THE UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI’S ALMA MATER IS SUNG WITH PRIDE, at homecoming and athletic events and with bittersweet emotion at commencement ceremonies. Yet most of us don’t know anything about its creation by two people who wended very different ways to the University of Miami soon after its founding.

The Tunesmith: Gifted Versatility

Christine Asdurian (a.k.a. Christine Oviatt Asdurian Thompson), M.A. ’27, was a talented pianist from Armenia. Her dramatic life journey began when she was just 3 years old: She recalled being carried by her newly widowed father, a clergyman, across her war-blasted country on a camel in a basket lined with red satin. The two ultimately made it to the United States, but Asdurian’s father died soon after.

At age 7, Asdurian was adopted by two sisters, Sarah A. Thompson and Esther H. Thompson, of Litchfield, Connecticut. Education was a priority for the Thompsons, and Asdurian took full advantage of the opportunities they offered her.

At Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Asdurian earned Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Music degrees in 1916 and was voted “most talented” by the senior class. The next year, Asdurian earned a Master of Arts in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and married William Robert Suda. They had a son
in 1920 but separated soon after.

Christine Asdurian

From 1924 to 1926, Asdurian worked as a pianist for the department store chain Gimbels, performing live throughout the New York tristate area for a regional radio show. Arriving in Miami in 1926 to pursue advanced musical studies at the University of Miami, she studied piano with Earl Chester Smith and was mentored by UM’s first music dean, Bertha Foster. UM’s first president, Bowman F. Ashe, often recruited her to perform at civic functions and donor appreciation events.

The Lyricist: Tone-Deaf but Tireless

Meanwhile, William “Bill” S. Lampe was headed toward his own date with ’Canes destiny.

In 1925, Lampe had been a spirited liberal arts student at the University of Pittsburgh when he was expelled two weeks before graduation, says his son Seth Lampe, for too much partying. So Bill Lampe made his way to Miami, driving an old Graham-Paige over 1,600 miles of unmarked dirt roads and, he later told his son, “across the backs of alligators” as he approached the city to join the Miami Herald as a sports writer.

In the summer of 1926, Bill Lampe helped UM promote its first football game, scheduled for September 17. Diving into various PR and administrative roles at the U, says Seth Lampe, “He wrote just about everything, including all the football cheers, program notes, and signage.”

While Seth Lampe recalls that his father “couldn’t carry a tune in a basket,” Bill Lampe wrote the words to the school anthem on the back of an envelope of an overdue bill. He then tapped Asdurian to compose the music.

UM’s first football game was called off when a Category 4 hurricane ravaged the region just as the new university’s first classes were about to begin. The following month, as Miami began its slow recovery from the storm, the U’s Alma Mater was sung for the first time.

Coda: Lives of Varied Accomplishments

Asdurian returned to New York in 1929, resuming her live radio performances until 1931. She stopped playing the piano after a serious back injury but soon found a new outlet for her artistry: designing ballet costumes. She moved to Los Angeles, California, and worked for a time with famed dancer-choreographers David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska.

President Pearson presenting award to Bill Lampe

In 1961, Asdurian wrote to the University of Miami’s second president, Jay F. W. Pearson, to congratulate him on the University’s desegregation and enrollment of more than 70 African-American students. “Do they still sing our Alma Mater?” she asked in closing. Yes, President Pearson assured her, adding “We will always think of you as one of our fine musicians.”

Female students at the Miami Conservatory of Music

Asdurian died in 1963 at the age of 70.

Bill Lampe moved back to Pittsburgh in 1928. He married his college sweetheart, Harriett, and rose through the editorial ranks of the Hearst Corporation to become editor
in charge of special projects.

The company championed the creation of an interstate highway, and Bill Lampe met with President Dwight Eisenhower every week for a year. Thanks in part to those conversations, driving from state to state is now far easier (and less infested with alligators) than it was in Lampe’s day. Later, as an advertising executive in Detroit, he helped to found the PGA.

In 1948, Lampe was named an honorary UM alumnus. Some years later, Lampe was told about a friendly campus debate regarding how to sing the Alma Mater. “What scares me,” he joked, “is that somebody may ask me to write a second verse.” Lampe was named an honorary alumnus of the Band of the Hour, UM’s marching band, in 1990.He died in 1992 at the age of 86.

Engraved in the hearts of the ’Canes family, the Alma Mater is much more than its words and melody; it is a testament to the resilience, talent, and fruitful collaboration of its creators.

Special thanks to: Koichi Tasa/University of Miami Archives and Special Collections; Jeffrey R. Willis/Converse College Archives and Special Collections; Jocelyn Wilk/Columbia University Archives; and Seth Lampe.

The post Harmonic Convergence appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Students in the U’s Orange Umbrella Consultancy gain career skills by providing communication services to real clients.

By Michael R. Malone
Illustration By Nicole Andujar

“SIX MINUTES ’TIL STATUS REPORT,” a student shouts into the sleek ambiance of the School of Communication’s Koenigsberg and Nadal Interactive Media Center. The heads-up rallies his fellow members of the Orange Umbrella Consultancy, scattered among the center’s low-profile sofas, circular desks, and green-walled cubicles.

The managing director of Orange Umbrella, Melissa Jane “M.J.” Barnes, and her Maltese poodle mix, Captain.

One by one, the students share capsule reports of their progress on a multitude of projects: websites uploaded, videos produced, social media campaigns underway.
Since it launched in January 2017, Orange Umbrella has made pretty good progress itself. Within 18 months of opening for business—shortly after the inauguration of the media center that serves as its home base—the student consultancy had earned about $37,000 in client revenues. It currently serves a sizable roster of clients while providing some 50 students with real-world professional experience.

Though the consultancy is staffed primarily by students across the School of Communication, it is open to any UM student whose academic skills can be used to help fulfill a client’s communication needs.

Students from the Miami Business School, for example, assist with sales, operations, and human resource advisement. Orange Umbrella’s new strategy department is staffed with psychology and marketing majors. To facilitate creative collaboration, the consultancy recently combined its production and creative departments into one that encompasses film, copywriting, photography, and social media.

“The changes opened up our workflow and have elevated the work we can do for clients,” says Barnes. “Now we’re offering concepts grounded in research.”

REDEFINING A COLLEGE CLASS

Participation in Orange Umbrella takes the form of a class of between one and three credits. But with an intensity fueled by urgent business issues and a service portfolio driven by client demand, the consultancy redefines the very notion of a college class. Its products and services track with those found in the professional communication consulting world, including branding, website design, video production, copywriting, and event management.

“We’re able to do that,” says School of Communication Dean Gregory Shepherd, “because we are one of the broadest schools of communication in the country.”

The Interactive Media Center, which provides an environment much like that of a professional agency, is central to Orange Umbrella’s existence and development. “From the get-go,” says Shepherd, “we imagined building out this space as an exciting window on the world that showcases interactivity—and locating the consultancy in a space that feels state of the art.”

Barnes, Orange Umbrella’s founding director, ventured to Miami from Houston, Texas, ten years ago to take a job at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Her six-plus years with the renowned global advertising agency proved invaluable when she joined the School of Communication as a lecturer two years ago. In fall 2016, Shepherd asked her to help develop the framework for the student consultancy.

After a soft launch, the initiative expanded quickly. “With growth and referrals, we evolved very organically,” Barnes says. “It was nebulous, chaotic, energetic, and amazing.”

Soon it was clear that the consultancy needed a brand identity of its own. The selected name not only references one of the colors that ’Canes bleed and the umbrellas that dot the Gables campus; it also evokes the concept of an overarching entity that connects various endeavors and disciplines.

SAVVY, SATISFIED CLIENTS

Among Orange Umbrella’s early successes was a Kickstarter program for Growers 2 Home that raised $13,000 in a month. When the Doral-based flower importer was seeking to invigorate its marketing efforts, Growers 2 Home business development executive Roberto Reyes reached out to the University through his sister, a UM grad.

Meeting occasionally with Reyes and his colleagues under Barnes’s direction, students including senior Christian Felipe suggested revisions to the Growers 2 Home pricing scheme and developed a new communication strategy that, says Reyes, has helped the firm blossom.

“It’s definitely been a win-win,” Reyes says. “Our partnership complements their coursework. For us, it’s a way to accomplish something important for our business.”

“I’ve gained a lot more experience as a leader,” Felipe says. “I’m doing assignments like those I’ll be doing in the work world.”

Orange Umbrella clients also have included an investment company, The Lennar Foundation Medical Center, a start-up subscription-based box service, and several businesses needing assistance with website redesign, blogs, and social media.

At Orange Umbrella, students work collaboratively in an agency-like atmosphere to provide a growing roster of clients with services ranging from graphic design and copywriting to social media campaigns and market research.

“It’s amazing to work with not only start-up clients and nonprofits but some really thriving businesses that come to the students for help figuring out how they can communicate their business model on social media,” Barnes says.

Ariella St. Rose, a senior, joined Orange Umbrella for some extra learning experiences as she looked ahead to her post-graduation life. She has researched, written, and designed portions of a client’s user interview aimed at increasing engagement. St. Rose also created a QR code and handled print marketing for another—all-new additions to her skill set.

“I have excellent teachers, but this is learning that you couldn’t possibly get in class,” she says. “You don’t know until you go out into the world—things are so much different than you imagine.”

BUILDING ON SUCCESS

While she admits that a consultancy with actual clients can be a bit stressful, St. Rose appreciates the challenge of real deadlines: “When you meet them, it feels like a reward.”

Orange Umbrella clients are reaping the rewards as well. “We successfully wrapped up a number of contracts last semester and have had an influx of inquiries from businesses large and small, as well as from the University president’s office,” says Barnes. A couple of contracts with one new, high-visibility client—boats.com—has led to a very fruitful partnership.

Barnes credits a good part of the consultancy’s success to support from the OU nine-member advisory board—four School of Communication professors and five experienced community members.

“There’s a wealth of interest among people both on and off campus who are willing to give their advice, expertise, and time to help us move forward,” she says. For Dean Shepherd, Orange Umbrella has already far exceeded expectations.

“I sometimes worry that it’s tempting for students to spend too much time in the consultancy,” he says. “They love it—it’s where they want to be. Yet they still have classes to take and other obligations. They have to keep their priorities straight.”

So far, the tradeoff is working. Shepherd credits the students with continuing to foster the work ethic and commitment to excellence the consultancy forged early on. “The quality of the clients and the students’ dedication to the quality of work they’re providing are remarkable,” he says.

“We don’t want to get a lot bigger right now. I’d rather be small and excellent than large and mediocre.”

After all, Shepherd notes, as the students have found in both their client projects and the growth of the consultancy itself, “It takes a lot of effort to build a brand.”

The post Juicing Creativity appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

The research vessel F.G. Walton Smith, owned and operated by the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, is a distinctive resource for scientific expeditions.

By Jessica M. Castillo

Research vessel F.G. Walton Smith

GAZING DOWN INTO THE COBALT-BLUE WATER OF THE ATLANTIC ONE DAY LAST FALL, a group of researchers, students, and guests aboard the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences’ research vessel (R/V) F.G. Walton Smith stood transfixed—partly to restrain their queasiness as the vessel rose and fell through six-foot waves, but mostly to revel in the pod of dolphins frolicking below.

Lillian Custals, M.A.L.S. ’12, assistant scientist in the Rosenstiel School’s Department of Ocean Sciences, cooed a warm greeting to the dolphins as the observers wondered aloud whether their marine companions were of the bottlenose or Atlantic spotted variety.

Custals and the Rosenstiel School researchers aboard are on a biannual expedition to collect deep-sea water that will ultimately help scientists better understand the chemistry of the world’s oceans. They departed at daybreak for this one-day trip to the Gulf Stream, 15 miles east of Key Largo.

At sea for an average of 150 days a year, the 96-foot catamaran is one of 18 research vessels in the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System, a consortium of nearly 60 academic institutions and national laboratories.

At sea for nearly 150 days a year, the F.G. Walton Smith offers undergraduate and graduate marine science students unparalleled research experiences.

“The F.G. Walton Smith is essential to our ability to understand and address issues related to ocean circulation, climate studies, natural hazards, human health and marine ecosystems, and to providing a best-in-class marine science education program for our undergraduate and graduate students,” says Rosenstiel School Dean Roni Avissar.

Its seven-member crew, three of whom live onboard, are part of Rosenstiel’s Marine Operations team, which also includes a fleet of small boats and programs devoted to diving and small boat safety, the Rosenstiel motor pool, and a marine tech program that oversees research equipment on three Royal Caribbean cruise ships.

“We’re here to help the researchers do what they do best, making sure they have what they need to help them conduct their science,” said Marine Operations Director Richard R. Behn, a retired one-star rear admiral from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Commissioned Corps.

Sampling the Gulf Stream

The samples being collected today are from below the surface of the warm oceanic current, whose steady flow helps ensure relative purity. They will become part of Rosenstiel’s consensus reference material program.

Led by Dennis Hansell, professor and chair of ocean sciences, the initiative builds on Hansell’s earlier work collecting ocean water samples from locations that included 2,600 meters below the surface of the North Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea. These days, Hansell and his colleagues collect water samples in the Florida Straits at depths of up to 700 meters to serve as consensus reference material for the study of dissolved organic carbon in the world’s oceans.

“The concentrations of carbon and dissolved nitrogen in the deep ocean are very constant,” Custals explains. “Changes in these concentrations take thousands of years.”

Treated and placed in vials, the water samples will eventually be shipped from Hansell’s lab to scientists around the world, who buy the material as a reference standard for their own research.

Also on board are Chelsi Lopez, an ocean sciences Ph.D. candidate, and Claudia Alvarez, a research associate in the Department of Marine Biology and Ecology.

Albert Ortiz, a research associate in the Department of Ocean Sciences, has joined the journey to collect and test water samples for phosphorus on behalf of Kim Popendorf, assistant professor of ocean sciences. On the upper deck, he works with Adriana “Andi” Fragola, an M.P.S. student in marine conservation, and Jake Jerome, an administrative assistant at Rosenstiel who recently earned an M.S. in marine affairs and policy. After fashioning hoses and setting up two bins to collect and store the water samples, the three head to the main deck.

There, Jerome works alongside electronics expert Denis Ilias, a 12-year veteran of the Walton Smith crew, to lower an apparatus known as a CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) rosette into the water at a series of decreasing depths. Once the rosette is in place, Ilias remotely designates the timing as the top and bottom of each of the rosette’s 12 Niskin bottles, designed specifically for this purpose, open and close. As the bottles fill up, electronic instruments measure the salinity, temperature, depth, and concentration of particles in the water column.

Student and faculty researchers aboard the F.G. Walton Smith collect water samples in the Florida Straits at depths of up to 700 meters.

After each submersion, Custals helps her team transfer the water to corresponding color-coded and labeled containers—after first swirling some of each water sample into its designated bottle, then pouring it out. The step ensures that the samples contain only the waters they were drawn from.

As Fragola handles one container, her bicep tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates becomes visible. The coordinates, she explains, pinpoint the spot where she released leatherback sea turtles in a remote marine sanctuary off the coast of Nicaragua last year.

“It was one of the most transformational experiences of my life,” she says. Fragola’s subsequent proposal to manage the sanctuary received funding from Fabian Cousteau, grandson of the legendary aquatic explorer Jacques Cousteau.

Meanwhile, Marine Operations team members Stewart Bell and Kevin Jones, serving today as acting captain and acting first mate, are roving through the vessel, staying in constant communication with the scientists to ensure that they are reaching their intended cast sites and collecting the water samples and data they need.

On the main deck, clambering in and out of the engine room, Mike Shoup, the ship’s chief engineer, and Carol Mandel, the assistant engineer, make sure that the vessel’s engines are staying cool and running smoothly. Throughout the expedition, the engineers must strain the water that cools the engines and clean the removable cylinders that fill up quickly with seaweed and indiscriminate sea junk.

In the galley, chef Randal Hughes is preparing the day’s third and final meal: tabbouleh salad, barbecued chicken, and tostadas with all the trimmings. Downed with some ginger ale, the almond croissants Hughes made for breakfast help ease some of the guests’ seasickness. But the rough ride barely fazes the crew as they navigate the four- to six-foot waves at a leisurely 10 knots, or about 11.5 miles per hour.
“The ship,” says Bell with a nonchalant shrug, “is very stable.”

A Floating Research Hub

As a shallow-water vessel, the Walton Smith makes it possible for the researchers to navigate into shallow bays and areas. Its three small work boats can be deployed to carry divers to otherwise impassable sites. It can sail without refueling for up to two weeks and desalinize seawater for a constant supply of drinking water.

Thanks to these features and many more, the vessel commands rental fees of $15,000 per day—but it’s available only to scientists seeking to add to our understanding of the world’s oceans.

“The research must be for the sake of contributing to science,” Behn says, “not for commercial or profit-making reasons.”

Scientists from the University of Buffalo and the University of Mississippi spent two weeks in late November and early December, respectively, aboard the Walton Smith to study the impact of hurricanes Irma and Maria on coral reefs in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

In 2018 the vessel will host, among others, researchers from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and the National Science Foundation, exploring a host of oceanographic questions.

Meanwhile, before nightfall, Bell steers the Walton Smith through Government Cut and Fishermans Channel. The boat passes South Beach on the starboard side, Fisher Island on the port side, the glittering downtown skyline straight ahead. Mandel glances appreciatively at the magnificent view as she strains the cooling water for the ship’s engines. Jones prepares the anchor.

With the sun setting and a cool breeze stirring, the ship docks at the Rosenstiel School’s picturesque Virginia Key campus. The scientists, guests, and crew disembark—windswept, sunburned, exhausted, and satisfied by a productive day that will add to our understanding of ocean health.

Gathering their gear and steadying their sea legs, the researchers pause to revel for a moment in the breathtaking views of Biscayne Bay at dusk. Then they turn and lug their troves of data to the lab.

To take an interactive look at the R/V F.G. Walton Smith, watch videos from the research trip, and see photos and polls, go to: https://features.miami.edu/2017/fg-walton-smith/index.html’

The post Vessel of Discovery appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Some 50 years ago, a group of University of Miami engineering students got caught running a pirate radio station out of an Eaton dorm room. Today the student-run station, WVUM 90.5, is a mainstay in South Florida’s alternative music scene and is nationally acclaimed as a community where students express themselves freely and gain professional experience as radio broadcasters.

Back in the summer of 1967, UM broadcasting major Peter Berlin, A.B. ’68, was home in New York and taking classes at nearby Hofstra University. Radio was booming, so when Berlin learned Hofstra had its own campus station, he signed up to host an evening show. When he returned to UM in the fall and got wind of the renegade station operating out of his dorm, he approached The Men’s Residence Hall Association to establish something official.

Along with the team he assembled, Berlin began putting together contracts, begging local radio stations to donate their outdated equipment, and negotiating with both University administrators and the FCC to get WVUM on air. His was the very first live voice in February of 1968.

“Rick Whitman [then station engineer] flipped the power button on, and I said, ‘This is WVUM, Voice of the University of Miami testing on 90.5 FM,’” Berlin says, recalling one of his favorite campus memories. Berlin went on to work in radio for years and now curates 1960s playlists for a morning show.

WVUM was registered as an educational station, with the goal of promoting campus events and activities, along with airing some music and specialty programs. The initial broadcast was only 10 watts, reaching just around the proximity of campus. The most recent update in 2013 to 5.9 kw means you can tune in anywhere in Miami-Dade County. The station’s online livestream attracts listeners from all over the world, bringing the estimated tally to 60,000 listeners weekly. And instead of spinning vinyl, DJs use software to queue up songs automatically from a digital music library curated and updated weekly by the music directors.

As the station’s geographic reach grew, so did its repertoire. The overall sound is alternative and electronic music, and the staff actively seeks out music not played on any other Miami station to create WVUM’s distinctive sound. There are music specialty shows, talk shows, news reports, and broadcasts of Hurricane Sports. From one hour to the next you never know what you may catch—from video game music to psychedelic rock, from a science talk show to a dissection of New Orleans-influenced jazz and hip-hop.

Some of the specialty shows are passed down over time and have become legendary on the airwaves, like the 24-year-old Electric Kingdom Live or the even older Metal Revolution. Students work hard to curate their shows, some consistently bringing in guests and interviewing local musicians. Over the years, prominent guests like contemporary jazz band Snarky Puppy and former University of Miami President Donna Shalala have all been featured on the air.

“We treated our positions at WVUM like they were real jobs,” says former WVUM general manager Amber Robertson, B.S.C. ’12, noting that the professional skills she honed at WVUM have translated to her current position as marketing manager at CBS Interactive. “I think the fact that we put so much time, love, and passion into the station really made a difference.”  

Paul Driscoll, vice dean for academic affairs in the School of Communication and WVUM’s faculty advisor for 27 years, credits the staff for making the station the best it can be.

“It is completely operated by the students; I am hands off unless there is a legal issue,” said Driscoll, who primarily handles the station’s license with the FCC. “I think it is important to let the students make the decisions on the content, as it gives them a chance to be creative.”

Driscoll, whose Ph.D. is in mass communications, notes that the station’s cutting-edge format would not work in commercial radio but has worked for WVUM thus far and in a top-15 radio market in the country, no less.

“WVUM is the most powerful media outlet that the University has to reach the local community,” he says.

In 2011 the station earned national recognition with an MTV Woodie Award for best college radio station. It is consistently included in the Miami New Times annual “Best of Miami” list and has received multiple awards from the National Broadcast Society. Many of these awards are based on voting by loyal listeners.

Senior Associate Dean of Students Steven Priepke, station manager Emmi Vélez, and WVUM faculty advisor Paul Driscoll show their pride for the studio renovation, which includes a mural by popular Miami street artist David Anasagasti, better known as Ahol Sniffs Glue.

Much more than a club, WVUM is a nonprofit organization funded in large part through underwriting—paid promotional content for local businesses. Every spring WVUM students run the station’s Radiothon fundraiser, hosting events, offering various donation packages, and begging their families to help keep the station afloat. This year, the students made one of their biggest pushes yet.

“A lot of our equipment in the studio hadn’t been renovated in over 40 years, and it was failing almost every day. People just always had to go in there and fix it,” says current general manager Emmi Vélez, a junior journalism and political science double major who has worked at WVUM since her freshman year. “The station had a second production studio that was nonfunctional, but with the new equipment, the students will be able to literally double their workload.”

Securing the funding for a full renovation of the WVUM studio, located on the first floor of the Whitten University Center, has been every general manager’s top goal over the past several years. Vélez accomplished that in the spring 2018 semester when the Division of Student Affairs granted the station a $150,000 loan to be paid off over the next five years.

The station hosted a ribbon-cutting celebration in April to unveil its updated equipment, streamlined workspaces, and an “eye-catching” mural created by a popular Miami-based street artist known for his vast fields of sleepy-looking peepers.

WVUM has about 100 student members with majors ranging from media management to neuroscience. And their dedication does not end after graduation. Many alumni still tune in to the station, donate every year during Radiothon, and come back to campus during Alumni Weekend and Homecoming to host shows with current student DJs.

“We’re an eclectic group of people, but we can all bond over this love for WVUM and for music,” Vélez says.

The post Boosting the Signal appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Marisabel Lavastida’s long, graceful fingers nimbly guide the needle in and out of its target. She pulls the gray thread taut and snips the excess. But this is no tailor shop, and Lavastida isn’t a seamstress. The local artist, her arms a gallery of tattooed images, sits among her tools at a table outside the Lowe Art Museum, calmly hand-sewing the binding on a four-page, index card-size zine (pronounced zeen). A DJ from WVUM radio plays music for the crowds as they circulate through four large tents set up for the 2017 Miami Zine Fair.

Lavastida is one of the 146 vendors and presenters who took part in this day-long celebration of small handmade booklets, held April 22 on the Coral Gables campus. Her zines—with titles like via iPod and Classified, Cycle and Hypnotism—showcase collages she creates from discarded books and encyclopedias.

“I have no idea when I make them,” she says. “I just make the collages, and then I make the book from that, clumping them together. It’s a lot of social and political ideas and also a focus on the animal world.”

One called Drowning World, for example, addresses the timely issue of rising sea levels, she explains.

Social issues and activism played a key role at the fair, which took place on Earth Day and coincided with the March For Science held in Washington D.C., Miami, and other cities around the world.

Art and activism have been part of the zine community pretty much since the beginning in the early 1900s. Even when political messages were not overt, the act of independently making zines (also known as “fanzines”) could be considered revolutionary.

University of Miami Special Collections describes them as independent, usually self-published texts popular in underground subcultures, printed in limited editions, and often produced via photocopy (or, before that, mimeograph) machines.

Cristina V. Favretto, head of UM Special Collections, shared her expertise on the zine movement at this year’s fair, held on campus for the first time in its three-year history in partnership with Exile Books; O, Miami Poetry Month; the Lowe; and UM Special Collections.

In “A Whirlwind History of Zines from Roman Times to the Present,” Favretto offered a speedy summary that started with Romans writing on walls and whizzed next to American Revolutionary War-era pamphlets produced by Thomas Paine before pointing out that the first zines were launched by science fiction fans passionately documenting the genre. Moving into the modern era of zine styles and influences, she discussed the classic “ransom note” font inspired by the Sex Pistols’ album covers of the 1970s. Then, for the many millennials in the audience, she explained the role of the mimeograph machine—complete with its blue ink and alluring smell—in creating zine booklets before the advent of the photocopier.

The format offered fans “an easy way to get their work out,” says Favretto, who began building UM’s collection when she joined the UM Libraries faculty in 2008. In less than a decade, Special Collections has amassed over 10,000 zines organized into 88 collection boxes, all documented, cataloged, and digitally archived for online access.

Though other universities have zine collections, Favretto says what sets UM’s apart is its size and distinctive hemispheric focus. While it includes works from all eight continents, many of the materials are specifically reflective of, or produced in, South Florida, as well as Caribbean and Latin American countries.

Favretto cites the Firefly Zine collection as particularly noteworthy. A 2,000-item donation from former residents of the now-defunct Firefly collective house, a Miami punk rock and activist community, its holdings cover everything from political beliefs and causes to the Miami punk scene to alternative forms of transportation such as bicycles.

The Lenny Kaye Science Fiction Fanzine collection comprises an international trove, originally owned by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, that spans the 1940s to the 1970s. Other gems include the Reggae Fanzine collection, Caribbean and Latin American Zine collection, and Leila Miccolis Brazilian Alternative Press Collection, which includes works painstakingly collected over 45 years by the Brazilian author, poet, and literary critic.

Plenty of entertaining issues and offbeat titles can also be found, including issues of Flapper magazine from the 1920s, a group of zines called Feminist Pizza Party contained in a to-go pizza box, and several zines documenting The Rocky Horror Picture Show cult movie.

Favretto’s nostalgia for zines dates back to her days as an art school student involved in the punk rock scene, which helped zines truly take off in the 1970s. She recalls how these raw but vibrant journals, like Sniffin’ Glue and I.D., captured the spirit of a burgeoning but underground music movement while helping to connect like-minded communities in the decades before the internet.

Over time the zine scene grew to cover a wider variety of subjects encompassing everything from comics and anarchist politics to women’s rights and environmentalism, to more esoteric topics like dumpster-diving, alternative fashions, and tattoo art.

The fact that collector catalogs now market zines at hefty prices, says Favretto, supports something she has said for years—that zines represent an important category of historical documents to be preserved.

But she and the staff at Special Collections do more than preserve zines. They promote them as vehicles for education and inspiration, inviting visitors to flip through their hand-stapled pages.

Gema Pérez-Sánchez, associate professor of Spanish in the College of Arts and Sciences, has used the collection to teach her students about life in post-Franco Spain. “The students loved it,” says Pérez-Sánchez, who had them make their own zines to interpret La Movida, Spain’s countercultural movement of the 1980s popularized in the films of Pedro Almodóvar.

Brenna Munro, associate professor in the Department of English, assigned the students in her Queer Sexualities: Literature and Theory class to find LGBTQ zines that would enhance their project research. And Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a visiting professor at the School of Communication, had her Blogging/Journalism class use the collection to study possible connections between zines and the emergence of internet-based blogs.

Dezare Sellers, B.B.A. ’17, learned about the collection when her Women’s and Gender Studies class used it as background for creating their own publication, which they displayed at last year’s Miami Zine Fair. This year Sellers distributed her own zine, Smart and Sensual, at the fair.

“Even with something as small as 16 pages, I was overwhelmed at first,” says the recent grad, who majored in business management. “But taking the class and seeing all the examples just proved to me that I was as capable as anyone of making one, and that the DIY (do-it-yourself) unfinished look is part of the charm. Zines don’t have to be perfect to make a statement.”

Outside groups benefiting from the collection have included Exchange for Change, a creative writing program for inmates at Dade Correctional Institution (DCI). The staff asked DCI inmates to create their own zines, which UM student Galia Bernat, an Exchange for Change intern, showcased at this year’s fair.

Favretto says this is the third golden age of the zine, following the 1920s and the 1970s. In Miami, the fair has seen exponential growth since its 2015 launch. Special Collections was able to add 90 works donated by fair participants to its zine inventory. And Favretto and her staff remain eager to encourage the next wave of zines and zinesters. Recently seniors from Miami’s New World School of the Arts high school visited the collection, gleaning inspiration for their own creative projects.

“Young artists need a voice,” says Amanda Season Keeley, founder of Exile Books. And zines, she insists, provide a unique mode of expression the world wide web has not yet rendered obsolete. “People want something tangible, something different from the internet and blogs. The Web gives people anonymity, where you’re not taking responsibility. Zines are more ground-level, more grassroots.”

Sellers, who also produces a blog at smartandsensual.com, agrees. “The internet has really made it easy to get your ideas out into the world, but I still value the work and time it takes to create a zine,” she says. “The zine format just lends itself to strong ideas.”

The post You Know I Read It in a (Maga)Zine appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

By Annie Reisewitz, B.S. ’96
Photo by Donna Victor

More than 60 years after earning her master’s degree
at UM, Nancy Voss continues to curate
the marine school’s treasure trove of specimens
known as the Marine Invertebrate Museum.

WITH ITS EXOSKELETON, TENTACLE-LIKE LEGS, AND LONG ANTENNAE , this creepy crawler has all the repulsive characteristics of the household cockroach—but at 10 times the size. Nancy Voss, M.S. ’54, walks toward a shelf inside a cramped room at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, reaches up with both arms, and removes a large jar containing one of the specimens. “A very interesting marine animal is the giant sea roach,” Voss explains, showing the isopod’s insect-like features to a pair of visitors. “Now, this,” she continues, “is closely related to our roach that infests our home. This is in Biscayne Bay, and it is also all down through Brazil. And in South America, it is found in food markets and is excellent eating.”

The post Hidden Treasure appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

On a sunny January day in Santiago de Cuba, Oriente, 13 students from the School of Architecture scurry through the halls of the Church of Santa Lucia looking for the iconic eyes among the wooden crosses and masonry of the Colonial-style sanctuary. “Karen Mathews, an art historian who went with us to Cuba, told us that since Santa Lucia gouged her eyes out in her devotion to the Lord, there were figures of eyes hidden throughout the church,” says Jorge Hernandez, B.Arch. ’80, professor in the School of Architecture.

The unusual scavenger hunt was one of the many highlights of an 11-day trip to the island by architecture students who traveled with Hernandez and fellow faculty members: lecturer Ricardo Lopez, B.Arch. ’00, M.A.S.T. ’07; Carie Penabad, B.Arch. ’95, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies; and Christopher C. Mader, assistant professor of research with a joint appointment as a director at the Center for Computational Science. Mathews, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Arts and Sciences, also worked on the project.

Their mission, as part of the Documentation and Preservation of Historic Buildings studio class, was to begin the refurbishing process for the Church of Santa Lucia. Built in 1701, it is one of 12 churches designated to the World Monuments Watch by the World Monuments Fund. They are considered cultural heritage sites that face imminent challenges.

School of Architecture students (left) traveled to Santiago de Cuba to start a restoration project on the Church of Santa Lucia (above).

The 18th century Iglesia de San Francisco (left) and the Cathedral of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción in Santiago de Cuba.

“I think the trip helped to demystify the place for many of the students,” says Cuban-born Hernandez, who was crucial in helping the Cuban Catholic Church get the World Monuments Fund designation in 2016. “They were able to confirm for themselves the state of the island, the quality of the people and the architecture.”

The students spent eight-hour days measuring the inside of the church, sketching its architectural features, and drawing blueprints, as well as interacting with other visiting architects and students from Europe who were studying places of worship in Oriente, Cuba’s easternmost province.

“I never knew what Cuba looked like, and when I got there and saw the deterioration, it blew me away,” says Camille Cortes, a 21-year-old architecture student on her first trip to the island. “It was a very special trip.”

The students were lodged in the church’s retreat house and spent time getting to know the locals as well as the needs of Santa Lucia’s parishioners. As part of their class, they presented their building proposals for the church, which included ancillary structures for the parishioners, says Hernandez.

Exploring Cuba’s architecture has been the clarion call for thousands of artists, painters, tourists, academics and, of course, architects throughout the years. As the largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba enjoyed a privileged position for the Spanish conquistadores because of its geographic location. Havana became a prosperous port of entry to the New World, and the Spanish spent great wealth in building fortresses to protect the country’s capital, which is unlike any other in the hemisphere.

“What is extraordinary about Havana is that for more than four centuries the city has benefitted from a confluence of European, African, and American influences,” says Penabad, whose parents are from Cuba.

“The city, although deteriorated, remains pretty much frozen in time,” says Sonia Chao, B.Arch. ’83, a research associate professor at the School of Architecture and daughter of Cuban emigrants. “Each layer of Havana’s 500-year architectural and urban legacy, and their respective inherent lessons, remains clear.

“That’s invaluable and it makes Havana a really unique place for our students to learn about urbanism and architecture,” adds Chao, director of the Center for Urban and Community Design.

Her academic research on Cuba dates back to 2002. Under the tutelage of a U.S. foundation, she has visited the island on numerous occasions, reopening the door to academic dialogues and collaborating on research focused on historic preservation, sustainability, urban design, and urban regulations with faculty and students from UM and the University of Havana’s CUJAE-Instituto Superior Politecnico José Antonio Echevarría and the Offices of the Historian in the cities of Havana, Cienfuegos, and Santiago.

Her scholarly activities on Cuban architecture include design workshops, lectures, and exhibitions—including one at the second Architecture Biennial in Havana—as well as multiple publications and a book due out later this year tentatively titled Havana—The Caribbean City: The Evolution of Its Urban Form and Regulations, which covers 500 years of history. Chao’s extensive academic work fostered a reconsideration and re-appreciation of earlier form-based codes, in turn nourishing the preservation-minded urban design regulations that eventually emerged for three historic neighborhoods in Havana.

With foundation support, hundreds of books in Spanish were donated to the CUJAE and the other four architecture schools across the island. Others were edited and produced in collaboration with local academics on urbanism and design theory that would prove seminal for Cuban architects and students.

“The local academics are the curators of that great [Cuban] urbanism and architecture,” says Chao, who, since 2004 has been teaching a popular class at UM called Havana: The Challenges and Opportunities of Preserving the Past. “To think that they wouldn’t have the most recent kind of information at their disposal seemed to put them at a handicap. Needless to say, they’ve been at preservation for some time, so we learned from their academic and hands-on know-how as well.”

Other faculty at the school, such as lecturer Rafael Fornes, have been instrumental in establishing academic relationships with Cuban scholars. “Ever since its founding, the University of Miami School of Architecture has had a huge interest in Cuba,” says Fornes. “There have been great exchanges between professors.”

Since 1996, Fornes has taught a class at UM called Studies of La Habana, which explores not only the architecture but the culture of the city as well. Using his many contacts on the island, he led student trips to Cuba as a visiting professor for Notre Dame and Yale universities. After 1996, when it became near impossible to travel to Cuba, Fornes organized trips to such places as New Orleans, Key West, and Saint Augustine, cities that have “a great Cuban influence,” he says.

Born and raised in Havana, Fornes graduated from the CUJAE in 1981 and worked on several projects in his native Cuba. After immigrating to Hungary, he moved to Miami in 1992 and came to know several prominent Cuban-American architects, including Andres Duany, lecturer at the School of Architecture. Duany and his wife and partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the school’s former dean, are highly influential architects credited with launching the New Urbanism movement.

In 1998 Fornes returned to Cuba to teach a series of seminars at the CUJAE on Miami’s Architecture and Urbanism. The seminars were very well received and gradually opened the way for other UM professors to visit the island.

In the early 2000s, Duany began a lecture series on New Urbanism for University of Havana architecture students. His lectures were printed in the book Charlas en el Capitolio de La Habana sobre el Nuevo Urbanismo (Talks at the Havana Capitol Building on New Urbanism).

The work of School of Architecture faculty in the island continues. Last November, Fornes, Lopez, and fellow lecturer Jorge Trelles, B.Arch. ’82, participated in the Convención Científica de Ingeniería y Arquitectura (Scientific Convention of Engineering and Architecture) at the convention center in Havana.

Recently, UM professors Victor Deupi, the son of Cuban-born architects, and Jean-Francois Lejeune curated an exhibit, Cuban Architects at Home and in Exile: The Modernist Generation, at the Coral Gables Museum. The display covered the work of prominent Cuban architects inside and outside the island, demonstrating the breadth and diversity of Cuban architecture. Dozens of pictures, drawings, documents, and letters were displayed along with photos of buildings such as the Tropicana Night Club and the National Bank in Havana.

For Deupi, getting to know many of the architects in the exhibit had a special meaning.

“This was my father’s generation,” says Deupi. “They were his teachers, his colleagues, mentors, and his employers.”

Many of the archival items came from boxes that had been long forgotten, stored away in closets by the relatives of the architects or even the architects themselves. Thanks to the success of the exhibit, most of the documents, photos, maps, and other architectural materials will be donated to the UM Libraries’ Cuban Heritage Collection so that the legacy of these Cuban architects will be preserved and available for posterity. “We are building the archive of Cuban architecture,” says Deupi.

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An avid sports fan who grew up in Canada, Gillian Hotz loved the brawling physicality of ice hockey. Yet as a young research neuroscientist who came to the University of Miami in 1992 to study traumatic brain injury at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s new Ryder Trauma Center, she was stunned by her first high school football game. Even sitting up in the stands at Harris Field in Homestead, where the powerhouse Miami Southridge Senior High Spartans played, she was unnerved by the violent, relentless THWACK! of helmet and shoulder pad colliding. “These were big, fast, strong kids, and I couldn’t believe how hard they were hitting each other,” Hotz recalls of that night in 1996 when she accompanied the team doctor, Lee Kaplan, then an orthopedic resident at UM/Jackson, and now director of the University of Miami Sports Medicine Institute, to the game. “And they were doing it again and again. I said to Kaplan, ‘This is crazy! These kids are killing each other.’’’

Not one to ignore a potential health or safety issue, Hotz returned to Jackson and cornered neurologist Kester Nedd, who was the director of neurorehabilitation at Ryder. Hotz urged him to start a clinic for mild traumatic brain injuries—which is what concussions are—for high school and other athletes.

“There were 35 high schools in Miami-Dade County, and I knew some student-athletes who got their heads knocked ought to be looked at before they returned to play,” says Hotz, founding director of the KiDZ Neuroscience Center at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, part of UM’s Miller School of Medicine, and director of the Concussion Program. “But we didn’t know much about concussions then, and the culture was to shake it off, and get back into the game.”

Her intuition would prove prophetic. Today, concussions are considered a major public health concern, and there is growing awareness they should be treated for what they are—an injury to a vital organ. Caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head, concussions disrupt how the brain functions and can alter it permanently. But they are invisible injuries and weren’t on the nation’s health radar until National Football League players began suing the league for ignoring the growing evidence that multiple concussions put them at high risk for what’s been called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). As depicted in the 2015 film Concussion, the progressive neurodegenerative disease is blamed for the premature neurocognitive decline and deaths, including a number of suicides, of dozens of NFL players.

Hotz’s nearly quarter-century crusade to change the culture of ignoring concussion, which included the passage of a state law barring concussed youth athletes from immediately returning to play, has made Florida, and particularly Miami-Dade County, a safer place for contact sports. And it all began that night in Homestead, when she enlisted Kaplan and Vincent Scavo, then Southridge High’s athletic trainer, to her cause. With their support, the University of Miami has become home to one of the nation’s most comprehensive multidisciplinary programs for concussion diagnosis, treatment, education, training, and research.

Now part of the University of Miami Sports Medicine Institute, which Kaplan launched with Scavo in 2008, the concussion clinic Hotz and Nedd established at Jackson in 1996 manages about 800 sports-related concussions a year. About 200 of those are high school athletes (mostly football players) from Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which partnered with UM in 2011 to establish the nation’s first countywide concussion testing and monitoring program for all high school students who play contact sports.

Given its reputation and experience, UM’s concussion program also has attracted several multidisciplinary concussion faculty and millions of dollars in concussion research grants from an array of organizations, including the NFL, General Electric and Under Armour for their Head Health Initiative, the military, and the private sector. Two of the grants come with the tantalizing prospect of revolutionizing concussion diagnosis and treatment.

Concussion By The Numbers

The number of concussions reported by sport and gender among Miami-Dade County’s public high schools shows that the brain injuries are not the exclusive domain of football players, or male athletes. Soccer is the No. 1 reason female athletes sustain concussions and, according to research presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 69th Annual Meeting, female athletes are more likely than their male counterparts to sustain a concussion.
To learn more about UM’s concussion program, and partnership with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, visit uconcussion.com.

The newest grant is for the development of a pill derived partly from the cannabis plant that could provide the first clinically proven concussion medication. The other is for a portable assessment device, a pair of computerized goggles that can objectively, accurately, and quickly diagnose concussions on the sidelines or in the locker room.

“We know that if we diagnose concussion and intervene early, the long-term consequences can be reduced,” says Michael E. Hoffer, professor of otolaryngology and neurological surgery who joined Hotz’s team in 2014 after spending much of his 21-year U.S. Navy career treating head injuries. “Both the diagnostic device and the pharmaceutical countermeasure are very exciting for these reasons.”

Research on the cannabinoid pill is still in the preclinical stage but, backed by serious funding, is promising. Last year Scythian Biosciences Inc., a Canadian company, awarded Hotz and a team of other neuroscience experts and researchers at The Miami Project and the Miller School $16 million to test a compound that they hope will reduce brain inflammation and the immune response, halting the cascade of symptoms many concussion sufferers endure.

Initially, common symptoms can include headache, blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and confusion. Some people briefly lose consciousness. Over time, depression, anxiety, irritability, and mood swings can set in. Most, however, recover within two weeks.

But according to the 5th International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport held last year, symptoms in 10 to 20 percent of sports-related concussion cases persist for weeks, months, even years. With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating as many as 3.8 million sports-related concussions in the U.S. annually, that’s a huge population at risk for long-term effects.

The proposed medication combines cannabidiol (CBD), a major but non-intoxicating constituent of the cannabis plant, with a chemical that disrupts cannabinoid nerve-cell receptors. Naturally occurring in the human body, cannabinoid receptors are part of our endocannabinoid system, which is involved in appetite, pain sensation, mood, and memory.

If the compound, which should be in clinical trials next year, proves successful at halting concussion symptoms, it could help clinicians manage what is considered the most complicated sports-related injury. Concussions are so difficult to diagnose and treat because you can’t see one on an MRI or CAT scan and, like snowflakes, no two are alike. The symptoms vary and evolve rapidly, depending on the severity of the injury and the stage of the disruption to brain function.

“Concussion is not one disease; it’s a spectrum,” says Nedd, an expert in managing concussion symptoms. “You have to understand how the brain is organized and, when it’s injured, how that organization changed. You have to properly classify that before you start treatment.”

Too many community doctors, he notes, intervene too late and with the wrong treatment at the wrong time. “The patients say, ‘I have a headache,’ so you give them a pill for the headache; they say, ‘I can’t sleep,’ and you give them a pill for sleep. Then they say they are anxious and depressed, and pretty soon you don’t know if the pills are causing the problem, or the brain injury.’’

The goggles, known as the I-Portal PAS—portable assessment system—are familiar to most UM athletes, including those in club sports, because many volunteered to help Hoffer and his co-principal investigators test and refine the devices. Hoffer, Carey Balaban of the University of Pittsburgh, and Miller School graduate and otolaryngology resident Mikhaylo Szczupak, B.S.A.E./M.S.A.E. ’12, M.D. ’15, received grants from the Department of Defense and the Head Health Challenge II, which is funded by the NFL, GE, and Under Armour, to conduct the tests.

The goggles are equipped with two 3-D cameras that each sample one eye’s movement at 100 frames per second—much faster than the human brain processes images. As a result, they can detect abnormal eye-reflex responses, which indicate subtle balance and visual deficits. The goggles essentially enable clinicians to see what they’ve never seen before: a concussion.

Developed by Neuro Kinetics Inc. (NKI), the goggles incorporate many of the oculomotor, vestibular, and reaction-time tests that Hoffer helped NKI adapt from the company’s I-Portal Neuro-Otologic Test Center (NOTC). A sophisticated $250,000 rotary chair found in specialized balance centers, the I-Portal NOTC can measure concussion symptoms both initially and during recovery with 95 percent accuracy. The goggles, Hoffer says, can do about the same—in four minutes, at a fraction of the cost, at the site of the injury, and without an expert operator.

“The goggles are the future,” he predicts. “They will become the AEDs [automated external defibrillators] of the concussion world—with one at virtually every sideline, or locker room.”

Aside from their affordability and portability, the I-Portal PAS goggles, which could be on the market by next year, have another huge advantage. Nobody, not even elite athletes, can fool them. For an invisible injury that relies on self-reporting, in a culture that reveres and rewards strength, toughness, and perseverance, that’s critical.

“Many athletes don’t report their symptoms because it’s not a big deal,” Hotz says. “They have a headache, they take a Tylenol, and eventually they feel better. But too many athletes hide their symptoms for fear of being yanked from the game, or ruining their pro prospects. That’s a huge problem.”

A lifelong soccer player, David Goldstein wasn’t hiding anything when he played through what turned out to be his third concussion in four years during his freshman year at Ransom Everglades School in Miami.

When he collided head to head with an opposing player during the district finals in January 2010, he didn’t give it any thought. Filling in for an injured varsity player, the game was the biggest of his life. All he cared about was helping Ransom win, which it didn’t.

“You can see it on the video: I instantly put my hand to my head. I knew something was wrong, but it was a huge opportunity for me. I had a lot of adrenaline and the game mattered a ton,” Goldstein recalls.

The day after the match, Goldstein, who graduated from Princeton University in June and is pursuing a master’s degree in sports management at Columbia University, went to his club practice. He still had a headache but didn’t want to disappoint his coach. Afterward, he collapsed, wracked with pain that, along with nausea, sensitivity to light and sound, irritability, and exhaustion, would persist for four months, through visits to a number of doctors.

“They all suspected a concussion and they said the same thing: ‘You pass the standard neurological exams. We don’t know what else to do for you. Rest. Don’t play. Sorry,’” Goldstein says. “Then I found Drs. Hotz and Nedd, and within two weeks I was symptom-free. They asked me questions others hadn’t. They gave me medication others hadn’t, and they tested my balance, which I thought was strange.”

Hotz also administrated a 20-minute computerized neurocognitive test that would help confirm his diagnosis. Known as ImPACT—for Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing—the test is usually given to athletes in the preseason to establish a baseline for cognitive function in the event of a head injury. Hotz gave Goldstein, an excellent student, the test anyway, matching his results against an average student. His ImPACT scores were below average.

Determined to help other students avoid his ordeal, Goldstein and his parents launched a fundraising campaign for concussion awareness and testing in 2011, raising enough money to enable athletic trainers to administer the baseline test to every one of Miami-Dade’s 15,000 public high school student-athletes. This summer, the Miami Dolphins Foundation announced it would assume the cost of countywide baseline testing for Miami-Dade’s high school athletes, and eventually those in Broward and Palm Beach counties, too.

Goldstein also spearheaded the passage of the 2012 Florida law that bars youth athletes who exhibit concussion symptoms from returning to practice or play until a physician clears them. Proposed by a statewide concussion task force that Hotz led, the bill was signed into law at the Miller School by Governor Rick Scott, who dedicated it to Daniel Brett. The year before, Brett, a high school freshman from Broward County who dreamed of playing for the Miami Hurricanes, took his own life, ending two years of agony from multiple concussions.

Today, funded by the annual Daniel’s Dash for Concussion Awareness 5K Run/Walk in Sunrise, retired NFL wide receiver Ray Crittenden, a researcher on Hotz’s concussion team, visits area high schools to talk to football players about the consequences of ignoring concussion symptoms.

Crittenden knows he’s reaching some young men, but research shows most high school football players still do not report symptoms. “I’ll see some of these kids in the clinic, and they tell me, ‘You’re the reason I’m here,’ but the culture is embedded by high school,” he says. “We really need to start earlier, so they grow up in a culture of awareness.”

Fortunately, Crittenden says, Miami-Dade has a growing legion of sentinels—the hundreds of public high school coaches, athletics directors, and trainers who, through the state law and their training for and participation in the countywide concussion program, understand what Scavo began learning the night he met Hotz on Southridge High’s sidelines.

“Concussion is serious, and we all have to take it seriously,’’ says Scavo, who became UM’s head athletic trainer in 2011. “We are the frontlines, and now we have the tools to build awareness and change the culture.”

Now a model for the nation, the countywide program is also a valuable research tool, providing Hotz and her team the big-picture data on how and when youth athletes in all sports suffer concussions, and how long they take to recover. But it’s also an essential prevention tool, raising red flags about isolated problems. Hotz points to a high school that, over two weeks, sent seven football players to the concussion clinic. She soon learned why: None of them had been wearing their assigned, properly fitted helmets; they were just randomly grabbing one.

“To get a handle on injury prevention, you have to have a surveillance system in place that helps you look at where, when, why, and how injuries are happening,” Hotz says. “Now we have those answers, and can drill down to the problem and fix it. Maybe it’s the helmet; maybe it’s a tackling technique issue. Without surveillance, we wouldn’t know.”

And without Hotz, who also launched the countywide BikeSafe and statewide WalkSafe programs to teach youngsters to ride and cross streets safely, Florida might be a far riskier place to play contact sports.

“People ask me all the time if I would let my kid play football,” she says. “Absolutely I would. But I wouldn’t drop my kid off at a pool that didn’t have a certified lifeguard on duty. And I wouldn’t drop my kid off at a field to play without a coach or someone there who is trained in proper tackling techniques and who understands concussion.”

The post Tackling Concussions Head-On appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

The children play soccer barefoot on a dirt field, and when they aren’t imitating the flamboyant striking and passing skills of their country’s greatest footballers, they roam neighborhood streets, playing other games or sometimes just looking for something to eat.

If not for the efforts of a woman named Julia, many of them would go hungry. A 50-something community elder with an energetic spirit, Julia helps keep their bellies full, working with a group of other women to prepare meals that feed as many as 100 kids a day.

Life in some parts of Las Flores, a 5-square-mile shantytown near Barranquilla, Colombia, often presents a multitude of challenges. Food can be hard to come by; sewage, water, and electrical systems are nonexistent in most areas; and residents build shotgun-style homes with whatever materials they can find—in this case, mostly wood.

Nicki Gitlin, B.Arch. ’15, documented the streets of Las Flores, Colombia, as a student in the Informal Cities studio.

And usually where they need to go is to the larger metropolis to work in factories and hotels. Some of the women toil as housemaids. “Grandparents and children are most prevalent during the day, when the men and women are at work,” says Penabad, adding that Las Flores and many other such slums are surprisingly sustainable.

“There’s a well-structured network of families,” says Cure. “Older, more established families usually become the leaders, creating day care centers and micro businesses that help the community.” One woman, he notes, even started a mobile clothes-washing service, wheeling a portable manual washing machine door to door.

“Everyone living in an urban slum isn’t necessarily worse off,” says Justin Stoler, an assistant professor of geography and regional studies in UM’s College of Arts and Sciences, whose own research on informal settlements has taken him to Accra, Ghana, to explore links between neighborhoods, the environment, and human health. “Living in a slum has been shown to hinder growth but also sometimes to aid it via tight-knit communities that offer better resilience for overcoming stressors and communities where residents take care of one another and provide buffers from all the problems they’re dealing with on a daily basis.”

But media stories don’t often report on the resilience of these communities. Usually it’s the bad news—like crime or residents’ poor health and educational outcomes—that grabs the headlines, Penabad laments.

“Some people feel these settlements should be cleared out and bulldozed and the inhabitants relocated, but that’s the wrong thing to do,” she says. “Once these individuals are displaced, not only is their rich community life fractured, but they’re banished to the outskirts, usually far from the city center, which is where they make their livelihood.”

Improving the infrastructure within—from installing water and sewer lines to providing electricity and introducing public transportation routes—would do more to help slum dwellers than any relocation effort would, says Cure. But such public works-style projects require funding, not to mention the even greater task of convincing local governments to pour money into areas they don’t even include on formal maps.

Residents of Las Flores have been lucky in that the private sector has funded electrical and water projects in isolated areas of their settlement. But more improvements are needed, such as an urgent care clinic and a large banquet-style hall where community elder Julia and the other women with whom she works can feed the scores of children they cook for.

And that just scratches the surface.

To that end, Penabad and Cure’s students have taken to the drawing board to propose projects that could help ramp up Las Flores’ infrastructure.

BIKE TAXI STOPS AND STREETLAMPS

Residents taking bike taxis to work and neighborhoods with no street lights were among Nicki Gitlin’s first observations of this Colombian shantytown when she helped map it over a year ago as part of the Informal Cities studio, which requires students to conceive of and design a project that fills a critical need in the community.

“Lots of bike taxis, but no bike taxi stops,” says Gitlin, B.Arch. ’15. “And without streetlamps, some of the neighborhoods aren’t safe.”

So Gitlin, who has since graduated from UM and is now working for an architectural firm in New York, designed a single apparatus to solve both problems—a bike taxi stop that converts into a streetlamp at night. She also came up with a way residents could take an active role in improving their city, developing a GPS system that would operate through bike taxis.

Another student, once he arrived in Las Flores, saw opportunity in the settlement’s proximity to the Magdalena River. Already an income and food source for local kite fishermen, Colombia’s principal river could, with the implementation of a local water taxi system, become an important transportation route, taking residents from the water’s edge to the center of Barranquilla, where many of them work in the service industry.

The extension of Barranquilla bus routes into Las Flores, homes built with better ventilation, and a local fishery are among the other ideas UM students proposed.

“Small projects,” says Penabad, “large implications.” But only if their maps fall into the right hands.

TOOLS OF EMPOWERMENT

That is why, after the completion of every mapping exercise, Penabad and Cure give copies of the maps, accompanied by data and statistics, to government officials in the hope that the settlements will be incorporated into the larger formal city.

“Informal settlements aren’t going to disappear,” says Penabad. In fact, more than 800 million people live in slums worldwide, according to the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). In Latin America and the Caribbean alone, at least 24 percent of the region’s urban population reside in slums.

Maps of these informal settlements, Penabad, Cure, and Stoler agree, can provide a powerful case for inclusion.

“Great things can happen when you put communities on a map,” says Stoler. “It legitimizes them. Many slums are typified by informality. People are doing work that’s not on the books, that’s informal in nature, and often the government doesn’t recognize these areas and doesn’t even count the people. When suddenly you put boundaries around them and create maps, you’re further legitimizing their existence. You’re saying, ‘Hey, this community is now on the map just like all the other communities the government acknowledges, and these people matter too.’

“By mapping these communities in increasingly better detail,” continues Stoler, “you create a digital infrastructure that becomes the cornerstone for deploying actual infrastructure. Decision makers are less likely to consider putting in new electrical lines or extending the pipe water network into a neighborhood unless there are clear boundaries and a defined constituency.”

The maps also can make governments aware of potential new economic markets and the enterprising spirit of the people who live in slums, like the community elder on Santa Cruz del Islote, the most densely populated island on Earth. During a 2015 mapping exercise of that islet, where more than 1,200 people inhabit a piece of land off the coast of Colombia that’s roughly the size of a baseball field, Penabad and Cure learned of a woman’s efforts to raise donations for solar panels that were eventually installed on some homes.

Stoler, who for the past 12 years has been studying slums in West Africa with a team of researchers from universities across the nation, also encountered his fair share of enterprising shantytown residents during the considerable amount of time he spent in Ghana’s urban slums. While conducting research on drinking water needs in Accra, he met a young man who was starting his own business as a bagged-water supplier.

“He was living in a slum in a little shack with a couple of machines,” Stoler recalls.

Five years later, the UM researcher returned to Accra and tracked down the young entrepreneur, discovering that he had become a successful businessman with a modern factory and dozens of machines.

“People living in slum communities are as smart and resourceful as anybody anywhere else, and they are often forced to be creative to make ends meet,” says Stoler. “Their ability to adapt is amazing. So why wouldn’t local governments want to harness that work ethic, that creativity, that resiliency? And that’s why we should keep mapping.”

Looking like a giant insect with its four legs extended outward, the quadcopter sits in the center of the dirt road, its propellers beginning to spin faster and faster.

In Las Flores, a small group of curious youngsters gathers around, while just a few feet away Chris Mader, director of the software engineering core in the University of Miami’s Center for Computational Science (CCS), flips the switch to a remote-control device, sending the camera-equipped drone skyward with the speed of a rocket blasting off from its launchpad.

The aerial mapping of this shantytown near Barranquilla, Colombia, has begun.

“Robots that fly” is how Mader describes the drones he and CCS colleague Amin Sarafraz have been using to help two University of Miami School of Architecture professors, Carie Penabad, B.Arch. ’95, and Adib Cure, B.Arch. ’97, map informal settlements in Latin America.

Initially Penabad and Cure mapped the settlements on foot with pencil and paper, using traditional surveying techniques and satellite images that were not always clear. After they learned about CCS’s flying robots, though, their methods for mapping slums literally took flight.

An aerial view of Santa Cruz del Islote, the most densely populated island on the planet, taken from a drone operated by CCS software engineers.

Flying a programmed grid pattern at 15-to-20-minute intervals, with a GoPro camera attached to its underbelly, a single drone can map a 5-square-mile shantytown like Las Flores in about two days, according to Mader, who has traveled to Colombia with Penabad and Cure as a member of their mapping team.

The 600 to 800 high-resolution digital images captured by the drone are used to produce a highly detailed composite photo showing an aerial layout of the entire city—from rooftops and foliage to streets and even and trash piled up in backyards.

“For mapping small areas like informal settlements, drones are ideal,” says Mader. “They can fly closer to the ground [the drones Mader uses typically fly at an altitude of about 130 feet], they’re inexpensive, and it’s technology anyone can use.”

The drones have significantly reduced the time it takes to map a settlement. That doesn’t mean Penabad and Curie have abandoned the personal side of their research. They still walk shantytown streets, but only to gather the information drones can’t, such as the stories told by the inhabitants of some of the poorest and most vulnerable places on Earth.

“There may be 200 children under the age of 10 living in an informal city that’s not being serviced by any medical facility,” says Penabad. “The maps can show us where a medical clinic or school can be built.” Among the other questions that can be answered: Are there boundaries within slum neighborhoods? Where does the slum stop and the formal city begin?

Penabad and Cure’s goal is to make UM a center for the collection of data on informal settlements throughout Latin America. “We’ve found a way to map these in a pretty distinct way,” Penabad explains. “We’d like to acquire enough funding to deploy this toolkit more systematically and make it entirely open-sourced mapping.”

The post Off The Charts appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

THE FIRST TIME TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY, WHOSE LARGELY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK inspired this year’s Best Picture Academy Award winner, realized he could provoke the senses through theater, he was just 14, acting in plays about substance abuse at Miami rehab centers. Audience reactions ranged from gratitude for “helping us understand what our children go through while we’re on drugs” to a demand that the show be stopped because of its emotional intensity. Then there was the deep regret expressed by the man who used to sell drugs to McCraney’s mother.

From age 9 through his high school years at Miami’s New World School of the Arts, McCraney turned to theater as an after-school guardian, a shelter from his turbulent Liberty City neighborhood, and a place where the kid who always felt like an outsider discovered a sense of belonging. Now McCraney, 36, is a globally acclaimed playwright and recent professor of theater and civic engagement at UM who still finds comfort under the stage lights, their protective glow shielding him from the intimacy of meeting new people who have not yet revealed whether they are “friend or foe.”

Identity, intimacy, and trust are topics McCraney was wrestling with in the summer of 2003, when he wrote In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the gritty but tender coming-of-age story about a bullied gay black boy in the projects whose mother is a drug addict, whose unlikely father figure is a notorious drug dealer, and who struggles to understand his sexuality and his place in the world. It is McCraney’s story.

A recent graduate of DePaul University in Chicago at the time, McCraney was headed to grad school at Yale when he got the news his mother had died from AIDS-related complications. The play was an outlet to “figure out my life now that I was missing the one person who could tell me who I was, beyond my memory,” he recalls.

Subsequent works—The Brother/Sister Plays, Head of Passes, Choir Boy, and Wig Out!—plus two years in London as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s International Playwright in Residence catapulted McCraney into the theatrical limelight, but lately the MacArthur Fellow is captivating moviegoers with Moonlight, the film adaptation of his never-produced autobiographical script. After landing the Golden Globe for Best Picture in 2017, Moonlight went on to earn eight Oscar nominations. It took home three wins—Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and, in a Hollywood-worthy showstopper after La La Land was incorrectly announced, Best Picture.

But McCraney’s story might never have been so widely known. During a screening and Q&A at UM’s Cosford Cinema in January, McCraney credited School of Communication lecturer Rafael Lima, who had been McCraney’s high school playwriting teacher, with planting seeds of advice that ultimately helped this poignant and intimate piece take root in a way that had previously eluded him. “He said, ‘If a story keeps coming to you visually, then it’s a film. If you hear it, then it’s a play,’” recalled McCraney.

Almost a decade after he finished the work, a mutual connection forwarded it to 30-something filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who had grown up three blocks from McCraney and whose mother also struggled with crack cocaine addiction, though the two had never met as boys. Moonlight captures Jenkins and McCraney’s collective experience of survival in a reality that left them bruised yet aching to make sense of it through art.

The character of Juan, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Mahershala Ali, was based on Blue, a boyfriend of McCraney’s mother. “He was a drug dealer, and he was every bit of a hero to me,” said McCraney. “He taught me how to ride a bike. He taught me how to swim. He told me that I was good enough. He often stemmed my mother’s abuse from affecting me in many ways. I was the best-dressed kid in Liberty City for a long time. I always wanted to honor that memory—but not expunge it of any of the things that, actually, he did.”

Moonlight, which The New York Times describes as “so richly evocative of South Florida that it raises the humidity in the theatre,” places its lens on Liberty City in a way few films have. For McCraney, who has “story by” and “executive producer” credits on the film, that authentic exposure is key to preserving the neighborhood and nourishing the voices that emerge from it.

The chance to help cultivate Miami’s “homegrown talent” drew him back from arts epicenters like New York and London. In 2015 McCraney joined UM’s College of Arts and Sciences as a professor of theater and civic engagement, and launched a unique educational initiative at Liberty City’s African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (AHCAC), his childhood safe haven.

Last summer, he led the inaugural Youth Artist Leadership Summer Program at the AHCAC, a partnership that united the center, the University of Miami, Miami-Dade County Cultural Affairs, and Arts for Learning.

McCraney guided 14 young black women, ages 13 to 17, as they wrote and performed an adaptation of Antigone, the Greek tragedy by Sophocles about the daughter/sister of Oedipus. Though the story is nearly 1,600 years old, the teens made it their own, infusing the final burial scene with music and lyrics that were a catharsis for the burdens they carry: “Let the rain from these tears wash these seeds of hate and malice and watch them grow into something new, something better. I’m going to cry my last for my sister, for Antigone, for all the sisters. I’m going to cry my last tears for government violence visited on my body, on her body, on our bodies.” The chorus follows with a litany of modern-day evils they pledge to bury: hate, rage, homophobia, wickedness, body shaming, misogyny, addiction.

“Black women understand, perhaps more than anyone, what it means to try to make their way in a place that is constantly saying ‘no way,’” McCraney says. “That’s what this program is about—getting young citizens to feel they have a voice.”

He maintains that nurturing young voices through the arts awakens imagination, which then leads to empathy.

“If you can’t imagine what other people’s lives are like, and if you can’t walk in someone else’s shoes, even in your own mind for a second, how are you a good doctor, a good lawyer, a good scientist?” asks McCraney. “We often think of the arts as something we can do in our spare time. But if they don’t have access to it early, no matter what life they were born into, all students suffer in some way.”

A shining example of the potential for homegrown talent to give back, McCraney insists communities also benefit from investing in arts education for youth.

“It goes right back to empathy,” he continues. “If you have people who can say, ‘I was raised, nurtured, and educated by my community,’ then they will do better by the community.”

Though McCraney will bring his considerable talents to Yale School of Drama full-time in July as chair of the playwriting department and playwright in residence, his legacy will continue to impact his hometown.

“This is a stunning example of how artists can move us to new understandings of our world,” UM President Julio Frenk said after watching Moonlight. “Tarell is a son of Miami. He is an artist of Miami. And he is an advocate for Miami. The film we just saw is such a beautiful, poetic, loving portrait of our incredible city in all its dimensions.”

The post ‘Moonlight’ Becomes Him appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

ELECTION 2016 IS LONG OVER. A NEW U.S. PRESIDENT HAS BEEN SWORN IN, AND THE WORK of governing the country continues amid a maelstrom of political debates and policy changes. But this wasn’t just any campaign cycle, and University of Miami faculty, students, and alumni have been—and continue to be—involved at just about every level. From former presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, J.D. ’96, to current White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, J.D. ’98, Republican pundit Ana Navarro, A.B. ’93, and Univision journalist Jorge Ramos, M.A. ’96, alumni figured prominently in one of the most deeply divided, unpredictable presidential races in U.S. history. Earlier this year, Helen Aguirre Ferré, M.A. ’83, was named a special assistant to the president and White House director of media affairs, making her one of the administration’s highest-ranking Hispanics. And while overall voter turnout was up only slightly from 2012, civic participation among students at UM hit new highs.

The post ‘Canes Take Election by Storm appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Thanks to the persistence of UM physician Hansel Tookes and an unlikely ally, Florida’s first syringe exchange program is fighting the spread of HIV one hypodermic at a time.

By Amy Driscoll
Courtesy of the Miami Herald
IllustrationS By Brian Stauffer

The doctor on a mission met the homeless heroin addict who lived under a tree last year at Jackson Health System’s special immunology clinic when both men were struggling to overcome the odds.

Jose De Lemos, infected with HIV and hepatitis C from a shared needle, had gone without treatment for almost a year. He’d dropped 80 pounds, suffered from night sweats and a rash on his leg and chest. Even walking hurt.

He was in no mood for conver-sation with a well-meaning doc.

But Hansel Tookes, a University of Miami doctor with a degree in public health and a calling to public service, isn’t the kind of doctor who is easily put off. He talked to De Lemos anyway. Sent him to dermatology, started him on meds for HIV and hepatitis C, worked to find him a bed in rehab, and talked — about his own uphill battle to create a syringe exchange program in South Florida, the kind of program that might have prevented De Lemos’ infection.

A public health advocate in Miami, where new HIV infection rates consistently top the state and national charts, Tookes [M.P.H. ’09, M.D. ’14] had been struggling for years to get a bill passed in the Florida Legislature to create a program in Miami-Dade County to help end that terrible distinction. In that time, he had gone from medical student to doctor. Testified before legislative committees over and over. And learned just how hard he would have to fight to get what he considered a very modest proposal to save lives and improve public health through a conservative, Republican-dominated Legislature. For De Lemos, his doctor’s commitment to the cause — an unpopular one, at that — was a revelation: “I’m hard-headed. And he’s persistent. He’s like, ‘If you get clean, you can talk about this. You’ll be great … You can help me.’ I admire him because he went through a lot but he kept going.” Tookes recalled a different moment with his patient: “He started crying because he said he didn’t know people cared.”

For the next eight months, as De Lemos kicked heroin, endured a skin condition that caused blisters across his entire torso and finally saw his sky-high viral count drop, Tookes started seeing hope, too. His proposal, which had been stalled for years, started gaining traction. The nationwide heroin epidemic had changed the dialogue about blood-borne diseases. De Lemos’ appointments with Tookes now usually included an update on the needle exchange bill in Tallahassee. Sometimes, when there was a big vote, Tookes played video recordings of the committee meetings on his phone for De Lemos to see. “The reception in the ER isn’t great. I had to prop the door open,” Tookes said, with a laugh. “But we watched.”

In March, a full five years after Tookes published a study in a medical journal when he was still a student that documented the harsh reality of illicit needle use in Miami, Governor Rick Scott signed the Miami-Dade Infectious Disease Elimination Act, making Miami-Dade’s program the first legal needle exchange in the American South.

The victory didn’t mean his fight was over. Legislators weren’t unanimous when they approved the bill, and the IDEA act reflects that: It creates a five-year test program, only in Miami-Dade and without any public financing. Tookes and UM, which will run the program, must raise all the money for the program privately, through grants and donations. Tookes — doctor, public health advocate and needle exchange crusader — must now also become a fundraiser.

He’s undaunted. His determination has carried him this far, and he is already envisioning the rest. “When I flew back to Miami after the bill had passed, I looked at the city as we were landing at MIA and I thought, what we just did is going to change the health of tens of thousands of people,” Tookes said. “And that was an amazing feeling. And that’s an amazing truth. And that’s where we are.”

Advanced HIV cases

Tookes, a 35-year-old internist, took on the against-the-odds fight for a needle exchange because he felt he had to. Too many people were coming through the doors of Miami-Dade’s public health system like De Lemos, with advanced cases of HIV in an era when the virus that causes AIDS is generally treated as a disease you live with, not one that kills you. Injection drug overdoses were rising, too.

The doctor knew getting people into treatment earlier could make a huge difference in their lives and reduce infections of others. (“I’m trained to look for public health solutions,” he said.) A needle exchange was a step toward that goal. Florida had never allowed a needle exchange program before. But why couldn’t that change?

His grandmother, Gracie Wyche, had set the bar high in his family. She was a pioneering black nurse in Miami who started out in the then-segregated wards of Jackson Memorial and eventually became a head nurse, concentrating on a mysterious illness in the 1980s that later became known as AIDS. Tookes became even more interested in public service during his undergraduate work at Yale University and a stint as an investigator for Project Aware, an HIV testing/counseling clinical trial at UM. He got a public health degree at UM, and then his medical degree.

Now a third-year resident who does his research through UM’s division of infectious diseases at the Miller School of Medicine, Tookes said his grandmother’s work set him on this path. “She inspired me,” he said. “There’s just a long history of service on both sides of the family.” The HIV numbers drove him, too. In 2014, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale region ranked No. 1 in the nation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the rate of new HIV infections in areas with more than 1 million people. That year, Miami-Dade County had 1,324 new HIV cases, the CDC said, while Broward had 836 cases. Statewide, in 2014, the Florida Department of Health said 110,000 people were diagnosed and living with HIV. People are still dying of the virus: In the United States, 6,955 people died from HIV and AIDS in 2013, according to the CDC.

Tookes saw the toll up close, in the examining room. A man in his 40s who had sex with men, no body fat and pneumocystis pneumonia, a disease often associated with AIDS — who didn’t know he’d probably had HIV for years. An impoverished woman from Liberty City with a debilitating bacterial infection from a severely compromised immune system, who had never before been tested for HIV. Or a young man diagnosed with HIV a few months ago who revealed to Tookes during a clinic visit that he uses intravenous methamphetamine. “Everything with this issue — all of the advocacy that we did for this policy — was to fix an issue that we were seeing in everyday clinical practice … I think as physicians, we had a duty to intervene,” Tookes said. “We knew there was something we could do for these people to help them from getting so sick, and so we decided to fight for it.”

He faced deep suspicion about the idea going back to the just-say-no 1980s. Although needle exchange programs have become increasingly common even in GOP-controlled states — Indiana’s [then] governor, Mike Pence, changed his position [in 2015] after an outbreak of HIV and hepatitis C — Florida remained a holdout. Some lawmakers continued to believe that giving addicts clean needles amounted to government-endorsed drug use.

Starting in 2012, Tookes — backed by a coalition including the Florida Medical Association, the Florida Hospital Association and the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office — tried to make headway with lawmakers. When he hit the wall of opposition, he didn’t give up. He didn’t get disillusioned or cynical. He tried again. And again. In the legislative sessions of 2013, ’14, ’15. Then 2016 came along. The heroin epidemic created a whole new conversation around the issue of injection-drug use.

State Senator Oscar Braynon, a Miami Gardens Democrat, sponsored the syringe exchange bill — over and over — because of the high rates of HIV and hepatitis C in his district. He said he saw opposition flag after Florida shut down its “pill mills” starting in 2011, sending opioid users to the needle. “The first thing people hear is that you’re trying to empower drug users to use drugs,” Braynon said. “But the narrative changed over time … What started to happen is that drug use picked up. First it was people in the ’hood. But now it’s some of the wealthier people.”

And so the Legislature’s attitude changed. Injection drug use — and the blood-borne diseases that can go with it — were no longer just “a Miami problem,” Tookes said. “In the context of a nationwide heroin epidemic and in the context of what I believe were many more constituents across the state going to see their senators and representatives and telling them that this was something that was ravaging their communities, we had a lot more of a sympathetic ear from the Legislature this year,” he said.

A needle exchange program won’t fix Miami-Dade’s problem with HIV and hepatitis C. But Tookes says it will help. And though a small percentage of HIV infections can be traced directly to needle use and the biggest risk factor is still sex, reducing the number of shared needles reduces the community’s risk overall. People who share needles don’t always tell their sexual partners that they are at risk.

A needle exchange also brings the hard-core, drug-injecting population into the public health system to be tested and treated. That reduces the risk to everyone else and cuts costs of treating their illnesses. This is not just theory. In Washington, D.C., the number of new HIV infections dropped from an average of 19 a month to six a month after a needle exchange program was introduced in 2008, according to a study released last year by George Washington University’s public health school. The reduction in cases saved taxpayers an estimated $45.6 million, using CDC estimates that the average lifetime of care for AIDS patients costs about $380,000.

Miami-Dade stands to save money, too, if addicts stop reusing needles. A study co-authored last year by Tookes showed that the cost of treating patients who had bacterial infections as a result of dirty needles ran about $11.4 million a year at taxpayer-funded Jackson Memorial Hospital.

For Tookes, all of these public health arguments start with what he learned on the streets of Miami interviewing intravenous drug users when he was still a medical student at UM. The study he published in 2011 showed that drug users in Miami were 34 times more likely to dispose of their needles in public than drug users in San Francisco, which has had a needle exchange program since 1988. Tookes still sees the bits and pieces of drug equipment in bushes and along streets, even in upscale places like Brickell Avenue, lined with highrise condos and financial companies from all over the world. “I still have syringe radar,” he said. “I spot them everywhere.”

Hansel Tookes, M.P.H. ’09, M.D. ’14

Jose De Lemos died on February 23, 2017, but not before seeing IDEA Exchange open its doors in December. Hansel Tookes continues to advocate for public health solutions.
IDEA Exchange photos:
Jasmin Shah/Comer Family Foundation

By the numbers

IDEA Exchange has already enrolled 240 participants, testing roughly half of them for HIV; traded 23,111 dirty needles for 21,523 clean ones; and raised about $700,000 in contributions.
To donate to Florida’s only needle exchange program, based in Miami, go to https://advancement.miami.edu/netcommunity/sslpage.aspx?pid=1634.

‘People are still dying’

No one knows exactly why Miami-Dade’s HIV infection rate remains higher than other metropolitan areas, even as medicines are better than ever, statewide rates have declined and mother-to-child transmissions — AIDS babies — are rare.

Public health officials rattle off a variety of contributing factors: Thirty-five years into this epidemic, younger people think of HIV as a treatable, chronic disease.

Drugs like Truvada, which can prevent HIV infection if taken as a precaution, have added to that perception. HIV is largely an urban disease. Immigration brings people to Florida from places without much access to health care or health education. Miami is an international party town, and the highest risk for HIV is unprotected sex, especially for men having sex with men. Testing and medication in South Florida can be difficult to find.

Also, HIV has fallen out of the headlines for the most part, added AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s advocacy and legislative affairs manager Jason King. “People are still dying. But you don’t get the press coverage … So it’s not at the forefront of people’s minds.”

Stigma is part of the problem, too. If you can’t admit you have HIV, your sexual partners are probably at higher risk.

“It’s not a death sentence like before but the stigma still exists,” said King, who is HIV positive. “And then they have to be conscientious about disclosing it to their next partner and they fear rejection.”

That’s definitely true in Miami-Dade, said Dr. Cheryl Holder, a general internist who works at Jessie Trice Community Health Center and is an associate professor at Florida International University.

Holder says stigma, especially in the African-American community, is one of the toughest issues she combats when she sees patients with HIV.

“We’re seeing changes in communities, but it’s still labeled as wrong and there’s something wrong with you … I still have patients who hide their medicine.”

Walking out of the health center at the end of a day not long ago, she saw one of her patients, a young man in a hoodie, waiting for a ride from a family member. “If it weren’t for his diagnosis, I would have waited with him for his family. But as I walked by, he didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at him. And that’s when I know it’s stigma. He couldn’t just pull me over and say, this is my doctor. We need to normalize health care so I don’t have to walk past my patient and not meet his mom.”

Raising Money

In some ways, Tookes’ work starts again now. Though Congress lifted a ban on federal funding for needle exchanges in late 2015, no federal money can be used on needles themselves. And Florida’s bill specifies that no public money can be used for the program.

That leaves Tookes, working with UM, raising it all — about $500,000 a year. And the pressure is on: Other counties in Florida are watching to see how well the program works.

“This pilot program is going to make a big dent in the infection rate in Miami. All eyes are on us. We have to make this a success.”

He has raised $100,000 from private donors locally — including Joy Fishman, the widow of the inventor of Narcan, the “save shot” for people who are overdosing — and another $100,000 from the MAC AIDS Fund.

Nancy Mahon, global executive director of the fund, said that syringe exchanges are key to fighting HIV/AIDS. “Needle exchange programs like this halt new infections, period. There is still work to do, but providing sterile syringes and supportive services to IV drug users is a solid step in order to begin saving lives.” Miami-Dade’s health department is joining the effort.

“Definitely, we will be helping in any way we can,” administrator Lillian Rivera said. “We can’t buy the syringes, but we definitely will be providing wrap-around services. As the patients come in, we will be ensuring that they will be tested for HIV and hepatitis … All of the services that we have will be available to the patients that come through the door.”

The IDEA Exchange, which will be run through UM, comes too late to prevent De Lemos’ infections. But it’ll help others as the 35-year war on the epidemic continues — as many as 2,000 in the first year, Tookes said. A project manager will start work in August, and other staff members are next. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is donating the HIV and hepatitis C test kits with the agreement that those identified with one of the diseases will be linked with medical care. Tookes is hoping that other groups will follow.

And De Lemos — at 53, homeless no longer — will do his part, inspired by the fight of his doctor to pass the law. His viral load is so low it’s considered undetectable, and he is looking at life with new eyes. Service is part of his personal plan now. “I really want to be a part of this needle exchange program. If he can do that, I can do anything.”

Tookes says he will measure success with each HIV test, each syringe handed out.

“This has been a long journey … It’s a very exciting time for Miami. We’re going to save a lot of lives. We’re going to save a lot of money. We’re going to give people a lot of clean needles. We’re going to provide HIV tests. We’re going to get people into treatment … We’re going to change the world.”

Reprinted with permission from the Miami Herald. A longer version of this article originally appeared in the Herald on July 29, 2016. Since then, UM’s groundbreaking IDEA Exchange opened its doors, with Tookes, an infectious disease resident at Jackson Health System and the University of Miami, as its medical director. His team has already exchanged more than 21,000 syringes. Unfortunately, Jose De Lemos passed away not long after its opening. On April 27, IDEA Exchange announced a new program to distribute the anti-overdose drug naloxone (Narcan) to local substance users.

The post Pushing The Needle appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Sunny Odogwu, an imposing figure at 6 feet 8 inches and 325 pounds, steps to the podium at the University of Miami’s Shalala Student Center ballroom.

The microphone disappears into his hand as the Hurricanes football player tilts it upward before addressing the crowd of students, faculty, and staff attending the Dear World storytelling presentation on campus, the culmination of a photo shoot that drew almost 200 members of the UM community.

“No matter how bad of a day I am having,” says Odogwu, one of five UM students selected to share the story behind his photo, “I always try to remind myself of where I have been. I grew up in a 10-foot-by-10-foot room with my six siblings, my mom, and my dad.”

In keeping with Nigerian tradition, his parents and youngest siblings shared the room’s lone twin bed. The eldest took the couch (more “like a little chair,” he says), while the rest of the family slept on the floor. But Odogwu, fast outgrowing the small space, opted to sleep outside.

His parents helped get him to the United States, where he eventually played basketball and attended high school in Maryland. During his senior year, his friends convinced him to try football.

Projected onto the screen behind Odogwu is his recent Dear World Portrait. In it, his massive palms are spread to reveal in black marker his chosen message of truth: “Came from a dungeon. Now I’m here.”

Since its 2009 launch in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, the Dear World organization has collected nearly 50,000 distinct message-on-body portraits of individuals around the globe—from war-torn South Sudan to Boston in the wake of the marathon bombing. Participants are encouraged to share on their skin one thing they want to tell the world.

Colleges and universities also bring Dear World to campus to encourage students, faculty, and staff to open up as a community.

“This program, like the many programs hosted and supported by the Division of Student Affairs, asks students to be a bit vulnerable, to step outside their comfort zone and to exhibit resiliency,” explains Michael Baumhardt, associate director of Student Activities and Student Organizations, who, along with Patricia A. Whitely, Ed.D. ’94, vice president for Student Affairs, and Gail Cole-Avent, executive director of Student Life, was instrumental in bringing Dear World to the U this past September.

When the photographer arrived, nearly 200 subjects, most of them students, elected to face the camera, words of hope and loss, strength and longing, pain and inspiration inked bravely across their faces, forearms, and chests.

UM President Julio Frenk was among the participants, writing the message “Fall down seven, get up eight” on his hands.

Initiatives like this, notes Baumhardt, serve to reinforce Frenk’s vision for the University as a global and hemispheric institution that promotes a “culture of belonging” in which all members of the community feel important and believe they have an opportunity to add value.

“Dear World gave our students the opportunity to express themselves and share their stories with fellow students,” Baumhardt says. “Our campus community learned many life-changing and impactful stories about our peers and colleagues—stories that would not have been shared if this open and engaging environment had not been provided.”

The Division of Student Affairs and University Athletics sponsored the event. View more photos from Dear World at UM and video from the storytelling presentation at miami.edu/magazine. On Twitter, #DearUM.

The post Wearing Their Stories appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Dried up rivers. Lone polar bears on drifting ice sheets. Coastal cities ravaged by super-charged hurricanes. In the face of environmental fallout, artists, communicators, and designers are making climate change visible and visceral as a way to compel action. Their creative methods can distill complicated science into visual storylines that evoke emotion while expressing the hope of human ingenuity. Prolific artist Xavier Cortada, A.B. ’86, M.P.A. ’91, J.D. ’91, uses a variety of media to convey the gravity of social and environmental issues such as climate change. His initiatives with school-age children encourage them to engage in science and eco art, and most of his own artwork portrays a sense of the whole world being interconnected as well as a strong hope for the future.

Xavier Cortada’s artwork Cucuyos is a series of porcelain flowers that, upon closer look, are composed of Florida click beetles, ecologically important pollinators.

Isaac Stein’s redesign of Miami Beach and Biscayne Bay made headlines.

Michelle Seelig surveys efforts like 350 Earth’s Santa Fe River art event. Photo: Michael Clark

The post The Art of Climate Change appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

A winged migration has researchers and health officials alarmed. In the highland regions of Africa and the Americas, disease-carrying mosquitoes have been making their way upslope, putting people at risk for viruses that previously affected only populations in lower-lying areas. Agencies and institutes like the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program have all warned that vector-borne diseases will spread more widely as the planet’s climate continues to change. “There’s been a big debate in the literature about malaria being found at higher and higher elevations as a result of climate change,” explains Douglas O. Fuller, professor of geography and regional studies in the University of Miami’s College of Arts and Sciences, who studies the distribution patterns of mosquitoes around the world. “Well, the same thing is happening in the Americas, but there hasn’t been a lot of attention in the literature.” Fuller studies mosquito populations using environmental remote sensing and other geospatial technologies, including spatial modeling to map urban sites throughout the Americas and in Haiti. His digital precision mapping technique uses environmental data such as climate layers to reveal the probability of a mosquito species occurring within a specific pixel on a map. “We’ve been pretty successful,” he says. “The idea is that some of these maps will feed into mosquito control efforts and help local authorities do a much better job at targeting whatever elimination or control activities they’re engaged in—whether it’s spraying, the distribution of bed nets, or more public awareness about areas that are likely to be at higher risks.”

Whitney Qualls, a UM research scientist with the Miller School of Medicine, sprays insecticide on plants in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Bioclimatologist Larry Kalkstein presents data on how heat impacts public health at a climate change symposium at the Miller School.

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Just before sunset on a picture-perfect South Florida evening, members of a Miami real estate organization meet at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science to learn about the biggest threat to their livelihoods and the most tangible consequence of the warming planet in South Florida: rising seas. Since the 1950s, sea levels have risen by about 9 inches right outside the school’s dock and are expected to outpace the projected global average of up to 3 feet by 2100. Among the world’s most populous cities most vulnerable to rising seas, Miami also has the most to lose—more than an estimated $3.66 trillion in assets sitting on an indefensible, porous base. Leading the group up the catwalks of the Rosenstiel School’s $15 million SUSTAIN (SUrge-STructure-Atmosphere INteraction) laboratory, Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences, says the 38,000-gallon wind-and-wave tank that can simulate a Category 5 hurricane will one day help forecasters predict which hurricanes will suddenly and rapidly strengthen. “The reason we’re so bad at understanding and predicting intensity,” Kirtman explains, “is we don’t have a really good idea of how the ocean and the atmosphere transfer energy at the air-sea interface.” Understanding how the oceans and atmosphere drive the world’s climate is immensely complicated. The sea and air are in perpetual motion. Like giant moving puzzles, each has innumerable interlocking parts. Understanding what each piece does, what it did in the past, how it varies naturally, how it’s changing with increasing greenhouse gases and rising global air and sea temperatures, and how it will affect sea levels in a particular place, like South Florida, is even more difficult. As Kirtman, head of UM’s Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, says, “It is harder than rocket science.”

Rosenstiel oceanographer Lisa Beal, left, studies how changes in one of Earth’s most dynamic currents, the Indian Ocean’s Agulhas, may be altering the heat balance of the Atlantic, with repercussions for the climate and sea levels around the U.S. and Europe.

Rosenstiel School scientists are working to nurture corals that can survive the ocean’s increasing heat and acidification.

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Charting the Course
to Our New Century

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An abridged adaptation of
President Frenk’s inaugural address

PHOTOS BY ANDREW INNERARITY

At about the time I was named this University’s sixth president, we broke ground on a construction project. This project was borne from a desire to strengthen connection.

For decades, the eastern part of Lake Osceola on the Coral Gables campus had been impassable to the western side. The bridge that got under way last summer was meant to address that limitation.

Three months ago, on a warm, clear October day, we officially opened what is now called the Fate Bridge, and together we crossed it for the first time, celebrating not just completion but connection.

When I think about all I have come to know about this University and where I believe we should head, I find myself focused on the opportunities that come from building bridges.

Before constructing a bridge, engineers draw up plans, and surveyors chart the terrain. I have been myself a surveyor of ideas these last six months, immersed in listening, learning, and leading.

I have learned that we are immensely proud of our roots and our humble beginnings. We are resilient—enduring and growing through times of turmoil, threat, and challenge. And we have an extraordinary capacity for renewal—reinventing ourselves and leaning in to hurricane-strength forces that reshape our landscape, literally and figuratively.

Just 10 years from now the University will celebrate its centennial. Where should we set our sights for the next decade? What must we do to fulfill our potential in our new century?

Today I will share what I have come to see as our greatest aspirations—four defining visions for our future. We aspire to be the hemispheric university, the excellent university, the relevant university, and the exemplary university.

Being hemispheric means capitalizing on our distinct geographic endowment—our unique capacity to build bridges that connect the Americas. Many universities seek global engagement, but the University of Miami is uniquely positioned to be the hemispheric university.

Before President Frenk delivered his inaugural address, his former boss, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, described him as an “extraordinarily able and effective leader.”

Our founders spoke of a Pan-American spirit that should imbue their new university. Today that early aspiration continues to unfold—even as the bridges that span cultures and continents grow in number and strength. We will develop a hemispheric strategy based on broad partnerships and institutional consortia that will include research collaborations, an innovation hub, and exchange programs for students. We often call such programs “study abroad,” but we might better call them “study within”—the opportunity to live inside another culture in ways that both enrich and transform.

Building on our founders’ prescient vision, we are on track to become a force for integration across the Americas and, ultimately, throughout the world.

Next: the excellent university. Our drive for excellence permeates every domain of our work—from research to public service, from teaching to athletics, from health care to the arts.

Yet, the pursuit of excellence is being challenged by the pressure to demonstrate short-term value. Increasingly, research funders require evidence of immediate impact, forgetting that many technologies that have changed the world began with a researcher asking: “Why?” Or “what if?” Similarly, the arts and humanities are often dismissed on the grounds that they lack so-called practical value—despite their crucial role in giving context to our choices and meaning to our lives.

Another threat to excellence is fragmentation into silos that divide people, ideas, and disciplines. The result is that the whole can become less than the sum of its parts. We must combat this tendency in academia by striving to build bridges, not empires. Much of this University’s potential stems from the fact that—for all the diverse strengths of our 11 colleges and schools—we are one U. In this spirit, we will foster connections across disciplines spanning from molecules to meaning.

Between now and our centennial, I am committed to mobilizing the re­sources to fund 100 new endowed faculty chairs, with a mix of senior, junior, and visiting professorships.

Building on our current strengths, I am delighted to announce a major new initiative to support basic and applied science and engineering, thanks to an extraordinary gift of $100 million from Phillip and Patricia Frost. Their generosity will carry us further and faster in our quest for excellence, across all domains critical to 21st century advances.

Educational innovation represents another exciting frontier for universities. We owe the relentless pursuit of pedagogical excellence to our students, who are our most enduring legacy and the most energizing force on our campuses. We will therefore develop a University-wide platform to take full advantage of the current revolution in teaching and learning.

If education is to fulfill its crucial function of expanding opportunities, we must build a bridge between excellence and access. Excellence without access leads to frustration and deepens social inequality. Access without excellence leads to waste and can reinforce inequality by segmenting opportunity according to wealth. While it may take a while, I am committed to boosting financial aid to meet 100 percent of student need.

Board of Trustees chair Stuart A. Miller, J.D. ’82, and Aileen M. Ugalde, J.D. ’91, vice president, general counsel, and secretary of UM, conduct the investiture and passing of symbols of office to Julio Frenk.

Along with excellence, we must commit to relevance—from the beginning, this University has served the local and global communities to which it belongs. More than ever, we must build a sturdy bridge that connects scholarship to solutions.

For instance, rising sea levels are a major threat to Miami as well as the rest of the world. Climate change is an arena where virtually every academic discipline has something to contribute and one where our institution is already showing the way forward. In the coming months, we will announce a new University-wide effort to expand our considerable expertise in sea-level rise. This is exactly the kind of transformative, global contribution that Miami can and should be making to the search for sustainable solutions.

We are enormously proud of our academic health system, but this is a time of profound change. Only health systems that successfully navigate this uncharted territory will thrive in the future. We at the University of Miami will lead the way in the new era of value-based integrated health care.

Technological innovation offers yet another opportunity for expanded impact. The University of Miami is uniquely positioned to propel the development of a major innovation hub with hemispheric scope, one that draws on our strengths in the life sciences, nanotechnology, and computational science, among other fields.

Finally, we aspire to be an exemplary university. Our value is indivisible from our values. Integrity, respect, diversity, tolerance, resilience—such qualities are at the heart of who we are and who we want to be.

Our athletic programs draw millions of eyes to the University and give us a chance to model the importance of fair and respectful competition.

One of the most important ways to be exemplary is by embracing diversity, whatever form it takes.

We have adopted the recommendations from the Task Force on Black Students’ Concerns. We have also announced a plan to develop gender-inclusive housing to better meet the needs of the students who have done so much to open our eyes to gender identity issues.

I must stress that diversity by numbers is not enough. We will develop policies and practices that foster inclusive, respectful, and safe interactions throughout our campuses.

Diversity can flourish only in a climate of tolerance. Universities must lead the way by intentionally cultivating the free expression of diverse perspectives.

This is deeply personal. My father and his family were forced to leave Germany in the 1930s. I would not be here today if they had not found a welcoming refuge in Mexico, a country that was poor economically but rich in the ways that matter most—tolerance, kindness to strangers, solidarity with those who suffer persecution. These values are as important today as when my family was given the opportunity to start a new life. I know that many of you share similar stories.

I am proud to be this University’s first Hispanic president. At the same time, I am keenly aware that each of us holds diverse identities. The resolve to stand against the external forces of discrimination and intolerance can be strengthened if we embrace our inner diversity. In this way we can counter an exclusionary definition of the “others.” Each of us is all of us. National politics and international diplomacy would be much more effective if they were driven by this conviction. Exemplary universities must demonstrate to the larger world that such an enlightened pathway is indeed possible. I commit to serve this University as everyone’s president.

I have often thought how fitting it is that a force that once threatened our existence has become the symbol of our strength. We are Hurricanes—now and always.

That invincible spirit is also reflected in the symbol of the ibis—a symbol of the resilience and renewal that define us as a University. Resilience is the capacity to not just overcome adversity, but to be strengthened by it. To be smarter for it. From our finances to our football program, that is who we are.

Renewal is not just the act of rebuilding. It is the process of reimagining, reinventing, and reinterpreting. From music to medicine, that is who we are.

I have no doubt that this same spirit will fuel our work as we continue to chart the course to our new century. Together, we will build new and necessary bridges to become a truly hemispheric, excellent, relevant, and exemplary university.

The University of Miami can be a model of renewal—redefining the global agenda and leading the way in the hemisphere, in the laboratory, in the classroom, on the playing fields, and in service to society.

With resilience and renewal, we can be looked to as a leader, and we can shape our destiny.

With resilience and renewal, the University of Miami can, like the ibis, take flight, and soar.

—UM President Julio Frenk

To watch a video of the inauguration, go to inauguration.miami.edu

Clockwise from top left: Finlay Matheson introduces Firsts at UM; Professor Donald Spivey moderates the event; President Julio Frenk and archivist Koichi Tasa examine early University records; Trustee Arva Moore Parks, M.A. ’71, discusses some of UM’s key achievements.

Inauguration Week

Firsts at UM

Golfer Terry Williams Munz, B.B.A. ’77, the first woman in the U.S. ever awarded an athletic scholarship, and professor emeritus of history Whittington Johnson, the University of Miami’s first black faculty member, both hold important places in Hurricanes history. And both were among the special guests who were celebrated at “Firsts at UM,” a wide-ranging public conversation between UM President Julio Frenk and Arva Moore Parks, M.A. ’71, a senior member of the UM Board of Trustees, held two days before Frenk’s official installation as UM’s sixth president.

History professor Donald Spivey moderated their exploration of many UM milestones at the Robert and Judi Prokop Newman Alumni Center—the first LEED-certified building on the Coral Gables campus.

Frenk, UM’s first Hispanic president, credited his paternal grandmother with inspiring him to create his own collection of “firsts” as a new member of the Hurricanes family. Over her 106 years, Mariana Frenk-Westheim, who fled the Nazi regime of 1930s Germany to begin life anew in Mexico, chronicled her first-time experiences in the book Y mil aventuras (A Thousand Adventures).

Frenk and Parks, author of the recently published George Merrick, Son of the South Wind, discussed how Merrick, the founder of Coral Gables, declared early on his intent to build a University of Miami in Coral Gables and understood even then the value of the city and university to bridge North and South America.

Their discussion also touched on the capacity of the University, chartered in 1925, to triumph over adversity, its many innovations and research discoveries, the influence World War II and the G.I. Bill had on its growth, and the role athletics and athletic achievements have always played in student life.

In addition to Munz and Johnson, other “firsts” in attendance included the grandchildren of UM’s first president, Bowman Foster Ashe; Joan Feil Clancey, M.S. ’55, the first woman admitted to the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science; and Norman Kenyon, M.D. ’56, the first student president of UM’s first class at Florida’s first medical school. Finlay Matheson spoke on behalf of his family, who sponsored the Firsts at UM event.

—Maya Bell

Pan American University: The Original Spirit of the U Lives On is on view at the Otto G. Richter Library through the summer.

Clockwise from top left: Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney; School of Communication Dean Gregory J. Shepherd, right, introduces Frost School Dean Shelly Berg; Neuroscientist Amish Jha talks about training the brain to be more attentive; Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair in Visual Journalism, discusses the power of visualization.

’Cane Talks

Waiting in line for a cup of coffee. Reading your morning email. Filling up a tank of gas. All of these things take more time than it takes to hear one mind-expanding ’Cane Talk.

Modeled after TED Talks, ’Cane Talks are 10-minute-long live presentations that are archived for future viewing at canetalks.miami.edu.

President Julio Frenk enthusiastically introduced the first installment of this stimulating new series the morning of his inauguration as UM’s sixth president.

“The idea behind this is to showcase the enormous breadth and depth of talent in our faculty, the great amazing students that we have, and the success and devotion of some of our alumni,” Frenk explained.

The first 10 speakers on January 29 included a student, an alumna, a cave-diving anthropologist, a pioneering AIDS researcher, two deans, a neuroscientist, an award-winning playwright, an expert in data visualization, and a professor specializing in the law as it relates to education, race, and identity.

During his talk, former Royal Shakespeare Company playwright in residence Professor Tarell Alvin McCraney, who recently joined UM’s Department of Theatre Arts, shared video from the hip-hop version of Romeo and Juliet he staged for the National YoungArts Foundation. Held in a Miami park—outdoor events being a key aspect of Miami culture, McCraney noted—the production united a host of local talent, from ballerinas to break dancers. “Miami now has a chance to tell its own story,” said McCraney, “a chance to capitalize on its own cultural awakening.”

In another talk, School of Architecture Dean Rodolphe el-Khoury guided listeners on a fast-forward journey from Elisha Otis’s 1852 invention of the elevator safety brake to the outer limits of the imagination—a world in which houses detect airborne viruses and bridges converse digitally with skyscrapers and highways. “What if this world of computers and the Internet was integrated with the built environment? What if you could access it and engage it with your body and your senses?” asked el-Khoury. “Now this is the world we are fleshing out here at the University of Miami.”

Commenting on the transformative power of ’Cane Talks, Thomas J. LeBlanc, UM’s executive vice president and provost, said, “There are so many fascinating and wonderful things going on here at the University that people don’t know about. If you can attend a 10-minute talk and it causes you to follow up with some additional readings, or maybe come to some additional lectures, we can get more people engaged in the intellectual work at the University.”

Watch all 10 ‘Cane Talks at canetalks.miami.edu

Inauguration Week Snapshots

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  President Frenk and longtime UM benefactor and Trustee Phillip Frost toast to a new era during an inauguration eve dinner held on the Foote University Green. The next day, during his inaugural address, Frenk announced a landmark $100 million gift from Frost and his wife, Patricia.

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  A day before his formal investiture, President Frenk participated in a ceremonial groundbreaking for the Miller School of Medicine Center for Medical Education and the renaming of the Clinical Research Building, both made possible by major gifts from the Miller and Soffer families.

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  Inauguration Week concluded at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science with a forum on teaching, research, and discovery in the new century, attended by President Frenk; Lady Blanka Rosenstiel, widow of Lewis Rosenstiel, the school’s namesake; and Dean Roni Avissar.

• 

  Carrying congratulatory signs in English and Spanish, Sebastian and students gather at the Student Center Complex Lakeside Patio for a community reception to celebrate the installation of their sixth president.

The post A Bridge to the Future appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

A few moments of intimacy became an Internet nightmare for Holly Jacobs. It cost her her name. Literally. Then it made her a crusader. “It takes an incredible amount of strength and support and money and psychological treatment to be able to come out of this and be OK,” Jacobs says. “You’re never the same. It is possible to get past it, but it completely changes your life.” In 2011, Jacobs was a victim of nonconsensual porn disseminated via the Internet. Nonconsenual porn, also referred to as “revenge porn” in the media, refers to the distribution of sexually graphic images of individuals without their consent. Jacobs went to the police. They told her there was nothing they could do, that there was no law against what had been done. At the time, only three states had laws against nonconsensual pornography, and Florida wasn’t one of them. Jacobs found help at the University of Miami, with Miami Law professor Mary Anne Franks. Together their efforts have led to laws against nonconsensual porn in 26 states and given birth to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a collaborative support and advocacy organization housed at the School of Law and aimed at helping victims, educating the public, and fighting Internet abuse on an increasing variety of fronts. “We’re concerned about people having equal protection of civil liberties online. That includes privacy, and it includes lots of other things including our right not to be discriminated against,” says Franks. “In some ways, discrimination can take place much more easily using online resources than it could have taken place 10 or 15 years ago.”

Patricia Abril studies how the abundance of private information now shared online should be governed.

From drones to self-driving cars, the law “is always playing catch-up” with technology, says A. Michael Froomkin.

The post Remotely In Control appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.

Medical Students like Patrick Azcarate are often the first point of contact for patients. Photos: Andrew Innerarity

Research Associate Clara Choi, B.S. ’14, enters patient data in the system.

Law student Roodelyne Davilmar conducts a legal intake with a Haitian mother.

The post A Clinical Collaboration appeared first on University of Miami: Miami Magazine.