story. The couple asked their friends and family to spread the word and to consider getting evaluated as a match. Within 24 hours, 70 people had called in to volunteer for the screening process. “They had to dedicate one nurse just to take calls for me,” she says, clearly moved even four years later by the generosity of their circle.

Her younger brother, Bobby Delaney, a police officer, was the first to call in. He turned out to be a match.

In February 2022, 13 months after her initial diagnosis—and after an additional 10 rounds of chemotherapy—Delaney-Sloper and her brother were in adjacent operating rooms for the lengthy and technically demanding surgical procedures. After ensuring that Delaney-Sloper had no signs of cancer progression, Hernandez removed much of the right lobe of Bobby’s liver, a process that took about six hours.

Then fellow Ģ����ý transplant surgeons and removed Delaney-Sloper’s diseased liver. Finally, Tomiyama completed the transplant of Bobby’s liver to Delaney-Sloper.

Ģ����ý 12 hours after they began, the surgeries were complete: Tomiyama and Hernandez debriefed before going home. The procedure, they told Delaney-Sloper later, was textbook perfect.

While Delaney-Sloper spent the first day or so in a sedation-induced haze with her husband and rotating crews of nurses, she does remember the moment her brother walked in, pushing a wheelchair to maintain his balance. She recalls how good he looked—so much better than she had expected after donating 69 percent of his liver. “Seeing him for the first time, I felt pure joy, an overwhelming love for him, and admiration for his bravery. What he had done for me was incredible, and I was relieved that we both got through,” she recalls. “I felt very hopeful for the future.”

The pair was discharged from the hospital eight days later; they spent about a month at a nearby Airbnb so that doctors could monitor their recoveries. Over the course of the coming months, their livers each regrew almost to full size.

Delaney-Sloper continues to adjust to her post-transplant life; she lives with numbness, tingling, and pain from chemotherapy-induced neuropathy in her feet. She continues to have frequent medical appointments, and she will be on immunosuppressants for life. Yet it’s a new—and in some ways more purposeful—kind of normal. “I could be dead right now,” she says matter-of-factly. But she notes that it has been four years since she woke up after that first devastating colonoscopy—two years past the doctors’ initial prognosis. Her most recent scans show no evidence of disease.

Built to go big

Stories about against-the-odds cases like Delaney-Sloper’s often get simplified to highlight a single patient and a heroic doctor. But this kind of storytelling can obscure a reality that is far more layered.

Hernandez does fit the heroic mold. That’s in part a reflection of his relentless work ethic; he has been known to sketch out surgical ideas on cocktail napkins at conferences and to ditch dinners with colleagues to refine those ideas in his hotel room. He jokes that after his own three children, liver cancer is his “fourth child.”

His drive also comes from a deeply personal source: When Hernandez completed his residency at the Mexican Institute of Social Security, his classmates celebrated with friends and family; he attended the recognition ceremony alone. His mother was home receiving chemotherapy for liver cancer, and the rest of his family remained with her as she fought for her life. She died at age 58.

However we wish to portray Hernandez’s heroism, innovations like his demand extensive teamwork and a deep bench of expertise and resources—as he himself is quick to note. “Living donor liver transplantation requires two operating rooms, two groups of anesthesiologists, two groups of nurses, and a donor team,” Hernandez says, ticking off just a partial list of the surgical team. Success involves hepatologists, radiologists, pathologists, pharmacists, infectious disease specialists, nutritionists, psychologists, social workers, nurse practitioners and coordinators, and administrative and support staff.

Their work is urgently, and increasingly, needed. The incidence of colon cancer in people under the age of 55 has nearly doubled over the past decade and continues to increase by 1 percent a year. Medical experts aren’t sure of the reasons; our changing diet, environmental exposures, even microorganisms in our gut might play a role. But Hernandez and his colleagues are focusing on an even more alarming fact: More of these younger patients are diagnosed at advanced stages. An understanding of potential solutions and how to accelerate them is essential.

Hernandez’s pathbreaking liver surgeries began in the early 2010s, when he was working at the London Health Sciences Centre in southwestern Ontario. There he advanced a distinctive two-stage surgical operation to treat liver cancer and metastasis. First presented in 2012 by a German team at a Miami conference, the ALPPS (Associating Liver Partition and Portal vein ligation for Staged hepatectomy) procedure offered a promising treatment for patients whose liver cancer was so extensive that it was often considered inoperable. In the first step, surgeons removed tumors from the smaller side of the liver and redirected blood flow to help that side regrow. Then, once the healthy part had regrown, surgeons removed the remaining cancerous section so the patient could survive without liver failure.

The audience of surgeons greeted the Germans’ presentation skeptically, pointing out the significant risk of complications. But Hernandez saw potential for patients who had few other options. He pushed forward with ALPPS, carefully selecting patients with the most promising clinical profiles. The procedure worked once, twice, and eventually some 50 times. While the cancer often ultimately returned, it was extending the lives of patients whose cases had seemed to hold little hope.

The field began to take notice. Soon enough, suitors from around the world were hoping to lure him to their institutions. One of those offering a position was , then the chair of the Medical Center’s .

As Hernandez deliberated over his next move—a move that likely would determine where he spent the rest of his career—he saw major potential at URochester. “I had the opportunity to develop a team,” he says. “And I could be a leader that could have an impact not only in upstate New York but nationally.” To have that kind of influence, he knew he had to have more than a single strong champion. He needed the backing of an institution. With that kind of support, he felt confident he would be able to take his biggest ideas as far as they could go.

He had other options, but he chose URochester. And here he began building clinical and research teams.

The next big swing

Hernandez was eager to recruit fiercely dedicated experts with wide-ranging perspectives, a strategy shaped by his own international training. As a young surgeon he had sought out institutions in Mexico, Canada, and Japan, where he had the chance to study some of the most advanced liver procedures. He wanted to learn from the best, wherever they were. The peripatetic path had additional advantages: It gave him insight into the strengths and shortcomings of different healthcare systems and the influence of cultural norms, lessons he would draw on to navigate complex medical challenges.

For example, Japan’s relatively conservative approach to organ donation from deceased donors had led it to rely more heavily on living donor liver transplantation. It was one reason Hernandez spent several months learning specialized techniques at Kyoto University, where such surgeries took place two or three times a week—far more frequently than at hospitals in North America.

So it was understandable that Hernandez’s first Ģ����ý hire would be a Japanese-trained surgeon. Sharing Hernandez’s obsessiveness, Tomiyama was known to practice suturing techniques in his spare time at home. Having worked in Canada and the US, he appreciated both the meticulous approach to surgical techniques that he had learned in Japan and the sense of urgency that moves medicine in America. “The great thing about the US,” Tomiyama says, “is that we try to make things happen as fast as possible.”

Tomiyama would eventually become indispensable for Hernandez’s next big swing: living donor liver transplants for colon cancer patients whose disease had spread to their liver.

A paper by a Norwegian medical team that Hernandez had reviewed for a journal convinced him that such transplants could be part of a cure, despite previous discouraging outcomes that had squelched the practice in the 1990s. With both donor and patient surgeries happening simultaneously, he knew he’d need Tomiyama, a trusted, highly skilled surgical partner, to make the work possible.

To help care for patients before and after a living donor liver transplant, Hernandez has also leaned on the skills of one of his most recent hires, . The Ethiopia-born hepatologist is particularly focused on selecting the right patients for this care: “Are they fit enough to undergo liver transplant? Is their cancer too aggressive to be treated safely and adequately with transplant?” He susses out the answers through a range of factors, including a patient’s response to chemotherapy and a series of biomarkers. Addissie’s goal is to prevent a worst-case scenario: a healthy donor who undergoes major surgery for a recipient who dies during or soon after the transplant.

Medical expertise alone will not guarantee a successful transplant. Leaders like Nancy Metzler, executive director of Transplant Services, ensure that the has the resources, systems, and institutional support for one of the most complex areas in healthcare. While the work of Metzler and her team often gets overlooked, it constitutes an indispensable part of the process. A seemingly trivial misstep—the late signing of a consent form, say—can delay or derail the entire process.

What’s more, ensuring that a patient has a confirmed ride home, or that a nurse is available for a full day to field 70 calls from potential donors, is about more than checking boxes. It’s about creating a larger sense of trust that allows a patient to feel truly cared for. While there are four surgeons in the operating room, Metzler notes, “there are 36 people back here” who have helped get the patient to that point.

The strength of these visible and behind-the-scenes systems leads to extraordinary outcomes. While only a handful of hospitals nationwide have completed even one successful living donor liver transplant for patients with colon cancer that has spread to the liver, Hernandez and his team have completed 26. Data compiled in 2024 of the first 23 patients who have undergone the procedure show that every single one survived at least one year. Ninety-one percent have survived beyond three years. No other institution has come even close.

Talent magnet

Hernandez is clearly competitive, a mindset he frames around leadership and excellence. “Everyone remembers the first person who reached the moon. Neil Armstrong. But who was the second? We want to be the first at Rochester,” he says. “And we want to be the best.” Being a leader requires more than just the technical skills and insight of an individual or even of a highly skilled team like the one Hernandez has strategically helped build. It requires systems and institutional structures that can sustain complexity, support high-stakes care, and turn innovation into standard practice.

One example of this broader, amplifying infrastructure: Ģ����ý’s . It was recently named a National Cancer Institute–designated cancer center, placing it among the top 4 percent of cancer centers nationwide. The designation acts as a magnet for talent. “It allows us to recruit the best and brightest people from across the country,” says , director of the institute. “Under Dr. ’s leadership of our cancer service line, Dr. Hernandez’s colleagues, gastrointestinal experts, pathologists, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, and many others demonstrate incredible transdisciplinary collaboration, which is an essential characteristic of an NCI-designated center.”

Among many other functions, the institute helps connect specialists across disciplines to support the development of clinical trials and to streamline patient care. The structure enables deep expertise and cross-field collaboration, which in turn allows treatment of complex cancers.

Wilmot also plays a foundational role in research, where advancing a single discovery often requires the expertise of dozens of scientists. For example, under the guidance of Hernandez, fifth-year surgical resident recently authored a about patient selection, insurance approval, and outcomes of living donor liver transplant for those with liver metastases. (The paper includes data from Delaney-Sloper’s procedure.) The 16 authors included 15 from the Medical Center, in areas ranging from surgery to pharmacy. All had links to the Wilmot Cancer Institute.

Beyond the Medical Center, Hernandez can tap into the full depth and breadth of Ģ����ý’s research expertise, which goes well beyond traditional boundaries of medicine. That might mean partnering with an engineer interested in robotic surgery or a biologist studying tissue regeneration—insights that could further advance his work.

Hernandez believes that it may be possible to double or even triple Ģ����ý’s current rate of these highly specialized procedures, currently about 10 per year. He imagines a future Ģ����ý that’s synonymous not just with living donor liver transplants but with other innovative liver surgeries as well.

Still, the goal is not innovation for its own sake. It’s about what that innovation makes possible. For Delaney-Sloper, innovation has meant extra years with her husband and her daughters (now 12, 14, and 16). It has meant more experiences and more milestones. And it has meant a profound connection with her younger brother, who gave her the liver that saved her life.

When she talks about the experience at URochester, she describes it as both “a warm hug” and “a well-oiled machine.” The phrases might seem at odds with each other. Yet together they capture what made her care extraordinary: the kindness and skill of the individuals who provided it, and the precision and power of the system behind them. “I went there for a reason,” she says on a Zoom call a day before she and her family left for a vacation to Zion National Park.

“And I’m still here.”

In your 13 years as University archivist, what’s one question that’s stumped you but that you remain determined to answer?
—Tama Miyake Lung, editor, Rochester Review

My prize for “still looking for the answer” goes to the school song, “The Genesee.” Why do we only sing two verses, when it was written with three? For me, determining when we dropped the middle verse has been the first step to the why. There are a lot of clues and some distracting anecdotes but no definitive answer yet to this admittedly low-stakes question.

A 1916 article in the student newspaper, the , proclaims: “‘The Genesee’ as an Alma Mater is ideal, for it links our college to the river about which our city centers . . . its first notes are the signal for ‘on your feet’ and ‘hats off.’”

We all know —written in 1891 by Thomas Thackeray Swinburne (Class of 1892)—with music arranged by Herve Wilkins (Class of 1866).

“The Genesee” was embraced by students and within a decade became our alma mater. It’s the first entry in a songbook used at the Commencement Week festivities of 1893.

But Swinburne kept tinkering with it: A new version appeared in the Campus on December 14, 1898. The biggest changes were in verse three: Gone were the gathering force, the devious course, and forever loyal be, replaced by a mill-wheel, a grove, and vernal hours.

Was Swinburne more focused on improving the poem (in his view) than on lyrics? The revisions confused singers: Letters in the Campus urged upperclassmen to learn the new words so they would be in sync with the first-years. Luckily, the lyric reverted after a few years.

What evidence is there for when the switch to two verses occurred? A songbook pasted in the scrapbook of Raymond Ball (Class of 1914) may be the first printed indication, although freshman handbooks continued printing three verses.