Since May 1998, FIU has partnered with Peace Corps for a Master’s International Program and has recently added an undergraduate track, Peace Corps Prep, focused on international relations and community service. The program builds on the Global Learning for Global Citizenship initiative and meets the growing demand for diverse applicants for the service organization as it continues to tackle the most pressing needs of people across the globe.

“I believe that what makes FIU students so appealing is this focus that the entire school has on international business, service and environmental issues,” said Steve Hunsicker, Peace Corps recruiter. “The school really lives up to the ‘international’ in its name.”

See where FIU alumni have served with the Peace Corps

But it’s not the academic training alone that makes FIU alumni desirable candidates, says Hunsicker. The organization also values the school’s growing minority population, representing the rich, multicultural backgrounds of Americans. Hunsicker says that the success of volunteers often relies on being able to relate to those in other countries, regardless of backgrounds. This global perspective, he says, is paramount.

A centerpiece of undergraduate education at FIU, the Global Learning for Global Citizenship initiative launched in 2011, requiring all students to take global learning courses and a foreign language. The goal is to provide students with opportunities to explore real-world problems, learn global perspectives and ultimately be globally engaged.

Hilary Landorf, director of Global Learning, knows the value of a global perspective and Peace Corps first hand, as a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Morocco from 1979-1981.

“I truly believe in Peace Corps. For me, and for everyone who I’ve ever met, it’s a life transforming experience,” she said. “When I came back two years later, I felt very confident in my language and teaching skills. I went back to school, got a master’s degree and also got certified in ESOL.”

Landorf is now spearheading FIU’s Peace Corps Prep Program, which consists of four global learning courses, four semesters of foreign language, a minimum number of approved global co-curricular activities and a written self-reflection. The unique combination of undergraduate coursework and community service focuses on international development. FIU is the only school in Florida and the largest of the 24 schools that offer the program.

At the graduate level, Professor Krish Jayachandran, who heads the Master’s International Program, sees the implications of international service through the research students conduct. While the majority of the thesis topics are based on local research in the U.S., Peace Corps students focus on global environmental and social issues.

The MIP allows students to earn up to six credits for their Peace Corps service and upon completion of the classes, awards a master’s of science degree in environmental studies with a concentration in biological management.  

Mongolia

Zachary Murray ’09, currently serving in Mongolia, wakes up in the middle of the night to restart the fire in his ger, a portable tent that Mongolian nomads still use. The tent provides little warmth from the frigid temperatures. Buckets of water and eggs freeze overnight. He can’t remember the last time he ate a green vegetable.

“I eat carrots every day,” Murray said, speaking to FIU Magazine from Mongolia.

The Miami-born and raised alumnus has learned to adjust to his new lifestyle in Uliastai, the rural city accessible by a 30-hour bus ride from the capital, Ulaanbaatar. With snow on the ground seven months out of the year, his daily attire consists of heavy layers of clothes and boots.

“Living in a developing country really pushes you,” Murray said. “When things don’t work out or go to plan, it teaches you a lot. It even teaches you how many days you can go without showering.”

The religious studies graduate got bit by the travel bug after a visit to Israel so he moved to Japan after graduation and became an English teacher in Kagoshima. He then moved to Kyoto, learned Japanese, and worked in guest houses in Tokyo before carefully planning his next step – joining Peace Corps.

He was assigned to teach English in Mongolia. That involved adding a third language, Mongolian. In between teaching, Murray works with local Mongolian teachers, instructing them on lesson planning and other formal skills.

Murray thrives on the variety and scope of work that comes with his main assignment. He’s worked with two other Peace Corps volunteers to establish a basketball leadership camp, and provides dental education and care for the local youth.

“I spearhead projects, go to businesses to ask for funding, and organize camps,” he said. Doing it all in another language adds to his skill set.

“The point was not for me to do the basketball leadership camp alone, but to train the Mongolians to do it so they can continue doing it yearly and make it sustainable,” he said.

As for what’s next for the world traveler, he’s contemplating a variety of options, including the Foreign Service, returning to Japan, or maybe heading to graduate school in the U.S.

Ultimately, Murray knows that Peace Corps has shaped him into a different person.

“I like my mind always being open and discovering new things,” he said. “You learn a lot about yourself while you’re doing Peace Corps – you not only give, but you receive a lot, too.”

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Philippines

Three years after returning from the Philippines, Shala Meindel ’08 still sends packages of supplies to the orphanage she served in while in Peace Corps.

Her FIU studies in criminal justice and social work led to an assignment at an urban juvenile detention facility on the Southeast Asian island. The locked-down unit had no windows, air conditioning or beds. It housed dozens of children ranging from three to 18 years old. Many had been charged with petty crimes such as theft, while others were there for murder. Meindel saw only children in need and was focused on ministering to their critical needs: literacy, life skills, and drug and alcohol intervention.

“It was an amazing experience,” Meindel recalled. Many of the children had never gone to school and supplies like crayons and paper were foreign. Such limited resources drove her to apply for grants to supply the center with books. Slowly, she began teaching basic literacy.

The children helped Meindel learn Tagalog, the local language, to communicate better with them and understand what their lives were like on the streets.

“They have to figure out how to cope with being on the streets their whole lives and experiencing trauma,” she said. “You try to teach them things that they would use in real life. The kids in the U.S. do drugs to get high. Over there, they get high to cover the hunger pains. As a result, they get addicted at really young ages.”

About a year into her time at the facility, she was transferred to a new site – a Catholic orphanage for boys in a rural village. Her new assignment was working with teenagers who had fallen so far behind in school they could no longer attend. While she was still tasked with teaching basic reading skills, she continued to address individual needs.

Meindel won a grant through the Appropriate Water Project to pay for a water pump for the village, eliminating the one –and-a-half mile walk previously needed to get water. Running water improved personal hygiene and agriculture in the community.

Since returning to the U.S., Meindel carries on her mission to help at risk youth, now serving as an outreach worker in San Diego.

“I still love the work, but it’s different,” she admits. “Adjustment was, phew, I don’t think I’ll ever adjust. I’ve been gone three years and I still miss it every day.”

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Colombia

Stephanie Sheffield ’10 is serving in Santa Marta, Colombia, a coastal city flanked by beautiful beaches and the Sierra Nevada mountains. She arrived in August of last year for her assignment, Teaching English for Livelihoods (TEFL) project.

The TEFL project supports the training of Colombian primary and secondary teachers in improving their English as a foreign language teaching abilities through co-teaching, co-planning, workshops and one-on-one tutoring with volunteers. Sheffield works with both English and non-English teachers to improve their spoken and written English skills.

Ultimately, the project allows for the development of bilingual community activities, giving young Colombians the tools to become competitive workers in different fields, especially the hospitality and tourism industry. Sheffield feels Santa Marta has the potential to be a major tourist destination if the community becomes more proficient in English.

“FIU helped me become a great teacher,” said Sheffield, who majored in Spanish and minored in education. “In turn, it has helped me become an awesome Peace Corps volunteer. I feel that I have a lot of tools to offer the English teachers here in Colombia that I learned from FIU.”

In addition to teaching English, Sheffield serves as a resource, educating community members on nutrition, wellness and sexual health. She hosts girls’ camps, English clubs for local children and bilingual forums. She also organizes a weekly event called “Spanglish” where university students come to practice English with her and other Peace Corps volunteers.

“Spanglish is probably my favorite,” she said. “It has grown to be pretty big, and we’ve been able to help a lot of college students and young professionals increase their English proficiency and become more comfortable speaking English. Many of them are studying fields that would benefit greatly from more English speakers such as hospitality, tourism and international relations.”

Sheffield plans to return to the States for graduate school after her service ends.

“I love education,” she said. “I want to see what I can do on a global scale to help people get quality education.”

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FIU alumni have served in 74 Peace Corps posts around the world.

Vrana, who passed away in 1994, created the sculptured mural to reflect the university’s mission of providing quality education to meet the needs of the diversity of Floridians. His work was inspired by his years of travel in Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe.

Got a great FIU story to share? We want to hear them all, from any decade and any perspective. Visit go.fiu.edu/memories today and tell us your story. 

Diane Ramy Faulconer ’74, MS ’74

• Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences
• Master of Science in Management
• Lifetime Member, FIU Alumni Association

You spent nearly 40 years in the nursing profession. What attracted you to the field?

As a 12-year-old I went into the hospital for an ear infection. To pass the time, I read all the then-popular Cherry Ames novels, which were about a mystery-solving nurse. I also greatly admired the nurses who took care of me. That was a great motivator, and so in high school I enrolled in all the courses required to get into nursing school.

And did you go straight into nursing school?

The day after high school graduation I was on an ocean liner headed to Italy with my grandparents. We stayed for three months, and when I returned I inquired about admission at the nursing school affiliated with a college in my hometown in Connecticut. I was accepted even though classes had started a month before, so I spent the time trying to catch up on everything I had missed. More than a decade later, I earned two degrees from FIU.

Dean Ora Strickland likes to say, “Nursing can take you in so many directions.” Was that the case for you?

Definitely. Most of my career was spent at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, where I worked my way up from a team leader in the surgical unit to supervisor of the operating room to coordinating the ambulatory services of 52 specialty clinics and, finally, serving as director of nursing for the operating room and post-anesthesia care unit. During that time I published more than two dozen articles and was active on the editorial boards of several nursing publications, not to mention managing seven-figure budgets and a large staff. Later, I worked as an independent consultant specializing in healthcare operations, interim management and quality assurance.

You and husband Lee made a seven-figure planned gift in support of graduate students pursuing careers in nursing and business. What prompted this generosity?

We were influenced by the actions of Warren Buffett and others who have set an example of giving back to the community. The best way to support the community is to educate people. This is the right decision for us.

You have retired from nursing. How do you like to spend your time?

I have traveled the world – over 120 countries – visiting some as many as three or four times. I continue to travel and have many great experiences and meet such interesting people.   ♦

A new group has been established to get recent graduates actively involved with their alma mater in a meaningful way.

“The Young Alumni Council was founded on the idea that young alumni truly care about their community and want to give back to FIU,” says Hiram Hernandez ’03, who came up with the idea. The new council, working with the Office of Alumni Relations, will direct programming that appeals to alumni 35 years and younger, which represents about 70,000 FIU graduates.

Through activities and events, the council will promote career development, networking opportunities, leadership opportunities and philanthropy. Individuals serving on the council will also have the chance to learn about leadership through their connection with the university. They will be invited to support FIU’s fundraising efforts.

“We volunteer our time because we are grateful for FIU and the doors graduating from FIU has opened for us,” Hernandez says. “We volunteer because we believe that giving back is the best way to receive.

Currently 20 or so alumni are members of the council, but there is room for more. Interested alumni are invited to learn more at FIUalumni.com.

“We look to fill the council with young alumni who care about FIU, are dedicated to serving others and do so in a manner that represents the success FIU has had in its young history,” Hernandez says. “We hope that the Young Alumni Council is the organization that represents FIU young alumni at large.

Ultimately, Hernandez says, the group aims to showcase to the community the high-quality, caring, civic-minded professionals that FIU produces.

“Those individual qualities become yet another reason for young students and established alumni to want to come to FIU and continue the learning and growing process,” he says.

“There are many, excellent organizations throughout South Florida that serve young professionals for different reasons, but our group is special because we are focused on strengthening FIU throughout our community and the world.”   ♦

Big questions, all of them. And on any given day, they form the intellectual landscape for Washington, D.C., policymaker Peter Smith ’06, JD ’09.

He’s a lawyer and an economic analyst helping to lead a U.S. Social Security Administration project examining labor market changes over the past 30 years and setting federal policy on how skills and education prepare individuals for the modern economy. The chair of the FIU Law Alumni Association DC Chapter, he founded a nonprofit law firm in Baltimore that helps startup businesses. And in 2014, Smith was selected by the Next City organization as one of the nation’s 40 Under 40 emerging urban leaders working to improve cities.

“I’m a big believer in the value of broad experiences,” says Smith. “When you’re working on a problem that no one has cracked before, you never know from where your inspiration may come. The more clearly that you see relationships that aren’t so apparent on the surface, the more effective of a problem-solver you’ll become.”

Smith landed in the Beltway in 2009 after earning double bachelor’s degrees in sociology/anthropology and international relations, followed by a law degree. At the Social Security Administration, he’s involved with several large-scale, multi-agency, data sharing projects. In examining labor markets to set policy, Smith’s work affects dozens of federal and state programs, from access to healthcare, eligibility for welfare and return-to-work/vocational rehab programs to financial aid/student loan repayment waivers, transportation and housing services.

He’s also part of the White House initiative to push for more interactive collaboration and data exchange between agencies, and more data-driven policy.

Turns out the Social Security Administration—the federal social insurance program for retirement, disability and survivors’ benefits—holds a great deal of social, economic and demographic data that can be useful to public policy researchers. One problem they are looking at in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health involves individuals suffering from schizophrenia.

“We are using the data and reaching out to experts and saying, ‘This is our problem what do you suggest to fix it?’ ” he says. “These are huge issues that touch every single American.”

Of course, Smith notes, cities matter when you are tackling such issues. He thinks a lot about Miami and, in particular, how his alma mater can shape the city’s future.

“We have this sweet spot now where Miami is this hip spot in the world,” he says. “History tells us that won’t last. Miami has some substantial hurdles to get over, and FIU has a role to play in that.”

Miami needs a strong public research university to support the expansion of an educated workforce, Smith says, and it ranks near the bottom of educational attainment among American cities.

Along with an educated workforce, cities also need infrastructure to spur entrepreneurship. Smith decided to see if he could help create that infrastructure in his home city of Baltimore. The city, though smaller than Miami, is full of young, motivated entrepreneurs, many of them coming from Johns Hopkins University, says Smith.

He founded Condesa Union, a nonprofit law firm that gives no-cost legal advice to entrepreneurs trying to get their business off the ground. “We are working with people who have the ideas,” he says. “They see opportunities but they don’t know how to take that opportunity and make it real.”

His work with Condesa Union helped earn him selection for the prestigious Vanguard Conference held by Next City. The 40 under 40 “changemakers” come together to exchange ideas on how to improve cities across sectors, including urban planning, community development, entrepreneurship, government, transportation, sustainability, design, art and media.

What Smith realized from the conference is that it can be easy to come up with big sweeping ideas, but “it’s harder to come up with small ideas that you can do, for instance, building pedestrian infrastructure.”

For now, Smith is working in both realms — big sweeping ideas, like better managing and sharing the data of the world’s largest social security system, and also grassroots ideas, like giving a startup business a shot at making it in his local community. Where his career will go next, he isn’t quite sure.

“My plan has always been to remain as flexible as possible and keep myself as open as possible to as many potential opportunities as I can,” he says. “You get out there and take in all these ideas. That’s what makes being here so exciting.” ♦

By Karen-Janine Cohen

FIU students with an interest in Asian art know the work of Xu Bing through books or U.S. exhibits. For nine studying art and art history, however, meeting the famous Chinese artist in person during a study abroad was extraordinary.

“Seeing work in class is like watching a film,” said senior fine arts major Nathalie Alfonso of the inherent distance in classroom studies. “Being here,” she said of her trip to China, “you are not in a film anymore. You are backstage.”

The program introduced students to contemporary art through the lens of history. It focused on current work while familiarizing students with the ancient traditions and age-old cultural sensibilities that still exert influence today. Excursions included trips to cultural and historic sites while also offering unprecedented access to the studios and homes of working artists.

Related: FIU builds cooperative ties to the East

Led by FIU Professor Lidu Yi, who personally knows many of China’s artists, the group was warmly welcomed by such luminaries as performance artist He Yunchang, multimedia artist Wang Qingsong, woodcut artist Yang Hongwei and painter Lan Zhenghui. (Wang and Xu will both be holding exhibitions at the Frost Art Museum during the 2014-15 season.)

Students also gained a first-hand awareness of the key role tradition plays in contemporary Chinese art. Xu’s work, for example, invites people to consider how China can grapple with its own history, both ancient and modern, while moving forward.

“How do we face this history? If we throw away everything, we have nothing,” said Xu, who, in 1999, was named a MacArthur Fellow during a time when he lived primarily in the United States. The last centuries, he noted, were all about industrialization and westernization. Little attention was paid to preserving China’s own tradition. “We need to explore the essential values that come out of this tradition.”

 Talking to the students, Xu drew a direct line from traditional landscapes to the inspiration for his work. Reverence for nature permeates the work of the early masters, he explained, and landscape painting – along with calligraphy, which is integral to China’s visual art – are seen as the rich apex of Chinese art. They embody the traditional virtues of Chinese culture.

To understand those influences, students visited museums to see the celebrated landscape paintings from the Song and Ming dynasties as well as early Chinese bronzes. Along with art, students also visited historical sites, among them the archaeological digs in Xian that hold the Terracotta Warriors, the buried army of China’s first emperor dating to about 200 B.C.

A high point of the trip was two days spent at the Yungang Grottoes, a religious shrine and World Heritage site near Datong. Buddhas as tall as 50 feet and exuberant stone carvings of thousands of smaller Buddhas dating from the fifth century attest to the arrival and influence of Buddhism in China. There, the students toured a section undergoing restoration and still off limits to the general public. Zhang Zhuo, director of the Yungang Grottoes Research Institute, sponsored the group’s two-night stay and held a seminar on the challenge of conserving the sacred site while also welcoming visitors.

Related: A cultural roller coaster | Asian Studies program grows

The easy flow between China’s past and present is striking, said Roderick Smith ’14. “They still have ties to their history, all the way from pre-history and pre-colonial times up until now,” he said. “Chinese art has its own rules and vernacular, based on its own tradition, which makes it unique and at the same time, somehow familiar.”

Expanding students’ vision and their understanding of Chinese culture was a goal of the trip, Yi said. “I want this to be a transformative experience in many ways,” she told the students upon their arrival. “I saw the world, and the experience of learning different cultures transformed me. I want you to have the same experience, to transform, in spirit, in reality, in your future. You can feel it. You can touch it. It resonates inside you.”

Senior art history major JeanCarlos Fernandez quickly understood Yi’s message. “Looking out the window when you are on a bus or a taxi adds another layer to what you know about art,” he said. “It’s the art, the food, the culture, all of it together.”   ♦

Karen-Janine Cohen is a fine art student with a focus in drawing and ceramics, and expects to graduate this year with a BFA.

She wondered if there were other cartoons like Sailor Moon. Eventually, Garcia found a store in Miami that sold original and unedited Japanese anime comic books and videos.

That extracurricular interest grew and by the time Garcia was ready for college she knew she wanted to study Asia, and specifically Japan. She found all she wanted and much more at FIU, eventually earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Asian Studies. What made her FIU education particularly rewarding, she says, were the opportunities Asian Studies provided for her to live and study in Japan.

Related: FIU builds cooperative ties to the East

“In this corner of the U.S. there’s not a huge Asian population but we had a really good program nearby at FIU that allowed me to learn about this area of the world,” she said. “It has a good diversity of professors and courses and opportunities in place that allowed me to do things that I wouldn’t have been able to do without leaving home to go to another school. Having the opportunity here with scholarships and study abroad allowed me to indulge in these passions.”

Many are drawn to FIU’s popular Asian Studies degree programs for the same reasons. Students often fall into two camps, says director Steve Heine: they want to study Japan for its culture or they want to study China for its economy. They can do both in FIU’s Asian Studies Program, a robust contribution to FIU’s international offerings that boasts undergraduate and graduate interdisciplinary degrees, established study abroad and internship opportunities, comprehensive foreign language study, the publication of an academic journal, numerous conferences, workshops and community events.

The program continues to expand based on student demand.

“In terms of world regions in the Pacific Century, there’s no question China and Japan both economically and culturally are the fastest growing leaders,” Heine said. “If you look at our enrollment, the trajectory is upward. Student demand is really there to study this part of the world.”

The growth of Asian Studies has been supported with more than $2 million in grants from the Japan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education and the Freeman Foundation. A $275,000, four-year grant from the Japan Foundation has enabled FIU to fund faculty research and travel in Asia, the expansion of the Asian studies collection at the library, workshops and guest speakers. The grant also helps support the Japan Studies Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published jointly by Asian Studies and the Southern Japan Seminar.

When the BA in Asian studies was introduced in 2002, Heine projected an enrollment of 30 students. Today, Asian studies enrolls 150 undergraduates, plus 200 minors and certificate students. The seven-year-old master’s degree program has 25 students and is graduating eight to 10 graduate students each year. Heine has recently put forth a proposal to develop a Ph.D. program in the future.

Graduates of the program are working in a variety of places from the Japanese consulate, to museums to U.S. federal agencies that seek multi-lingual area studies graduates. After earning her master’s degree, Garcia spent two years living and working in Japan as an English teacher.

Related: A cultural roller coaster | The past and the present meet

Asian Studies is intentionally interdisciplinary with 16 faculty members in language studies, literature, sociology, religion, art, history and international relations. Around 400 students a year are enrolled in Japanese and Chinese language courses at FIU. Heine, who founded the program and has guided its growth, is among the nation’s most respected scholars of Japanese Buddhism.

During her time in Asian Studies, Garcia was awarded scholarships that allowed her to study abroad in Japan twice, solidifying her decision to live there in the future. The transition into Japanese culture, a topic that is the subject of many books by American travelers, was a smooth one, Garcia said, because of her coursework at FIU.

She had taken Japanese language for four years, studied the tea ceremony, learned about race relations and pop culture in Japan. Garcia found that her knowledge of Japanese culture opened doors to new experiences and friendships.

“It all came full circle,” she said. “Studying in-depth gave me a well-rounded education and then when I went there, I lived it from the Japanese perspective as well. People say to me, ‘Wow, you’ve gone way out there living in the Far East and experiencing something not many Americans have.’ It’s made me very grateful that the Asian Studies program is there.”   ♦

Chinese and American cultures are strikingly different, but one FIU alumna has made the transition look easy. She is proof that FIU’s Marriott Tianjin China Program prepares its students for success in the United States.

Since its inception in 2006, the China-based, FIU-run program has produced more than 250 students like Margaret Fan ’10, MS ’12: Chinese nationals who earn bachelor’s degrees on their home turf and then head stateside for master’s degrees at FIU’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management. Fan is currently a training manager at Royal Caribbean Cruises.

While working toward her BA, Fan became certain she wanted a job in a headquarters office in the United States. So in 2010 she came to Miami to continue her education. Luckily for Fan, she arrived with a cheat sheet for American culture. While studying in the FIU program in China, she spent hours each day working with American professors and American exchange students. That taught her about a number of important differences.

The exchange students she met showed her a different lifestyle and approach to learning. For example, “Chinese students focus on scores, but [exchange students] have a better balance between life and school,” Fan said. The American students, she found, took a more nonchalant approach to classes and were more concerned with job experience. Many took time from class to go on trips around China.

“Chinese students are more disciplined,” Fan said. “They sit up straight, and most students will show the professor they’re paying attention. But American students are more casual. They are not as nervous as the other students in the class.” Fan suspects Chinese students are nervous because they have a greater pressure to graduate on time. As part of that effort, most do not work during their schooling and so never get a chance to use their knowledge in a practical way before graduation. FIU’s hospitality undergraduates in Miami, on the other hand, must take internships and find part-time jobs within the field as a part of their training.

In China, classroom culture is built around structured courses where professors stress the importance of class content over its real-world application. Fan says some strict professors will routinely call out the quietest students to participate, a marked contrast to what happens in the United States, where, she says, “If you don’t make yourself loud, nobody is coming to you and asking ‘How do you feel?’”

Read more: Looking to the East | Past and the present meet | Asian Studies program grows

All the insight she gained as a student in Tianjin helped Fan adopt the mentality of an American student when she finally arrived in the United States to purse the master’s. Life was no longer strictly about school and grades, she understood, but also friendships and work.

She used her outspoken nature to develop bonds with her American professors, who helped her gain experience working at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival and, eventually, land the job at Royal Caribbean.

Fan encourages her Chinese peers to come to the United States, even knowing it will take most of them a while to get comfortable. Where she herself adapted easily enough – “For me it feels like I have a switch, on and off” – she recognizes that it’s not quite so natural for everyone else.

And while she jokingly admits that learning to like American-style Chinese food is one of the most difficult things for any Chinese student to do, the rewards of immersion are invaluable, both for purposes of working in the industry and for personal satisfaction.

“The people who adapt to two cultures are more flexible,” Fan said. “You respect all different reasons and behaviors. You accept them.”   ♦

Marcus Cooke grew up in Peterborough, England, and in secondary school he found himself friends with an argumentative lot of blokes. They were sharp, downright pedantic, and anything anybody said would immediately turn into a debate.

Their fights weren’t about sports or girls, really. One kid, his specialty was languages. Another could debate history all day. And Marcus, he got into science.

“It made you good at backing up what you say, because whatever was said, you had to prove it,” Cooke recalls.

Considering that background in proof and argument, maybe it makes sense where you can find Cooke today. He’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on free radicals and oxidative stress. The new chair of FIU’s Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, Cooke arrived over the summer from the University of Leicester in England.

If all goes well, he might one day help cure cancer. And Alzheimer’s. And find a way to stop aging.

To be fair, Cooke doesn’t say those kind of things very often. But if he’s successful, if things come together like he hopes, his work could lead to all types of cures.

“People expect we are thinking about curing a disease in our day to day, but that’s not really how it works,” said Cooke, who’s 44 years old but looks maybe 20 years younger. “What we’re doing is adding grains of sand to a pile, and someday someone is going to climb to the top of that pile and find a cure. Maybe that will be us, or maybe we will help someone else get there.”

His work boils the question of a cure down to the molecular level, studying how atoms produce free radicals, or unstable atoms desperately seeking electrons. These free radicals are produced when we’re exposed to harmful things like radiation or too much sunlight or cigarette smoke, and then they go to work invading all parts of our bodies.

Some of these free radicals do good, like combating bacteria. Other free radicals become harmful, causing disease and breaking down our DNA and protein, a process which causes aging. Cooke’s initial goal is to find a way to identify the bad ones. Once he does, then he can work on a way to eliminate them, which could quite possibly lead to curing all kinds of ills.

“I play this game with people where I’d ask them to name a disease and then I’d explain how free radicals come into play with it,” Cooke says. “It’s hard to find a disease that is not affected by them.”

The good news is that science already believes it has a way to combat free radicals. Antioxidants, found in foods like blueberries and broccoli, appear to do a good job beating them back.

One problem with describing his work, Cooke says, is that antioxidants and free radicals have become buzzwords. “Recently people have really jumped on the free radical bandwagon.”

Cooke isn’t the kind of scientist that you’ll find chained to a lab microscope. He’s more of a collaborator, the kind of guy who comes up with ideas by sitting down with his peers to solve problems. That’s exactly what the department needed, says Mark Williams, acting dean of FIU’s Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work. “Nowadays, science is so complex that the idea of a scientist in a lab doing his own work alone is not the reality,” Williams said. “We were looking for someone who is a good communicator, and that’s Marcus.”

That’s evident if you look at an invention Cooke patented. It’s called the Compac-50 HTP Comet Assay Tank. It helps process lab samples and is smaller than a desktop printer. It replaced a larger, more expensive, more complicated device. Cooke dreamed up the idea one day chatting with his lab workers about problems with the old unit. So he put together a prototype, and now his invention is being produced commercially.

It makes sense that Cooke is the guy who would come up with new ideas. He looks more rockabilly than scientist, with parted hair that slicks upward, a chain connecting his wallet to his belt, and black boots that look ready for a motorbike. His office also looks more like a museum to his passion, classic horror flicks, than one dedicated to science. “I do things in my personal life that are as far different as my day job as possible,” Cooke says. “You have to disconnect if you want to come in here and come up with new ideas.”

As for those friends from secondary school, most of them have gone on to jobs where they’re also good at arguing or proving a point. There’s a barrister, a foreign correspondent, the head of the European diesel engine program at Ford.

“When I think back on it now, maybe it sounds pretty nerdy that we spent all that time arguing about such nerdy things,” Cooke says. “But I’m glad we did.”

If it helps Cooke figure out free radicals someday, we all may be glad he did.   ♦

Political staffer Kate Yglesias Houghton ’06 was in the middle of a campaign swing through Ohio in March 2012 when she finally decided to go see a doctor. She had not been feeling well but her demanding schedule as the traveling point person to Democratic National Committee Chair and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz didn’t leave her much time to worry about her health. The then-27-year-old didn’t even have a regular doctor.

With two days off, she caught a plane home from Cleveland to Washington, D.C., and went to a walk-in clinic. She figured she had the flu. They sent her to the Emergency Room because her red blood cell count was so low.

More tests followed. Two weeks later Houghton sat across from a hematologist who began speaking about “immature white blood cells.”

Houghton knew what that meant: cancer.

Her boss is a breast cancer survivor and Houghton had been fundraising for cancer research and care for years. She’d volunteered for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She and Wasserman Schultz created the Congressional Women’s Softball Game in 2009 to benefit the Young Survival Coalition, a nonprofit that helps young women under 40 with breast cancer. The event has raised more than $500,000 to date.

Now, a doctor was struggling to tell Houghton that she had a rare form of leukemia.

“It’s got to be so hard to tell a 27-year-old she has cancer,” Houghton said. “I thought he was going to cry.”

* * * * *

Community service was part of Houghton’s upbringing. Raised in a Miami Catholic family,  she has a grandfather, Robert Yglesias, who serves as a deacon at St. Louis Catholic Church. Her grandmother, Barbara Yglesias, imbued her with the idea of “social justice.” Together they volunteered in the women’s maximum-security section of the Krome Detention Center teaching remedial English and math.

Early on, Houghton knew she wanted to make a career of community service. At FIU, she studied political science and began to see the connection between social justice and public policy.

“I realized I could go into nonprofit work, but in the course of learning about government and how many people you impact I saw that there was a way of doing what I wanted on a much larger scale,” she said. “You can help people. My eyes opened to a different world.”

She went on to earn a graduate degree in public policy at George Mason University and completed a congressional internship with Wasserman Schultz in 2007. Eventually, the Congresswoman asked her to join the team. Houghton’s responsibilities grew when Wasserman Schultz became chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

* * * * *

Acute myeloid leukemia comes with a life expectancy of three to six weeks. When she was diagnosed in 2012, Houghton was in the midst of planning the annual softball game she founded. It pits the female Washington press corps against bipartisan women members of Congress for seven innings of fun and friendship, all to help women with cancer. Houghton was too sick to make it that year.

“My husband went in my place and wore a shirt that said ‘Mr. Kate,’ ” she said.

Houghton more than beat the odds on leukemia. Four months after her diagnosis, she went back to work. The next year, she was back in the game. She poured her energy into the softball game and helped raise a record $166,000 to help young women with cancer.

“That was me sticking it to cancer,” she said.

Today, Houghton is in remission and serves as the director of the Democratic Women’s Alliance at the DNC. Day-to-day her role is to give Democratic women leaders the tools they need to effectively communicate the party’s platform and messages. She quickly analyzes and responds to issues in a fast-paced, high-stakes political arena.

The issues have always been personal for her. None more so than the Affordable Care Act. As a cancer survivor, she said, “There’s a security in knowing I’ll never be denied coverage because of this massive pre-existing condition I have.”

She’s had $450,000 of medical treatment to beat cancer. “It gave me a real perspective on what medical bankruptcy could mean,” she said. “I could lose my home for something I didn’t do to myself.”

As the oldest child of a working mother, Houghton is also passionate about establishing pay equity for women. “Women earn 78 cents for every dollar men make,” Houghton says. “I don’t understand that. I’ve been inspired by so many strong women.”

Accepting leadership of the DNC Democratic Women’s Alliance, she said, was scary. But cancer never was.

“What is the alternative? I could live or die. Dying was not an option,” she said. “I was going to live. In some ways it’s the most sure thing I’ve ever done.”

Being a cancer survivor, she said, has fueled her commitment to making change through public policy.

“People’s living conditions can be improved by the service providers, by the government,” she said. “I’ve seen how policy impacts a person in a personal way.”    ♦

By Nick Ducassi

Just beyond the shadows of downtown Miami’s skyscrapers, Desmond Meade JD ’14 stared at empty railroad tracks, planning to jump when the next train came around. How would those last seconds of his life go down, he wondered. Would wheels crush his head? Would he die instantly? Or would the life slip out of him slowly, adding more agony to the three painful decades that had brought him here in the first place?

Call it fate, God or a delay, but no wheels barreled down the tracks that afternoon. Drug use, jail sentences and chronic homelessness had driven him to the brink of suicide, but his end was not to be. At that low point, he had no inkling of the kind of turnaround of which he was capable, one that within 10 years would see him earn a law degree at the FIU College of Law.

Raised in Miami, Meade joined the Army after high school. He was kicked out of the Army though, when he was caught stealing liquor while stationed in Hawaii. After returning to Miami, he started working as a celebrity bodyguard, and the late nights led to hard drinking, drugs, and, eventually, felony drug charges.

The storm clouds were only beginning to roll in. In 1995, his mother passed away. Soon after, the bank foreclosed on his family home. Depression set in. Drugs and alcohol eased his pain but quickened his fall. In 2001 Meade was sentenced to 15 years in prison for possession of a firearm.

Good behavior earned him an early release, but life didn’t become much easier. Landing a job was nearly impossible, and Miami’s sidewalks became his mattress. That’s when, in 2005, Meade approached the railroad tracks in a daze and waited to end his life. But in a last minute moment of clarity, he came to his senses and walked across them instead.

Meade checked into the Chapman Partnership in downtown Miami, where he was given shelter, substance abuse counseling and medical services. While there, he befriended Frank Hernandez, who spoke about his own struggles with addiction at Meade’s group counseling sessions and inspired Meade to tell his own story.

Meade started speaking about his own journey at treatment centers three to four times a week. “The joy that came over me when I connected with my community, and spoke about my experience…it was a joy that I had never felt before. I had no idea that I’d been longing for that feeling my entire life.”

Not only did his words help those who heard him – they also kept him straight. “I talked the talk, and I had to walk the walk,” Meade says. Moreover, they gave him a sense of purpose and reason to live. “I discovered that true satisfaction comes in giving back to this planet – to society. It’s in that that we find our true purpose. I realized my calling was to help people less fortunate than myself.”

Back on his feet and living at the Recovery House, he decided to spend the rest of his life helping those less fortunate than himself – and that his work would involve the law. “It’s intertwined in every aspect of our lives. I knew that if I had a greater understanding of the law, I would be of greater use to the people I was trying to help – the disenfranchised.”

He enrolled in the paralegal studies program at Miami Dade College and flourished academically. While at MDC, he started working with the Formerly Homeless Forum, a group that advocates for policies to end homelessness and is a member of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. He went on to complete a bachelor’s degree at MDC in public safety management with a concentration in criminal justice and eventually worked his way up to becoming the president of the FRRC.

His professors encouraged him to continue his education, and he was accepted into FIU’s law school, but a cloud of uncertainty hung over his acceptance. Florida is one of the only states in the country that doesn’t automatically restore felon’s rights once they’re released. Moreover, the Florida Bar Association prohibits felons who haven’t had their rights restored – a process which, on average, takes more than a decade – from even taking the bar exam. There was a chance he could never practice law in Florida.

Nonetheless, if death couldn’t stop him, neither could ambiguity. He balanced his law school studies with speaking engagements and advocacy work. Eventually, the NAACP, which has been working for rights restoration causes at the statewide level for decades, caught wind of him. “He was so gifted, so clear in his understanding of the law,” says Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington Bureau and its senior vice president for Advocacy and Policy. “He was so committed. It was almost as if he was obsessed to right this democratic wrong in our society.”

This past March, the NAACP flew him to Geneva, Switzerland to testify before the Human Rights Committee at the United Nations about his experience as a felon stripped of his civil rights. “To watch Desmond testify very openly and engage one on one with these incredible leaders from all over the world was just incredible,” continues Shelton.

Associate Professor of Legal Skills and Values Ila Klion says it’s not hard to see why he’s been so effective. More than his smarts, she said, Meade “has this amazing ability to reach people. When he speaks and he smiles – people get very endeared to him. He really swoops people in.”

At the end of the day, Meade himself has skin in the game, although that’s only part of the reason he’s currently leading a charge to launch a ballot initiative in 2016 that would automatically restore the rights of 2 million formerly incarcerated Floridians. Not only would it give them the right to vote – it would allow Meade to take the bar exam.

Until his rights are restored though, Meade has plenty to keep him busy. In September, he made his third visit to the White House on behalf of the Live Free Campaign to make policy requests related to felon disenfranchisement. Meade is the state director of the campaign, which – is part of PICO, a network of faith-based organizations addressing the causes of violence and crime and encouraging congregations of different faiths to be more civically engaged.

“Personally, I think he could do more good in this world by NOT being a lawyer than by being one,” Kion said.“Whether that means felons’ rights, inner city rights, or racial oppression, he’ll always be involved with making things better.”

Ultimately, for Meade, it’s about strengthening communities from the bottom up: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the same goes for our community. To make our community strong, we must empower those among us who are the weakest,” says Meade. “You can’t just walk past the homeless guy or drug addict and say he’ll never amount to anything, because I was once that homeless guy. I was once that drug addict. As a society, we have the ability to transform.”   ♦

The dragon has served as a symbol of Chinese culture for thousands of years. Its sometimes-menacing appearance does not detract from its positive connotations: power, strength and good luck.

Yet for all the mythic creature’s bravado – Chinese parents, in a traditionally patriarchal society, have long pushed their sons to work toward dragon status – it has for most of history contented itself at home, not looking to venture beyond the borders of its native land.

That is, until now. In just a few short decades, China has steadily and methodically grown into a global economic power. Its meteoric ascent on the world stage belies its past as a once fiercely inward-looking nation. Today it actively seeks to engage with the outside, both at home and abroad. And to help keep its momentum going, the dragon has come knocking on the door of the Panther.

FIU at the forefront

In May at its annual commencement ceremonies, the FIU program that offers China’s first and only in-country foreign dual-enrollment degree celebrated its 10th anniversary. To date, more than 1,000 Chinese citizens have earned FIU degrees in hospitality and tourism management on their home turf, and another 1,100 are currently enrolled.

“There’s no other arrangement in China like what we have,” says Mike Hampton, dean of FIU’s Miami-based Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, which oversees the China program. “The student goes all four years in China and earns an FIU degree.”

The program grew out of China’s need for high-level executives who understand how to do business in the global marketplace, Hampton explains. While Chinese citizens staff the country’s international hotel, resort and restaurant chains, foreigners generally have held the upper-management positions at those companies – something Chinese leaders want to progressively change, especially as the hospitality and tourism infrastructure continues to grow. (By most accounts, at least one new hotel opens in China every day.)

Related: From China to Miami: a cultural roller coaster

“That’s how they saw this partnership, as a strategic mechanism to help prepare graduates to be qualified to go in the hospitality and tourism businesses and eventually assume the senior executive roles,” Hampton says. “They would like to see Chinese nationals serving in key leadership roles within Chinese businesses.”

Today, graduates of FIU’s China program – known formally as the Marriott Tianjin China Program in recognition of a major donor to FIU’s program in South Florida – hold top jobs with multinational corporations such as Hilton Worldwide and Royal Caribbean. Many work in China, while others – including some of the more than 250 who followed up their China-based FIU degrees with a master’s from the Chaplin School in Miami – are involved with the development of huge Chinese resorts in places such as the Bahamas and Brazil.

An auspicious beginning

The unprecedented collaboration with FIU came about as Chinese leaders recognized a need to fast track hospitality and tourism education. A meeting between officials at Tianjin University of Commerce (TUC) and FIU’s Jinlin Zhao, a hospitality professor who was born in China, led to talks, and the Chaplin School’s strong reputation – other universities vied for the opportunity that FIU eventually won – sealed the deal.

Soon after, in 2003, FIU set about working with local authorities. TUC would build, at its own expense, a dedicated campus based on specifications provided by FIU. Classrooms and labs, for example, would mirror their counterparts in Miami, and the curriculum – all courses are presented in English – would follow precisely the one offered stateside.

“Everything is taught the same way,” Hampton says. “It’s not just the language. It’s all the learning outcomes, all the support services. We have our career services support, our counseling support, everything.”

And the same graduation requirements that apply to undergraduates in Miami – among them a passing grade in English composition – have to be met by Chinese students in compliance with the standards of the U.S. organization (the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, or SACS) that accredits FIU.

Related: Interest in Asian Studies at FIU explodes

Today the program remains unique in China. Representatives from foreign universities have regularly come to TUC to observe and learn from FIU in preparation for their own collaborations with Chinese universities, although no other has established an in-country dual-degree program. Administrators from the University of Central Florida, New York University and Dublin University are among the many that have visited FIU’s TUC campus.

Says Peng Lu, FIU’s associate provost for international programs, who travels regularly between Miami and China, “In China, FIU is very famous and one of the reasons is because people can actually see FIU in Tianjin.”

More to come

The experience in Tianjin has inspired a long list of potential FIU-China projects – nearly four dozen, more than with any other country. These include 11 active, albeit currently small, programs in the College of Engineering that offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees in South Florida to Chinese students. Many of the other proposed projects live only on paper in the form of agreements and likely will take several more years to materialize. And several are cooking.

Currently on the front burner: four more hospitality management programs in, as Hampton calls them, “strategic cities,” among them Beijing and Shanghai. These programs, Hampton says, promise to be bigger than the original in Tianjin simply by virtue of their location in travel-and-tourism hotspots and in their ability to attract and educate far greater numbers.

“We have the opportunity to be the driving force in hospitality and tourism education in China,” Hampton says. “We have experience now that has given us unique insight into how to work closely with government and industry to help achieve the goals that they’ve set for their growth and development.”

Chinese trade

Just as learning to navigate the hospitality business within the context of western practices remains critical to China, so also does learning to do business in general. Once again, FIU has been tapped. Already in the works, FIU’s Spanish-language program at Qingdao University in the eastern province of Shandong follows in the footsteps of the original hospitality program. Students will earn degrees from FIU after completing four years of education in their own backyard.

“There is an interest in trading with Latin America,” explains Pascale Bécel, chair of FIU’s Department of Modern Languages, “so training speakers of the language is an important goal to achieve this.”

In fact, the move is just that: a first step toward FIU’s introducing an international business program at Qingdao University in a few years. Lu confirms that China’s interest in the Spanish language has everything to do with China’s interest in building up commerce with Latin America.

“Spanish is the hottest language in China,” Lu says. Just as many Americans are rushing to learn Mandarin, so the Chinese are scrambling to acquire the language of the next region in which they want to do business. With English already conquered, Spanish represents the new horizon.

Currently about 60 students per year are majoring in Spanish at Qingdao. FIU’s involvement should raise the quality of studies and is expected to make a big impact on the verbal proficiency of graduates – Chinese programs have traditionally placed greater attention on writing skills – who will take jobs as translators and interpreters, Bécel says. In Miami, she and colleagues will train some of the current Qingdao faculty in methods and approaches commonly employed in the U.S., emphasizing, for example, the importance of student interaction in the classroom over lecture-style teaching. As well, she will hire additional Spanish instructors, likely from within the large South Florida talent pool, to travel to China and teach the upper-division courses that constitute the FIU portion of the degree.

“It’s been a very challenging project, also very exciting,” says Bécel, who anticipates that cohorts will swell to 100 annually within a few years.

Good for South Florida

FIU’s expanding presence in China can be attributed to both its academic strength and its location in a city regarded as the gateway to Latin America.

Chinese officials, Lu explains, would like to conduct their business, particularly with Central American officials, in Miami, with its established commercial infrastructure that includes firms specializing in international law and a world-class port. Where trust in support of direct business relations between Latin America and China generally does not yet exist and past dealings have not always gone well, Lu continues, South Florida makes an attractive meeting ground to carry out trade negotiations and sign distribution agreements. Having FIU as an academic partner provides a base from which China can move forward, Lu says.

Related: The past and the present meet

Officials in the port city of Qingdao, for example, would like to maintain an office at FIU out of which to operate when in town for meetings with business and government leaders. And FIU and Miami-Dade County officials together have considered doing the same at Qingdao’s campus. Lu believes FIU could possibly facilitate greater interaction among all parties by organizing conferences that would touch upon both academic research and trade issues.

Frank Mora, director of FIU’s Latin American and Caribbean Center, agrees that the university has a role to play. “There is a significant demand on the part of Chinese businesspeople and others who have been visiting and trading in Latin America for 10 years now to learn the language and culture,” he says. “I think we at FIU can create a hub here for training, understanding, knowledge.” And, Mora adds, that education must extend in both directions: “Latin Americans want to understand and do business in China.”

Clearly, any efforts made by FIU have the potential to contribute profoundly to South Florida and the state. As FIU’s backyard becomes the nation’s center for Sino-Latin American commerce, the local economy will benefit from new port fees and the expansion of services and related industries that support such trade.

Helping the Chinese advance their hospitality and tourism goals already is having a positive trickle across effect, Hampton says.

“Because so many of the companies that are branding the resorts and operations being developed by Chinese investment groups are based right here in South Florida” – among them locally headquartered, alumnus-owned Kerzner International, which is working with a Chinese conglomerate to build the $1.5 billion Atlantis Resort in the coastal city of Sanya – “revenues come back to those brand companies,” Hampton explains. “The residual impact of that permeates many, many levels to benefit everybody. It’s good for the state of Florida. It’s good for America.”

Good for FIU

“When the winds of change blow,” goes an old Chinese proverb, “some build walls, while others build windmills.” President Rosenberg is among those promoting the windmills.

“By 2040, it is estimated that the Chinese economy will dwarf the U.S. economy,” he states. “We must prepare our students and community for this eventuality.

“Our academic collaborations and partnerships with Chinese universities and students will enable us to deepen cooperation and mutual understanding as well as economic well-being.”

The two-way street of economic well-being is real, Lu says. With 1.4 billion people, China is the world’s largest education market, and one with needs the country internally does not have the capacity to meet. “China’s education supply is not enough and cannot be improved soon,” he says. That’s where universities like FIU come in.

And so Lu encourages FIU to continue to lead, which includes fostering exchange and mutual understanding in a variety of ways. To that end, FIU is introducing students in South Florida to Chinese culture and language through several study abroad programs for undergraduates and one for international MBA students that is run by the College of Business. And recently Lu has been tasked with establishing programming through FIU’s University College, which offers noncredit courses and professional training to the community, and he is working with the Miami Dade College-based Confucius Institute, which offers similar outreach.

The activity vis-à-vis China simply reflects what FIU is all about, Rosenberg says.

“FIU’s approach to China is aligned with our broader strategy to provide high-quality learning and research opportunities to our students and faculty,” he says, “and to use win-win partnerships to find solutions to community problems.”

In the end, both the dragon and the Panther come out ahead.   ♦

Three years ago, FIU Marketing Director Eduardo Merille and I were brainstorming ways to elevate FIU on the national stage. We know FIU is a special, transformative place full of amazing people. How then, with limited resources, could we show the rest of the world what we see?

We settled on the ideal showcase: a TEDxFIUevent featuring alumni, faculty and students contributing to the global community of ideas. At the event and online, we could invite the world to experience the intellectual, scientific and artistic richness that define FIU.

Approved and officially licensed by the national TEDx organization, we set about identifying and coaching our speakers – no notes and no podium allowed on stage! – and soon had a buzz going. To help us along, we sought out a few more FIU folks who truly “get it” – such as our emcee Alberto Padron, who immediately recognized the potential of our idea. He’s been the face of TEDxFIU for three years, perfectly framing and shaping the event so it is an unforgettable experience for the audience. And Communication Arts staff member Char Eberly likewise came on board, eagerly participating in countless rehearsals and sharing her public speaking expertise and genuine support. We are grateful to Alberto and Char and the many others who fell in love with this idea worth spreading.

Convinced TEDxFIU was the perfect platform, we still wondered: Would anyone else? Well, three years later the numbers are proof positive of the impact: hundreds of speaker applicants, tickets sold out in a matter of hours, packed audiences, more than 300,000 views of our TEDxFIU videos. And then there are the speakers themselves – alumni, students and professors who have bared their souls, made us re-examine our thinking, inspired us to try again and dazzled us with their innovation.

The theme for TEDxFIU 2014, held on Nov. 13, was “Fearless Journey,” a motif that is the essence of the event itself. Our speakers shared their stories of adversity: watching beloved people die, losing it all, crashing at 200 miles per hour (literally) on the way to the finish line. And they shared their stories of triumph: transforming the lives of children, building homes in Haiti, giving back autonomy to aging adults. I invite you to be inspired by the Fearless Journey by watching their talks on the TEDx channel at go.fiu.edu/tedxfiu2014.

— Deborah O’Neil MA ’09

The center’s headquarters will be built on land donated to FIU from NTBG, and will be adjacent to The Kampong, the NTGB’s only garden outside of Hawaii. Scientists at the center, which was approved by the Florida Board of Governors this week, will lead efforts to preserve and study tropical plants for future generations. Research will have a strong focus on the economic uses of tropical plants. The center is supported by a $2.5 million gift from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust and a matching $2.5 million gift from the Batchelor Foundation.

“The International Center for Tropical Botany will leverage FIU’s global expertise in tropical studies to further our efforts in conservation and sustainability,” said FIU Provost and Executive Vice President Kenneth G. Furton. “Today, our scientists lead the way in our management of tropical plant resources and protecting the biodiversity of our planet. This center serves to further their reach to create greater understandings and stewardship of these resources that we use for food, medicine and so much more.”

The proposed 7,000-square-foot building will be designed to complement The Kampong and Coconut Grove.

By Joel Delgado ’12, MS ’17

When doctors suggested that Emily Podschweit call it quits from sand volleyball, she was having none of it.

The sophomore sand volleyball player just underwent her second reconstructive knee surgery in less than a year, but walking away from the sport she loved was not a thought she was willing to entertain.

“That wasn’t even an option. The decision was easy,” said Podschweit, who is fighting to make a comeback for the 2015 season.

The external pressure facing Podschweit is strong. Coaches want her back on the court as quickly as possible. So do her teammates.

But in order to get back on the sand, she needs to push those pressures aside and put her trust in the hands of Head Athletic Trainer Gabe Casanova ’02, MS ’07, and the FIU athletic training staff.

“I need to block out what my coaches, my teammates, and my family want and focus on what I need,” Podschweit said. “I can see the growth of my rehab because of my trust in the athletic trainers.”

Led by Casanova, a two-time FIU alum who holds a graduate degree in physical education and a bachelor’s in exercise and sports science, the staff’s main goal is to get Podschweit and other athletes like her back on the playing field safely and quickly.

“You can’t take away the drive and work ethic of a person,” Casanova said. “The average person might not be able to get through it, but someone who comes in twice a day is going to have a different outcome. That person is going to take themselves to a level where they are not the average person.”

Extensive Coverage

FIU has made a significant investment into expanding care for its student-athletes.

At the heart of their operation is the 4,500 square-foot athletic training center, where athletes from each of FIU’s 18 sports programs have been receiving treatment since its completion in 2006.

Nestled toward the back of FIU Arena, it features a hydrotherapy room with underground hot and cold plunge pools and a therapy pool with an underwater treadmill, a functional training area where student athletes can perform various training exercises and a rehabilitation area with 12 treatment tables.

On the field, they are prepared to deal with just about any injury. Off the field they handle nearly every aspect of care for the athletes – from pre-participation physicals and preventive care to first response and post-surgery rehabilitation.

The high demands and stresses on the bodies of student-athletes in their respective sports, from quarterbacks getting sacked by 290-pound defensive linemen to the unnatural act of throwing a baseball at 90-miles-per-hour, make them especially susceptible to injuries.

That’s why a majority of student-athletes – about 75 percent of them, according to Casanova – end up receiving treatment at the facility during their collegiate careers.

“We are as basic as a scraped knee and sniffles and as complicated as full dehydration with an IV and post-operative rehabilitation. We are pretty much the one-stop shop for healthcare for the athletes,” Casanova says. “It’s really fun because everything is constantly changing… it keeps you on your toes. There are a lot of different opportunities and challenges that arise.”

Casanova also uses creativity to keep athletes engaged with the healing process. For instance, he uses video games to help recovering athletes.

He came up with the idea of retrofitting a Wii controller inside of a baseball bat to help replicate an actual baseball swing during a batting practice simulation. It’s useful for players who injured a part of their body that affects their swing, like a broken finger.

The Wii Fit can also be used to treat athletes recovering from concussions by combining mental exercises (such as working out math questions that flash up on a screen) with physical activity (raising a barbell to one of three different heights, each of which corresponds to a multiple-choice answer). This simultaneously helps student-athletes work on muscle development while improving their cognitive function during recovery.

“It’s extremely important to think outside the box. You want to create techniques that are realistic and sports-specific for the athletes,” Casanova says.

Related: Training the trainers: FIU program a cut above

The athletic training staff includes six athletic trainers, including Casanova, and six graduate assistants who are working toward attaining a master’s degree at FIU, usually in sport management or physical education: sports and fitness studies.

Mick Thompson, a graduate assistant on staff who works with softball and women’s soccer players, experiences many of the demands that come with the profession everyday.

From never knowing when a catastrophic injury will occur to managing the expectations of coaches with a manageable recovery time, the job can take a toll.

“It’s a high stress job, there’s a lot of pressure to get them back on the field and to get the athletes healthy,” Thompson says. “The work ethic of these athletes always impresses me and pushes me. This is everything to them and I want to work just as hard as they do. It goes both ways.”

Beyond the Physical

But athletic trainers are not just there to tend to sprained ankles or broken fingers. Their care often extends well beyond the physical.

Little can be more devastating for an athlete than suffering an injury that forces them to sit on the sidelines and endure an often painful rehab process – and there is often an emotional toll that the athletic trainers witness firsthand.

“We’re not only here just for the physical therapy or the triage care but we’re here to help kids balance out their emotions on how they’re feeling and why they’re not playing or not healing as fast as they thought,” Casanova says. “It’s heartbreaking at times. You’re their rock and you’re what they got. It can get pretty intense.”

That makes it even more important for the athletic trainers to be encouraging during the discouraging moments of a student’s recovery.

“We have to be positive with them, greet them with a smile and keep rooting them on. Just as a ‘normal’ student, we make sure they are going to class, doing their homework, managing their time well, taking care of their bodies, making sure they’re eating properly and staying hydrated properly,” says assistant athletic trainer Bailey Mintz, who received her master’s degree in recreation and sport management from FIU in 2013.

When FIU baseball player Aramis Garcia, drafted this summer by the San Francisco Giants, suffered an oblique-muscle injury late in the 2014 season, Head Coach Turtle Thomas was hoping to have him back on the field as soon as possible. But he also understood that the best thing he could do was let the athletic trainers do their work.

“They do a great job taking care of them and they are great at getting players back to us as fast as they can,” Thomas said. “It’s important for us to listen to them and work with them.”

Working with Casanova and assistant athletic trainer Tim Vigue, Garcia received the help he needed to pull through some of the frustrating moments of the rehabilitation process.

“The hardest part of that was not being able to be there for my teammates at such a pivotal point during the season,” said Garcia, who went on to become the Conference USA Player of the Year. “What they do physically for us is just a part of what they do. I’d tell Tim, ‘It sucks not to be out there,’ and he helped me stay positive throughout the process. To me, how you help an athlete mentally is the most important part.”

After sitting almost a month, Garcia was able to return to the lineup just in time for the conference tournament and was drafted by the San Francisco Giants in the second round of the 2014 MLB First-Player Draft shortly after the season ended.

Casanova, along with the rest of the athletic training staff, has earned the trust of the athletes. They trust him with their health, with their recoveries and with their overall wellbeing.

“Gabe always lives up to his word. If he says something and he guarantees it, it’s going to get done no matter what,” says Jessica Mendoza, a senior on the sand volleyball team. “We know he has our back and that he’s going to look out for us. He’s trying to benefit us for our future and help us be healthy for life.”

Related: Top surgeon has been caring for FIU student-athletes for two decades

For Camila Rosado, a senior on the sand volleyball team, the personal investment made by Casanova into their lives is just as important as the skills and expertise they possess.

Rosado suffered a torn labrum in her shoulder that doctors originally thought would have her out for six months. Working with Casanova and his team, coming in twice a day, nearly every single day during the rehab process got her back on the court in just three.

“He cares about every single athlete here and that’s something in the end that’s just as important as him being good at what he does,” Rosado says.

In the decade he has spent treating FIU athletes, the players have become more than just patients or part of the job.

“People always ask me ‘Do you have kids?’ I say I have two at home and 434 at school,” Casanova jokes. “They do things that take you to the boiling point and then they do things where you absolutely fall in love with them. There are athletes here that I would love for my own kids to be like because they’re pretty awesome.”

Road to Recovery – and Success

And while the athletic trainers are often there for some of the most difficult times in an athlete’s collegiate journey, they are also there for the high points as well.

For Casanova, watching his athletes succeed on the playing field and overcome doubts due to a serious injury make all the extra hours and long days worthwhile.

“Whenever I have someone with a catastrophic situation and we get them back from a major surgery or a major injury where the thought was they might not ever come back… Every time I see them get back on the field, my eyes water,” Casanova says. “That outweighs everything else.”

In 2010, Casanova was on hand to witness FIU baseball’s magical run through Sun Belt Tournament in Murfreesboro, Tenn., as the team won its first conference championship in over a decade.

After the Panthers won the championship game, seniors Junior Arrojo and Corey Polizzano presented him with the trophy privately to show their appreciation for the role he played in helping the team get to experience that moment.

“For us to be successful as a program, you have to have your best players on the field,” Thomas said of the baseball team. “We wouldn’t be able to do that if it wasn’t for this staff.”   ♦

As a young chemist in 1988, Kenneth G. Furton faced a career-defining decision. After completing post-doctoral research work in nuclear science at Swansea University in Wales, Furton returned to the United States where he was recruited by industry and academia. Two job offers were of particular interest. The first was Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company. The second was FIU.

“I asked my mentor, Professor Howard Purnell, what he thought I should do. There was no doubt in his mind,” Furton said. “He knew I would want the freedom to dream big and pursue my own research. Once I realized he was right, the decision became easy.”

When Furton arrived on campus, FIU had eight buildings and 17,000 students. He helped to grow the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, first as an educator, later as department chairman. All along, his true passion has been his research. Furton found a niche in forensic chemistry and, in particular, scent detection. His career’s work has produced more than 700 journal articles and presentations on drugs, explosives and human scent detection while guiding the careers of more than 100 students who have worked in his lab. His findings have influenced policies worldwide involving canines in law enforcement. Along the way, he founded the International Forensic Research Institute at FIU, the first approved by the State of Florida to assist law enforcement.

By 2001, the seasoned chemist moved into the administrative offices of the College of Arts & Sciences. Six years later, he was named dean. Without hesitation, he changed the face of FIU’s largest and most diverse college, organizing it into three thematic schools that address some of the most critical issues facing society today.

And now, Furton will lead the academic future of the university that recruited him nearly 26 years ago. In April of this year, President Mark B. Rosenberg appointed Furton FIU’s new provost. Writer JoAnn Adkins sat down with Furton to talk about his new role as FIU’s senior academic administrator.

As provost, what are some of your big ideas for FIU?

My top priority is to lead the development and implementation of a bold new strategic plan for the university. There are four focus areas – improving student success, highlighting preeminent programs, expanding FIU’s financial base and attaining the top Carnegie research classification. My overarching goal is to ensure that the quality of an FIU education and the value of an FIU degree constantly improve.

What plans do you have to expand FIU’s research agenda?

I believe strongly that FIU should strive for Carnegie Very High Research classification, the premier classification in academia. Our scientists are already performing cutting-edge research. If you look at what we’re doing with sea level rise, nanotechnology, ADHD in children and transportation, you realize FIU takes its role as Miami’s public research university very seriously.

Nationally, much focus has been put on STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] education. What does that mean for FIU? For the social sciences and humanities?

STEM education is critical to America’s innovation success, but the U.S. is being outperformed by other countries. As a result, it’s become a national priority, which creates a real opportunity for FIU. We’ve made an effort to develop more innovative STEM courses and educational programs to help students excel. Plus, the diversity of our student population is a generation ahead of most of the rest of the country, so FIU can serve as a national lab for STEM transformation.

Having said that, the humanities and social sciences are more important than ever, because employers want well-rounded employees. We split the College of Arts & Sciences into three schools to ensure the humanities and social sciences were integrated with the natural sciences so we could provide innovative interdisciplinary programs. The integration of these disciplines is the key to graduating critical thinkers, team workers and effective communicators.

With your twins, Robert and Courtney, entering their sophomore year at FIU, what insights on FIU have you gained as a parent?

It’s been very insightful, actually. Through their eyes, I’ve seen areas where I know we can improve as a university. It’s helped me to think more about the actual student experience and how we can do things to give the students a clearer roadmap to success. You think you really know everything you need to know about a job, but as a father, I’m learning new things about FIU every day.

Are people surprised when they find out you are still a practicing forensic scientist?

Probably. I have testified as an expert witness dozens of times including in high profile capital murder trials. My research was also recently cited in the Supreme Court decision affirming the use of drug dogs for probable cause to search vehicles. I’ve actually expanded my focus to include birds and elephants in recent years. It’s definitely been a challenge to maintain an active research group and be dean, but it’s also very satisfying.

You’re often sporting some unusual neckties. Just how many do you own?

It’s definitely in the hundreds. My favorite is my Rolling Stones tie. I actually proposed to my wife, Debby, at a Rolling Stones concert.

What is something about our new provost that might surprise the FIU community?

I was a thespian in high school. I actually joined the drama club because my older sister, Karen, was a thespian and we were very competitive. My favorite performance was playing Anne Sullivan’s dead brother in “Miracle Worker.” Anne Sullivan was Helen Keller’s governess. Karen played Helen Keller. Playing a spirit, I had to deliver all my lines offstage. I thought I gave the performance of a lifetime but to this day, my parents and two other sisters still rave about Karen’s performance though she didn’t have to deliver a single line! The rivalry still continues.

What is your favorite spot on campus?

The Graham Center, during lunch in front of Bustelo. It captures the essence of FIU.   ♦

The U.S. airship K-74 spotted a dot on its radar just after midnight on July 18, 1943. It was almost certainly a German submarine thousands of miles from home, cutting through the Florida Keys.

The K-74 was one of about 200 zeppelins the U.S. military used to patrol coastlines during World War II. It had arrived days earlier from the Goodyear factory in Ohio. That night it would be one of two blimps patrolling the South Florida coast. They were searching for German subs that had been sinking merchant ships.

Lt. Nelson Grills, the K-74’s pilot, ordered his 10-man crew to battle stations. Built for scouting, Blimps weren’t supposed to start a fight. But there were merchant ships nearby, and Grills figured he had to act.

The moon was half full, and the pilot needed to use it to cover his approach. He angled the blimp to keep the moon in front of him so that they wouldn’t be silhouetted in the sky. He pressed down on the helm, and the 250-foot airship went nose first toward the mysterious ship. The dot on the radar was eight miles out.

There wasn’t much to protect the blimp. It had a .50-caliber machine gun, but the bullets would bounce off the reinforced deck of a German U-boat. Grills also had a .45-caliber handgun under his seat.

Petty Officer Isadore Stessel manned a handle that would release 500-pound bombs. They were set to go off after sinking 50 feet in the water, right where U-boats usually traveled.

Stessel wasn’t supposed to be there that night. Before the blimp set off from its base south of Miami, Stessel had been a last-minute replacement for a regular crewman. The bombs he controlled were the only chance they had to sink a U-boat, so the whole mission now rested on a substitute bombardier.

As the zeppelin dipped down to 250 feet above the calm waters, the crew could see the sub was riding on the surface. Moonlight lit up its wake. Grills told his crew to sit tight. If the vessel ended up being one of theirs, it wouldn’t fire at the passing blimp. If it began shooting, they’d know they were in for a fight.

The crew saw the muzzle flashes before they heard them, bright yellow explosions like blinking lights on the deck of the sub. One struck the K-74’s windshield, others peppered the balloon above them.

It was almost surely a suicide mission now. Blimps had no chance of surviving a fight with a U-boat, which had a pair of anti-aircraft guns on its deck.

The K-74 returned fire from its .50-caliber machine gun. Grills ordered Stessel to begin dropping bombs. But nothing happened.

The petty officer may not have heard the pilot over the blasting machine gun. Grills repeated the order. Drop the bombs, now.

That encounter, at just about midnight off the Florida coast, is the only known battle between a submarine and a zeppelin. It made headlines in papers across the globe, but it was soon just another forgotten battle between two mismatched crews.

Then came Anthony Atwood, a historian and Navy veteran, who earned a Ph.D. in history from FIU in 2012 writing his dissertation on the history of World War II in Florida. When he found out about the battle with the U-boat – and the harrowing and ghastly night the crew spent afterward – he became obsessed.

First, his fixation was to document the battle, to put it down on paper like never before. The forgotten piece of history eventually became his master’s thesis. Then he took inspiration from the fight to do something bigger. It became his starting point for an effort that should’ve been done a long time ago.

* * * * *

Anthony Atwood looks the part of career Navy. The 53-year-old is stocky, with a mess of gray hair that matches a thick moustache. He speaks like he’s giving an order to a petty officer, with short, declarative sentences that you can hear down the hall.

He joined the Navy after graduating from the University of Miami in 1981, climbed the enlisted ranks to chief yeoman or E7, and then earned a promotion to chief warrant officer, or officer grade. He spent plenty of time at sea and part of his service as a recruiter. “I handed out fliers at airshows,” he likes to say. It’s modesty, considering he also served during Desert Storm on the USS Blue Ridge command ship as it patrolled the Indian Ocean.

He got out in 1998 and entered the Navy Reserves. It wasn’t long until he found what he’d be doing next. He was at a Veteran’s Day event at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum, next door to Zoo Miami southwest of Kendall. He was standing at the edge of the property when a fellow veteran pointed through a chain link fence.

“Wouldn’t that make a great history museum,” the man said.

Atwood considered the fact that there isn’t a museum recognizing the sacrifice of soldiers anywhere in South Florida. “Bottom line, I was called to this project,” Atwood says. “I was motivated to pay it forward for those who didn’t come back.”

Atwood looked out over the weeds poking through an old parking lot. Beyond it was a two-story, colonial-style building that looked ready to collapse. Part of it had been burned off and large sections of the siding were missing.

But the building also had Navy in its DNA, with large columned entranceways and three stately dormers looking out from the roof.

Atwood researched the building and discovered that it had served as the CIA base for training anti-Castro fighters, an Army Reserve center, and a Marine Corps Reserve center. All of that came after its original purpose, as headquarters of Naval Air Station Richmond. During World War II, three colossal hangars stood behind it, each one long enough to hold ten football fields. In them, blimps were prepped for their scouting missions.

So it was right there, where Atwood had been standing that Veteran’s Day, that the K-74 had launched for its night-time patrol.

Atwood formed a nonprofit and began raising funds for a first-ever South Florida military history museum. In 2000, the Florida Legislature gave his organization $41,000 in seed money.

The next year, Atwood enrolled at FIU to get his master’s degree in history, irrevocably intertwining the twin efforts to document one of the war’s forgotten battles and to open a new museum to tell that story and many more from Florida military history.

* * * * *

As the K-74 lumbered its way down to the ocean below, the U-boat’s guns went oddly quiet.

The zeppelin had been spraying the deck with machine gun fire. The airship’s gunner had already gone through an entire belt of ammunition and reloaded the .50-caliber for another volley. And while the U-boat’s hull was thick enough to stop the rounds, there was no protection for the men manning the guns on the deck. It’s likely the K-74 had taken out a couple of them.

As the zeppelin passed directly above the U-boat, Grills shouted again for his replacement bombardier to pull the handle. This time, Stessel heard his pilot. He released one bomb. Then another. Two drum-shaped canisters dropped into the water below and exploded 50 feet down.

The U-boat’s guns opened fire again. They struck the blimp’s engine and sliced through the balloon. Fuel cells came dislodged and dropped to the ocean. The change in weight sent the blimp skyward, straight up. The crew was tossed around the cabin.

They climbed to 2,500 feet before the K-74 had enough. Luckily for the crew, it had enough helium left in the balloon to make a slow, gentle landing on the ocean.

Grills ordered his crew to inflate the life raft. But nobody was holding the rope as they threw it from the cabin; they watched it quickly drift out of reach. They dove into the Florida Straits. Stessel misjudged the jump and gashed his leg on the way out.

Grills placed classified documents into a weighted box and tossed it overboard. Water filled the cabin. He was almost ready to jump when he remembered the gun under his chair. If the U-boat returned, they may need to fight to keep from becoming prisoners of war. He sloshed through the ankle-high water and pulled the .45 from its hiding place.

By the time Grills returned to the door, his crew had floated away. He shouted but heard nothing in response. The airship was sinking, and he could wait no longer. The pilot jumped in. Alone, he decided the only thing he could do was swim to shore.

Islamorada was 25 miles away.

* * * * *

In January 2002, Anthony Atwood found himself in his own little corner of the Caribbean. Just as things had been heating up on his military history museum project, and most of the way through his master’s thesis, the Navy called up the Naval Reservist for full-time duty.

They sent him to Gitmo, that prison on the island of Cuba for the War on Terror’s worst. Atwood, a chief yeoman, patrolled the waters in case al Qaeda decided to come for a rescue mission. “Most of the time, we were just telling French tourists in sailboats to stay away,” he says, that modesty coming through again. “Luckily, al Qaeda never showed up.”

When he returned in October 2002, Atwood went headlong into his master’s thesis. On July 18, 2003, he published An incident at sea: The historic combat between U.S. Navy Blimp K-74 and U-Boat 134. In 130 pages, he documented not only the battle, but the circumstances that led to it and the aftermath.

In 2007, Atwood convinced the Department of Defense to sell the old airbase building next to the zoo for $1. Then he got Miami-Dade County government to chip in $3 million, and the state later added $500,000, part of a Building Better Communities initiative to improve Zoo Miami into a world-class destination. At that point, he was halfway to the $6 million he would need to open the South Florida Military Museum.

“At that point, they were so sick of me coming around asking for money,” Atwood jokes. “They were calling me Mad Mr. Atwood.”

Atwood needed to get the building off U.S. government property. So in 2010, the historic building was fitted with 96 airplane tires. Workers then slowly moved the building a half mile to where it sits now, just next to the train museum on county-owned land. A host of dignitaries were there, including Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart and Miami-Dade Commissioner José “Pepe” Diaz, who helped pull on the ropes. The building is the biggest historic structure ever moved in Florida, Atwood notes. It has become an engineering feat – the largest historic preservation project underway in the state.

Once in place, the work was really just beginning. Atwood needed to have a crew rip out asbestos. The entire interior would need to be gutted. And then every inch of the building would be refurbished.

He also had a big job before he could get the museum opened. He needed to figure out how to raise another $3 million.

* * * * *

While the K-74’s pilot swam to shore, the other nine crewmen held hands so that they wouldn’t drift apart. The flat seas that they had seen when they set out at dusk were being replaced by whitecaps. And among the waves, they spotted dorsal fins.

The blood from Stessel’s wound was likely attracting the sharks. The men had three pocket knives among them, and they pointed the blades out in front of them, even though they knew they would do little to fight off the predators.

At 7:45 in the morning, a Navy seaplane spotted them bobbing in the water. In response, a World War I-era destroyer tied up near Mallory Square in Key West fired up its steam engines. The USS Dahlgren was being used for training exercises. If the U-boat spotted it, the destroyer would have little chance to fight back.

It had taken the zeppelin the entire night to deflate. By about 8 that morning, it finally sunk. When it reached a depth of 50 feet, its final two bombs burst. By then, the men had drifted far enough from the wreckage to avoid the explosions.

It was about then that Stessel lost his grip. He drifted away from the other men. They shouted for him to swim back. But he was pulled under. He surfaced once more before the sharks dragged him down for good.

The rest of them huddled, back to back, clutching the pocket knives.

The Dahlgren reached them at 9:45. They had been in the water for nearly 10 hours. The destroyer’s crew spotted dorsal fins circling. The captain steamed forward, dangerously swamping the sailors in the boat’s wake, chasing off the sharks. The Dahlgren’s crew pulled up some of the men, while another boat nearby saved the others.

Eight of them were safe, but their pilot was still missing.

The Navy diverted a small flotilla in an effort to find Grills, pulling ships from as far as the coast of Cuba. He was spotted just before nightfall, 12 miles from the sight of the crash. He had made it nearly halfway to Islamorada. Sharks had circled him the whole way. His life jacket had cut into him as he swam, causing a severe slash on the back of his neck. He was dazed, sunburned, and dehydrated.

Things didn’t get better for the crew. A naval inquiry stopped short of concluding that Grills erred in attacking the sub, but none of the men were commended for their actions. The report also incorrectly claimed that the crew failed to drop bombs. In the official record, it was as if their attack had done nothing but lead to the destruction of a blimp and the gruesome death of Stessel.

The K-74 finally found deserved credit from an unlikely place. German military records released more than a decade after the war included communications sent from U-boat No. 134. They reported a battle with a zeppelin off the coast of the Florida Keys. The blimp had dropped bombs on the U-boat and caused damage to the sub’s ballast tanks. It was proof that the K-74’s crew had done its job that night by inflicting damage to the U-boat.

Allied ships chased U-boat 134 for the rest of that summer. Nobody can say for sure, but the K-74’s bombs likely weakened the sub. By September 1943, the German Navy declared U-boat 134 missing in action. It was never heard from again.

In 1960, the United States Board for the Correction of Naval Records reopened the inquiry into the battle. The board amended the official record to show that the crew dropped two bombs on the U-boat. The Navy awarded Grills, who had become a lawyer in Indianapolis, a Distinguished Flying Cross. The surviving members of his crew received a Navy Commendation Medal.

But the board overlooked the crew’s substitute bombardier. Stessel, the crewman who had been eaten by sharks, received no credit. After a petition from his cousin, the Navy in 1996 finally awarded Stessel a Purple Heart, the Navy Commendation Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.

In his thesis, Atwood writes that the battle embodies military sacrifice. “Its crew made a hopeless sacrifice attack, knowing they would go down. What bigger, easier target is there than a blimp at point-blank range? Where less inviting to enter than into mid-ocean at midnight? Still they went into the crucible of combat.”

* * * * *

Atwood stood on the temporary plywood floor of the future 12,000-square foot South Florida Military Museum recently and began an imaginary tour. “You’re standing where a person comes in, and they’re directed right here, into the gift shop,” he said, moving through a two-by-four frame that will one day be a doorway.

Inside, the building was still nothing more than plywood and studs. But outside, workers had reconstructed the intricate wooden entranceways and patched the termite-eaten siding. Signs of the fire were gone, and the asbestos had long ago been removed. Newly installed windows still have tags on them.

He continued through the rooms to come, each dedicated to a war in which South Floridians served.

“This picture,” he said, presenting a portrait in the future Vietnam room, “this is Bruce Carter. He was killed in Vietnam. Fell on a grenade and saved four others. He got the medal of honor.”

Upstairs will be the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis rooms. Across the hall, Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s those young veterans Atwood thinks about most. “This is for them,” he says again and again.

Atwood always exudes energy, but here, on this virtual tour of his space, is when he truly becomes animated. He gesticulates to the future display cases and offices. He imagines a museum with several staff members, including a professor, a librarian, and a secretary. Maybe they’ll add a post-graduate FIU fellow and a team of interns.

To get there, he’ll need more money.

This year, the Legislature sent Atwood another $1 million. But he’ll still need another $1.4 million to get the doors open. “Where am I going to get that from?” Atwood says. “I don’t know where. I have a lot of things in the fire and a lot of pledges, so we’ll see. We’ll see who comes through.”

He doesn’t worry, though.

“No, I don’t lose sleep,” he says, finishing the tour with a quick dash down the temporary stairwell. “I’ve already died and went to heaven so many times out of worry. So I don’t die anymore.

“It’s a freaking hoot to see this come together.”

Downstairs, Atwood has a makeshift office set up with picture books laid out. They include photos of the building when it served as a headquarters for zeppelins.

When he worries if he’ll have the money to finish construction, Atwood just needs to look at the photos of the airfield that once held the K-74 and imagine when it set off on its final flight.

After all, Atwood did all of this for guys like Grills, who swam 12 miles in shark-infested waters. And Stessel, that backup bombardier who never returned from the ocean.

That memory is enough to keep Mad Dr. Atwood going.   ♦

• Senior Vice President of Animal Health, Research and Conservation, Georgia Aquarium
• FIU Doctorate in Biology (Immunology)
• Alumni Association Lifetime Member
• 2014 FIU Torch Award Recipient

You’re a man of science, but many might see instead a lucky guy who gets to work with beautiful creatures. Which of these descriptions best fits you?

I think the second. Whether working at Georgia Aquarium with whales or in Florida with our stranded-dolphin program, I feel blessed to be around these animals, even 30 years into my career.

What started you down this career path?

My interest in becoming a veterinarian took root at age three or four while growing up in rural western Pennsylvania. We had various pets – dogs, cats, hamsters and, later, raccoons, birds and rattlesnakes – and my mother encouraged me by taking me to zoos and aquariums.

And how did you get where you are today?

As a veterinarian in Miami, I became interested in what causes diseases in animals. That led to four years of postdoctoral comparative pathology training at University of Miami School of Medicine as a National Institutes of Health Fellow. I then became interested in how disease relates to immune function, which led me to FIU. My dissertation work there on marine mammals was pivotal in my landing the job at Georgia Aquarium, the largest in the world.

Tell us about your research activities.

Much of my present research involves bottlenose dolphin health assessment studies in the Indian River Lagoon off the Atlantic coast of Florida. That work has morphed into using dolphins as sentinels for the health of oceans and even human health, which is like using dolphins as the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Frankly, we’ve haven’t been very good stewards of the ocean environment, and I believe that is starting to catch up with us. It is in our own best interest to investigate all wildlife health patterns that could potentially affect our own wellbeing as three-fourths of all emerging infectious diseases in humans originate in wildlife.

People often think of aquariums as tourist destinations. Why do we need such places?

Modern aquariums and zoos provide transformative life experiences and inspire children and adults alike. I am a living example. And besides the education they offer, aquariums and zoos conduct critical research and conservation programs. For example, our team at Georgia Aquarium is working with coral reefs in the Florida Keys, whale sharks in Mexico and endangered penguins in coastal South Africa, among other projects.

Tell us about your animal friends.

My favorites include Florida manatees. They are amazing creatures with a remarkably responsive immune system. My wife and two young daughters just got a new Labrador puppy called Sunshine. We have a ball python named Sammy and two macaws, Griffin and Caleb. They all are important members of our family.   ♦

“It’s been a great experience,” said Yam, who could not be happier with her choice.

She and fellow students are entering the workforce with better qualifications and more experience than their competitors. In fact, this summer, some of them are working to ensure that athletes like pro-football stars Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson finish their training camps ready for repeat MVP seasons.

FIU’s professional master’s program in athletic training was launched in 2007 – one of just 29 in the country and the only in Florida – and in just seven years it has become one of the most well-known in the nation. Selection is competitive: Generally only 25 out of 80 applicants make it in, and failure is not an option.

A rigorous schedule has students spending half the week in class and the other half in clinical rotations with FIU athletic teams, at local high schools and in doctor’s offices.

“I like the flexibility of our classes,” Yam said. “We only have classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And we have two days for our clinicals. It allows us to see a variety of injuries.”

Classroom time includes working with programmable, life-like mannequins that simulate the kinds of situations with which athletic trainers deal everyday: broken bones, cuts and trauma to organs. As students diagnose their “patients,” classmates act out the roles of concerned parents, coaches and teammates to help create the often-chaotic atmosphere in which athletic trainers find themselves.

Such high-tech training boosts learning outcomes and increases confidence and critical thinking skills, says Jennifer Doherty-Restrepo, director of the program. The results: In the past three years, 100 percent of FIU graduates have passed their board certification exams on the first try.

Related: Athletic trainers play critical role in the health and well-being of student-athletes | Top surgeon cares for FIU student-athletes

“FIU is way ahead of the game. Athletic training educators from other programs are looking to us to give them the how-tos to incorporate simulation into their programs,” Doherty-Restrepo said. Department heads from Florida State University and Florida Gulf Coast University are among those who have visited campus to see what they can learn.

And an emphasis on evidence-based practice – a method that requires students to research injuries and understand the reasons for treatments instead of simply mimicking their instructors – prepares them to step into an environment where anything can happen. Students can be found on the sidelines during every game played at FIU and many local high schools. That level of activity is a key reason they are able to compete for and complete internships at fast-paced, high-visibility organizations.

Yam is currently an intern at NASA’s Rehab Works program, which trains and rehabilitates what she calls “industrial athletes.” She said she mainly deals with overuse and postural injuries from engineers who do not lift properly and desk jockeys who are mostly sedentary.

The need for athletic trainers in this area is continuing to grow: Companies like General Motors have started hiring them to evaluate workstation setups and potentially hazardous situations and to rehabilitate workers on-site in hopes of cutting healthcare costs and reducing worker’s compensation claims.

“We provide the one-on-one contact that patients need,” Yam said. “I’m loving it.”

Meanwhile, student Elijah Bouldin is interning with the Minnesota Vikings, and a fellow classmate with the Denver Broncos – two nerve-racking positions.

“It’s millions of dollars behind the people you’re touching, the product you’re touching,” Bouldin said. “You don’t want to mess up, but I think I’ll be okay.”   ♦

Fifteen FIU cheerleaders were waiting to get their physicals over the summer when the resident physician was unable to show.

So Dr. Keith Hechtman, one of the most highly regarded orthopedic surgeons in the country, did the physicals himself. For more than 20 years as FIU Athletics has added new sports, changed conferences and advanced in division, Hechtman has been treating and caring for FIU’s athletes as the head of sports medicine.

“This is not a guy who’s trying to learn the ropes. He doesn’t need to drive across campus to do physicals for us, but he will because of his dedication to us,” FIU Head Athletic Trainer Gabe Casanova said.

Hechtman’s dedication to the health and wellbeing of FIU’s student athletes dates back to the early 1990s, shortly after returning from his service as an orthopedic surgeon for the U.S. military during Operation Desert Storm.

Related: Training to win: Athletic trainers play critical role in the health and well-being of student-athletes

Not only does he treat FIU’s athletes, but also serves as an assistant team physician for the Florida Panthers hockey team and was a physician for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

He has earned a reputation as one of the best physicians in America and has consistently been named one of nation’s “top doctors” by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd. since 2003.

“He is the best all-around physician I have ever worked with,” Casanova says. “No one can perform the types of surgeries he does as well he does.”

Hechtman’s goal is not simply getting players back on the field as soon and as responsibly as possible – something he is very good at. His top priority is to make sure that the student-athletes in his care will be healthy long after they end their collegiate careers.

“We want to do what’s best for the athletes not just in the immediate, but also for four or five years down the road when they are starting their families,” Hechtman said.

When a student-athlete first comes to Hechtman and his team for an evaluation after an injury, his first goal is to provide them with peace of mind.

“They come in sometimes scared and worried about how seriously they are injured. We want to give athletes reassurance and the confidence that we can treat their injuries and that we are going to take care of them,” Hechtman says. “We let them know that we are not abandoning them and that we’re going to be there for them to the end.”

Related: Training the trainers: FIU program a cut above

In order to ensure a successful recovery, Hechtman stresses the importance of bringing other physicians, the student-athlete and his or her coaches and parents into the process as well.

“It’s not just me, but a team that’s involved,” Hechtman says. “It’s bringing this group together and developing a support system to guide the student-athlete.”

For Hechtman, who is also a professor in the Department of Orthopedics at FIU’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, seeing the athletes he operates on return to the field and perform well is the ultimate reward.

“Seeing them getting back out there and scoring a touchdown or hitting a home run and then coming back to say ‘thank you’ is a tremendous reward,” Hechtman says. “To see their transformation and going back to doing what they want to do, it’s great to see.”   ♦

Flash forward 18 years, and Carlos Rafael Rivera’s name is attached to the latest Liam Neeson thriller, A Walk Among the Tombstones, chockfull of suspenseful music. The FIU alumnus wrote the score at the invitation of director Scott Frank, to whom he had once given guitar lessons.

“It’s serendipity,” Rivera says as he reflects upon that chance acquaintance. At the time of their first meeting, Rivera was a graduate student at the University of Southern California. He was just one of dozens of folks offering instruction through a local music store, and Frank picked his name out of a binder. “Much of this – how it happens – doesn’t make sense,” Rivera concedes. “Only if you look back, you start to find the most unlikely connections that lead to this specific reality playing out. Truly mysterious.”

Fate, dumb luck, karma, call it what you will, Rivera’s talent remains at the root of his success. After completing his education, he served as composer-in-residence for the Miami Symphony Orchestra, and his work as a guitarist includes soundtracks for Sandra Bullock’s Crash and TV’s Scrubs. A man without an ego, Rivera is nonetheless enjoying his proverbial 15 minutes of fame.

“There is a certain affirmation all us musicians need, whether we acknowledge it outwardly or not,” he says in reference to recent attention, including a positive mention of his score by the movie industry’s trade publication Variety. “It is a very vulnerable enterprise to make music your career. You are constantly judged for what you do, to say nothing of your own self-judgment. So it is extremely encouraging to have any recognition for the work you do, from just about anyone – friends, colleagues, family, teachers.”

And speaking of teachers, Rivera recollects his days at FIU very clearly. “I remember Orlando Garcia[an FIU music composition professor] was very hard on me when I was starting out – in a great way. He challenged my choices.

“But I remember the first piece I felt I was actually saying something with and he happened to approve of. And that is all you need—one ‘yes’ to get you going. It’s the oasis in the desert that pushes you to continue on.” 

Says Garcia, still teaching FIU students all these years later, “I have always expected much from my students and so it was with Carlos. I only praise a student’s work when I feel that it is warranted – which turns out to be not often – and I believe that this may be what he was referring to.

“I remember Carlos to be a very hard working and motivated student,” Garcia goes on, adding that he and his colleagues were very proud when he secured the coveted composing award as a student.

In recent weeks Rivera has talked with several reporters, among them one from the BBC in South Wales, but he can still reminisce about his FIUMagazine interview nearly two decades ago.

“I totally remember that,” Rivera says, fondly recalling writer Maydel Santana-Bravo, today the director of FIU Media Relations. “She was awesome. It was my first interview. There’s an example of encouragement.”

As for FIU Magazine, we’re still here to spot the student with that something extra, the one – of the many thousands of graduates who exit campus every year on their way to doing something worthwhile – whom we can hold up as an example of the promise that FIU makes possible.

— Alexandra Pecharich

It was an unforgettable spectacle. One that would probably never be allowed today. While it did not win him the election, he is quick to add, “It was a LOT of fun.”

Today, 38-year-old Peña again has high hopes of leading his peers. The new incoming president of the Alumni Association didn’t rent a helicopter this time, but he still has dreams for the future of the university he never really left. Peña, a franchise development manager for Wyndham Hotels, is one of the four diehard FIU fans affectionately known as “The Four Horsemen.” He and his wife Samantha Peña ‘07 are also new parents to daughter Reagan, who will turn one in September.

Soon after his May 2014 installation, he sat down with FIU Magazine editor Deborah O’Neil to talk goals, community and expansion.

Congratulations! What’s top of mind as you begin your term?

There are so many opportunities and so many good things. It’s necessary and it is time that we rev up. FIU has over 20,000 Alumni Association members. We are a huge university of 54,000 students. FIU is now the big player here in South Florida and we need to act that way. People need to know the services we provide and the difference we make.

What’s on your agenda as president?

The youth fair is my No. 1 priority. FIU has no place else to grow. We need it because it’s going to serve the community. We also need to be very involved with community events like eMerge or the Job Creators Network. I am also focused on the capital campaign. First, we really want to see the alumni center built. The time is now because I think the right people are going to step up. First generation scholarships are the second priority. Over 50 percent of our students are first generation college students and that speaks volume about what we are to South Florida.

That’s a lot. How are you going to make it all happen?

There are a lot of goals but we have the team to do it. The FIU family really believes in who we are. If it’s one two or three people wanting to make all these things happen, it’s never going to happen. But if it’s 20,000 or 200,000 alumni saying we really want the FIU footprint to grow and be a bigger part of South Florida, we can make it happen.

What kind of leader do you want to be known as?

I want to be known as a doer, as someone who doesn’t leave a stone unturned. We can’t sit around on our laurels. There’s no reason we can’t accomplish the things we are talking about

What’s your FIU story?

I grew up in Miami and went to Columbus High. I wanted to go up north to a big football school and have a college experience. Early on at FIU, I learned that we are the ones that were making FIU big time. As a student I was on the committee that voted for a fee increase to establish the football team. One day, when FIU is playing in a national championship, I will be able to say I was one of the students who helped bring football to FIU. I had a great time at FIU.

The new Alumni Association vice president is Eddie Hondal and I know you two go way back.

Eddie was the director of the Alumni Association when I was a student here. Back then, Eddie and I were the only ones who would call sports radio and want to talk about FIU sports. Sometimes they would be nice and let us on the air. Now Eddie and I are working hand-in-hand to help lead the Alumni Association once again.

What challenges do you see ahead?

Convincing people that everything I believe is possible IS possible. If I do my job, I can convince them that together we can get a lot done.

What do you think alumni want from the association?

They want value. FIU is such a diverse place and we have so many different generations that value is defined differently for different people. Everyone is looking for networking opportunities. I think people are looking for career development, educational development and growth and continuing education. I also think they want a sense of belonging.

What motivates you to do so much for FIU?

What motivates me is the opportunity to build a legacy at FIU and leave something behind where I’m helping to make our community a better place.

So in a way you’re doing it for your daughter?

I am. She will bleed blue and gold. She was born on Thursday and on Friday, Sept. 6, FIU was playing UCF and the week before we were in Maryland. I missed both those games. I expect her to be at least athletic director of FIU one day to make up for it.

Look into the future and tell me how you see FIU. Where are we going?

I answer that by where I see South Florida. South Florida is already a capital of Latin America and in the future will be even more of an economic engine of the Western Hemisphere. FIU will be at the forefront in terms of business, trade and what we give back to the community. If you can balance being a corporate leader and serving the poor, you have a great balance. I see it happening soon.   ♦

Poor grades in high school threatened to sink the hopes of attending college for David Van Rooy. During those days of uncertainty, the value of planning his future and working incrementally toward his goals began to dawn on him. Twenty years later, the successful human resources professional not only holds the bachelor’s degree that once seemed so elusive, but he went on to earn a master’s and Ph.D. in organizational psychology from FIU.

While Van Rooy has certainly seen the fruits of his own strategic calculations pay off, he has also interacted with employees and leaders to help him better understand how some get ahead and why others don’t. He encapsulates what he has learned in the recently published Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You from Where You Are, brief excerpts of which appear here.

By David Van Rooy MS ’03, Ph.D. ’05

In my career I have been extremely fortunate to work at some of the most recognizable and influential companies in the world, including Walmart, Marriott International and Burger King. Over time, as I was growing my own career and contributing to these organizations, I was able to identify essential factors that lead either to career prosperity or disappointment. I quickly realized that employees are most concerned with their current jobs, and some about the next job. In either case, they focused primarily on the short term.

People often have not considered how their current job will prepare them for the next one, and the next one, and so on. I knew that if I wanted to give valuable advice, I would have to address the long term. I want to help people chart their personal and professional courses in an exciting, invigorating way that’s intuitive. Your trajectory is the path you create for yourself.

The Power of Feedback

Quite simply, people are not good judges of their own skills, particularly ones in which they are not strong. In conversations with your boss, focus less on the ratings you receive, and push to get to the deep feedback that you need. When you let go of numbers, you open yourself up to receive substantive feedback that you can actually use.

Do not let success preclude you from seeking feedback. In particular, pay attention to feedback relating to those shortcomings that you have been able to mask because of success in other areas. Seeking the right type of feedback will enable you to solidify your strongest areas and embark on a journey to improve those areas that others deem weaknesses. Think of feedback as a compass – something that when used frequently and correctly will keep you on track. And how you react to feedback is critical. Do not rationalize the feedback or explain it away. Do not get angry.

Persistence as a Differentiator

A compelling body of research has explored the factors that underlie successful performance, which can be explained via a straightforward equation: Ability x Persistence = Performance. Persistence will continue to stand the test of time as a differentiating characteristic that the most successful people possess.

The elements underlying the significance of persistence are closely connected to motivation. Motivation, though, can be short-lived if the reasoning behind it is faulty. If you are motivated for the right reasons – driven by what you love doing – it will become much easier to remain persistent, even when confronted with adversity.

Persistence also requires preparation. More than 2,000 years ago the Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Luck is where the crossroads of opportunity and preparation meet.” This reasoning still applies. When opportunity arises, you will become your own worst enemy if you have not prepared for it. You must enter the situation knowing that you have done everything within your power to seize that moment.

Think Big, Act Small, Move Quick

The best path to reach your big goals is often through small actions and quick moves. Over time, you will be able to accomplish what you seek by tackling one mountain at a time. Each mountain will come with challenges, but when you break these into the respective pieces, it will become easier for you to meet and overcome each one – and to do so quickly.

As you chart your trajectory, you must consider the importance of ensuring that you set goals that are specific and attainable yet difficult. If you have no goals, it will be very hard to have any idea of what you need to work on. If you have a broad goal, such as wanting to open a business, you don’t know where to start. If you have an easy goal, you run the risk of selling yourself short. You therefore need to create a plan that includes a series of goals.

When you follow the BSQ approach, you will feel yourself gaining momentum. You will feel that something that seemed difficult is actually very manageable. You will have the confidence to get there. Your accomplishments will grow, as will your belief in yourself. As this transpires, you will find that you are almost unknowingly thinking bigger and bigger as you take on new challenges in your life and career.  ♦

Adapted from Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

© 2014 David L. Van Rooy
All rights reserved.
Published by AMACOM Books
www.amacombooks.org
Division of American Management Association
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

Douglas Browne ’78 was promoted to president of Peabody Hotels while continuing to serve as the general manager of the iconic Peabody Memphis.

1980s

Maria Elena González ’80 is the newest assistant professor in sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Daniel A. Gwinn ’82 recently founded a new law firm, Gwinn Tauriainen PLLC. It has offices in Troy, Mich.

Keith Pierce ’83 has been appointed to the 2014 executive committee of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. He is currently the executive vice president for brand operations at Wyndham Hotel Group.

Antonio Gomez ’87, MS ’07, was recently promoted to principal engineer at Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technologies division.

Chris Hansen ’88 has been tapped to open and manage the new Loews Hotel in Chicago.

Julio C. Jaramillo ’88 is president-elect of The Florida Bar Foundation, a statewide charitable organization with a mission to provide greater access to justice. A founder of the Colombian American Bar Association, Jaramillo has served as president of the Colombian American Service Association and worked pro bono for the Dade County Bar Association’s “Put Something Back” program.

Catherine Rodriguez ’88, MBA ’90, M.Acc ’91, was recently promoted from foreign service specialist to director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions in Miami.

Nanette L. Avery MS ’89 recently published her latest book, Orphan in America, a fiction novel that details the impact of the Orphan Train movement during the early 1900s.

Ana Carolina Cruxent ’89 created the anti-obesity video PSA Rewind the Future, which has recently gone viral and has more than 3.5 million views on YouTube.

1990s

Michael Whelan ’92, MS ’94, was named 2014 Engineer of the Year by Northeast Florida Engineer’s Week Committee. Whelan works as the assistant director of waterfront engineering at Taylor Engineering, Inc.

Monica Marulanda ’94 was featured in the article “5 Hispanic shop creatives you need to know” by Digiday, an online magazine for the digital media, marketing and advertising community.

Gregory R. Singleton MS ’95 received the Alumni Award of Distinction from the North American Interfraternity Conference for his work with the Kappa Alpha Order National Fraternity. He also received the Morlan-Bishop Award from Omicron Delta Kappa for work at Austin Peay State University.

Suria Plante ’96 will be general manager at the soon-to-open Residence Inn by Marriott at the Fort Lauderdale Airport.

Ralph Rosado ’96, MA ’03, was appointed assistant city manager for the City of North Miami Beach in April 2014.

Iris Escarra ’97 has been named co-chair of the Land Development Practice Group at Greenberg Traurig in Miami. She works to develop the firm’s land use, zoning and real estate development practice in Miami-Dade County.

Andrea Milrad MS ’97 received her seventh consecutive President’s Club award, which is given to associates to sell at least $1 million in one year, from the hotelier HelmsBriscoe.

Patricia Acosta ’98 has been appointed to the board of The Florida Bar Foundation, a statewide charitable organization with a mission is to provide greater access to justice. A long-time advocate for the legal rights of the working poor, Acosta has received numerous awards recognizing her commitment to public service and outstanding pro bono legal representation.

 2000s

Nate Delinois ’02 and Diana Contreras ’05 were recently featured by Channel 10 News and Complex Art + Design Magazine for their mural of Jay-Z and Beyonce at Speaker Boxx Miami in Carol City, Florida.

David Monter ’02 has been hired as vice president, controller for Miami-based Professional Bank. In this role, he will manage the accounting department, oversee regulatory reporting and assist the CFO in asset management and financial reporting.

Hai Zhang M.Arch ’02 opened his first solo art exhibition, “Everywhere – Nowhere,” at the Luise Ross Gallery in New York.

Michelle Nunez-Mendoza ’03 was hired by the University of Miami as the associate director of marketing for information technology.

Michael W. Weissberg MS ’03 was named full professor and director of the associate’s degree program in crime scene and the bachelor’s degree program in forensics at Keiser University.

Anllelic Lozada ’04 recently became a personal marketing integral coach in New York City where she helps professionals create their personal brands.

Tyler Mckeiver ’05 recently joined President Barack Obama’s administration as a senior advisor for intergovernmental affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Cristina Rosell ’05 married Erik Lyngved on May 30, 2014, in New Orleans. Sisters Carla Rosell ’03 and Gabriela Rosell ’10 served as bridesmaids during a ceremony at Holy Name of Jesus Parish. Following a honeymoon in Greece, Cristina and her husband are home in Baton Rouge, La., where she is currently working toward a Ph.D. in English at Louisiana State University.

Diana Beltran ’07 is Wyndham Hotel Group’s new Learning and Delivery Manager for Latin America. She previously worked at Wyndham Worldwide Corporate services as the Sustainability and Innovation Manager.

Mary Benevente ’07, MS ’08, was recently promoted to senior vice president and chief financial officer of Professional Bank, a Miami-based boutique bank tailored to business professionals.

Priscilla Anne Ortega ’07, MA ‘14, and Michael Jesus Baluja were married in Waterford, Ireland, on March 11, 2014. Their destination wedding was held at Waterford Castle where they were joined by 15 of their closest friends and family while others watched the ceremony in an live streaming broadcast.

Juan P. Espinosa ’08 was honored at the 2014 Florida State Thespian Festival in Tampa. His original play “Amygdala” was chosen to represent Florida at the Education Theatre Association’s Thespians Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Melissa Rubinstein ’08 and her husband Shimon Rubinstein opened a chiropractic office in North Miami Beach that will office services to babies, children and adults and host weekly health workshops and monthly parent meetings.

Eric Anderson MS ’09 and Mengyuan Chen MS ’12, who met in the events management class at the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, were wed in December 2013. Eric is at Royal Caribbean in Global Tour Operations and Mengyuan is working for ABTS Convention Services.

Stephanie Diaz-Perez ’09 recently opened her second Sweetness Bakeshop located in Hialeah, and operates a 4,000 square foot production center in Doral which supplies local businesses with gourmet dessert options.

Evan Rosenberg ’09 and his wife Kimberly Rosenberg welcomed their first child on May 20, 2014. Ashlyn Leigh Rosenberg was born in Boca Raton, Florida, and weighed 6 pounds, 12 ounces.

Maria Trujillo ’09 Self-published her first novel, Lost in the City of Flowers. It is a time-travel adventure for young-adult readers that takes place in 15th century Italy.

2010s

Lis-Marie Alvarado ’10 participated in Al Jazeera America’s show Borderland, during which she retraced the steps of migrants who died along the U.S.-Mexico border. She is an avid immigrant rights defender and community organizer in Miami with the organization WeCount!

Myka Figueiredo ’10 was named chair of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce’s HYPE (Helping Young Professionals Engage) Committee and will sit on the chamber’s board of directors.

Rebecca Rodriguez ’10 was appointed by the American Bar Association as a member of the Steering Group for the Customs Law Committee.

Gabriela Rosell ’10 earned a law degree from the University of Miami in May 2014. She is currently studying for the Florida bar exam.

Natali Aguero ’12 and Allen Feliz ’12 were married January 17, 2014, in Key West and later celebrated with friends in Cozumel, Mexico.

Karla Maria Cabral ’12 founded the nonprofit organization M3 World Inc., which caters to youth empowerment via product design, access to information and empowerment workshops.

Jacqueline Failer MIA ’12 recently presented her paper “Seeking the Spiritual Self within the Interior Environment: Analyzing the Work of Heidegger to Define the Human-Object Relationship” at the Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum at the University of Toronto.

Jennifer Bound ’14 saw her spice rub land on grocery store shelves this summer. As a student in the Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management in December of 2013, she created the winning recipe for a competition hosted by the Badia spice company. “Holy Smokes” debuted at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival the following February and hit stores in 86 countries just a few months later. (A portion of all sales goes back to FIU.) Jennifer currently works for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.

Erin Harrelson MS ’14 was hired by UHZ Sports Medicine Institute in Miami as an athletic trainer and recently traveled to Costa Rica to provide medical care and instruction to children and the elderly.

Austin LaPoten ’14 was accepted into the prestigious Sofitel School of Excellence Management Training Program in Munich, Germany.

In Memoriam

William “Bill” Winston ’79 passed away July 13, 2013, at the age of 57. After earning his degree from the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, he started a 24-year career with Hilton Worldwide, first with the quality assurance and operations department and, eventually, in a role that had him supporting affiliate brands. Always passionate, he worked well beyond business hours, including weekends and evenings, to give his all to the team members, customers and others with whom he interacted – a quality that earned him great admiration and the title “King of Customer Service.” He was an active member of the Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham, Ala., and a supporter of the Foundation Fighting Blindness.  

For three weeks in May, 14 college-aged young people with intellectual disabilities came together to live at FIU’s Modesto A. Maidique Campus. Enrolled in the first Panther LIFE Residential Program, they settled in at the University Tower residence hall and participated in classroom discussions and activities designed to help them develop independent living skills. They studied nutrition, fitness, resumé writing, communication styles and relationship issues. Guided by FIU staff, among them FIU students who serve throughout the year as dormitory resident assistants, the young adults learned to create budgets and shopping lists, accomplished chores and cooked their own meals. They even tackled the infamous Team Ropes Adventure Challenge (TRAC) at Biscayne Bay Campus. FIU Magazine accompanied the group and documented its journey.

By Dan Grech MFA ‘12

The ambition of Associate Professor Eric Goldemberg’s Spring 2014 graduate-level architecture class was breathtaking. The 22 students would be divided into four groups, each responsible for producing a multimedia art installation based on abstract ideas of space, rhythm and flow. The pieces would be displayed at exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Miami Beach. The teams were working with donated materials and a shoestring budget – and they had just three months to pull it off.

“These deadlines are like a guillotine,” Goldemberg said in February, clearly delighting in the challenge. Goldemberg had taught at Pratt and Columbia University, but he said, “This is the most ambitious class I’ve ever taught.”

Six months later, the challenges of working with students were laid bare: deadlines had been blown, exhibitions postponed and ambitions scaled way back. Nonetheless, for a few hours in August, a provocative and challenging installation emerged at Miami Beach Urban Studios, created by five die-hard students, several collaborators and one weary professor.

“I would not have been able to accomplish half of this without their energy,” Goldemberg said in August of graduate students Stephanie Colon, Matt Barnard, Jack Garcia, John Gioello and Manuel Perez Trujillo.

The admiration was mutual. “Eric has made me see architecture in ways like no other professor,” said Colon, who has been Goldemberg’s student since 2008. “I’ve learned everything from him.”

To describe in words the abstract multimedia art-music-architecture installation conjured by this student-teacher collaboration can’t possibly do it justice, which is why FIU Magazine made a video. But here goes anyway: The piece was a stark white mural that covered half of the gallery wall. It featured overlapping curved lines that resembled sand dunes as seen from above. It was made out of high-density foam – the stuff surfboards are made of – and created using FIU’s Department of Architecture CNC milling machine, a very large 3D printer. Built into the piece, like an iPhone docked in a speaker, was a removable guitar – suggesting that this installation was designed to be played and not just observed. Which is exactly what happened for two fleeting hours at the end of August. But more on that in a moment.

*****

The initial design for the mural was inspired by the python.

In February, Eric assigned a group of four students to represent “not just the shape of the python, but its behavior, character, and personality.” The students explored every imaginable aspect of this non-native predator that has invaded Florida’s Everglades: its pattern of movement, its mythology across cultures, its skin patterns and pigmentation. Other groups were assigned their own abstract investigations.

“With Professor Goldemberg, it’s not a typical teacher-student situation,” said former student Noel Palacios, who now works at an interior architecture firm in Miami. “These are raw experiments, and he’s in the trenches with us. It’s exploratory. It’s a dialogue. It’s a process of discovery.”

Those original four students investigating the python peeled off the project at the end of the Spring 2014 semester. Others picked up their work. Those initial explorations morphed into the final piece, called “Abyecto” – which the program said means, “heinous, hideous, or even abject, the name of a piece that ironically has none of those attributes.” In fact the name playfully references contemporary discussions in architecture about object-oriented ontology, a trend picked up from the philosophy of Graham Harman.

Stephanie Colon worked on the digital renderings of “Abyecto.” She called it “a pile of snakes slithering together and coming out of the wall.” As an architect, she wanted to explore how this beautiful and disturbing mural “changes the space through its mere presence and has a psychological effect on people.”

Nearly 100 people experienced its psychological effect during the exhibit’s provocative two-hour debut-finale performance on August 28 at FIU’s Miami Beach Urban Studios on Lincoln Road.

Scott F. Hall, a professor at the University of Central Florida, opened the evening by extracting from its dock a single-string baritone bass guitar, an instrument he invented called the “monobaribasitar.” He played a guitar riff oddly reminiscent of both baroque music and Eddie Van Halen’s 1981 solo “Eruption.” The body of the guitar was designed by Goldemberg specifically to be played by Hall, and the curved profiles of the guitar were extrapolated and distorted to generate the geometry of the large mural with docking stations at both ends.

Scott Hall, in foreground, plays the monobaribasitar accompanied by Jacob Sudol and a teaching assistant use transducers, creating a surreal musical performance.

A performance by FIU Assistant Professor Jacob Sudol followed. Sudol and his teaching assistant ran handheld transducers that looked like matchbox cars along the surface of the mural. The transducers generated beeps and buzzes ranging from the sound of static to the hum of an electric razor to the chirp of crickets on a summer evening.

Goldemberg attended the finale with Veronica Zalcberg, his wife and creative partner at Monad Studio, and their two young children.

“We worked intensively on this,” Goldemberg told the crowd – quite the understatement. After the musical performances, he asked for an encore. “My wish for tonight is for you to play together,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”

“Okay, guys,” said Hall, picking up his instrument. “Sound art!” For the first and perhaps only time in the history of music, a monobaribasitar and transducers played an improvised duet.

The following day, “Abyecto” was taken down. The studio needed to make room for a new exhibit. Because the mural had been glued to the wall, it did not survive the dismantling. “Abyecto” had been as beautiful, disturbing and fleeting as a snake slithering in the sand.   ♦

Photo Gallery

Liriano and her team had taken a “sick” 40-year-old space – one that lacked proper ventilation and contained flooring and furniture today known to be made with toxic components – and turned it into a multi-functional community center in a low-income neighborhood. With a concierge-style reception area featuring podiums instead of a traditional desk, child-centered classrooms and a dedicated play area, in addition to plenty of natural lighting and access for the disabled, the end result wowed users.

“Here enters this woman with two kids,” Liriano recalls of the grand opening. “She comes in, looks around and drops to her knees. She was overwhelmed by emotion because, for the first time, her kids could go to a facility and be safe and be healthy.”

And while not all of her jobs end with such a dramatic display of approval – Liriano works mostly with corporate clients such as Sabadell United Bank and Bacardi, as well as FIU – she recognizes that feeling figures prominently in every project.

Related: Alumnus of the Year Gerald Grant Jr. ’78, MBA ’89

“I think most people don’t realize the power that we have as designers to influence the way people learn, the way they work, they way they live,” says Liriano, today the vice president and director of interior design for the Miami-based Florida practice of HOK, a global architecture and engineering firm. “Whether it’s a museum, whether it’s a university space, whether it’s an American Airlines Admiral’s Lounge, there’s an emotion that happens when you walk in.”

And that happens by design. “Most clients want their physical space to showcase who they are, and it’s not just a sign on the wall,” says Liriano, an Alumni Association lifetime member.

Her ability to give physical expression to how a company perceives itself or, more importantly, wants to be perceived, has propelled her locally within the industry. During her 30-year career she has landed big projects and developed long-term relationships that have brought her repeat business.

Today’s Trendsetters

In the last several years, Liriano has witnessed the downsizing of the corporate footprint. More interesting, however, is a trend that involves those closest to the bottom of the corporate ladder: millenials, the 20- and early-30-somethings who have redefined the workplace of today by literally breaking down walls – for which they have little need in the digital age.

“Baby boomers like me and clients my age still tend to want enclosed spaces. Millenials want to be able to pick up their laptops and work anywhere,” says Liriano, 50, who with a daughter that graduated from FIU in December enjoys direct knowledge of the demographic. (She and her husband also have a high school son.) “They want much more open, much more collaborative areas.”

In HOK’s own Miami offices, on the ground floor of a refurbished warehouse in the Wynwood Arts District, that reality hits home: open cubicles with access to daylight from expansive windows; free-standing work stations available to visitors; walls covered with architectural plans and design renderings. Nothing is hidden. And inhabiting the place: young FIU graduates. Fully half of the 12-person staff hold FIU degrees. Their presence – in an urban space that also sports the exposed brick, stained-concrete floors, visible ductwork and clean, modern lines one might expect at such a firm – backs up Liriano’s observations about what the up-and-coming value in a workplace.

“The younger generation wants vibrant, really cool spaces to work in,” she says. “If they walk into a space and it looks dreary, and it’s not very attractive, they don’t want to work there.”

Emotion rearing its head again.

The New Interior of FIU

With FIU in the midst of another building boom, Liriano has had opportunities to develop creative study spaces for young adults. The $57.5 million Academic Health Center 4 at MMC, on which she worked while with her previous company, is a catalog of the ways in which architecture and interior design have together responded to the demands of youth.

The structure features floor-to-ceiling windows and, inside, open interior stairways and transparent office walls that allow natural light into every corner and views of virtually all activity.

“Students need daylighting. It’s proven,” Liriano says of the new emphasis on sunshine for all. “The more daylighting they have, the more they learn, the more vibrant they are, just their physical being inside the room is different.”

Upholstered couches and chairs, small meeting tables and wall-mounted dry-erase boards fill the building’s common spaces in support of group studying and team projects. Exterior stairway landings feature outdoor furniture that turns a pass-through into a gathering space. And throughout the teaching areas, flexibility reigns.

“The last is part of what FIU appreciated very much, to be able to look at a footprint for a classroom and see how many different ways they can reconfigure that room,” Liriano says. “Students and professors no longer want classrooms lined up with tablet armchairs. They want group learning where students are engaged with their classmates and professors.”

Now working on the College of Business’ $35.7 million MANGO building, Liriano talks about “student streets” – active spaces for meeting friends and interacting with classmates. These will exist along open bridges that connect the two halves of the building. The lack of enclosure overhead and inclusion of a food court on the ground floor – an area left to the individual vendors to outfit – will ensure that the buzz of community fills the air.

“Vibrancy is not just about color. It’s also sound,” Liriano says about what young people appreciate. “I don’t think students want quiet spaces unless they’re inside a classroom. They really, really want these student streets to support who they are and what they’re doing. It’s the learning environment of the future.”   ♦

It’s hard to imagine Gerald Grant Jr. ’78, MBA ’89, with a Jamaican accent. But he had one, back when he was 9, when his family first moved to Miami. And the kids at school, they were relentless at making fun of it.

So that summer he gave himself a task: he would lose the accent. He did it mainly by watching TV. He’d mimic the plain American accent he heard, enunciating every syllable to get it just right. When school started in the fall, Gerald Grant Jr. sounded just like another American kid.

But he wasn’t, really. Gerald Grant Jr. was another American kid who also happened to have the drive of 10 men. Maybe that sounds like an exaggeration, but not if you’ve met Grant, the 58-year-old statesman and gentleman FIU named its first ever Alumnus of the Year at the March 2014 Torch Awards. Not if you’ve seen the bold persistence that characterizes everything he does, whether it’s his morning workout or the million dollars he promised to his alma mater.

Grant says he developed that intense work ethic back in Kingston, surrounded by a family that talked a lot about working harder than anybody else. His dad was a cobbler and had a good shoe repair business going. “We were not necessarily wealthy, but when you don’t realize you don’t have funds, you don’t really miss it,” Grant said.

Then his mom came back from a visit to Miami with plans to relocate there. So they moved in with Grant’s aunt and uncle, and his dad got a job as a security guard. It was a struggle for a while, but his parents saw that sacrifice as worthwhile if Grant went to college and did well.

“We came to the United States, and it gave me an opportunity for a good education. That one thing changed my life,” Grant says.

Grant began his working life as a dishwasher on the weekends at Dunes Motel on Miami Beach. Soon, Grant was the short-order cook. His pay: $2 an hour.

It was through Junior Achievement in high school that Grant met someone from the department store Burdines. Grant took a part-time job there on the loading dock, and the company saw they had someone with ambition. They put him in the management training program and quickly moved him up.

It was about that time that Grant’s family had a talk about avoiding debt. His parents didn’t want him to take out student loans and walk away from college under water. When he started at Miami Dade College, he would figure out a way to pay as he went.

Grant had a coworker at Burdines who kept talking about her friend, Jennifer Adger, and how much Grant would like her. Grant agreed to call her and they met at Jennifer’s mother’s house for their first date. Two years later they were married and eventually had two children, Jasmin, 27 and Gerald Grant III, 23.

It was during those years at Burdines that Grant picked up a little side business, in addition to everything else. He started by spinning records at friend’s parties, weddings and events, and sometimes on chartered yachts. Grant built up a party-starting record collection and even developed a DJ name: The G-man.

Grant earned his associate’s degree at Miami Dade College, but he never considered stopping there. He moved on to FIU to study business and be part of the Honors College. That’s where his upward trajectory, his constant steps in the right direction, almost ended.

His first semester at FIU, Grant just couldn’t seem to juggle it all. His grades were horrible, and he had no idea how he was going to fix it. This was his crossroads, the moment where maybe he failed out or maybe figured out how to get past it.

Business professor Lynda Raheem, who’s now retired, sat him down and explained he had options. “She told me, ‘Look we have resources that can help you.’” Grant signed up for tutoring, and it changed everything. The fact that Grant was paying for college himself – working three jobs to do it – meant that every class had true value. “There was no opportunity for me to take a class over. I had to do it the first time.”

Meanwhile, Burdines had moved Grant into the finance division and realized he had a penchant for numbers. It wasn’t just accounting. By paying his way through college, Grant had learned firsthand how to budget, save, and manage money. He shared what he learned in his first book, published in 2010, Bold Moves to Creating Financial Wealth.

After earning an MBA at FIU, Grant eventually went to Great Western Bank and Citibank before landing the job he was working toward all along.

He started at AXA Advisors in 1995 as a financial planner, and met his mentor, Ron Hicks, a retirement benefits specialist in Buffalo. “We hit it off like brothers,” Hicks recalls. “He took what I gave him as a mentor and just ran with it. Now he is the mentor, and the roles are reversed.”

Hicks learned about his friend’s dedication to everything. Grant wakes up at 3 or 4 every morning, has a strict workout routine, and then has his day scheduled to the minute, all the way to dinner at home at 9. “He starts his day when we are all snoozing,” Hicks says. “Gerald is very driven, and he enjoys what he does.”

Grant also began volunteering for FIU on the Alumni Association Board of Directors and the Foundation Board of Directors, and also served as president of the Alumni Association and a member of the Honors College Advisory Board. When Duane Wiles started 11 years ago in the alumni office, Grant called to welcome him. Grant told Wiles he had a plan: he wanted to be the first African American alumnus to donate a million dollars to FIU.

“You know, ultimately, he’s just a good man. Gerald has always wanted to give back to his alma mater,” says Wiles, now FIU’s associate vice president of Alumni Relations.

And give back he has. He is a member of the university’s governing board, the Board of Trustees. This year, he founded and led FIU’s first Panther Alumni Week, successfully bringing more than 100 FIU grads back to campus to speak to students during one week in February.

Related: Alumni share career advice, life experiences during Panther Alumni Week

The million dollars he spoke of was a bold dream 11 years ago, but Grant soon climbed up within AXA. He became a vice president, in charge of teaching other financial advisors, and then director of financial planning.

And late last year, just as he had promised more than a decade ago, Grant became the first African American alum to give FIU a million dollars. With the gift, the school created the Gerald C. Grant Jr. and Jennifer Adger Grant Scholarship Fund, which will provide scholarships in FIU’s College of Business.

Grant sees the scholarship helping students just like him – students who are maybe not A students but the ones who need some financial help, and the ones willing to work hard to make that money worthwhile.

He isn’t slowing down just yet, but Grant has a plan for after retirement. He’s going to break out that LP collection in the closet of his home office. He’s going to revive the G-man.

Occasionally, maybe when he’s playing dominoes in the back yard or spinning reggae in his office, he lets a bit of that Jamaican accent come out.   ♦

In previous issues of FIU Magazine, we brought you the story of GLOWS, or Global Water for Sustainability, the largest USAID grant at FIU. This $80 million project set out a decade ago to make an impact on the global water crisis by developing a new model of university-directed, scientifically guided, collaborative development work.

Ten years later, as the work of the GLOWS program scales down on four continents, FIU has distinguished itself as a global solution center for one of the most urgent environmental and public health and problems on the planet. FIU is one of just a handful of universities leading such wide-reaching global development efforts. The project involved FIU hydrologists, ecologists, biologists, public health and legal experts, as well graduate students doing research on water-related issues.

The global water crisis is a complex, multifaceted problem of supply, access and management. In some places, there is not enough fresh, clean water. In other places, water is plentiful but poorly managed.

The solutions delivered by the FIU-led GLOWS teams are sustainable, locally managed and integrated across communities, regions and governmental organizations. Through GLOWS, Thousands of families now have access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation systems. Communities are now following customized water management plans that protect natural resources. Through targeted educational campaigns, thousands of schoolchildren now have understanding of basic hygiene, which will reduce the incidence of sometimes-deadly waterborne illness. Local men are now trained to build pumps and can bring their skills to other communities.

The GLOWS program is emblematic of FIU’s growing visibility as a globally engaged research university. As FIU expands its reach in the community and around the world, you can expect to see us leading the way as a solution center for issues that matter most to our children’s future.

— Deborah O’Neil MA ’09

Got a great FIU story to share? We want to hear them all, from any decade and any perspective. Visit go.fiu.edu/memories today and tell us your story. 

By Joel Delgado ’12, MS ’17

Scott Calabrese was introduced as the sixth head coach in FIU men’s soccer history in January, but the program has been on his radar for years – since 1996, to be exact.

That was when Calabrese, then playing professionally for the Rhode Island Stingrays, made a trip to Richmond, Virginia – the site of the NCAA Tournament Final Four. One of the final four teams that year was an FIU team that came up one win shy of a national championship.

In 2008, Calabrese was tapped as East Tennessee State’s first head coach when the university launched its men’s soccer program, and over the next six years the Buccaneers enjoyed a high level of success.

ETSU won two conference championships and two trips to the NCAA Tournament under Calabrese. Now he will try to do the same at FIU.

“Since that Final Four in 1996, I’ve seen FIU as a program that can compete at an incredibly high level,” Calabrese said. “I’d like to see FIU men’s soccer as a top program in the country, competing in the NCAA Tournament regularly.”

FIU News: How is Miami different from other places you coached?

Scott Calabrese: I feel like Miami is a soccer town. It already has a soccer culture of its own, and that is a real advantage for us. The youth teams here are very good, and there are a lot of fans that have a great deal of knowledge in regard to the sport. It’s a city that is very accepting of the sport.

What are you enjoying the most about life in Miami?

I like that Miami has a high level of diversity. Soccer is such a diverse sport in and of itself. It’s an international game, this is an international city and FIU is an international university. I love coming across different individuals with different ideas.

How have you seen the game of soccer grow in the United States?

When I was growing up there was no professional league and there was very little attention and coverage given to soccer. In my 30-plus years of involvement with the sport, things have changed drastically. Soccer is now a major sport in this country. It’s incredible. I went to a national team game when I was around 12 or 13 years old, got the tickets the same day and there were about 10,000 people watching. Now they are packing stadiums with 80,000 people in them. The U.S. Men’s National Team is a huge focus of attention for this country to rally around.

The quality of the players we produce has also improved and we have gained  respect worldwide from other soccer-playing countries that are more established. The United States is starting to produce players at a level where there is a lot of interest in us. Now you start seeing players like David Beckham coming over to play and interested in starting a team here in Miami. I think that’s a massive plus for this area and the country.

What should fans expect from FIU men’s soccer on the field this fall?

We have quite a few South Florida players so the style we play will be conducive to their talents. We’re going to be a technical team that’s going to look to pass the ball. We’re going to be an attacking team, trying to take chances and score goals. We’re going to try to control the game by maintaining possession, and I think one of the things that will be really critical to our success is how hard we work. I think one thing I would like to see is a blue-collar mentality behind the technical and attack-based aspects of our game.

We have a group of older players who are established and mature that will provide us with good team leadership. We also have a younger group – this large group of sophomores – that is now maturing. As a group, we’ll be more cohesive than we were last year.

What’s the most difficult part of making the switch from one program to another?

Within coaching, it takes time to develop a relationship with players. It takes a while for them to get to know you, to establish trust, to get across your expectations and for them to ultimately take on the behaviors and standards of the program. That process is not something that happens instantaneously and it can’t be accomplished in a week or a month. It takes time and it happens organically.

What’s makes soccer the “beautiful game” for you?

I love when teams play with such cohesiveness – in terms of their understanding between each other, their movements and their decisions – that they make it look easy. It’s fluid and you create chances.

Ultimately, there has to be passion in it. One of the things that attracts people to any sport, and soccer is no different, is that when people play with passion and emotion, it’s inspiring. And for me that’s something that has to be a part of what we do here, too.  We have to play with desire; that’s what inspires people.

What is something not many people know about you?

I spent five years practicing aikido, a Buddhist oriented martial art, when I was an assistant coach at Clemson, and before that I would drive up to Greenville, S.C., three times a week and train with a pretty accomplished aikido sensei.

What have you learned about coaching over the years?

Coaching is much more about human beings than Xs and Os. Student-athletes have goals, things they want to achieve, and they are emotionally tied to their success. Having relationships with the players, helping them achieve their goals and gain the right perspective on how to be successful… I’ve gravitated much more toward that side of coaching.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has forecast El Niño conditions in the Atlantic this year, predicting a smaller number of hurricanes than average  in 2014. The overwhelming consensus among scientists worldwide, however, is that storms will continue to increase in both frequency and severity over the middle and long runs. And even a small storm can inflict huge losses if a structure is not strong enough.

Building code provisions, particularly for the Miami-Dade High Velocity Hurricane Zone, have been revised and tightened in the last two decades based on lessons learned from previous storms. But until FIU’s Hurricane Research Center (IHRC) introduced the Wall of Wind (WOW) – the largest and most powerful university storm research facility – it was impossible to gauge just how South Florida construction would fare in the face of a major storm. By the fall of 2014, the Wall of Wind — in partnership with Miami-Dade County – will have completed tests on how well different building products hold up under different natural disaster scenarios.

Currently there is a mandatory building code, but this is a negotiated, consensus–based minimum for the level of hazards and risk that a community faces, explains Rich Olson, director of FIU’s Extreme Events Institute and the IHRC. The problem is in the “minimum.” And “the general public thinks they’re safe if the building or their home is built to code. But that begs the question: safe against what?” says Olson.

Since the code mainly targets mid-level hazards, like a Category 3 hurricane, this means buildings and homes are inherently at risk from anything stronger, such as a Category 4–let alone a Category 5–storm. Just because something is “built to code” doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily safe or secure in a higher category  storm. And, as a hurricane is so often a “multi-hazard event,” it is the combination of wind and storm surge that has the most devastating impact.

“The second part of the problem is that the events appear to be changing,” Olson notes. “So that basically means you’re getting sliced from two sides of the same sword. Code isn’t what people think it is — and the hazards are increasing,” Olson says.

Miami-Dade County official Jaime Gascon recognized the level of uncertainty even in brand new construction so he began working with IHRC and the WOW to create an enhanced building code “isolating the products and the conditions that people will face.”

“We want to see what is working and where we need to tweak things,” says Gascon. “This is the science and the research to show where it is necessary.”

Arindam Chowdhury, director of IHRC’s Laboratory for Wind Engineering Research, says WOW is testing new ways to ensure that structures survive natural catastrophes. “It is not enough to test winds straight on,” he says. “We are looking at different wind directions combined with wind-driven-rain to see where there are vulnerabilities in a building and whether prescriptive code guidelines are actually effective.” These distinctions will be critical this summer as well as in the many storm seasons to come.

After all, South Florida knows well that the NOAA 2014 forecast does not necessarily equate to calm conditions in this tropical climate. There were El Niño conditions in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew blew through the region and led to a new building code in Miami-Dade County. As the saying goes in hurricane country, “It only takes one storm if it’s a direct hit.”

Pictured above, from left to right: Abraham S. Ovadia, Esq. ’09; Pamela Silva Conde ’03, MBA ’12; Gregory Bossart, Ph.D. ’95; Carlos Duart ’94, MS ’99; Gerald C. Grant Jr. ’78, MBA ’89; Katherine Vargas ’04; Louis Stervinou ’87; FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg; Ernie Diaz ’89; Ana Menéndez ’92; Gustavo Roig, Ph.D.; Dr. Vivian Obeso ’94; Barbara M. Sharief ’97, MSN ’00; Marlene M. Liriano ’89; James S. Rose ’78; Timothy E.D. McLaughlin-Munroe, MPH ’02 (Not pictured: Francisco Martin ’93)

More Torch 2014 coverage:

• From dishwasher to million-dollar donor: Alumnus of the Year Gerald Grant Jr.
• A master of form and function: Alumna Marlene Liriano’s work showcases contemporary trends in commercial interior design
• Georgia Aquarium’s Gregory Bossart Ph.D. ’95 on the importance of dolphins
• Alumni from around the world honored at Torch Awards

Florida International University’s one-of-a-kind hurricane simulator, the 12-fan Wall of Wind (WoW), takes the national stage this week as a special, interactive feature of a new exhibition opening at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, D.C.

The 15-month exhibition, Designing for Disasters, explores new solutions and historical responses to a range of natural hazards, including earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, storm surge, flooding, sea level rise, tsunamis, and wildfires. The WoW exhibit spotlights FIU’s role as a national leader in hurricane mitigation research.

FIU’s WoW is the only research facility in the world capable of generating wind speeds of Category 5 hurricanes, like Katrina and Andrew. FIU wind engineering researchers are advancing the understanding of hurricane impacts on buildings and other structures, while also developing innovative damage mitigation products and techniques. Museum visitors will see firsthand how the WoW works through an interactive replica that generates five wind speeds directed at a small-scale residential building. They can move up the wind speeds and, literally, try to blow the roof off the house.

“To have our FIU Wall of Wind so prominently featured in an exhibit lasting 15 months in the nation’s capital brings home to every visitor our university’s cutting edge research capabilities,” said Richard Olson, director of FIU’s Extreme Events Institute and the International Hurricane Research Center. “The exhibit is striking and highlights that we need not be passive in confronting risks of all kinds, including hurricanes.  We are honored to be contributing to the Museum’s public awareness efforts.”

The exhibition opening coincides with the newly released White House National Climate Assessment, which documents a significant rise in extreme weather around the country. Among other hazard dynamics, the report projects an increased number of the strongest hurricanes, Category 4 and 5, in the future.

The National Building Museum is uniquely positioned to bring a message of disaster mitigation awareness to the general public, said Executive Director Chase Rynd.

“We are the neutral forum that can bring together the experts—from engineers, to architects, to teachers,” he said. “The museum provides the public a look at the best practices and best thinking that’s out there on how to make our world safer and stronger.”

Designing for Disasters runs through Aug. 2, 2015 at the historic National Building Museum, America’s leading cultural institution devoted to the history and impact of the built environment.

By Deborah O’Neil MA ‘09

Social work major Shanice Lum You struggled during her first semester at FIU. Far from her Connecticut home, she felt alone in this big city and her classes were tough.

When she got an F in Intro to Statistics, it was the first time she’d ever failed a class.

In higher ed, there’s nothing unusual about Lum You’s new-student experience. But experts will tell you that how a university responds to students in this vulnerable moment can make all the difference to their academic success. The right intervention can turn a potential dropout into a guaranteed graduate.

What happened next is a case study for how big universities can give students the individual support they need, and, in the process, boost the nation’s four-year graduation rate of 41 percent and six-year graduation rate of 59 percent.

Lum You’s grade triggered a series of new high-tech and high-touch safeguards that FIU collectively calls the Graduation Success Initiative (GSI). Led by Undergraduate Education Dean Douglas Robertson, FIU has invested significantly in research, technology and new personnel to make systemic changes in how 38,000 undergraduates get from the first day of school to the commencement stage. In the process, FIU’s six-year graduation rate climbed 9 percentage points in just two years, virtually unimaginable for a university this large.  And it promises to increase another 3 points this year.

“From 41 percent to 50 percent in two years,” said Robertson. “That’s real. We are transforming the way we administer the undergraduate curriculum.”

Universities around the country are taking notice. Last fall, FIU was one of only two public universities in the country recognized with a high profile national award from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities for making visible progress toward improving graduation rates. National higher education leader Lawrence Abele served on the APLU committee that reviewed applications for the award, Most Visible Progress: Opportunity Award.

“I’m a suspicious guy,” he said. “I went into FIU’s website and drilled down as far as I could. When I did that at some schools the results weren’t so positive. At FIU, you really built a solid system for all students. I thought FIU’s program was fantastic.”

While most undergrads have never heard of the Graduation Success Initiative, they will tell you, straight up: FIU has got my back. Lum You’s falling GPA sent up a red flag in the new electronic system that maps out each student’s four-year plan for graduation.

Her FIU inbox lit up with messages: You are no longer on track to graduate. Social work majors must earn a C or better in statistics. Contact your advisor immediately.

Meanwhile, in the School of Social Work, her advisor Shimon Cohen also got an alert as part of the electronic tools he uses to monitor the progress of the 350 students he advises. All of Cohen’s students are social work majors and he’s an expert on the program’s requirements. He’s also a social worker himself – and one of the 69 new advisors brought on through GSI and assigned to each major — so he’s able to offer students a first-hand understanding of the field.

He immediately reached out to Lum You.

She told him: I really want to be a social worker. I don’t want to switch majors.

Cohen could see that she had grades of B or higher in her social work courses. She just needed extra help to get through statistics. So they went to work on an academic plan to retake Intro to Statistics the following semester. He sent her to the tutoring center. She put in the extra study hours.

Cohen checked in with her all semester long. “He’d call and say, if you need help come on over,” You said.

The plan worked. Second time around, Lum You got an A. In December, when her GPA climbed high enough to qualify Lum You for an internship, Cohen noticed.

“He sent me an email saying, ‘You did it!’” Lum You recalls. “I showed my mom, ‘Look he’s so proud of me!’”

Read: The five pillars of GSI

A few years ago, FIU might have lost someone like Lum You. With too few advisors and a weak academic support system, there was no easy way for the country’s seventh largest university with more than 50,000 total students to detect a problem with any single individual. In the same way, there was no mechanism to reconcile course requirements with course availability. That meant high demand classes were filling up and students couldn’t get the classes they needed to graduate.

Another problem was the undergraduate trajectory. In the old system, there was a period when students would fall off the map. Robertson called it, “The Bermuda Triangle,” the sophomore year during which students could not yet declare a major. Many found themselves drifting with no academic home or clear educational path. Advising for freshmen and sophomores was centrally housed, and the student-advisor ratio hovered around 800:1.

Students, effectively, were getting lost in the system — held back by a failing grade, by uncertainty about what to study, by the unavailability of required classes. All too often, the students were dropping out.

That, in large measure, explained FIU’s lower than national average  on-time graduation rate.  The country’s other behemoth public universities face the same challenges. Arizona State and the University of Central Florida were both cited last year by U.S. News & World Report for low four-year graduation rates.

Four years ago, FIU administrators began to carefully examine graduation rates and systematically fix the problem. They didn’t quite know it at the time, but FIU was on the vanguard of a profound transformation in higher education.

Read: Student testimonials on GSI

National education leader Lawrence Abele has been talking about college graduation rates for as long as he can remember. For many years, he was howling in the wind.

“It seemed criminal,” said Abele, who became one of the most respected provosts in the country during his 16 years at Florida State University. “How can higher education lose almost 50 percent of its students and still stay in business?”

The economic and educational issues that arise from high college dropout rates seemed obvious to Abele. Plenty of data shows that adults with college degrees earn more money and experience more job satisfaction than those without. When students quit college, however, they are left with the economic burden but not the economic advantage.

About half of FIU students who drop out leave with debt, according to Douglas Wartzok, who served as FIU’s provost during the implementation of GSI. “The real concern is the debt of students who don’t graduate. We need to minimize that number.”

The federal government disperses some $112 billion annually in student loans. The national three-year default rate hovers around 15 percent and has been rising. When students cannot pay back their student loans, taxpayers bear the cost.

And that’s not all, Wartzok points out: “Student debt cannot be erased through bankruptcy, so the long-term consequences of default are much greater on the borrower than in other circumstances.”

Beyond the economics, Abele saw a more fundamental failure. Educational leaders were pointing fingers in all the wrong places. One common explanation for sagging graduation rates was that the students were not college ready to begin with. One study showed that assumption was wrong, Abele said. Some 65 percent of the students leaving college early were in good academic standing and a third were A students.

At FIU, leaders assumed students were dropping out for financial reasons. Not so. When surveyed, 62 percent of 8,700 FIU seniors poised to graduate said the No. 1 reason they were struggling to finish their degree was that the classes they needed were full. Only half that number said money was the issue.

Data like that affirms what Abele has been saying for years.  Universities need to stop blaming students for low graduation rates and take responsibility for fixing the problem. That’s how Robertson sees it also.

“If you place student success as a top priority and look at it from a student point of view, figuring out what to do isn’t so hard,” Robertson said. “If you get rid of the barriers and provide the support, good things happen for the students.”

The message has finally penetrated the halls of academia. In 2008, a  national survey asked university administrators for their Top 10 educational concerns. Graduation rates didn’t make the list. By 2011, graduation rates made it to No. 5.

In the end, it was the private sector, and not higher education, that  shifted the agenda. The Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the Helmsley Trust and industry leaders like retired Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine began talking about the failure of American universities to keep up with global competitors, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math. The broader issue of workforce competitiveness opened the door to more targeted conversations about where universities need to improve.

College graduation rates became a national conversation in 2010 when President Obama pledged to raise the nation’s college graduation rate to 60 percent in 10 years.

“In a single generation, we’ve fallen from first place to 12th place in college graduation rates for young adults,” Obama said at the time.

Universities have rallied behind the president’s challenge. More than 500, including FIU, committed to Obama’s goal by signing onto Project Degree Completion, led by the Association of Public Land-grant Universities and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The pledge calls on universities to award an additional 3.8 million bachelor’s degrees by 2025.

“This initiative is an economic competitiveness imperative for the future of the country and the individuals involved,” said M. Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

For FIU, the issue has now become a funding imperative. Starting this year, the Florida Legislature is tying state education dollars to university performance. One of the key measures in the performance matrix is graduation rate. This year, FIU fared well in the performance funding formula, tying for third with UCF among the state’s universities. With that comes an expected $7.2 million in new state dollars.

Transforming undergrad ed

FIU tackled the graduation rate problem looking for immediate and sustained results. Structural change was needed, but Robertson also wanted to make an impact now.  So as FIU began phasing in long-term programs, Undergraduate Education pulled up the files of every student in the 2008-2014 cohort close to finishing their degree. Then advisors started making phone calls.

“At the very granular level we reached out to these students to see what they needed to graduate and to try to make sure that happens,” said Robertson.

Student response was overwhelming. “We heard a lot of, ‘I need classes. Please help me,’ “ said Consuelo Boronat, the lead researcher in the Office of Retention and Student Success. “These poor kids. It’s an institutional problem. We are not providing enough of the classes they need. It is our fault. We have the power to do something about it.”

The university moved quickly to add course sections and find money for students in need of financial help. The triage delivered the results Robertson wanted. FIU’s graduation rate jumped 9 percentage points, a startling result with an undeniable message: Yes, it is possible to move the needle on graduation rates.

Meanwhile, new programs were coming on board. Robertson established the Office of Retention and Graduation Success with Ph.D.-level behavioral scientists. Their task is to figure out where and why FIU was losing students, and then recommend solutions.

The research has zeroed in on a handful of bottleneck core courses like College Algebra with high enrollment and high failure rates. They went a step further and looked at what percentage of students who fail one of those classes ended up dropping out: about 20 percent.

Something had to be done. So, in the case of college algebra, the university opened the new Mastery Math Lab in 2012. In 2013, FIU saw the pass rate climb 20 percent.

Research also found that students who had accumulated 75 hours of credits without declaring a major were the most likely to never finish their degree.

“It became clear we should get them into majors as quickly as possible,” said Wartzok, who will step down as provost June 30.

So FIU redrew the undergraduate roadmap. Starting with the Fall 2012 entering class, every student is required to declare a major. The Bermuda Triangle has disappeared. Undecided majors are no more at FIU.

With that shift came the addition of 69 new advisors around the university, each assigned to a specific major. In many ways, it is the advisors who are on the front lines confronting the problem of graduation rates, student-by-student.

Research is also applied in ways that help students make smarter decisions about their education. One study showed that journalism majors who earn less than a B grade in English Composition have a less than 18 percent chance of graduating.

With this data, an advisor is equipped to have a conversation with a student about whether the major is the right fit. The idea is to match student interests, skills and passion with the right program, said Charlie Andrews, the director of the undergraduate advising center.

“Failing one class isn’t the end of college,” he said. “It creates an opportunity for students and advisors to know something is going on. The conversation needs to be, is this really what you want to do?”

Andrews promotes the idea: “We are going to help you find a new dream.”

And that is part of the paradigm shift at FIU. Everyone works together to help each student succeed, whether they are majoring in biology or journalism.

“We are graduating from FIU,” Andrews said. “If where you are at isn’t right, let’s find the place that is.”

Creating high-tech solutions

As part of GSI, personal attention to students is supplemented with technology: MyMajorMatch, MyMajor, My_eAdvisor, Panther Degree Audit. All are online systems that provide students with information and guide them throughout their undergraduate education.

In 2012, Karen Cifuentes was in the U.S. Army stationed in New York when she was accepted to FIU as a transfer student. From New York, she mapped out her bachelor’s degree using FIU’s online system. It told her which of her community college credits would be accepted so she didn’t repeat courses. She mapped out every class she would take from day one to graduation.

“Everything is there for you,” she said. “You know exactly how to graduate in four years. And if you want to do it even quicker, it tells you how.”

Shimon Cohen was the advisor to both Cifuentes and to Shanice Lum You. The GSI digital tools provide him with countless ways to keep up with his students. For instance, he can generate student reports based on GPA.

Those who are falling below 2.0 hear from him. He asks questions like: “What are you going to do differently to improve your grades?” If they say, “Study more,” Cohen asks, “How do you study more? Maybe how you study is the issue.”

And then he makes it real. “They have to sign a contract that is an action plan to get back in good academic standing,” he said.

The My_eAdvisor tools also allowed Cohen to detect an issue that was creating hardship for social work majors. The prerequisites that students struggled with the most – statistics, economics and American government – were all crammed into the same semester.

“So the first thing we did was redo the map so those three classes are in different semesters,” Cohen said.

Cohen still communicates regularly with Lum You. She’s on track to graduate in December 2014. Meanwhile, she’s hoping to land an internship in child welfare or foster care.

“The fact that I’m applying for an internship says I’m almost done,” she said. “I’m excited to get out there and make a difference in people’s lives.”   ♦

I worked closely with the tenants so they could document the conditions in the building with the goal of improving their situation. We tried to create a human interest piece that would encourage people on the outside to take these folks seriously. We also wanted to show a level of joy in day-to-day life. Despite the dilapidated conditions, you had families working and doing their best to live a dignified life.

Absolutely. The best way to understand someone’s situation is to try to see it through their eyes. This has a twofold advantage. It gives you a perspective that you, the viewer, could never have because you don’t live their life. And it also empowers groups and individuals, gives them some control, not over their situation but how their situation is represented.

Tell me about FotoKonbit, the nonprofit you founded to put cameras in the hands of Haitians.

Our point is to create not only artistic representations of Haiti that challenge the status quo, challenge stereotypes, but also to provide a set of skills for young people so they can learn a trade and perhaps make a living by, for example, photographing weddings and baptisms. Especially in Haiti, art for art’s sake is not enough. The key is to provide people with something practical at the same time.

In part, this echoes what you aimed to accomplish in Brooklyn: allow people to tell their own stories.

Yes. Haiti is a tough place to live where it’s easy for photojournalists to get stereotypical pictures of struggle. From the outset, the three of us who started this wanted to try and do things a little differently: Teach folks how to take pictures so that others could actually see what they see. A news photographer might concentrate on problems, but a lot of times these folks would rather focus on what’s working. Sometimes the pictures are really unexpected.

One Drop presents an arresting array of photos and personal stories of people of color, each of whom shares his or her experience of being black. You took most of the photos, and your own story is included.

It was hard to go so public with my personal story, but it’s not something that I shy away from. This question of “Who are you?” just gets under your skin. I figured I could contribute to positive conversation that would challenge judgments, stereotypes and assumptions.

The many different ways in which people in the book choose to self-identify – “black,” “mixed,” “multiracial,” “Afro-Latino” – makes one realize how complicated and personal questions of race truly are.

It’s a big deal to have that choice. We’re entering a moment where difference is definitely embraced. I think that’s what the book is really good at capturing: these nuanced situations about what it means to be black.

I definitely work in a documentary tradition but one that is involved and subjective. I try to incorporate my experience and personal journeys. As an artist, I try to capture the beauty of life in those every day “in-between” moments.

I enrolled because I wanted a theoretical background to give my artistic work a floor to stand on, so to speak. Now teaching visual arts and popular culture classes, my goal is to really open up students’ minds to consider the world differently. My courses fall within FIU’s Global Learning Initiative, which aims to expose every single student in the university to a variety of perspectives. I think that’s changing the intellectual culture at FIU. You want graduates of FIU to be as broad-minded as possible.   ♦

Chad Moss ’94

• Senior Vice President, Moss & Associates
• Bachelor of Science in Construction Management
• Member, FIU Foundation Board of Directors
• 2010 Torch Award Recipient
• Lifetime member, FIU Alumni Association

Your family started Moss & Associates 10 years ago, and today you can claim construction projects in no fewer than a dozen states. What has been your biggest contribution to the company’s growth?

Building relationships with key clients and hiring strong employees.

Success in the construction industry means staying up on innovation. How is Moss & Associates doing that?

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is the link between design, construction and the facilities manager. We early on recognized the potential of this technology – which digitally captures processes and information spanning an entire project – and invested in its development and the development of our team. Our construction technology department excels at implementing this technology, and we have realized cost and time savings on projects of 5 to 10 percent while maintaining the highest quality standards.

Your company helped establish FIU’s Moss Built Environment Informatics Laboratory for use by students in the construction management program with the College of Engineering and Computing. What was your motivation?

The lab will teach the building blocks of BIM/virtual technologies, something about which Moss is very passionate.

How has your FIU degree made possible your success?

It was the foundation! It also led to a relationship with my university that has helped me grow personally and professionally.

Busy as you are, why do you make time to serve on the FIU Foundation Board of Directors?

I really feel like we are making a contribution to the university’s success, and I am inspired by my engagement with students, staff and fellow board members.

Do you have a motto by which you live, or phrase around which you rally in tough times?

“This situation is temporary; you will overcome!”

How do you want to be remembered down the road?

As someone who gave people chances and means to grow their careers through education and job opportunities.   ♦

Related: Behind the glass of Parkview with Chad Moss ’94

“When you first see the structure and then walk into the building, I think everyone is struck by the unique shape, look and architecture of the building,” said Dean Michele Ciccazzo. “It is magnificent.”

Take a tour of the latest additions to FIU.

Academic Health Center 5 (AHC-5)

Purpose: Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work, College of Arts & Sciences and International Hurricane Research Center research facilities, classrooms, offices

Size: 121,465 SF

Cost: $44.9 million

Cool feature: Huge cantilever that houses laboratory space

Opened: July 2014

See photos from concept to construction.

Academic Health Center 4 (AHC-4)

Purpose: Scientific research facility for the College of Medicine and the College of Arts & Sciences, wet and dry labs, classrooms and seminar rooms

Size: 136,082 SF

Cost: $57.5 million

Cool feature: A customized mass spectrometer laboratory

Opened: March 2013

See more photos on Flickr.

Parkview Housing

Purpose: Student living

Size: 620 beds with 290-car parking garage

Cost: $55 million

Cool feature: Floor-to-ceiling, glassed-in common room overlooking FIU Stadium

Opened: August 2013

Take a video tour of Parkview.

Student Academic Support Center (SASC)

Purpose: Honors College and University Graduate School offices, Enrollment Services, Student Financials, classrooms

Size: 73,173 Gross SF

Cost: $25.6 million

Cool feature: 750-seat auditorium, largest at FIU

Opening: June 2015

Satellite Chiller Plant

Purpose: Improve campus energy efficiency

Size: 14,000 SF

Cost: $7.1 million

Cool feature: Plant provides chilled water for laboratories when power goes down

Opened: April 2013

Stocker AstroScience Center

Purpose: Astronomy research observatory, classrooms

Size: 10,233 SF

Cost: $4.4 million

Cool feature: Control room inspired by the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”

Opened: January 2014

Take a look inside.

Management and New Growth Opportunities Building (MANGO)

Purpose: College of Business and FIU Online, classrooms

Size: 107,912 SF

Cost: $35.7 million

Cool feature: First floor mall with Starbucks, Panda Express, Taco Bell

Opening: Fall 2014

Ambulatory Care Center

Purpose: In partnership with Miami-Dade County, a treatment and diagnostic center open to the public

Size: 32,023 SF

Cost: $8.6 million

Cool feature: The new 109th Street bridge spanning 8th Street will lead pedestrians to the center

Opening: November 2014

Read more about the outpatient center.

Parking Garage 6 (PG6)

Purpose: Parking, bus port, retail

Size: 2,000 parking spaces, 35,000 SF

Cost: $42.6 million

Opening: January 2015

Restaurant Management Lab

Purpose: Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management advanced food production lab and brewing science lab

Size: 140 seat

Cost: $2 million

Cool feature: Two-story wine tower and spirits demonstration bar

Opened: September 2013

Take a video tour of the new facility.

Wolfe University Center Renovation

Purpose: Modernize interior and exterior of the Panther Square gathering area with new facades, new seating and a coffee shop. Mary Ann Wolfe Theater also being renovated.

Cost: $3.25 million

Cool feature: A bronze Panther statue for Panther Square

Opened: March 2014

See the completed renovation.  ♦

— Deborah O’Neil MA ’09 and Ray Boyle

The violin has been played, that much is clear. Its maple surface has the nicks and notches, scratches and grooves that come from daily loving use. Its orange red varnish is faded. Its fingerboard is warped. Its sound post needs replacing. And then there’s the glue repair in the corner, from the time a previous owner, in a moment of high passion, hooked the violin frame with a bow and tore a chunk clean off.

“This is definitely not a museum piece,” says FIU artist-in-residence Marcia Littley, the latest musician to play this 162-year-old violin. “It’s a performer’s instrument.”

And yet, for six decades, this fiddle went unplayed. Until earlier this year, that is, when Littley and the violin found one another.

In October, six months and nearly a dozen concerts into their unlikely romance, Marcia Littley and the violin were center stage at a concert of the Amernet Quartet at FIU’s Wertheim Performing Arts Center.

Littley, as second violin, sometimes played in tandem with the lead. Other times, she flirted with the cello or viola. She had a few short solos. As she played, Littley swayed her body and wrinkled her brow, a frown of intense focus on her aquiline features.

Littley was the most versatile performer on stage that night, adjusting her approach to make her partners sound perfect. Constant throughout was the clarity, the warmth, and the richness of that borrowed violin.

Thirty feet from the stage, in the front row, sat the violin’s owner, Victor Amram. Until April 2013, the violin had been dormant on the top shelf of his closet in suburban Miami-Dade County, waiting to be brought back to life.

Victor Amram strained to make out the line of Littley’s violin. He gripped the program in one hand and a wooden cane with his initials in the other. His eyes were rimmed red.

When he heard Littley play a fleeting solo, he was transported back to the living room of his childhood home in Cuba, in the years before Fidel Castro, listening to his father play folk music deep into the night.

Before reaching Littley, this violin had weathered a revolution, survived a house fire and endured years of oblivion. Its journey from a fine craftsman’s studio in 19th century Europe to a concert hall in 21st century Miami is a tale of dislocation, exile and serendipity. It’s also the story of how a single fiddle can transcend borders, cultures and even time, connecting lives in the most unexpected ways.

*****

The label inside Victor Amram’s violin offers a clue to its origin. It says “Antonio Guadagnini, Torino, Anno 1851.” Antonio Guadagnini descended from a long line of Italian violinmakers. His great grandfather, Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, is considered one of the finest craftsmen of string instruments in history, often mentioned with Stradivari and Guarneri.

Nearly a century after it was made, the violin turned up in Cuba, played by Alexander Prilutchi, concertmaster of Havana’s Orquestra Filarmónica. One of Prilutchi’s private pupils was a textile manufacturer and violin enthusiast named Jose V. Amram, Victor’s father.

Jose Amram was a Sephardic Jew who escaped unrest in his native Turkey to move to Cuba in 1922. There, he fell in love with a pianist and singer named Estrella Ortiz Veranes. They married and had a son (Victor) and a daughter (Raquel).

Jose Amram sold shoelaces and other products by day and practiced violin at night. He dreamed of one day playing in the philharmonic, studying under Prilutchi and eventually buying the maestro’s violin.

On weekends, Jose Amram moonlighted as the violin accompanist (and his wife the piano accompanist) for silent movies. He went by the stage name “Miller” to avoid discrimination for being a Jew. “Miller hará sonar su violin,” local theaters would advertise. “Miller will make his violin sing.”

“Music was like a religion to him,” his son Victor said. “It filled his life with something other than work. Violin was an expression of inspiration, joy and relief.”

Victor’s father practiced every night after dinner: Mozart sonatas, Argentine tangos, Hungarian csárdás. Sometimes he made up his own melodies.

“He had this compulsion to play,” Victor said. “He played all the time and tried to perfect himself.”

Those evening sessions became the soundtrack for Victor’s childhood.

In 1959, Fidel Castro took over Cuba. Victor and his sister left the island at their father’s urging. Jose Amram never made it out. He died of a heart attack in 1963.

The violin was still in Cuba. The family arranged to have it smuggled out, along with some family jewels. Its elegant black case was swapped for a frayed brown one, to escape the attention of Cuban customs agents. The violin made it to Miami, where Victor and his sister settled.

Today Victor runs a business distributing equipment used to milk cows. Neither Victor nor his sister played the violin. It barely survived an apartment fire in the 1970s. “The only things that made it out were the violin, the family jewelry and the cat,” Victor said.

Victor’s sister died in 2012, and Victor took sole possession of the violin. He wanted to authenticate the label dating back to 1851, and he asked for his daughter’s help. Connie Amram works as an office manager in FIU’s Division of External Relations. She called the School of Music and was referred to the school’s violinist-in-residence, Marcia Littley.

*****

Every musician dreams of picking up an instrument and just knowing.

“I always tell my students it’s the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck test,” Littley said.

Musicians can go an entire career without experiencing that moment. Or worse, they find the perfect instrument and aren’t able to afford it.

Littley had that moment once before, with the violin she now owns. It dates to the 1600s and has an arched top, creating a sweet sound. Problem was, the vigorous players in the Amernet Quartet sometimes drowned her out.

When Connie Amram visited FIU with the family violin, Littley was immediately struck by its flat top. “That was a clue that it was going to be a pretty powerful projecting instrument,” Littley said.

Littley drew her bow across the strings. It was the first time since 1963 a musician had played it.

“It was instantaneous,” Littley said. “It inspired me.”

Cellist Jason Calloway was also in the studio. He turned around in surprise.

“It sounded better than her violin,” Calloway said. “Brighter and louder, more open, more penetrating.”

Littley asked to borrow the violin for a few days. She brought it to rehearsal. First violinist Misha Vitenson and violist Michael Klatz agreed with Calloway: the sound was a perfect fit for the quartet.

That was in April 2013, and the FIU Chamber Players concert was a week away. She called Connie. “Would you like to hear the violin in performance?” Littley asked. “Would your father allow me to play it?”

Littley has since played the violin in nearly a dozen concerts and in a studio recording in May 2013. She uses her own bow and case. “I feel like this is an instrument that I was meant to play,” Littley said.

“Her violin was forcing her to work harder for the same result and giving back less. Now she’s a different fiddle player,” Calloway said. “It’s as if you take a runner training at altitude and bring her down to sea level. Suddenly the rest of the field is not capable of competing. Because she’s been running up hill the whole time.”

In October 2013, the Amrams sent the violin to New York for a new sound post and bridge, adjustments that will increase its power and richness.

“It’s like a miracle it worked out this way,” Connie said. “Marcia loves the instrument and the sound. She cares about it so much. My grandfather’s dream was to play it in an orchestra, and now it’s become a reality through Marcia.”

*****

A certified Antonio Guadagnini violin is exceedingly rare and can fetch six figures at auction, says Jonathan Solars of Florian Leonhard Fine Violins of London.

At FIU Magazine’s request, Solars and Leonhard examined photographs of the Amram violin. They concluded that Antonio Guadagnini did not make the instrument, even though it bears his name.

“In the 19th century, labels were made and put into violins that weren’t of that maker,” Solars said. “Violins would be made in France, given the label and sold at a lower price point. Still, this is a beautiful, well-made violin.”

The Amram violin has been appraised at more than $35,000. But Victor says he has no plans to sell it. He wants Littley to keep playing it as long as she wants, not only to carry forward his father’s memory, but because she loves to play it and a violin’s sound improves with use. “The more it’s played, the better it gets,” he said.

Ultimately, Victor wants to keep the violin in the family. He has six children, one of whom played violin as a child. He hopes his father’s violin will be played for centuries to come.

Solars says a fine violin will get passed from hand to hand, generation after generation. Any individual owner is but a temporary guardian. “We are passing through the lives of these violins,” he said, “not the other way around.”   ♦

Dan Grech (@dgrech) is a Media Innovation Fellow at the FIU School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He has worked at Marketplace, the Miami Herald and WLRN and has taught journalism at Princeton University and Columbia Journalism School.

Tony Argiz ’74 was honored by the American Jewish Committee of Miami and Broward with the 2013 National Human Relations Award for his work in defense of Israel and human rights.

William J. Spratt Jr. MS ’74 joined Akerman LLP as a partner in the firm’s Healthcare Practice Group in Miami. He has 25 years of experience in healthcare law and is recognized as leader in that area by the publication Chambers USA Guide: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business and The Best Lawyers in America.

Eduardo Gil ’75 is the senior vice president and chief financial officer for Davidson Realty Inc. and made the Jacksonville Business Journal’s 2013 List of Ultimate CFOs.

Duffy Keys ’75, owner of B Cellars Winery & Tasting Room in Calistoga, Calif., saw his wines receive four double gold and two gold awards at the 2014 American Fine Wine competition. Read our FIU Magazine story, and watch our video, about Keys.

Jose Villalon ’79 is the corporate sustainability director at Nutreco and served as chairman of the board for WWF’s Aquaculture Stewardship Council. He is married to Anita Villalon and has two children, daughter Gabriela and son Santiago.

1980s

Carlos Modia ’82 was appointed chief financial officer of Espirito Santo Bank after serving as senior vice president and chief operations officer since 2005.

Whitney K. Schiffer M.Acc. ’88 was promoted to director of audit and attest services at Berkowitz Pollack Brand Advisors and Accountants.

1990s

Frank Gonzalez ’90 was appointed principal-in-charge at Morrison, Brown, Argiz & Farra LLC.

Laura P. Templer ’90 has joined the law firm of Sirote & Permutt and is based in the firm’s Fort Lauderdale office. She defends mortgage servicers against claims of consumer fraud.

Emilia A. Quesada ’92 was named a 2014 Top Lawyer by the South Florida Legal Guide for Civil Litigation. Her practice focuses on complex commercial litigation.

Brenda K. Supple ’93 has been named shareholder by international law firm Greenberg Traurig at its Miami office. As assistant general counsel for Greenberg Traurig, she advises the firm in the areas of professional responsibility and risk management.

Cheryll Messam ’95, MS ’99, is a certified professional life and corporate coach and recently wrote a self-reflection e-book called Life is Just for Living. So How am I Doing?

Ileana Salort-Horta ’96, MS ’97, was appointed director at Morrison, Brown, Argiz & Farra LLC.

Michael P. Maher ’97 and Florencia Rossato ’11 were married May 18, 2013, in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Guests included several distinguished alumni, among them: Franco Battistini ’95, Jason Becht ’98,Troy Easley ’94, Matt Endara ’95, Walter Gonzalez ’96, Chadwick Hornik ’97, Jeffrey Jaramillo ’96, Juan Lardizabal ’96, Ramon Lopez ’01 and Roberto Valcarce ’89. Maher serves on FIU’s Executive Alumni Board and is a senior director with Synergy Business Consulting. Rossato is a paralegal in Coral Gables.

Jennifer Olmedo-Rodriguez ’99 was recently promoted to shareholder at the law firm of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. She and her colleagues were also honored as South Florida’s Real Estate Litigation Department of the Year by Daily Business Review.

Celina Saucedo ’99, MPA ’11, was promoted to director of administration at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Broward County.

2000s

Captain Paul Defay ’02 was appointed United States Air Force engineering flight commander at the 241st Engineering & Installation Squadron. He served previously as cyberspace operations officer and network systems deputy flight commander of the 119th Command & Control Squadron.

Joel Gandara ’03, an Honors College alumnus, is the founder of Underwear Station Inc., a distributor and manufacturer of men’s underwear and swimwear.

Alexander E. Binelo ’03, MS ’05, was promoted to principal in the audit department of Morrison, Brown, Argiz & Farra LLP.

David Van Rooy MS ’03, Ph.D ’05, wrote Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be with the purpose of helping people build successful and meaningful careers. Van Rooy is donating all proceeds from author royalties to military veterans entering the workforce.

Xiomara Uran ’06 is the Spanish interpreter for Rutgers University School of Law. She works in the school’s clinics, where law students, under faculty supervision, represent clients from within the community.

Catalina Orozco ’07 has been named assistant director of human resources at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore.

Kristina Mur ’07 successfully defended her thesis in March to earn a master’s degree in English literature from FIU this spring. She is currently a project manager in FIU’s Office of Publications.

Richard F. Puerto MS ’07 was promoted to partner in the tax department at Verdeja & De Armas LLP in Coral Gables.

Emmanuel Trenche ’07 is vice president of marketing communications at clearCI, an intelligence software company that helps businesses compete in today’s digital era. He was selected to speak at the Strategic Competitive Intelligence Professionals in May.

2010s

Hector Mujica ’11 serves as a social responsibility strategist for Google, overseeing the company’s employee philanthropic engagement in Latin America and parts of the U.S. He is also the company’s public policy lead for U.S. Hispanic Community Outreach and Business Development which has him working closely with several policy partners and advocacy organizations around the world.

Jose Pagliery ’11 is a technology journalist at CNN, where he reports on cybersecurity and privacy. He previously wrote about small business, immigration and health care policy for CNNMoney.

Natali Aguero ’12 and Allen Feliz ’12 were married January 17, 2014, in Key West and later celebrated with friends in Cozumel, Mexico.

Juan Brizuela ’13 works as the news correspondentfor the School of Architecture and the Department of Art and Art History for the College of Architecture + the Arts.

Joshua Dieguez ’13 was elected chairman of the Miami Lakes Neighborhood Improvement Committee.

Emmanuel Okwor ’13, a specialist in virtual construction and green building, has accepted a position as a project engineer with general contractor Foster Construction of South Florida.  

How did you land at FIU? I was the director of the American School in Lima, Peru. FIU had a contract to send us College of Education professors to train teachers. Nick Vigilante, who was the college’s dean at the time, along with then-Professor Paul Gallagher and others would come down to do that work in the summertime, and I would host. Leaving to return home, they would give me their business cards and tell me to stop by if I was ever in Miami. When things changed politically in Peru, and after my husband and I had had a child, we did go to Miami and started looking for jobs. I went to work in the engineering department at UM, and then I got word from FIU that they needed a coordinator of activities, so I sent my resume.

Listen to Ruth describe her not-so-great first impression of FIU:

Tell us about an activity you planned back in the day. In the early 1980s, the London cast of Beatlemania was touring the United States. An agent called and said the group wanted to play in Miami. So I said, “Why not?” When I told him I didn’t have a venue, we decided upon an outdoor concert. So I went to see the university CFO, Ron Arrowsmith, and we started looking at the contract. That’s when someone freaked out. One of the points of the contract was that we had to pay the band at the end of the event and it has to be cash and it’s $60,000! Ron said, “Are you crazy? We’re a state university.” I pleaded on behalf of the students, who had gotten very excited about the idea, and so the poor guy approved it.

Well, some of the faculty and administrators heard about the plan, and they were upset because we were going to have it outside the library by the lake there. So we had a meeting, and one administrator brings up a Florida statute that says we’re not to disturb the wildlife so near to the Everglades. I said to the gentleman, “Let me introduce you to members of the new  wildlife: our students. They want to have a little fun here.” Well, tons of students came out for the concert, and we had a barbecue beforehand.

Listen to Ruth describe how unwanted guests threw a wrench into concert activities:

Tell us how the Graham Center has changed over the years. When I came to FIU, I was really shocked by the building. It was really like a warehouse, very utilitarian. And it was an open building, with the common areas exposed to the elements. What would happen was that wildlife—ducks, lizards, opossum—would come in, and they would do their business. We had to constantly be cleaning. In the summer heat, the stench was awful. The rain and the wind would bring all the garbage in. It was very unpleasant.

Listen to Ruth explain the thinking behind the GC’s redesign and expansion in the 1990s.

You speak about FIU with such pride. Of what are you most proud? For one, that we have a public four-year university in Miami. So many people fought us on that. I would have arguments with my colleagues at UM who questioned why FIU needed to go from a two-year upper-division school to a four-year institution. We travelled from FIU in buses up to Tallahassee to make the case and were finally successful in 1981.

President Maidique is the one that said we will have a major research university. The first time I heard him make that pitch, I thought he was Don Quijote. “How is he going to do that?” I asked myself. We had no alumni, no money, and he’s thinking about research. We laugh about it now, but he did fight so hard to get the school of architecture, the law school, the college of medicine.

And then there’s the Graham Center. I take pride that we were able to bring the community together by bringing into one building the bookstore, the cafeteria, the Faculty Club, classrooms, a ballroom, offices for Student Affairs. It’s not like that other at other schools. I think we have one of the greatest student centers.

I know it was you who got the baby grand piano into the Graham Center, which for 17 years now has brought joy to countless students. But I understand it wasn’t easy to convince your boss. In trying to articulate to the administration that we needed a building that is inviting, in trying to address vandalism, with which we had had some problems, I always advocated that the environment would change the behavior of the students. We needed something not only inviting but interactive. We needed a computer lab, for example. We needed a game room.

We already had the noisy place, which is The Pit. But I thought we also needed to have a place for a different kind of student, a quieter place. And that’s why I thought we needed to build the gallery. And, of course, a piano in that space would offer something interactive. When I proposed it, Vice President Paul Gallagher was against it. I found out later that he had heard from faculty in the School of Music who didn’t understand what we were trying to do. In their defense, they had already witnessed theft at the school, and their thinking was, “A baby grand piano in the student center? Students are going to destroy it.” Well some time later, we were having a reception in the gallery. Someone said we needed to have some music, and I said, “No problem.” I brought out the piano I had been hiding for a year. No one knew. Later, when Paul asked me how much it cost to rent the piano, I said, “Paul, it’s your piano. We bought it.”

Hear Ruth talk about what the piano has meant to students.

How did you enjoy mentoring students? That’s one of the rewarding things. You can see their transformation. In the early years, students were sort of embarrassed to come to FIU. They came because they couldn’t afford somewhere else, even though many of them were qualified academically. But we told them it doesn’t matter where you go to school. It’s what you do with the education. “Come to FIU, get the best grades you can and then the big schools will come looking for you,” we said. That became a reality for many. They went on to Yale, Penn, Stanford, so many places. They became judges, CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders. We have graduates now that are in politics who used to clean floors here in the Graham Center. There are so many success stories.

How do you look back upon your career here? The biggest satisfaction is that I came and I embraced the dream of the early trailblazers. On a professional level, I was fortunate. I got to learn from a lot of talented people who mentored me, and that includes 19 vice presidents.  And where else would I have gotten to spend millions of dollars to design and outfit a building? I know my husband was grateful that I didn’t feel the need to buy things at home because I already had spent the millions here, for furniture, wallpaper, fabrics to get our GC ballroom outfitted. And I made lifelong friendships, people who became like family. They helped me realize many dreams, not just for myself but for the students.  ♦

Hear Ruth sum up her FIU career as she prepares to move on.
  

Did you have any support growing up when being gay wasn’t widely accepted?

No. I did not even know the word “gay” until I was a teenager. I felt pretty alone and hoped to grow out of whatever “it” was. While in Catholic school, I remember having to list the reasons why homosexuality was a sin, which were later written on the blackboard. I cannot remember even one of those reasons now, but I remember feeling very stressed that day.

So, how did you handle growing up gay?

I grew up in Rochester, N.Y., in an Italian, blue collar neighborhood where I learned to act tough even if I definitely was not. Basically I learned at an early age to always be on guard and not to be “too gay” out of self-preservation. I didn’t experience much distress in South Florida, and FIU was a safe place for me. It was pretty much “don’t ask, don’t tell.” There have always been some pretty great gay people at FIU even if they were not “out” as such.

What’s one myth about being gay we should settle once and for all?

That one chooses to be gay! False, false, false.

Why is it important for a university to have LBGTQA programs?

The programming makes for visibility without shame. Pride is something the LBGTQA community always talks about, and I want that pride to show at FIU.

What is your vision for the LBGTQA community at FIU?

I want LGBTQA students everywhere to experience the same rights as everyone else—academic freedom and freedom of expression in a safe environment. I want them to feel secure in themselves, safe and, most of all, included.   ♦

Six miles off the coast of Key Largo, 60 feet below the ocean surface, rests a yellow metal structure atop a stilt-like base. At first glance it appears abandoned, disappearing into a seascape of corals and sponges, and surrounded by schools of fish. But a quick peek inside reveals a complex human habitat designed for research and exploration — the only one of its kind in the entire world.

The Aquarius Reef Base allows marine scientists to leave the terrestrial world behind and live among their research subjects for days, even weeks at a time. It was deployed in 1993 by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. But in 2012, looming federal budget cuts threatened to surface the world’s last remaining undersea research lab.

One of the main challenges facing Aquarius was obscurity. For nearly two decades, it existed on a modest operating budget, offering a temporary home for researchers on a variety of missions. Quietly and resourcefully, Aquarius labored away, providing information for more than 600 research papers on conservation, ocean acidification, habitat protection and global climate change over the course of 117 missions.

The rescue plan

Meanwhile, most Americans were unaware of its existence. When Aquarius appeared on a list of government programs targeted for elimination, few noticed, except those scientists who understood its unique potential.

“It was a tough time for us,” said Aquarius Director Tom Potts. “You go to bed thinking about Aquarius. You wake up thinking about Aquarius. We lived with the uncertainty.”

As a graduate student, Potts was first introduced to Aquarius above water in 1990 while it was being prepped for deployment. Upon graduation, he was named Aquarius’ science director. By 2009, he became director of Aquarius. It would be tough to find someone who knows the research facility better.

“This is the only job I’ve ever had,” he said.

Though it operated out of the public eye, Aquarius did have a fan base. Largely comprised of researchers, diving enthusiasts and environmentalists, a grassroots effort was initiated in 2012 to save the world’s only undersea lab. Among those supporters was Miami technology entrepreneur Manny Medina, who founded Terremark Worldwide and is now chairman and CEO of Medina Capital Partners. Medina’s involvement would turn out to be key to rescuing the one-of-a-kind facility.

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart even made a trip to Aquarius in a public appeal to save the undersea lab. But the clock was ticking.

In the spring, a meeting was quietly organized by a group of Aquarius supporters. A small contingency from FIU was asked to attend. Mike Heithaus, marine biologist and executive director of FIU’s School of Environment, Arts and Society, was among those.

The plan was simple – find a host institution to maintain operations and develop a business model that would not be dependent on government funding. As the meeting progressed, it became clear to Heithaus that FIU was being asked to save Aquarius.

The Aquarius aquanauts

Undersea exploration is a relatively young science. In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists began documenting the variety of species that roamed the oceans, but they relied on nets dragged across the bottom of the ocean to bring dead and dying organisms to the decks of their ships.

Then, in the mid-20th century, self-contained underwater breathing apparatuses, or scuba, became mainstream among researchers. While scuba diving revolutionized the world of marine science, it still presented significant limitations on data collection, observation and experimentation. The more time divers spend underwater, and the deeper they swim, the more nitrogen their body absorbs (a process known as saturation). That means a diver may only have 90 minutes or less before he or she must surface to avoid the dangers associated with the build up of gas in the bloodstream.

“Imagine trying to do your job, a full day’s work, in only 90 minutes,” said Deron Burkepile, coral reef researcher and assistant professor of biological sciences at FIU. “Aquarius gives scientists the gift of time.”

Watch: Mike Heithaus and Deron Burkepile’s TEDxFIU talk

In Aquarius, researchers can saturate for days and weeks at a time. When the time comes to return to the surface, a 16-hour decompression process lowers the facility’s pressure, gradually allowing accumulated gases to exit the body. When the process is completed, the researchers can swim to the surface as if they were never underwater.

Having spent 20 days over the course of two missions in Aquarius, Burkepile has earned the distinction of being called an aquanaut. He has experienced, first-hand, the invaluable opportunity of living among his research subjects. Convincing FIU’s marine scientists that the university should take over Aquarius was like convincing a fish it should swim. But others weren’t as easily swayed.

The university solution

Months of discussions, formulating business plans and evaluating risks were undertaken by university officials. By January 2013, the decision was clear. Aquarius is an unparalleled resource for finding solutions to some of the world’s most pressing environmental issues. FIU announced it would assume operations.

“Aquarius offers tremendous research and educational opportunities, and we’re ensuring that this investment of American taxpayers continues to provide critical research results to the country,” Heithaus said. “For our students, Aquarius offers fantastic new possibilities. It’s a natural fit for the work we’re doing in the Florida Keys and throughout the world.”

Aquarius is more than a 400-square-foot habitat. It is tethered to a life support buoy on the surface that houses power generators, air compressors and data connections. A short boat trip away is a land-based facility where operations are monitored. Most importantly, Aquarius is staffed by a small, highly skilled team led by Potts and Roger Garcia, Aquarius’ director of operations. The crew has made a seamless transition to FIU.

Garcia, who was born in Cuba and grew up in Miami, spent 20 years in the Navy as a field medic, combat diver and Navy diver before joining Aquarius. His resume includes marine reconnaissance deployments, two Mediterranean deployments, a 1980s combat mission during the attacks on Libya and deployments in the Middle East. At Aquarius, Garcia’s No. 1 priority is the safety of all those who dive to the habitat, but he’s also been known to serve as boat captain, maintenance crew and even housekeeper. With no job too big or small, Garcia’s management style is simple – “Get it done.”

After spending months preparing for the inevitable shutdown, the crew worked tirelessly throughout the spring and summer of 2013 to return Aquarius to operations by the fall. Still, there was concern about where the operational support would come from in the future.

Then, just as dollars were running scarce last fall, Manny Medina, the Miami businessman who believed in the project’s potential, stepped forward. The Medina family’s gift of $1.25 million establishes the Medina Aquarius program and gives Aquarius stability.

The worldwide response

In September 2013, NASA commissioned the first saturation mission of the FIU era. While primarily a facility for marine research, Aquarius also serves as a training site for astronauts.

“Living and working in Aquarius is perhaps the closest thing on earth to actually being in space,” said William L. Todd, a program manager at NASA.

During the fall mission, four international astronauts, including two from the United States, one from the European Space Agency and one from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, spent a week in Aquarius.

Days after the astronauts surfaced, Aquarius made waves with an inside peek on a live broadcast of NBC’s TODAY Show, captivating more than 4.2 million viewers. CBS This Morning followed up with a segment that aired later in the fall.

In November, FIU sent four biology students – one undergraduate and three graduate students – to the habitat for the university’s first research mission since it assumed operations. For Burkepile, it was a rewarding experience to witness two of his students taking up residence in Aquarius on the 10-year anniversary of his first saturation mission. Ph.D. student Andrew Shantz, whose work focuses on protecting the world’s reefs, was among them.

“When I first heard Aquarius was going to be shut down, I was totally disappointed. I thought I had missed my chance,” said Shantz, a Washington D.C. native. “It was kind of surreal to realize it would become part of FIU.”

Related: FIU students descend on Aquarius

Shantz was joined by Laura Bhatti, also from Burkepile’s lab, along with Christian Lopes from Professor James Fourqurean’s lab and Mark Barton from Professor Kevin Boswell’s lab. While they were primarily there to conduct research, each of the students took time throughout the week to conduct virtual field trips with schoolchildren from all across the country via Skype. They were even able to virtually attend and teach classes at FIU while saturated.

“Aquarius presents FIU with unlimited opportunities,” Heithaus said. “Imagine being able to take a class that is broadcast live straight from a coral reef.”

The future of Aquarius

While its primary focus is research, FIU is implementing a business plan to help ensure its long-term viability. The plan relies on a diverse funding portfolio of educational and government missions, private industry and philanthropic support.

Just as operational support was running scarce, the Medina Family Foundation stepped in with a $1.25 million gift to establish the Medina Aquarius Program. Manuel D. Medina, founding and managing partner of Medina Capital, says the gift is his family’s way of giving back to the ocean, which has provided them a lifetime of inspiration and enjoyment. For FIU, the gift helps give Aquarius stability.

“FIU is committed to Aquarius because it is a unique resource allowing our students, faculty and collaborators to better understand and preserve our environment,” said FIU College of Arts & Sciences Dean Kenneth G. Furton, who along with Heithaus, led the charge to bring Aquarius to FIU.

“While much work remains to ensure Aquarius continues to operate well into the future,” he said, “we have renewed confidence due to the substantial local, national and international organizations and individuals who have shown their commitment to its growth and longevity.”   ♦

Banner photo: DJ Roller, Liquid Pictures

Brazile spoke at FIU’s recent Women Who Lead conferences, organized by the Women’s Center on each campus, and took a few minutes with FIU Magazine to reflect on her past and America’s future.

How did growing up in the Deep South influence your personal and career goals?

I witnessed so many groundbreaking events – heroic acts from ordinary people – to simply learning to overcome fear – fear of the unknown, fear of violence and fear of the enormous challenges we faced in a working poor household. My parents taught us to love the Lord, respect our elders, to listen before speaking and most importantly – to study hard and get a good education. They empowered us daily to never grow weary and to keep hope alive. Perhaps that’s the reason why I chose to pursue a career in public service – to give back and pay forward.

Who was your mentor and what was a key lesson you learned from him or her?

Throughout my life, I’ve had powerful role models, from my parents and grandparents to individuals in my community to working for some of the most inspiring people in American politics. Here’s what I’ve learned: to remain faithful to the cause of freedom, justice and equality for all.

What is the most historic event you’ve personally experienced?

There are so many important events that I have experienced – from the passage of legislation to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday to witnessing Barack Obama become the first African American to win the presidency in 2008.

The Higher Education Act, the major law that governs federal student aid, is up for renewal. What do you think needs to happen to make better higher education policy?

The reauthorization comes during a time of unprecedented scrutiny for the nation’s colleges and universities. We need to get on the floor of the House and the Senate for a vote, and we need to ensure that Pell Grants are strengthened so that everyone who wants to attend college can afford to do so.

Senator Tom Harkin has said in the past, Congress has made strides in expanding college access and must now focus on improving affordability and ensuring students succeed. Another challenge it faces is making sure federal assistance reaches an increasingly diverse and nontraditional student body.

What is your challenge to students?

It’s your turn to lead the change you believe in and to help make a difference. This is your moment, and it’s time students find their seats at the table – even if they have to bring in their own folding chairs.

What do you think of feminism today?

Feminism today is at a crossroad. The women’s movement is starting to experience the beginnings of resurgence, especially in reaction to countless attempts to relitigate issues we once thought were settled – like access to contraceptives. What is really important now is to keep that momentum, to bring women’s issues and women to the forefront of American politics and not let them fade into the background ever again.

What is your advice to women who want to take on leadership positions and help enact change in our society? What hurdles can they expect to face?

For women who want to be in positions of leadership, I say to them: take your seat at the table. It is so crucially important for women, especially young women, to be at the decision-making table. But, even more so, not to wait to be asked to join. Women have to stop waiting and start demanding what they deserve.

Women still face significant hurdles at every turn of life. One great challenge that is being discussed right now is paid parental leave. As the most powerful nation, how is it that we have some of the weakest parental leave policies? It is embarrassing and not only does it hurt American women and families, but it hurts the economy as a whole.

Finally, which issues will be important to women in the 2016 election?

Paycheck Fairness Act—equal pay for equal work, access to health care protections from the Affordable Care Act and access to reproductive health options regardless of the boss’s or insurer’s religious beliefs. ♦

Learn more about FIU’s presence on South Beach:

Miami Beach Urban Studios

The Wolfsonian-FIU

The Jewish Museum of Florida – FIU

South Beach Wine and Food Festival

The development, rollout and results of the GSI have been discussed, but the impact is best illustrated through the lives of the students who rely on the initiative and its tools and advisors to reach their educational goals. Here are a few of their stories.

The advocate

TruLe’sia Newberry knew early on that she would be enrolling at FIU; the International Baccalaureate student from Orlando was accepted on the spot with an academic excellence scholarship at an open house event in October of her senior year of high school. The following summer, she received an email prompting her to take the MyMajorMatch quiz. Though she already had political science in mind as a major, the quiz suggested she was best suited for a “helping profession” such as international relations or social work. It resonated with her right away.

Once on campus, Newberry and her advisor, Rosa Oré, went over the quiz results and the international relations program the quiz suggested.

“[Oré] convinced me to be a dual-degree student because I had enough credits coming in to get the 150 credits needed for two diplomas,” says Newberry. She also met with Shimon Cohen, an advisor in the Stempel School of Public Health and Social Work, who helped her fit in a social work minor.

Currently in her sophomore year, Newberry keeps a close eye on her dashboard and encourages her friends and peers to do so as well. When a friend called at 2 a.m. last summer in crisis mode about her academic progress, Newberry walked her through the Major Maps to show her how she could still finish her coursework on time in her chosen major. Well suited for a helping profession, indeed.

The multi-tasker

Garrett Pierman is a busy guy. He’s in the marching band, Honors College, and the Pi Sigma Alpha honor society. It may seem like a heavy load, but the senior political science major is on track to graduate this spring, after just three years at FIU.

“The GSI has been a really integral part of my career at FIU,” says Pierman. “Having the option to – on my own – plan out my semesters well in advance has been the key to my success here. The PDA was promoted right from the start, and I was able to enroll and plan my whole first year before I had even set foot in Miami.”

And though it doesn’t replace in-person advising sessions, Pierman also uses the GSI’s e-advising features regularly to communicate with his advisor. His next step – pursuing a Ph.D. at a top-tier university.

The striver

For some, the GSI has been a way to plan their college career from the get-go. For others, it is a tool to get back on track after hitting a bump. Katherine Osorio always knew she wanted to be a doctor, but after immigrating to the United States from her native Colombia and struggling with the language barrier, she was dismissed in her second year at FIU due to a low GPA.

When she learned of her dismissal in December 2012, she sought help – she wasn’t ready to give up on her dream. She was connected to Sherise Smith, an advisor in the biology department, who helped her apply for re-admission and get provisional status. Using the GSI tools, the two planned out the rest of her coursework, and they now meet monthly to discuss her progress.

“GSI has been useful for me in my case,” says Osorio. “I didn’t know what to do, and when they told me this is your advisor, that was easy for me to go to one person. She knows me, so I know what to do.”

With six classes and three labs left to go, Osorio is finally on track to realize her dream.

The transfer

Originally a marine biology major at the University of Hawaii, Pacific, Haley Scavone transferred to FIU after her sophomore year to study international relations. Seeing all her transferrable credits matched up to FIU’s graduation requirements in the PDA was a key part of her choosing to move to Miami over her other options.

“FIU accepted all my transfer credits,” says Scavone, an Honors College student, “and they were able to show me where they fit, what was left, and how I could graduate on time.”

Even more important to Scavone is the messaging feature. She used to communicate with her advisor primarily through email, but having their conversations archived in the GSI’s messaging platform has made things easier for both of them.

“In Hawaii, we didn’t even have an online portal… My advisor would give me paper forms and if I lost them I had to get a completely new one,” says Scavone, “So it was a refreshing change of pace when I got here and realized how user-friendly the system was.”

Requiring a major: All undergrads are now required to declare a major when they enroll at FIU, placing them immediately on a path to degree completion. The university no longer has an “undeclared major” option.

Hiring new advisors: FIU hired 69 new, master’s degree level academic advisors and placed them within the colleges to specialize in each of FIU’s 81 undergraduate majors. FIU now mirrors the national best practices with an student-advisor ratio of 380:1.

Creating a research team: The new Office of Retention and Graduation  Success in Undergraduate Education is staffed with five behavioral scientists who research and analyze when and why students are not completing degrees.

Adding online tools: MyMajorMatch allows students to explore career options and majors prior to enrolling or when they change majors. My Major provides students with a step-by-step guide to course selection from day one to graduation. My_e-Advisor lets students know if they are staying on-track and keeps them connected to their academic advisor within their major.

Establishing accountability: All student and advisor activity is tracked and available in a centralized dashboard system that is available to senior academics and administrators. On any given day, a dean can see a wide range of statistics such as what percentage of eligible students have applied to graduate or which advisors have not responded to student emails.

The same entrance in 2014, 44 years later:

Twenty years – impossible! But time is relative, especially when viewed in the context of the events of the day. And when I think back to the early 1990s at FIU, the pace of progress defied conventional logic.

I joined the communications staff in 1988, just a scant 16 years after FIU opened its doors. For many universities that’s just a brief blip, but at FIU so much had been accomplished by then. The institution really hit the fast track when Modesto A. “Mitch” Maidique became the fourth president in 1986, and his bold, visionary, plans took root. It was an exciting period marked by constant change as well as the emergence of a distinct identity. However, the perceptions of and conversations about FIU had not caught up with the reality of the dynamic, forward-thinking university.

The communications at our disposal to tell the FIU story were limited. There was the local press and a Web that was still in its infancy. We produced an employee newsletter and some high-level communiqués to donors and civic leaders – but no publication serving alumni, donors, and friends. Given the flurry of activity and accomplishments, a high-quality, color publication was needed to get the stories out there. FIU Magazine was an idea whose time had come.

With my partner-in-arms, director of publications and creative director Terry Witherell (now vice president of External Eelations), we set about birthing this periodical. However, we never would have left the starting gate without the full support (and funding) provided by the late Paul Gallagher, the vice president for University Advancement, Budget and Support Services, and other top administration.

From the get-go, we were both very deeply involved – selecting the most compelling stories, writing and editing, photographing (often shot by Terry herself), designing – all the pieces that need to come together to go to print. It was no easy task given the tight resources at our disposal, but throughout long days, evenings and weekends putting it together, it was a labor of love.

Looking back at our debut issue, I’m reminded of the remarkable people and times. There was a profile of Ron Jones, the founding director of the Southeast Environmental Research Center, an outspoken and passionate scientist deeply committed to the preservation of the Everglades. A story theorized on how Hurricane Andrew, which had devastated our community just two years earlier, could impact the convergence of ethnic communities. We looked at the construction boom transforming the campus. Over the course of the first few years, the magazine matured as we covered virtually all areas of the university and became appreciated by our readers, as well as those covered in its pages.

As FIU has progressed and grown over the last 20 years, so has this magazine. It’s a delight to receive every issue and revel in its storytelling and design, which reflects the vibrancy of a special university that means so much to our community.

— Todd Ellenberg MS ’91

Gerald Grant Jr. ’78, MBA ’89 has always understood the importance of alumni contributing to their alma mater. But it’s not just monetary contributions that matter to this Board of Trustees member and longtime donor. He believes that giving of one’s time and talents is equally important, and so he championed a way to connect successful graduates with students.

In February, Grant’s vision became reality during Panther Alumni Week, or PAW, during which more than 100 working professionals returned to campus to offer advice, share stories and impart wisdom to the next generation.
Some alumni were invited to speak by their former professors while others signed up on their own. Some addressed individual classes, while others participated on panel discussions on a range of topics.

Social work student Aneishia Richardson actively scribbled notes during the panel she attended. “I normally wouldn’t be able to hear from professionals that are doing what I want to do and what I’m passionate about,” she said. “The fact that they took the time to speak to us is very valuable.”

Many alumni appreciated the chance to reengage with the university. “They’re glad to be able to come back and share their experiences,” Grant said. “You don’t realize the impact you actually make on a student just by giving them a few tidbits on how to be successful.”

Class act: Meet five alumni who shared their expertise with students

“It’s not about knowing everything, but what you’re willing to teach yourself. Take the initiative. Learn and grow.”
–Armando Cruz ’01, MS ’05     

Cruz participated on FIU’s track and field team from 1998 to 2001 and today is cofounder and CEO of Cruz Country Fitness and Physical Therapy in Miami. 

What’s the biggest message you want to send to students? When approaching your career, come from a giving perspective. Don’t just come to take. Employers want to know what value you are going to bring to their company. Figure out how can you offer value.

What did sports teach you that has helped you succeed in life? The mindset of “If I want something, I have to work for it.” Sports taught us to be competitive. No one is going to give me my spot; I have to earn it. I have to push every single day. Being persistent with training and being consistent in what I do, day in and day out, will help me continue to grow as a person. I also learned not to be afraid to fail because if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to live.

What was the most rewarding part about being a student-athlete at FIU? I miss a lot of that higher-end competitiveness of the sport itself. I have taken that competitiveness and applied it to other areas, but there is nothing like competing in sport.

“Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself.”
–Diana Beltran ’07

Beltran is the sustainability manager for hotel and resort chain Wyndham Worldwide. She is currently working on a master’s degree at Columbia University.

Why come back to speak with students? To show them that you can follow your dreams, especially with the support of such an amazing school and professors who can get you the right connections.

How did FIU prepare you for your career? My freshman year, my dream was to be in international business. Then I found out about the hospitality school, and that matched my passions: travel and languages. I apply everything I’ve ever learned at FIU to what I do.

Which class at FIU influenced you most? The person who really opened my eyes to sustainability was Professor Nancy Del Risco, whose class on the subject I took my senior year. I adapted sustainability to what I was studying at the time, which was hotel operations, and made it my passion.

“Never make a decision because you’re desperate. Figure out what you want and chase it like a bulldog.”
–Carlos Duart ’94, MS ’98

Duart is president of architecture and engineering firm CRD Maguire, headquartered in Miami. He also serves on the FIU Foundation Board of Directors.

Why come back to speak with students? For me, it’s a way of giving back. FIU did a lot for my family and me. My dad got his degree here after he had had five kids because it was an affordable opportunity.

What’s the biggest message you want to send to students? Two things. First, work hard. Second, a lot of success occurs by just “being there.” Take the opportunity to network, go places, meet with other people. You would be surprised how many opportunities present themselves just because you put yourself out there.

What changes strike you the most since you graduated from FIU? How FIU’s reputation has grown to a worldwide level. I travel a lot, and I’m surprised how many times people know about FIU, whether I’m dealing with people from South America or in Europe.

“Continue to work at your practice even if at times it is difficult or you question it. Remain confident that you will find solutions for yourself.”

–Cristina Moline ’08, ’09 (double BA)

Molina is a studio artist and an assistant professor of new media and animation at Southeastern Louisiana University in New Orleans. Her art combines psychology with conceptual elements.

Why come back to speak with students? As an FIU undergraduate, I learned a lot through guest speakers. It’s easy to take the advice you receive from professors for granted because you see them on a weekly basis, but a stranger with different experiences can have a big impact. I want to have a similar impact.

What is the biggest challenge you faced in pursuing a career in art? The arts aren’t really perceived as a necessity. So one of the big challenges is to legitimize for yourself and the world why you should be making art. A way to overcome that is to find personal meaning in what you’re doing, to know that you’re contributing to society in a positive way and educating the public on the importance of art.

What do you miss the most about FIU? I miss my professors and the colleagues I worked with during my time at FIU. The studio program here really provided a good model of a collaborative practice. I miss getting together with my friends and classmates, and working all together in a supportive environment.

“Surround yourself with people who are just as good or better than you are and challenge yourself. Empower the people around you and work as a team.”–Lilliam Folguiera ’96

Folguiera is the managing partner of Projectability, a Miami-based marketing company. She is currently working on an MBA at FIU.     

Why come back to speak with students? I have fond memories of my time at FIU and I definitely wanted to give back. When you’re taking classes and working, you’re a little bit isolated and you don’t always hear what happens in the real world. I think it’s valuable to have someone talk to students to dissipate the fears they have about life after college.

How did FIU help prepare you for your career? It was my first exposure to a business environment, not only because I worked on campus, but also through my interactions with people and the classes I took. I learned the basics of marketing and business as well as how to interact with my peers and with other professionals.

What advice would you give students? Go for an internship and do a lot of research about the field you want to enter in the future. Look into career paths that are connected with the major you are studying. ♦

Professor Kates taught an obscure course that put FIU on the national map. It was an experiential course with the goal of preparing us for competition at Model United Nations conferences. Participating teams formulate political positions based on the actual policies of the countries they represent. A two-time FIU alumna, Professor Kates taught us skills in research, negotiation and public speaking.

Beyond just instructing us in the skills that we would use in our professional lives every day, Professor Kates made the course truly special. She handpicked every student who participated in the course. Some students were clear standouts, and some required a little work. In all of us, however, she saw great potential, and she never wavered in that belief. She worked to nurture us in areas we could improve upon. She pushed us to challenge ourselves. She served as a voice of reason and wisdom when we stumbled. And when we achieved heights we could not have imagined, she recognized our hard work.

Looking back, I worked harder for her than for any of my other professors. She made me want to be not just a better student, but a better person. From her I learned the value of teamwork and mentorship. She gave me lifelong friends who prepared with me in the trenches.

Upon her retirement in 2005 after more than 20 years of teaching, Professor Kates asked me to take over her course. It was an honor I could not refuse because I, the student, was now afforded the opportunity to learn through the lens of the teacher. This experience gave me the chance to share with a new generation the lessons I had learned under her leadership. Many of the students I taught never met Professor Kates, yet they speak just as highly of her as I do. When the 2006 team won the Outstanding Delegation Award – a rejoinder to awards earned earlier under Professor Kates’ direction – she was the first to call and congratulate us, much to the delight of our team.

My friendship with Professor Kates grew over the years. We kept in contact: yellow roses (her favorite) for her birthday, an email to catch up or a phone call to say hello. When a good friend and fellow alum planned a road trip in 2008 that allowed him to visit her in South Carolina for a few days, I flew up from Miami as a surprise. I can still see her exclaiming, “I knew it! I knew it was you, Khaleel!” when she realized I was the promised surprise guest. She opened her home to us and treated us like family.

I last spoke to Professor Kates a few months prior to her passing. I was driving through South Carolina, and I called to say hello with the hope of visiting. She was too ill to receive guests but, as she always did, she told me how much she appreciated my friendship, how proud she was of me and that she cherished our time together.

We all have our own Jeanne Kates, the FIU professors who work tirelessly for their students and push us to places we were not sure we could go. Professor Kates is no longer with us, but those fortunate enough to have been her students continue to honor her memory and carry on her indomitable spirit.   ♦

Khaleel Seecharan ’02, MA ’03, is an administrator at Ariadne Labs, a Harvard-led venture dedicated to innovation in healthcare delivery. He held several administrative positions at FIU and served as an adjunct instructor in political science and the director of the Model United Nations Program.

Share your own story of a cherished professor at go.fiu.edu/memories.

Four-year-old Danny calls out excitedly to a classmate passing by. “Estoy ganando,” he says in Spanish. “I’m winning!” Facing no actual opponents, the boy eagerly strings colored beads onto a pipe cleaner, counting them aloud as he goes. A few weeks later, Daniella, also 4, squeals with delight, her braid flying, as she rolls a ball toward plastic-bottle “bowling pins” and records her score on a sheet of paper taped to the wall.

Both children are part of a study involving the early-education enrichment program Math-Ways. Developed by FIU College of Education Professor Charles Bleiker, the program uses 15 simple activities—or “games,” as Bleiker calls them, despite their mostly noncompetitive nature—to boost the math skills of preschoolers. The activities require just 15 minutes of one-on-one time per week, over several months, between each youngster and a facilitator, in this case one of Bleiker’s graduate students. The results to date have been eye-popping.

In a post-assessment of the subjects who participated during the first year, Bleiker saw the children in the intervention group outperform those in the control group by an average of more than 30 percent on a standardized end-of-year assessment. Both groups began the school year with nearly identical averages on the same test.

“This is a big effect,” says Bleiker, who is replicating the study during the current school year with a new set of four-year-olds and will publish his research in 2015. “We’re pretty confident that, you do it like we’ve been doing it, and you’ll get similar results.”

Making the results all the sweeter: the children in the study all come from low-income families and are being raised in homes in which Spanish is the dominant language. (Math-Ways instruction is given in English.) They attend school in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, all of them enrolled in Florida’s free Voluntary Prekindergarten Education Program (VPK).

The U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2012 that incoming kindergarteners who were poor scored an average of 23 percent lower on start-of-the-year standardized math assessments than their middle-class peers.

Says Yukari Okamoto, a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an expert in early-childhood math education, “We know that it is children’s early math performance—not reading—that can more accurately predict their later academic performance. Programs like this one can help children build foundational skills during preschool years, which would positively influence their later academic success.”

The program offers children a roughly six-month boost in academic knowledge, Bleiker says. The preschoolers who received his intervention during the first year, for example, started kindergarten in the fall with math facility equivalent to that of a kindergartener more than midway through the school year.

Bleiker believes that early intervention could even out the playing field for those who come from economic disadvantage. He plans to test that hypothesis and investigate the program’s long-term scholastic benefits by following study participants as they take annual assessments in later grades.

Mercedes Ramos, director of the church-based preschool at which Bleiker has been testing his program, says children enjoy the activities and look forward to their weekly sessions.

“They find it more motivating than the regular curriculum,” Ramos says. And when compared to the control group, she adds, the students receiving intervention display greater enthusiasm. “They are more motivated to learn math and more excited to approach learning tasks.”

Industrious little Danny is a case in point. He on his own took the initiative to thread beads onto a second pipe cleaner to reach a whopping 100. Says Bleiker, “It’s way beyond what anyone would expect of a 4-year-old.” By contrast, the state’s VPK program sets a goal of children being able to count to just 20 by the time they complete the academic year.

Bleiker plans to run teacher workshops and to post videos online to guide both teachers and interested parents in how to use the activities, which range from stacking and counting cubes to a matching game that uses cards with numbers instead of pictures. Each one targets basic competencies such as identifying and naming numbers, comparing and ordering numbers, and understanding that a larger number can be broken into two or more smaller ones. The children are routinely directed to say, write, finger trace or talk about numbers as they play.

In addition to quantifiable improvements in math, Bleiker recognizes positive unintended consequences of the program. He cites an increase in students’ English vocabulary as they learn words and phrases not typically introduced in preschool, such as “greater than/less than.” And the facilitator’s constant reinforcement that a child is “winning” as he or she progresses through an activity promotes a sense of accomplishment and elevates individual self esteem.

Most important of all, Bleiker believes, early math intervention could have a life-changing impact.

“It could be that you encourage kids, and they become engineers and scientists,” Bleiker says. “We’ve got all these immigrants coming in, and if they become the engineers and the scientists and the mathematicians, that just paves the way for even greater success, and that’s the future of our society.”   ♦

The invitation, in true P. Scott Cunningham style, was irresistible.

He’s throwing an “old-fashioned book party” in honor of poet Adrian Matejka, and you’re invited.

If you didn’t know Cunningham, you might read “old-fashioned” and think this was a poetry reading straight out of Downton Abbey, with cocktails served by coat-tailed waiters surrounded by leather-bound books. What Scott meant by “old-fashioned” was the opposite: hip, retro, and not to be missed.

Respond soon, Scott suggested in the invite. “The guest list is pretty tight.”

“The Big Book Party” last November did not disappoint. It was held in the backyard of a 1920s home near the Wynwood and Design districts that have driven Miami’s arts explosion.

Some of Miami’s top literary lights wandered under the tree canopy, munching on boxes of Cracker Jacks. They gathered around an outdoor boxing ring for the main event: Two professional boxers slugged it out, Scott and his fiancé read a poem they wrote together, then Matejka took the ring to read from The Big Smoke, his poetic dramatization of Jim Crow-era heavyweight champion Jack Johnson.

MacArthur “genius” grant winning poet Campbell McGrath, Scott’s teacher and mentor at FIU, marveled from the sidelines. “This is not something I taught him,” he said.

That night someone offered McGrath the perfect description of Cunningham’s body of work, which ranges from whimsical poetry journals to over-the-top literary events to a month-long poetry extravaganza every April called O, Miami: “Scott has the soul of a Broadway producer trapped in the body of a poet.”

*****

The story of how P. Scott Cunningham, 35, went from FIU graduate student to Miami poetry impresario dates back to 2006, when Scott and some classmates from FIU’s Creative Writing MFA program met Campbell McGrath for beers on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach.

“As soon as we all sat down, Campbell, out of nowhere, declared that it was the first meeting of the ‘Miami Poetry Collective,’ ” Cunningham said. “By naming it, he gave us a kind of permission to go do stuff.”

Do stuff they did. The Miami Poetry Collective began setting up on street corners to write improvised poems-to-order on manual typewriters. They hawked a self-published zine of the Collective’s work for a few pennies. They hosted readings at bars and collaborated with anyone that was game.

In some ways, Cunningham has pursued the traditional route toward becoming a professional poet. He got his MFA. He’s landed a good two dozen poems in literary journals. He’s now looking for a publisher for his first book of poems.

But his grass-roots encounters from the Miami Poetry Collective – such as the time he was asked to write a personalized poem for a couple to read at their wedding – permanently altered the way Cunningham thought about his poetic project.

“What’s cooler? Getting published in a literary journal or writing something for two people that will be part of their lives forever?” Cunningham said. “It made me realize that trying to impress people who already love poetry is not important to me. We are creating a new audience.”

In 2008, Scott was nearing graduation, and as so often happens in Miami, members of the Collective began peeling off to pursue careers in writing or teaching in other cities.

“When I was graduating, I knew I wasn’t leaving Miami,” said Cunningham, who grew up in Boca Raton. “I really wanted to create the literary community that was in my head in Miami. I wanted to do things here that were community-based and that were right for Miami.”

Then Cunningham caught a break. Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Knight Foundation and a fellow alumnus of Wesleyan, had seen Cunningham selling poems around town and asked if he wanted to put together a poetry festival.

“My thought is we’d have readings by Seamus Heaney and get repetitive stress injury patting ourselves on the back,” Alberto Ibargüen said. “Scott said poetry is part of life and should be out in the community. I had a conventional notion, and he blew it up.”

That spark grew into O, Miami, a Knight-funded annual poetry festival held every April since 2011. It has the modest goal of exposing all 2.5 million people in Miami-Dade County to a poem during National Poetry Month.

O, Miami has featured its share of big names, such as actor-poet James Franco, singer-poet Patti Smith, and Obama inaugural poet Richard Blanco (also a graduate of the FIU MFA program). It’s sponsored crowd-sourced poetry contests with The Miami Herald and local NPR station WLRN. This year’s festival kicked off with readings from former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass and National Book Award-winner Nikky Finney. Click here for a full list of this year’s events.

But O, Miami distinguishes itself with the unconventional and the buzzworthy. Cunningham and his collaborators have sewn poems into thrift store threads, flown poetry banners behind planes, snuck poems onto drink coasters, and placed poetry parking tickets on cars. He rained poems written in vegetable ink on biodegradable paper from a helicopter. He even belted out poems using a bullhorn while driving a red convertible Lamborghini on Ocean Drive in South Beach.

“Scott capitalizes on the absurd flashy Miami image and projects it onto something that’s completely without flash,” said Arlo Haskell, incoming executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar. “Scott is a genius marketer. He makes poetry and literature fun, he makes it a collective experience.”

“Scott doesn’t believe that poetry is bound by the borders of the page it’s written on,” said Campbell McGrath. “Scott can write a traditional poem, but he’s also interested in what else it could be. He’s always pushing the boundaries.”

“Anyone selling poems for four cents on a street corner and shouting poems from a Lamborghini on Ocean Drive and dropping poems from the sky has a little bit of P.T. Barnum in them,” said Alberto Ibargüen. “But it’s all in the service of this cause, which is art and poetry.”

Cunningham said his mission is simple: “O, Miami has taught Miami that poetry is not dead. It’s a living genre, and it’s more dynamic than people give it credit for.”

*****

Cunningham has these words tattooed in a cursive script on his arm. “I will die in Miami in the sun.”

They’re the opening lines of a poem by Miami-born Donald Justice, one of the poets that’s most influenced Cunningham.

Cunningham’s published poems evince a verbal flair and a wry humor. They can take a nostalgic tone. They reflect some of his obsessions, such as his ode to NBA basketball player Zydrunas Ilgauskas, or the series he’s written about composer Morton Feldman.

But he has yet to capture his greatest obsession and his muse on paper.

“I’ve really failed as a Miami poet so far, in my opinion,” he said. “I think of my own tiny Miami poems and I get depressed.”

“But here’s the thing,” he added. “Even though I grew up in Boca, so South Florida is in my DNA, I’ve only lived in Miami since 2005. So to me, my Miami-ness is still in formation. I still have time to write an epic about the Venetian Causeway.”   ♦

Dan Grech (@dgrech) is a Media Innovation Fellow at the FIU School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He has worked at Marketplace, the Miami Herald and WLRN and has taught journalism at Princeton University and Columbia Journalism School.

A magazine is so much more than pages of words and photos. A good magazine has a personality, a point of view, a history. From the start, ours has embodied the spirit of this university: vibrant, bold, entrepreneurial.

Our magazine also has its own story to tell. This year, FIU Magazine turns 20. In that time, we’ve had only two editors, Todd Ellenberg MS ’91 and me. Todd hired me as a writer a decade ago when I was in graduate school at FIU. I became editor when he left to become assistant vice president of communications and marketing at the University of Miami. The high standards and great storytelling that Todd set in place remain.

This week, Todd came back to visit with me and with External Relations Vice President Terry Witherell. She was the original designer of FIU Magazine, alongside Todd. We had a great time reminiscing. They flipped through pages recalling photos they had taken, sharing the back stories of the stories, laughing about how certain spreads came together.

When FIU was just beginning to form its identity, Todd and Terry were the creative geniuses in the back office who understood the importance and power of telling the FIU story. Not everyone got that when the magazine started. It took time and consistent excellence to establish the magazine as the voice of this large urban institution.

Indeed, FIU Magazine has its own story to tell. I’m happy that Todd has agreed to write an essay about founding the magazine and its early days. Look for it in the Spring 2014 issue, which we are now wrapping up.

Today, FIU Magazine is one of the largest university magazines in the country. Our publication is consistently being recognized by our peers in higher education. On the same day that Todd came to visit, I received word that FIU Magazine won three regional awards for feature writing, photography and best overall publication design from CASE, the professional organization of university communications.

I’m incredibly proud of the magazine team, especially Art Director Aileen Sola, Staff Writer Sissi Aguila and Multimedia Producer Doug Garland. And as we celebrate, I’m reminded that behind those honors is an amazing creative team that stretches back two decades.

It is called UniversityCity and combines two major components: creation of a transportation hub at the Modesto A. Maidique Campus (MMC) featuring enhanced bus service to connect east and west Miami-Dade County, and the development of a small, economically stable downtown in the city of Sweetwater. FIU believes this new infrastructure will help alleviate worsening traffic by stimulating development of student-oriented housing in Sweetwater, encouraging use of public transit and decreasing the distances between where people live, work, play and go to school.

“We are trying to plan, prepare and build for the future,” says Steve Sauls, FIU’s vice president for Governmental Relations. “We’re leveraging university expertise to respond to locally based problems and thinking very intentionally about how people interface with the physical and social environment on and around campus.”

Related: Fighting gridlock with your smartphone

The project also will address FIU’s continued growth and its ability to serve ever-greater numbers of students. Today MMC has parking available for as many as 11,500 cars, a number that leaves many drivers circling around for open spaces during peak times on a typical weekday.

“We have a great university, and imagine if people couldn’t get here because the roads are all congested,” Sauls says. At issue are also questions of sustainability, among them quality of life, health and the environment. “These are problems with solutions that take a long time to plan and implement,” he explains. “We need to be forward thinking. There is no time like the present to begin working on them and to create momentum.”

Getting started

Over the last several years Sauls has built a coalition of local, state and national agencies to coordinate a variety of projects related to the UniversityCity plan. He also brought on board numerous collaborators and secured initial funding.

An $11.4 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant announced in the fall will make possible the construction of a pedestrian bridge across Southwest 8th Street to connect MMC with Sweetwater’s main street at 109th Avenue. The bridge will offer safe passage over a highly traveled seven-lane road and is expected to be completed in 2017. But that quiet area – currently a collection of mom-and-pop businesses – will see its first boost in activity long before that. This summer a new, private 15-story, student-oriented apartment building will welcome its first residents. Other residential projects are already in the works as are shops and eateries that would attract students, faculty and staff. For a commuter school bounded on four sides by busy thoroughfares, an easily accessible, dynamic urban village should create a lot of interest.

Architecture Professor Adam Drisin worked on initial plans for UniversityCity, which early on involved architecture students presenting ideas. FIU’s efforts in Sweetwater, he said, reflect a growing trend in American universities.

“They’re looking at breaking down the barriers, physically and metaphysically, between the context that they’re located in and the campus itself.” FIU’s satellite locations, among them the Miami Beach Urban Studios and the Brickell Center, are two such examples. Branching out into our immediate backyard also makes sense, he adds, so long as the push is about more than simply new construction.

“There’s another kind of investment,” Drisin says, “which is a kind of collective societal investment, about making great places, building great cities.” So, in addition to the bridge, he talks about “walkability” features, some of which Sweetwater will ask developers to help finance. These include landscaping, improved sidewalks, attractive building fronts and even public art that contribute to a neighborhood feel and facilitate both movement and human interaction. “A chance opportunity to bump into someone is really critical in constructing culture, whether it’s at a university or in a city,” he says.

The bridge should also, for the first time, encourage the residents of Sweetwater – a city of 14,200 largely Cuban and Nicaraguan immigrants – to venture to the other side. Awaiting them at FIU: healthcare providers at the FIU Health center, cultural events at the Wertheim Performing Arts Center, exhibitions at the Frost Art Museum, sporting events at the stadium and arena, free lectures and more.

“I think that Sweetwater is awakened to an opportunity with FIU that very few people ever thought was going to be possible,” Sweetwater Mayor Jose Diaz says. “Sweetwater is a small city with middle to lower class residents, and I think at this point we have to join forces [with FIU]. The future is inspiring, for job creation, for cultural enhancement, you name it.”

Promoting alternatives

Getting the FIU community and local residents to walk across a bridge sounds easy when compared to convincing car-obsessed South Floridians to take the bus. But that effort is also part of the UniversityCity equation. FIU’s project will significantly enhance planned “bus rapid transit” service between west Miami-Dade County and Miami International Airport. BRT offers fewer stops than regular bus service, to speed up travel time, and uses vehicles outfitted with electronics to switch red stoplights to green, potentially making the commute faster than a car ride.

Related: Federal grant to boost UniversityCity: a transportation hub at FIU

At MMC the trip will begin, or end, at Parking Garage 6, a 2,000-space “smart” structure (so-called for the sensors that will alert drivers to vacant parking spots) that will serve as a transportation hub on the north side of campus. Upon the garage’s completion in 2015, Miami-Dade Transit Authority will build on a bus-entry ramp and passenger platform. The near-term plan is for the bus to go northward from campus, along 107th Ave., to the FIU Engineering Center and then turn eastward onto Flagler Street to downtown Miami. The long-term plan is for the bus to continue northward on 107th Ave. to the 836 expressway going east with a final destination of the airport’s Miami Intermodal Center, where riders could catch Metrorail, Tri-rail and buses on other routes.

But the bus is just the start, leaders say. Moving people by alternative means also includes ramping up local trolley and shuttle services that will have students and area residents leaving their cars behind. And bike and car sharing services on campus and within Sweetwater could, for some people, negate the need to own cars in the first place.

Selling the bus

Showing people that they can get around efficiently without a car remains key. And so FIU is working with several partners to create the ultimate sales tool: a first-in-the-world “predictive” transportation app to navigate not just traffic but also parking and public transit, all based on real-time conditions. Its development figures prominently into the UniversityCity plan and is funded partly by the same U.S. DOT grant that supports the bridge. In an age of digital connectivity – when teenagers say they care less about obtaining driver’s licenses than the latest cell phone – such technology might prove the tipping point with commuters.

“Yes, it will give people navigation information based on just driving,” says Professor Naphtalie Rishe of the app, “but our goal, our ulterior motive is not so much to give people parking and traffic directions, but to give them alternatives.” Ultimately, he says, he wants to discourage driving altogether. But how?

By providing information so commuters can make better transportation choices, Rishe explains. Building on his groundbreaking data measurement system, Terrafly, he and his team are collaborating with the University of Illinois at Chicago, IBM and other international companies to bring together various existing technologies to create an app that uses crowdsourcing – drivers sharing their locations via cell phones – to establish real-time conditions. With that information, the app could suggest the best driving route while also pointing out where drivers might park to catch transit anywhere in the county.

The kicker: those waiting for a bus would also have access to its exact location in real time along with a fairly accurate approximation of its arrival at a particular stop – essentially removing the unpredictability that currently deters ridership.

Plenty of folks await the completion of Rishe’s work. “Once we deploy it, it will be a role model for the entire country,” says Rishe, who expects to have usable data within two years. “If that can work here and improve the experience for the local population and increase use of transit, then there is the potential of saving billions and billions of dollars across the country.”   ♦

Here’s my picks for our most impressive work in 2013:

Best story to give you hope in humanity

The Homeless Children Next Door
This story might make you cry. Or pull out your checkbook. The world is a better place because of people like FIU grad Beth Davalos.

Best news about driving in Miami

Miami’s Smart Bridges
Miami’s traffic woes are infamous. But thanks to the ingenuity of FIU engineers, we can drive the city’s busiest interchange feeling a lot safer.

Most fascinating story from The Fringe

The Lost Tribe
A tribe of one-time cannibals in a remote corner of Papua New Guinea claims to be a Lost Tribe of Israel. They also believe FIU Professor Tudor Parfitt, an expert on The Lost Tribes, will help them return to Israel.

Best amazing people of FIU stories

Profiles in Medicine
These profiles of some of our new College of Medicine doctors show us the personal triumphs behind this institutional accomplishment.

16-year-old graduate is more than just brains
It would be easy to miss the real story of Sky Choi, the youngest person to ever graduate from FIU. But our Digital Media Manager Angeline Evans and videographer Doug Garland captured his true passion in this story and video.

Best way to tell a science story story

The Nano Cure
A Charticle! We took a complicated research development and broke it down into a clear, eye-catching illustration that tells the whole story visually.

Best come back and visit us photos
Yeah, folks. That’s our FIU. Library photo by Eduardo Merille and Panther photo by Doug Garland. Click for full-size photos.

Our Most National Geographic moment
This photo by Tim Long captures so much of what we witnessed in Papua New Guinea. The Gogodala are a people reclaiming the tribal traditions lost to the influx of Christian missionaries. At the same time, they are looking forward, reimaging a new life for their children in the modern world. Click for a full-size photo.

Tastiest stories of the year

Chocolate-making family
A family of FIU graduates runs one sweet business. Don’t miss the awesomely chocolotately graphic too.

Beer Brewing the South Florida Way
You gotta love a university that has its own student brew club.

Design most likely to be turned into a poster

Nuestra Tierra Florida
Art Director Aileen Sola’s spread looks like some exquisite page of a book housed in Special Collections.

Leave me a note below and let me know what you liked best from 2013 and what you’d like to see more of in 2014.

— Deborah

Staff Sgt. Victor Arvizu, newly retired after 20 years in the service, cannot wait for 2014. Giddy with the anticipation of achieving a long-standing dream to become a nurse, in January he will join the ranks of former military medics starting classes at FIU. Designed just for them, the brand-new program gives credit to battlefield-tested veterans for their real-world expertise.

“I told my wife years ago that I wish there was something that would take into account all of our knowledge and experience and help us get into nursing school,” recalls Arvizu, 38, who felt his age worked against him. Now he praises FIU nursing leaders for taking the initiative and landing a $1.3 million federal grant to make it happen. “It’s like they were reading my mind,” he says. “They basically took everything that I had hoped and wished for and brought it to life.”

When Arvizu finally earns his degree, in just one year, he will stand among a growing legion of nurses – 4,000 and counting – whose training at FIU has taken them to heights they never imagined. The illustrious group includes people like Grisel Fernandez-Bravo ’85, who back in 1983 gathered with about 80 others as a member of the inaugural class of FIU students seeking a bachelor of science in nursing. Today the two-time FIU alumna, who also holds an MBA and a doctorate in nursing practice from elsewhere, oversees and coordinates the work of some 1,200 nurses as the chief nursing officer for Memorial Hospital West in Broward County.

Watch: Thirty years of nursing at FIU

Meanwhile, nursing education at FIU has just celebrated 30 years of serving South Florida as an innovator with many firsts to its credit. It has expanded from a small program to take the lead role in a multidisciplinary college that offers advanced degrees, attracts federal research funding, houses state-of-the-art simulation-training, conducts community outreach and boasts a highly respected faculty. And that’s just the beginning. A recent gift of $10 million will make possible continued growth within the newly renamed Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences.

“I’m extremely impressed,” Fernandez-Bravo says of both her own and FIU’s stellar trajectories. A caregiver at heart, she has soared professionally, propelled in large part by her initial training. “When I went into nursing, I thought I’d be taking care of patients forever,” she says, “but I truly believe that FIU gave me the foundation to know I had potential to continue my professional growth.”

A history of innovation

Leaders of FIU nursing have always recognized that serving the community – as many as two-thirds of alumni work in South Florida – means creating unique educational opportunities.

A prime example, from the early 2000s: the first-in-the-nation program to train as registered nurses foreign physicians who lacked requirements to obtain U.S. medical licenses. The goal was to return highly qualified professionals to the workforce during an acute nursing shortage.

“It was a turning point in my life,” says Peggy DeCardenas ’06, ’08, of her acceptance into the program in 2004. Coming from Cuba, she lacked language skills to continue a career in medicine. And so she and her husband, a doctor trained in Africa who likewise could not practice here, found themselves in desk jobs auditing insurance and Medicaid claims.

“I felt I had so many things I could offer – compassion and good care – but I couldn’t,” DeCardenas says of her former job situation. “The program let us go back to the community and give that. I am so grateful.” Today she works in a nephrology practice in Miami. Both she and her husband eventually returned to FIU to add graduate nursing degrees to their credentials.

Several years ago, the college took the foreign-physician program a step further by capping it with the master’s-level nurse-practitioner degree. Graduates can make diagnoses and prescribe medications, just as physicians do, and are in high demand.

Marie Ketty Jussome ’13, trained as a pediatrician in her homeland of Haiti, earlier this year made local headlines when she completed the program after losing her physician-husband in the earthquake of 2010. “I found it was the perfect program for me,” says Jussome, who is now pursing a Ph.D. from the college and hopes to one day combine clinical work with teaching.

Today the college offers no fewer than 16 nursing programs, tracks and certificates to prepare professionals for the full range of employment options. These include a nurse-anesthetist degree that in 2001 was the first established within Florida’s public university system, and a unique nurse-educator certificate designed to produce nursing faculty for community colleges and other schools.

Education for the 21st century

FIU has stepped up its nurse training in the current era of nonstop scientific advancement and evidence-based practice.

“We’re grasping the importance of science – psychological, physiological, sociological science – in understanding our patients’ diseases and how to care for them,” says Ora Strickland, dean of the college since 2011. “Our knowledge is exploding so fast that everybody has to learn more.”

To keep up with the proliferation of new treatments, medications and medical technologies, FIU undergraduate nursing students take increasingly rigorous coursework while participating in traditional clinical rotations – observing and assisting working professionals – at any of more than two dozen local hospitals. As of 2010, they also train in one of the most sophisticated simulated hospitals in the country.

The on-campus facility mimics a hospital ward complete with OR, ER and primary care settings. It features the latest equipment along with mannequins that can manifest the symptoms of various disease states. Establishing the high-tech center is just another way in which FIU adapted with the times to offer its students the best possible preparation.

“We get to care for patients that are acutely ill, and we have a discussion right after: what went right, what went wrong, what to improve,” undergraduate Natalie Leal says of the simulation lab. And, she adds, simulation builds confidence by providing hands-on experience. “You forget that you’re being recorded and your classmates are watching,” she says of the intense scenarios in which other students play concerned family members.

The human element also remains critical in graduating highly prepared professionals. Steadley Foster ’11 is a nursing administrator for a new program at Brown Mackie College in Miami, where he employs six of his fellow-graduates as faculty and looks to hire more. To this day he continues to call upon his former professors to guide him as he takes a greater leadership role in his own organization.

“They are just dynamite people,” Foster says of mentors such as the college’s former dean, Divina Grossman, today the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “It’s a place of support and motivation, of caring and compassion.”

Riding the next wave

In the coming years, one of the greatest impacts on healthcare likely will arise from the integration of disciplines. Once again, FIU nursing is ahead of the curve by investigating ways to encourage the team approach. The concept makes perfect sense within the setting of the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences, which brings together the physical and rehabilitative sciences – among them physical, occupational and speech therapy – with nursing.

“We have the honor and pleasure of having five different disciplines in this college, and that’s where we are going,” Strickland says of collaborative activity. “That’s the wave of the future. We have learned that each discipline has unique strengths. Standing alone, we don’t do the job as well, but when you bring that integrative, interdisciplinary approach, that’s where you reach your optimum.”

The caliber of students likewise continues to boost the college’s reputation. Many return after earning bachelor’s degrees to pursue advanced degrees that position them to take on greater responsibility and leadership roles.

That’s the plan for Arvizu, who wants to work in a hospital intensive care unit for a year before returning for a master’s. Whatever the course of his future, however, he knows one thing for sure: he has found his calling. “Selfless service is something that I learned in the military, wanting to help people in situations where they need somebody to guide them and make the right decisions,” he says. “I think that’s the biggest thing that motivates me to become a nurse.”   ♦