, 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.”

William (Bill) Hauser, a professor emeritus of history, is being remembered for his distinguished teaching career and his research on the economic and social history of Japan’s .

Hauser, who died at the age of 85, taught at the Ģ����ý��for nearly 40 years—from 1974 until his retirement in 2011, serving as chair from 1979 to 1985. His intellectual curiosity knew few boundaries: As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago he majored in mathematics, which he followed with a master’s degree in East Asian studies and a PhD in Japanese history, both from Yale University.

Hauser was devoted to interdisciplinary teaching and sustaining the field of Japanese and East Asian history at the University, and had a deep interest in Japanese film. He was also among the first faculty members in his department to draw on film as a tool for the teaching of history, according to longtime colleague , the University’s Franklin W. And Gladys I. Clark Professor of History.

“And,” Weaver recalls, “Bill had a wry, ironic disposition, like he’d seen it all before and wasn’t going to let any of it bother him.”

Case in point: in 1991, when the Students’ Association bestowed their Teacher of the Year award on Hauser. “I’m not sure the administration cares. I’m not sure my department cares, but it’s nice to know the students care,” Hauser said in his acceptance speech, vowing to use his $500 prize on a piece of art or toward one of his many trips to Japan.

But his department did care.

Speaking as chair at the time of Hauser’s retirement, Weaver called him a “Japanese historian by instinct as well as training” who was “a central and indispensable pillar of Asian and East Asian studies at the University for almost four decades.”

His undergraduate courses on the samurai, on traditional and modern Japan, on Japan and the Second World War, on women in East Asia, and on East Asian film—the latter his perennial favorite—consistently ranked among the department’s most popular, Weaver noted in his speech on the occasion of Hauser’s retirement.

“Two of Bill’s passions were palpable, and I was lucky to experience both,” remembers long-time colleague and friend , a Rochester professor emeritus of history and of public health sciences. “I went to his classroom on several occasions and enjoyed watching his joy teaching undergraduates the intricacies of Japanese history. The other was cooking—and eating—and I was lucky to be his guest for dinner many times where he would ‘wok up’ a storm.”

The author of (Cambridge University Press, 1974), Hauser wrote about the Japanese textile trade, about Osaka and its early commercial development, on Tokugawa political authority in Western Japan, and on the samurai and the Tokugawa shogunate. In the 1980s, Hauser’s interests turned toward Japanese family history and the management practices of Japanese family businesses. Later, his research interests shifted toward the portrayal of women and war in Japanese film and the Asian American experience generally.

Hauser is survived by his three sons, Benjamin, Aaron, and Zachary—all of whom are adopted from South Korea and about whom he said, according to in the Minnesota Star Tribune, that raising them “was more important and meaningful than anything he could publish.”

In October, Inside Philanthropy showcased the extraordinary commitments entrepreneur and philanthropist Tom Golisano, a Rochester area native, is making to Upstate New York this year. Following is an excerpt from the article by Ade Adeniji published on October 8, 2024. Adapted and reprinted with permission.

Billionaire Tom Golisano Gave $360 Million to Upstate New York Nonprofits. Here’s What He Had to Say

By Ade Adeniji
Staff writer, Inside Philanthropy

In September, 2024, billionaire Paychex founder Tom Golisano surprised 82 nonprofit organizations at a press conference with a $360 million commitment in unrestricted grants. The beneficiaries, all in Upstate New York, work on causes including animals, education and healthcare for developmentally disabled children.��

Raised in a middle-class suburb of Rochester as the son of a macaroni salesman and a seamstress, Golisano is worth $6.5 billion today. He has a track record of giving that goes all the way back to the 1980s, when he established the��Golisano Foundation, and his lifetime giving totals some $775 million.��

After high school, he worked as a bank teller to help his parents with their finances, and then went to Alfred State Tech, a two-year college.

After graduating, he eventually found work at a payroll processor that provided services for large companies. But soon he noticed a gap in the market and realized he could provide these same services to small companies with 50 employees or fewer. So Golisano took the leap and started his own company, Paychex, in 1971, with just $3,000 and a credit card. The early days were tough, but soon, the company started making money and expanded its orbit beyond western New York. In 1983, the company went public. Today, it employs 16,000 people and has a market value of around $50 billion.

Two years after Paychex went public, Golisano and his wife at the time, Gloria, decided that they wanted to start giving back. Their son, Steven, is developmentally disabled, and Gloria sought to better understand his condition.

Over the past three decades, Golisano and the Golisano Foundation have emerged as top donors in this space, pledging or donating more than $300 million to support individuals with autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.��A main component of the foundation’s work is building institutions and centers that it intends to serve as national models of collaboration for inclusive health.

Golisano thinks that there’s still not enough awareness in the philanthropic community about the range of organizations on the ground working on developmental disabilities. And that lack of awareness serves as a barrier for these organizations to connect with funders.��

One of the Golisano Foundation’s biggest grantees in the developmental disabilities space is the Special Olympics. The foundation contributed more than $67 million to launch and expand the Special Olympics��Healthy Communities��program so that people with intellectual disabilities can access healthcare in their communities all year.

So why did Golisano decide to take his giving to the next level in Upstate New York? The Golisano Foundation already had a long-running list of trusted grantees that it has worked with through the decades in Upstate New York and southwestern Florida. Golisano calls both of these places home, and had provisions in his will for more money to flow to these organizations in the form of a bequest. But more recently, he started to change his thoughts about that.

“I applied for immortality and didn’t get it,” Golisano said. “So I decided that rather than waiting for me to kick the bucket, I would advance the money to them ahead of time. Why make them wait?”

Of the $360 million, $201 million flowed to Rochester organizations, along with another $66.5 million to Buffalo nonprofits and $40 million to ones in Syracuse. Golisano gifted the remaining $52 million to the Golisano Foundation. Organizations run the gamut from nonprofits that serve the community like Veterans Outreach Center and the Child Advocacy Center of Greater Rochester; education groups, including Alfred State College and Niagara University; and animal welfare organizations, including Better Together Pet Rescue Center and Rochester Emergency Veterinary Services.��Golisano’s huge commitment to animal welfare organizations is thanks to his wife, former world No. 1 women’s tennis player Monica Seles, a passionate animal advocate.

Major League Baseball legend Ted Williams , “hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports.”

Over the years, teams have become increasingly scientific in their efforts to get players on base and beat out the competition, looking to fields like statistics, nutrition, and psychology to help players improve.

Now, one MLB team has tapped a alumnus who previously conducted fusion experiments at the (LLE) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to help their players find a competitive advantage.

JJ Ruby ’21 (PhD) is the senior director of research and development for the Houston Astros, where he leads a staff of 17 software developers and research analysts. Ruby’s staff works to ingest the massive amounts of data collected on players, develop tools to analyze the data, and conduct experiments in areas including aerodynamics and biomechanics.

“The landscape of the type of data in baseball is changing significantly,” says Ruby. “Now it’s a lot more akin to something like the data that I’d be taking at the LLE or during day-to-day work within physics or different engineering fields, than it is statistics data.”

For example, Ruby notes that with the implementation of the Hawk-Eye computer vision system in 2020, every single play at the major league level produces data about the position of each joint on the pitcher’s and hitter’s bodies every three milliseconds. Extracting meaningful intelligence from those massive amounts of data is a tall order.

“My job is to drive large projects that make sense of that data and set players up to develop new skills and succeed,” says Ruby.

Curveballs on the career path

Ruby grew up in rural Pennsylvania playing baseball and, like many American youth, dreaming of making it to the major leagues. But he also developed a love of science and became a first-generation college student, majoring in astrophysics and planetary science at Villanova University.

During a summer internship at LLNL, he learned about Rochester’s physics graduate program and the LLE. He would enroll in graduate school and develop lasting relationships with his advisors, LLE Senior Scientist and ,��the Tracy Hyde Harris Professor of��, a professor of��, and an associate director of science, technology, and academics at the LLE.

“Ryan and Rip gave me a lot of creative freedom during my PhD to approach problems that I found interesting,” says Ruby. “I did a really healthy variety of experiments, theory, data analysis, and computational work and it turns out that’s a very valuable mix of skills to develop that’s broadly applicable.”

While finishing up his doctorate and searching for jobs, he stumbled upon a post that he thought was too good to be true: a Bayesian inference scientist for the Houston Astros.

“I thought to myself, ‘That’s weirdly specific,’” he says. “I clicked on the job ad, and it basically described my thesis.”

He hit it off during the interview process with the Astros but another offer for a postdoctoral fellowship at LLNL was too tempting to pass up. Still, he agreed to do consulting work with the Astros, traveling to events like spring training when he could help. In 2022, he left LLNL to work full-time with the Astros as their lead innovator.

Ruby says he is invigorated by the challenges baseball presents and that he has a wealth of opportunities to collaborate at all levels of the organization, from farm teams to top players.

“The Astros excel at building the relationships between coaches, scouts, field, staff, medical staff, and the research team. Everything is seamless,” says Ruby. “If I were to come up with an idea tomorrow that I thought was compelling, there are many individuals in the organization I could call up and I know they would be excited to start trying it out and iterate.”

Coaching the next generation of researchers

“Even when I went to the Astros full-time, I definitely didn’t want to fully leave the academic sphere,” says Ruby.

So, he called his advisors at Rochester to see if there was an opportunity to stay engaged and work with students. In fall 2023, he joined the as a visiting professor, where he provides guest lectures and mentors senior design students.

This spring, he pitched four project ideas to the team, and they elected to create a device to launch balls at speeds ranging from 100 to 175 miles per hour to hit a half-inch radius target.

Ruby hopes the device will help his team find ideal bat materials, designs, and swing angles for specific scenarios. Wooden bats are surprisingly complex because they are made of organic material, and Ruby says that while other sports like golf are very intentional about the materials and designs of clubs, a player’s choice of bat is often rooted in superstition.

“We don’t have a great feel within baseball about the performance of bats,” he says. “There’s not a ton of care or thought put into the choice of bat and I think there’s room for improvement there.”

Ruby says the first senior capstone project with Rochester students was a great start and he looks forward to exploring additional problems over the next several years with future groups of students.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on May 10 issued another to reinforce education institutions’ response obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 concerning harassment and discrimination in schools based on race, color or national origin, which includes shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics. This encompasses harassment and discrimination against students and members of the school community who are, or are perceived to be, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, Sikh, South Asian, Hindu, or Palestinian.

The letter reviews the legal framework, the intersection of Title VI obligations and speech protected by the First Amendment, how OCR analyzes the presence of a hostile environment and discrimination, as well as how it evaluates a school’s response to a hostile environment and discrimination, and provides many detailed examples to make even more clear its expectations for compliance.

On April 29, editors from the Campus Times posed questions to University leaders regarding the content of an April 24 meeting between student protest leaders and University administrators. Below is the University’s full response to the CT:

The Ģ����ý has not considered and is not open to discussing an end to its academic involvement with Israeli institutions. This will not stop some stakeholders from requesting divestment from institutions outside of the United States, and the University will not punish students solely for respectfully requesting this, but the University’s position on this is clear. The April 24 meeting with the student protest leaders was intended to find mutual understanding on some ongoing divisions. It became—perhaps unclearly—a discussion on how University processes work and the steps that would be needed to introduce a proposal such as academic divestment to the Faculty Senate for consideration. To be clear, the Faculty Senate is a self-governing body and is free to address whatever topics they want to discuss relevant to the University’s academic activities. Senate resolutions can serve as recommendations to be considered by the University but are not the University’s position. The other point of this conversation was that complicated topics where consensus may be hard to come by would necessarily take a long time to work through—six months, a year, or more.  University leaders who were part of the April 24 conversation recognize that there may have been misinterpretations of the meeting’s outcome. 

Since October, Student Life officials have tried extremely hard to maintain open lines of communication with student protest leaders and have provided much leeway to find middle ground on freedom of expression, while always listening to them raise the issues they care so deeply about. Student Life officials are open to dialogue with protest leaders to seek bridges to areas of where there may be agreement and understanding moving forward.

University leaders need to provide clarification on the details of a meeting yesterday between student protesters and University administrators regarding protester demands. The students were demanding (1) a cease-fire call and (2) divestment from Israeli institutions. University administrators in fact made no commitment to either demand, but in particular made no commitment regarding a University divestment from any academic programs or ties with Israel, as is being inaccurately reported on some social media channels. University administrators made clear that neither demand was on the table. There has not and will not be any commitments about future academic divestment of University programs in Israel.

Ģ����ý leaders are aware of the newly established encampment on the Wilson Quad of River Campus and want to be clear about the rules and processes moving forward for those who choose to participate in this activity. These ground rules are put forth as a measure of transparency and clear communication as to how everyone can peacefully share campus while continuing to pursue their purpose at the University, be it wrapping up academic work and finals to end the semester or graduate; working on campus or moving about without disruption or interference; and participating in campus activities, including the upcoming Springfest Weekend events.

• Encampment participants must be members of the Ģ����ý community and must present a University ID if asked by a University official, including Department of Public Safety officers and staff.
• If a tent or individual is currently set up in a location that is needed for University operations, the individual must willingly relocate to an alternate location immediately upon request. Wilson Quad is the site of Springfest Weekend and Dandelion Day activities, so protest participants must clear their tent and belongings away from any space that needs to be used for this purpose.
• The same protest policies apply with regard to disruptive sound amplification and restrictions on poles and flags. If protesters violate these guidelines, they will be subject to the same conduct processes as previously established.

University officials are closely monitoring the situation, and these ground rules are subject to updates and changes based on evolving circumstances; any updates will be clearly communicated. While we affirm our commitment to our students’ ability to peacefully express their viewpoints, our priorities are protecting the safety and well-being of our University community members and guests and ensuring that the University’s operations and activities can continue free of disruption.

Carla Gazes, an attorney with more than 20 years of academic medical center experience, has been named deputy general counsel for health sciences and chief counsel to the Ģ����ý Medical Center. She comes to Rochester from the University of Chicago Medical Center and begins her new role on April 22.

Reporting to the r’s Vice President and General Counsel Donna Gooden Payne, the position oversees legal and strategic counsel for the Medical Center, working closely with its CEO and dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, David Linehan.

“Carla’s extensive and diverse experience in a complex academic medical center, strong sense of community and mentorship, ability to forge successful relationships with various stakeholders, and her warm and inclusive yet confident demeanor will help to move the University forward in new and exciting ways,” says Payne.

“The complexities of an academic medical center require expert counsel to effectively navigate the broad range of issues we face across all of our missions,” says Linehan. “Carla brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to guide our legal team and support us in all aspects, from patient care and research to regulatory requirements and financial issues.”

In her 22 years at the University of Chicago, Gazes served in roles of increasing responsibility, most recently as senior associate general counsel. She brings extensive experience in contractual, regulatory, and patient care issues. Gazes has served as lead privacy attorney, counsel on regulatory implications of strategic and business initiatives, and has experience supporting medical center financial operations and advising on research issues.

Gazes holds a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she also earned a certificate in health law. She holds additional certifications in both financial accounting and mediation.

Payne and Linehan expressed their gratitude to Diane Caselli, who has filled this role on an interim basis since July 2023. “Diane has done excellent work providing leadership during a transition period in which attention to many critical projects was required, including support for Dr. Linehan as he began work in his new roles as CEO for URMC and Dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry,” Payne says.