Successful graduates counsel students on achieving goals and attaining dreams.

WANTED: A professional with demonstrated success in his or her industry who exhibits humility and a down-to-earth sensibility to serve as a role model to a young person in search of self-actualization.

Sounds like a tall order. But in 2014, student Jevon Howell found a mentor who met all of his criteria when he sat next to alumnus John Farias ’99, EMBA ’16 at a dinner designed to bring students together with thriving FIU graduates.

Programs like the “Dining with 12 Panthers” event at which the two connected and the annual Panther Alumni Week, which has graduates going into classrooms to share real-world stories, lay the groundwork for incredible opportunities. By spending quality time with students, alumni inspire them to persevere through college and earn their degrees.

“Networking, learning about career paths and finding a mentor that bleeds blue and gold are just a few life-changing benefits of connecting with alumni,” explains Duane Wiles, executive director of the Alumni Association, of the special bond between students and alumni. “What’s important is the fact that students get to meet with people that were in their shoes and have made it.”

A world of possibilities

Howell agrees that having access to exemplary alumni can change everything. “You don’t know something is possible,” he says, “until you see success in the flesh. Meeting them and hearing them is proof.” Both he and fellow student Jonathan Williams, finance majors who studied in the Honors College, sought out Farias on the same evening because they recognized a potentially powerful mentor.

“They were hungry for knowledge and guidance,” says Farias, a leader within the mortgage industry. “I was not going to refuse two ambitious young minds,” he says of the first-generation students. Soon he began meeting with the pair weekly in the Graham Center. Together they talked about, among other subjects, the students’ potential to lead a campus business organization to which they both belonged, and which internships might provide the best learning opportunities and boost their resumes. Today, two years later, Howell, a senior, knows he can call Farias at any time. “John’s part of my life,” Howell says.

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Read more about mentoring: Community members offer students unique insights into their chosen fields

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Williams, who graduated in 2015, credits Farias with helping him land a job. He recalls how Farias asked a recruiter to come to campus and host a mock interview for himself and Howell. Williams said the feedback he received during that practice session set him up for success.

“We’re going with more foresight into different situations,” Williams explains of what a mentor can provide to someone just starting out. “And it just makes the learning curve and how to navigate this great thing called life much easier.”

Like Williams, Saad Ali ’16 got a boost in that direction thanks to his mentor, Peter Koltis ’87, a managing director for the Florida branch of a global professional services firm. The pair were matched through a College of Business program, and Ali, now a recent graduate, says Koltis helped him define his career path and demystify the “real world” of work. Koltis explained what different careers could look like and helped Ali weigh options for internships and jobs.

As an undergraduate, Shonda Witherspoon ’16 co-published an article in a scientific journal. Her identical twin Shalisha ’16 led the development of a multifaceted software system.

The sisters reached these incredible heights thanks to mentoring from Naphtali Rishe. The eminent professor of computer science holds five U.S. patents and directs several acclaimed university and community research centers. He is the principal investigator on numerous projects, many of them funded by the National Science Foundation.

So when an instructor suggested that Rishe meet the Witherspoons—first-generation college students who went on to graduate this past summer with the highest GPAs in the College of Engineering & Computing—busy Rishe jumped at the chance to hire qualified help. Impressed by the sisters’ assertiveness and enthusiasm, he offered them jobs, and the three soon dove into an important symbiotic relationship: The students contributed to the cutting-edge research coming out of Rishe’s lab—the two mostly created and maintained specialized collections, or datasets, of geographical and related information for access on the web—and the professor helped the two deepen and refine their skills by providing direct feedback on their activities.

“They have done spectacular work. It is a privilege working with them,” says Rishe, who has appreciated the chance to support two young talents in a meaningful way—something he continues to do as the women pursue graduate degrees at FIU. “This is an old-fashioned apprenticeship,” he says of what has resulted in both a productive collaboration and a close bond.

Read more about mentoring: Coaching the whole athlete

Coming full circle

Aaron Armbrister knows the challenges that children in underserved communities face. For many years, he was one of them.

“I’ve always lived in a poor neighborhood,” says Armbrister, pictured above, who started life in the Goulds area in southwest Miami-Dade County and later moved to West Coconut Grove. “A lot of kids will do what their friends are doing in their communities, which for the most part is not much. There aren’t many opportunities there.”

But in seventh grade, Armbrister was recruited to take part in a six-week summer enrichment program offered by Breakthrough Miami, an organization dedicated to preparing motivated youngsters to go to college.

“It was the first time I had contact with other academically driven students my age,” Armbrister says. That summer of learning set Armbrister firmly on a path toward academic achievement, and today he is a biomedical engineering major at FIU.

Equally important to Armbrister’s success, Breakthrough Miami offered him a chance to help others—and learn about himself in the process. Armbrister was enlisted to serve as a mentor and role model for younger students, something he has done now for several years. This past summer he used what he has learned at FIU to create a biomedical engineering curriculum for ninth and tenth graders and worked with the students to build an electrocardiogram device.

“I wanted to contribute back to the program,” Armbrister says, “because I gained a lot from it–opportunities to discover what I like to do and to be myself.” That example of someone coming full circle is exactly what the Breakthrough Miami leadership looks to create.

“He’s been in those students’ seats and is very relatable for them,” Nichelle Haymore, the organization’s director of college access, says of Armbrister. “They see someone who went through the program and sets an example for what the future could be like for them. Aaron is a great ambassador for what we do.”

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Read more about mentoring: Peer-to-peer mentoring

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And the payoff is there. An eighth grader whom Armbrister has mentored for three years sought him out this summer to express his appreciation.

“He thanked me for helping him realize how much he likes math and told me he was doing so much better in school now that he has confidence in himself,” Armbrister recalls. “It’s very rewarding to know that you were able to impact someone’s life and help build their confidence.”

Shaping the future

Eshrat Nikrooye-Asli arrived at FIU with a big decision to make.

She had been running an after-school tutoring program for elementary-school children that she had created with several friends. Now faced with the challenges of attending college, she had to choose whether or not to keep it going.

Rather than let the kids down, she made the program even bigger. She and a few other students in the Honors College together established EAST (Elementary, Arts, Science and Technology), an after-school enrichment program at Sweetwater Elementary.

In the spring, Nikrooye-Asli–now a junior triple majoring in political science, international relations and Asian studies–worked with the school’s fourth graders on a collaborative book project to introduce them to creative writing. Nikrooye-Asli and her colleagues are working to publish the students’ short stories in a book.

And during the current school year, they are students to gardening and theatre. She and her colleagues look to fill a gap for kids whose school has seen a discontinuation in after-school arts and science programming, and they want to provide youngsters with role models to look up to. Nikrooye-Asli herself recalls how much such mentors impacted her own life.

“I remember in elementary school they would come, and they would be like a big brother or a big sister to me,” she says. “When you go into a school, you are a role model for these students and can inspire them to go to college and be anything they want to be.”

Sweetwater Elementary Principal Janet Olivera likewise recognizes the power of what Nikrooye-Asli has helped establish.

“It’s important for our students to develop those educational and emotional connections with college students like Eshrat who are really passionate about working with them,” she says. “They really help give our students a vision of what they can be in the future.”  ♦

Having taken a few years off from school, he was eager to make up for lost time. He wasn’t expecting to get involved on campus. He didn’t foresee becoming a student leader. And he never anticipated graduating with a very impressive 3.62 GPA. But he did all of these things. And he says it started with one decision he made his first semester: signing up for the LGBTQA Mentors Program.

“The goal of the Mentors Program is to help create a safe, supportive and welcoming environment for our LGBT students on campus,” says Gisela Vega, associate director of LGBTQA Initiatives, which is part of the Multicultural Programs and Services (MPAS). The program’s main focus, she says, is to help LGBT students stay in college and graduate.

“We know that our LGBT population is one of the most marginalized groups on any campus,” Vega explains. “It’s been well documented that this population drops out of school at a higher rate than their straight counterparts because of the bullying and harassment they experience.  We want to make sure that doesn’t happen here at FIU.”

The four-year old mentorship program caters to about two dozen students each year. Nerissa Rae Mape signed up as a freshman in 2014 and today as a junior continues to meet regularly with her mentors, FIU librarian Marissa Ball.

“The mentorship helped me grow and become more open,” Mape says. She adds that such a program would have helped her tremendously in high school. “Back then, when I didn’t have a support group, I felt that I was alone.” Now, at FIU, “I found a second home. I found people who were like me and could give me advice and guide me to know myself better. I can’t explain it, but I became a different person than I was before the mentorship.”

“She’s much more comfortable with herself,” Ball says. “I can tell even the way she carries herself, the way she dresses, the way she talks about her social life and the things she’s involved in, she has grown exponentially.”

Mape says these programs can have a potentially huge effect on students within the LGBT community.

“That kind of support group, for some people, it’s rare for them. It’s important to have that kind of nourishing relationship to help them grow and help them go on their own path. It’s so important, especially because there can be a lot of hardships for people who are LGBT.”

According to a study by the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention, 34 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual high school students who completed a 2015 survey reported being bullied at school and 28 percent reported being bullied online. Forty percent said they had seriously considered suicide and 29 percent reported attempting suicide within the previous year. Ten percent stated they had missed school within the previous 30 days out of concern for their safety.

As for Hadley, he considers the mentorship program a launching pad for his career as a student. Through the program he learned about new-student orientation peer advisors and soon volunteered. He also found out about the Gay Straight Alliance student club at FIU’s Biscayne Bay Campus (BBC), and eventually served as president.

A first-generation college student and new to Miami, Hadley says he looked to his mentor, Carolyn Meeker, for guidance on everything from academics, to life at FIU and possibilities for grad school. And Meeker, the assistant director of Career and Talent Development at BBC, readily offered guidance.

“She was the embodiment of what you think a mentor should be,” says Hadley, who is now considering graduate school after earning a psychology degree this year. “It was personal but also job-based, networking, making sure I was keeping on top of things.”

Such encouragement, he adds, pushed him to get involved on campus in the first place. He says those experiences “make me feel even more proud to graduate from FIU.”  ♦

• Senior vice president and private client advisor, U.S. Trust Bank of America
• FIU Bachelor of Business Administration

Q: What are your fondest memories of FIU?

A: My fondest memories revolve around the friends I made while I was there and the professors who taught me. It was a very nurturing environment.

Q: Did you have a mentor at FIU?

A: My mentor came in the way of a fellow student. I had put my schooling on hold while living in Switzerland. When I returned after more than two years, I was feeling lost and not very motivated as my friends had all graduated. Lupe Pimentel [class of 1995] and I met in a finance class and she immediately recognized that I needed help. She quickly became my encouragement, my support and my guide.

Q: Why is it important to find mentors as you make your way in the world?

A: In life we are better connected than alone. There is always something new to learn, some better way to do something and someone out there that may have the answer that we are looking for.

Q: Why do you choose to mentor others?

A: I feel that it’s crucial to give back in whatever way one can. I have been very fortunate to have individuals along the way that have guided, encouraged and supported me, and without them my career path would have been much more difficult. So it’s natural for me to want to do the same for others. I also feel that we have a responsibility to help guide and teach the next generation because these young professionals ultimately will be our next business and civic leaders.

Q: What do you hope to share as a mentor?

A: I’ve tried to give others the wonderful advice that I’ve been given – believe in yourself, speak up, try something new. But I also try to instill in them the sense of responsibility to pay it forward, not only in the business world but in their communities as well. I encourage them to find a cause that they feel passionate about and to become involved. It’s important to really know the place one calls home and to be a part of what happens there.

Q: What is your proudest accomplishment, professional or personal?

A: Without a doubt it’s my family. My husband Jorge and I have been blessed with two wonderful children, Gabriella and Daniel, who thrill us and challenge us every day. Watching them grow and succeed and start making their own mark in life is humbling.

Q: You contribute locally by serving on several community boards. What diversions do you squeeze into your free time?

A: Traveling with friends and family, and photography, are at the top of the list.  ♦

Many of your programs have a strong mentorship component. What are the benefits? 

Success is built on relationships. The reality is none of us have gotten where we are on our own. We’ve always had people in our lives to help us get there. Mentors are instrumental in encouraging students so that they can succeed. Mentors teach them to think critically, to ask questions and to solve problems. Mentors are giving them skills for the workplace and for life.

How have mentors impacted you personally and professionally? 

Everywhere I’ve been, people saw potential in me and invested in me. My uncle and aunt pushed me toward college and supported me even as I worked 40 hours a week while taking a full load of credits. In the workplace, many of my supervisors began to bring out the best in me, positioning me for greater opportunities within the organization. You need people in your corner who will help you keep your eyes on the prize.

Is having a mentor essential for underrepresented students? 

When you look at individuals coming from low economic backgrounds, or first-generation college students, many are coming from environments where they have never seen success. I love the slogan of the 100 Black Men organization: “What they see is what they will be.” Underrepresented students in particular need to see successful people who look like them.

What has motivated you to mentor others? 

The greatest joy in life is being able to help bring out the best in other people and see them excel. And because it was done for me, I have an obligation to do it for others.

What does it take to be a successful mentor? 

It takes an individual who is genuine about making a difference in the lives of others, someone who is committed to the process. It’s more than just a quick phone call. It’s an investment of quality time.  ♦

Yolanda Suarez’s hands shook as she neared the stage. She was determined to become a leader for a national student-run professional organization. There was only one thing standing in her way: She had to give a speech to voting members at the national convention in Pittsburgh as part of the election process.

Suarez had spent hours drafting her speech and reviewing it with her mentor, who at the time was the faculty advisor of FIU’s chapter of the organization, Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism ManagementProfessor Miranda Kitterlin. Suarez knew she was prepared.

But as she climbed the stage, the reality of the situation hit her. She was about to present a timed speech in front of more than 500 students and professors from across the country.

As she braced herself to start, Suarez saw her mentor slip into the room. She didn’t want to let Kitterlin down. And just as she paused — heart racing and nerves on end – Suarez looked at the back of the room and saw Kitterlin with camera in hand, snapping a photo of her during her speech. Then, Kitterlin smiled and gave her a thumbs up.

At that moment Suarez realized, perfect speech or not, everything was going to be okay.

Kitterlin always knew Suarez was a rising star. “She sparkled,” Kitterlin says, recalling when she first met Suarez through activities for the National Society of Minorities in Hospitality (NSMH). “You knew instantly that she was going places.”

Before earning a spot on the national board of NSMH – 18 students who run the umbrella organization — Suarez was the president of the FIU chapter. She also served on the Hospitality Student Leadership Council, which is a select group of students that helps guide the vision of the Chaplin School’s Career Development Program and assists in selecting and organizing activities offered for students. Right after graduation in the spring of 2016, she landed a spot in Hilton Worldwide’s highly competitive management-in-training program – a professional internship program that guarantees full-time employment upon completion.

Suarez says she owes much of her success to Kitterlin’s mentorship. What began as a student leader asking the faculty advisor of an organization for advice quickly evolved into a cornerstone relationship. Suarez found someone with whom to discuss questions ranging from leadership opportunities and internship hunting to handling academic and life questions. Kitterlin also connected Suarez with local industry professionals and helped her prepare for job interviews.

“Miranda was the foundation of my education,” Suarez says. “Most of what I have achieved has been because of her or at her suggestion. It was almost like having a best friend in my corner, but a very special one.”

Kitterlin, for her part, says sharing Suarez’s journey has been a joy for her. She welcomes the chance to help students find their wings—often just the motivator they need to reach graduation.

“Having a relationship like this with a faculty member can make students feel more invested and more comfortable, more secure and confident with their place at FIU,” Kitterlin explains. “It’s not just about going to class. It’s about getting the full experience of everything that FIU has to offer, and one of those things is access to faculty and the opportunity to build relationships.”

That’s mentorship at FIU.  ♦

Georgina Picos ’87 was appointed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch to serve as a federal immigration judge. She was one of 15 sworn in earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. She began hearing cases in June.


1990s

Aida Fernandez Brena ’92 was featured recently in Modern Luxury Interiors Magazine for her remodel of a Dominican Republic home.

Dorothy Negrin ’93 was hired as commercial litigator at the law firm of McGlinchey Stafford PLLC’s Fort Lauderdale office in July.

Ann Justiz ’94, the vice president and director of sales and marketing at Safe Fuel Systems, was featured with her husband on the cover of 145 Magazine, in which she discusses their growing company.

Joe Madera ’96 was appointed manager of the new SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Jackson, Wyoming.

Mireidy Fernandez ’98 was promoted to senior planner in Miami-Dade County’s Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources, where she serves as project manager for amendments to the county’s Comprehensive Development Master Plan.

Elizabeth Garland ’99, MA ’08 and husband Douglas Garland ’10welcomed their first child, Adeline Katherine, on April 15, 2016. Adeline loves the Dixie Chicks and her daddy’s goofy faces.


2000s

Charo Oquet ’00, an interdisciplinary artist who creates installations, videos and live performances, received the 2016 Here & Now Commission Award. Here & Now is an initiative launched in 1999 by the Miami Light Project to promote South Florida-based performing and multimedia artists.

Steven Harper ’01, JD ’06, a partner at Harper, Meyer, Perez, Hagen, O’Connor, Albert & Dribin LLP, was elected treasurer of the Inter-American Bar Association’s executive committee.

Patrick Redmond ‘03, who for years taught English at George Washington Carver Middle School in Coral Gables, published his first novel, “Some Go Hungry,” in 2016.

Marcia del Rey JD ’05 created a $25,000 scholarship for first-generation students. When matched by the College of Law’s First-Generation Scholarship, awardees will receive near-full tuition.

Claudia Dominguez ’08, an attorney in the Deerfield Beach office of ROIG Lawyers, will participate in the 2016-2017 Leadership Fort Lauderdale Program.

John Ellis “Jeb” Bush Jr. MS ’09 was appointed to the board of directors of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.


2010s

Tyler Schwartz MA ’11, a landscape designer, received the 2016 “Green Means Green” award from the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce for promoting sustainability in his company, Tyler Schwartz Design, Inc.

Marcelle Taha MS ’11 joined High Street Retail USA as a design specialist.

Ryan Benson MBA ’12 was appointed to the board of directors for the Boys & Girls Club of Collier County, an organization dedicated to providing a safe environment in which to promote the education, vocational leadership and character development of children.

Claudia Gonzalez ’12, MPA ’16, assistant chief of staff in FIU’s Office of the President, and her husband Anthony Gonzalez ’12, ’13, a student in FIU’s College of Law, welcomed their first child, Sofia Leonor, on April 14, 2016. Both parents and family are thrilled at the arrival of the newest little Panther.

Shantavia O’Bryant MBA ’12 welcomed the birth of her second child, Gia Madison, in June 2015.

Simone Cook ’14, a social media manager and account coordinator at Sonshine Communications, received an award of distinction at the 22nd Annual Communicator Awards.

Chanel Rowe JD ’14 was appointed to the Florida Bar’s “Student Education
& Admissions to the Bar” committee. She is an attorney with Shook, Hardy & Bacon in Miami.

Natalia Zuluaga MFA ’14 was appointed artistic director at Art Center South Florida.

Jennifer Lacayo ’15 was hired as a junior public relations associate in FIU’s Office of Media Relations.

Kathy Quardokus Fisher was finishing her post-doc studies at Oregon State University in readiness for a move to FIU, where she had accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of Earth and Environment. Shortly before she and her husband embarked upon their cross-country trek to Miami, she received an email from her soon-to-be boss. Chair René Price was encouraging her to join FIU’s Faculty Mentoring Program (FMP), a voluntary program for junior faculty members.

“I’d participated in workshops as a post doc, so I knew that finding a mentor, especially one outside of my own department, was important,” says Quardokus Fisher. “For me it was a no-brainer.”

She was matched with Geoff Potvin, a senior assistant professor coming up for tenure in the Department of Physics. Both colleagues are in the College of Arts, Sciences & Education (CASE).

“While we are in different disciplines, we’re in the same eld and both affiliated with the STEM Transformation Institute, which makes for a great fit,” says Potvin. He was a mentee himself and found the experience worthwhile. “Mentors give you a fresh perspective that’s really helpful,” he says. He signed on to become a mentor this year.

The program’s goal: to prepare young faculty to take on increased responsibilities and meet expectations. Teaching. Research. Securing funding. Forging collaborations. And doing it all, in many cases, in a completely new setting. It can be overwhelming.

Proven Track Record

Then an associate dean, Suzanna Rose had already spent 20 years consulting nationally on the issue of faculty development by the time a 2010 survey found that FIU faculty considered mentoring inadequate. In response, then-Provost Douglas Wartzok asked the colleges to create their own mentoring programs. Rose volunteered to create one in CASE.

An assistant U.S. attorney recalls the friendship of a pivotal professor.

By Joel Delgado ’12 MS ’17 

Coaching the whole athlete

A lot can go wrong in 33 feet. FIU diver Lily Kaufmann knows that well. No matter how many times a diver stands atop the platform and looks down at the tranquil water below, the worry that something will go awry still rattles the nerves.

“In diving, there’s a lot of room for failure,” says the junior psychology major. “You’re more likely to screw up than get it right. But it feels so good when you do get it right.”

Dealing with the fear is half the battle, and with the help of her coach and mentor Rio Ramirez, Kaufmann (pictured above, right, with Ramirez) has been able to face it again and again with great success. Under his guidance, she claimed bronze medals in two diving events at the Conference USA Championships last season and participated in the NCAA Zone B Diving Championships, where she set a personal best.

The greatest battles for any diver are in the mind, and Ramirez has been able to provide both a listening ear and words of wisdom to help Kaufmann and her teammates push past the anxiety and take the plunge.

“When you’re on top of the tower,” Ramirez says, “it’s just you. You and your fears, your strength and your power. Every time you do a dive, you are reinforcing that you can overcome those fears.”

Helping student-athletes work through those challenges gives Ramirez an opportunity to break the barrier between sport and life to instill lessons that his divers, like Kaufmann, can use both in and out of the pool.

“Sharing my experiences with them is what I like the most about coaching—that human element,” Ramirez says. “Every chance I get, I try to make a regular moment into a teachable moment and a learning experience.”

The founding director of a transformational program for faculty and staff helps the underrepresented tap into their potential.

Barbara Bader knows each of the 170 faculty and staff members who have participated in the Educational Leadership Enhancement Program (ELEP). She knows who is job hunting and who is content. She knows who loves their job but not their supervisor — and vice versa.

ELEP participants know Barbara Bader. They know she has a loving husband, Jerry, two daughters and four grandchildren. They know she believes in the power of a handwritten thank-you note or typed business letter. Most importantly, they know she believes in them.

Use the toggle buttons on the timeline above to view highlights from the Wertheim’s history.

This year, the Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center at FIU recognizes and celebrates the contributions of students, faculty, alumni and community members who have made it a hub for creativity and public engagement in South Florida over the past two decades.

The Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center is where theatre majors present four full-scale productions per season, and where music majors participate in over 150 performances during the concert season. It’s also where public figures come to share their ideas, serving as a forum for everyone from presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Gary Johnson to Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez and the many speakers of TEDxFIU.

“The Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center stands as part of our commitment to recognizing the importance of performance, creativity and big ideas in the educational and cultural life of our community,” said Herbert Wertheim, the inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who along with his wife Nicole, has enabled gifts of millions of dollars to the university’s performance arts programs.

The Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center opened its doors in 1996 after the Wertheims donated more than $1 million to the university’s music, theatre and dance programs. Their initial investment in the arts at FIU was soon followed by a gift of the Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center’s crown jewel, the Sydell Ida Wertheim Concert Organ, an awe-inspiring instrument featuring more than 4,000 pipes. Named for Herbert Wertheim’s mother, the concert organ is the largest in Southeastern United States and one of the most technologically advanced in the country.

The Wertheims’ continued support has transformed the space into an incubator for student talent from the FIU School of Music and the FIU Department of Theatre as well as a top-notch venue for the likes of Arturo Sandoval, Susan Starr, Paquito D’Rivera, Miami String Quartet, Nestor Torres, Peabo Bryson, Tony Succar, Jon Secada, Misty Bermudez, Olivier Latry, Dame Gillian Weir, Amernet String Quartet and many more.

“Through their generosity and vision, the Wertheims have helped to give FIU a cultural hub, and now this standout facility serves both the university and greater South Florida as a driver of creativity and public engagement,” said FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg.  

—Timeline produced by Clara-Meretan Kiah; additional reporting by Alexandra Pecharich and Elizabeth Garland.

The word “mentor” typically conjures an image of someone older, an individual in a leadership position who shepherds a young person.

Leave it to FIU students—and their counterparts at institutions around the country—to break the mold. Increasingly, they are assisting peers through organized programs. The goal: help newcomers navigate university life and stay the course.

“What better mentor than someone living that experience right now?” asks Claudia Biscardi. She runs a program in the Office of International Student & Scholar Services that matches seasoned international students with those just coming in. The students’ similarities in age and life experience, she says, make the arrangement ideal. “They are on the same page.”

A hand to those who follow

Sherwin Hilton Jr. turned his difficult adjustment into a positive for someone else. “There were a lot of things I didn’t understand about the differences between the Bahamas and America,” says the civil engineering major, “and I had to stumble along and figure it out myself.” That rocky start prompted him to volunteer as a sophomore to assist an incoming fellow Bahamian. He gave her a campus tour and shared a few meals out. He explained how to get a Florida driver’s license and suggested she de-stress with free chair massage at the Student Health Center. Remembering the questions and loneliness he once faced, he says,” “I just wanted to help in any way I could.”

As with Hilton and his mentee, students in mentorship programs often get paired around a shared background—country of origin or racial or ethnic heritage—and less frequently around a common major. Usually the mentor is not much further along in his or her studies than the mentee. That fact alone can inspire students who find starting at FIU daunting, particularly those who are the first in their families to attend college.

“If I was feeling a certain way about a situation, or school was dragging me down, she was always there. She would be the sounding board,” Najarro says. “I believe her when she says she understands.”

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Read more about mentoring: FIU students make a difference in local youngsters’ lives

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Mentored by vets herself, Rosario took up the mission of helping other soldiers-turned-students forge their paths when she became president of FIU’s chapter of the national Student Veterans Association.

“Every veteran is unique. Some have all these ambitions, and you just have to stop and say, ‘You have to take care of yourself first,’ make sure they’re in the right state of mind to take on school,” Rosario says. She impresses upon peers that lessons learned in the military can transfer to educational, career and leadership goals. Her passion comes in part, she says, from wishing her own brother had had such support. He committed suicide upon returning from Afghanistan.

And while veterans have mentored one another informally for years, the SVA recently started a bonafide program. Any former or active duty soldier enrolled at FIU can sign up. The organization tracks participants, but the type and frequency of interaction will remain up to those involved.

“In the grand scheme of things, that’s what mentorship really should be,” Najarro says. “You don’t have to have set times or do all these [scheduled] things. It’s just when your mentee needs assistance, you help him to the best of your ability. If you can be there, you’re already a great mentor.”  ♦

FIU has righted a sinking ship.

The outdoor sculpture “Journey’s End” first docked on campus in 1997. Sometimes referred to as “Noah’s ark” by passersby, the 12-foot-by-40-foot artwork represents a seafaring vessel that has taken on water.

Exposed to the weather for almost two decades, the sculpture grew increasingly rickety as its wooden elements suffered damage. So the university commissioned the original artist to recreate it with steel. The New York-based sculptor Ilan Averbuch in August had the forged components trucked down to MMC, where he personally assembled them near the northeast corner of the Wertheim Performing Arts Center. The piece soon rode a wave of positive reactions.

“It’s beautiful,” says Maria Sobera, a junior music major who walks past the sculpture daily on her way to class. “I watch ‘Game of Thrones,’ and it’s kind of like ships that you would see in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy worlds,” she says, referring to the writer whose novel inspired the TV program. “It makes me want to travel.”

Shantanu Balkundi, a trained biomedical engineer employed in FIU’s Office of Technology Management and Commercialization, found the composition an ongoing source of interest. “This was a little intriguing for me,” he says. “I have been looking at it every day and trying to figure out what it meant. It gave me some food for thought.”

Tender loving care

The work, which first arrived as a gift of the Martin Z. Margulies Family Collection, is one of more than 60 the university displays on the grounds of its two campuses. Its restoration signals FIU’s commitment to stewardship of outdoor art, whether owned by the university or on long-term loan from private collectors. These pieces together constitute FIU’s Sculpture Park, and keeping them in good condition has taken on new urgency.

“You can’t just put it out there and hope that it survives,” says Jordana Pomeroy, director of FIU’s Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum. New to the university in 2015, Pomeroy has taken a proactive approach by convening a task force on monumental works. A conservator was hired to examine and assess the condition of existing pieces, and the resulting report offers a detailed maintenance and restoration program.

Universities and cities across the nation are grappling with the costs of preserving al fresco sculpture. (In South Florida, high humidity and salty air pose special concern as they can cause mold growth and corrosion.) These include not only the expense of routine cleaning but, sometimes, treatments and repairs that require expert attention.

Task force members will consider future additions to the campus sculptural landscape—be they outright purchases, commissions, donations or loans—with an eye to projected expenditures. What costs too much to maintain? Will insurance on certain works exceed what the university can afford?

Quality over quantity

Equally important, the group will begin to craft a plan for building a cohesive collection moving forward by considering, among other things, aesthetic attributes and individual works’ importance from an art history perspective. While reaching consensus on art might seem nearly impossible—“A hundred people are going to have a hundred opinions,” Pomeroy concedes—she has the right individuals in place to begin making the tough decisions.

Chief among them is internationally renowned art collector, documentary filmmaker and former Knight Foundation vice president Dennis Scholl, a 1977 FIU alumnus who is leading the task force.

“Every great university deserves a great sculpture garden,” Scholl says. And while he acknowledges that getting there can take “decades and decades,” he is up for the challenge.

“You have to first establish a plan, then go out and look for opportunities to acquire the kind of work that you’re seeking to exhibit,” he says. “We all hope . . . that there will be people in the FIU community and in the South Florida community who want to participate with us, whether it’s by donating large-scale sculptures or by helping us acquire or commission sculptures by world-renowned artists.”

Ultimately, Scholl adds, it’s about creating an outdoor setting equal to the level of intellectual activity that goes on in the classroom and research lab. “We want to make sure that the impression one gets is of a world-class university.”

Firing imaginations

Thoughtfully situated art helps foster a sense of place and “makes us think critically about our environment and our public spaces.” So says landscape architecture professor Roberto Rovira, who serves on the task force with other university personnel, among them an architectural historian, the Frost’s resident curator, a graphic designer and a representative of the university president. “Anything that provokes that process is absolutely in line with our mission as a place of learning.”

Rovira encourages students and others to ask questions when they encounter a work. “Hopefully it makes them want to know more,” he says. “Who is it by? What is it made of? Why did the artist choose to do it this way? Why did the university select this piece of art over another?”

Pomeroy adds that public sculptures can serve as oases of calm and beauty that enhance the experience of walking through campus. And an investment in high-quality works drives home that “This is a place where creativity and art is appreciated.”

Averbuch, the artist who made “Journey’s End,” believes his piece fits in with many of these goals, particularly with regard to sparking meaningful reflection among young people. He encourages viewers to see a narrative in the work, be it one taken from the Bible—the aforementioned Noah’s ark—or from popular novels and movies that speak to “dislocation,” of objects appearing in unexpected places—such as a ship on a landlocked university campus.

“My hope is that it tells each student a story that he wants to hear,” Averbuch says. “The idea is to steer people’s imaginations and minds.”  ♦

—By Ayleen Barbel Fattal and JoAnn C. Adkins

For Kayla and Tim Riera-Gomez, the troubling phone calls from their son’s preschool started when he was only 3.

Christopher was misbehaving. He yelled at teachers. He threw things.

He had temper tantrums. His crying fits lasted as long as an hour. By the time he was 4, the school was threatening suspensions.

“At first, we thought it was willfulness, this kind of strength-of-personality that if we can get through it, he was going to do amazing things for the world,” Kayla said. “Then it progressed. We were receiving calls from the school, sometimes two and three a day.”

The parents were left wondering how a 4-year-old could get kicked out of preschool. They realized something more than just willfulness was afflicting their young son. And they realized he wouldn’t just grow out of it.

The parents were a happy couple that enjoyed professional success. Kayla is an attorney and Tim is a lobbyist. When Christopher was born, they thought they were starting a happy new chapter in their life. But the emotional fallout of Christopher’s daily challenges left them tired, confused and feeling helpless. It took a toll on their marriage. Christopher picked up on the stress, which only led to more behavioral issues.

Kayla and Tim talked to Christopher’s pediatrician. They met with the principal at his school, who offered to work with the family to help Christopher. But they were still left wondering — why was Christopher so mad?

They hired a behavioral aide that attended preschool every day with Christopher, but did so without a diagnosis since mental and behavior disorders are typically not diagnosed in children that young. Without a diagnosis, they could not bill the behavioral aide’s assistance to insurance. The expense was high, and they knew it could only serve as a temporary solution.

“Your child is the only one with an adult shadow. That doesn’t make them feel any better among their peers,” Tim said.

It was around that same time, Tim heard about FIU’s Center for Children and Families (CCF), a nationally recognized clinical center committed to improving the lives of children and families struggling with mental health concerns.

Kayla didn’t want to hear it. She knew little of their programs but thought the center was for families with bigger problems than theirs. Tim persisted. He talked to co-workers who had participated in some of the center’s programs. They talked about the positive effects on their children and on them as parents. Kayla finally decided to test it out. She attended a seminar by psychology professor Katie Hart on early interventions for children with behavioral, social-emotional and learning challenges. Kayla walked into the room on FIU’s campus with an open mind. She was hoping for some tips, maybe even some convincing that they could help. As Hart began speaking, the stoic mother was reduced to a puddle of tears.

“It was like Dr. Hart was inside our house,” Kayla said. “She described everything happening in our house, every fear we have.”

It was then that Kayla understood what CCF was offering her and her family. CCF’s psychologists understood the issues. They have seen it all before. They have studied it. And they continue to study it today. In that moment, Kayla went from “this isn’t for us” to “we need your help.” Kayla and Tim enrolled Christopher in the center’s award-winning Summer Treatment Program.

CCF was founded and is led by William E. Pelham Jr. — a pioneer in the field of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) research and treatment. He is the architect of the intensive Summer Treatment Program, where children receive 360 hours of treatment in just eight weeks — an equivalent of seven years worth of weekly one-hour sessions. The internationally lauded program has been replicated at many sites throughout the world.

Treatment plans are focused on improving problem-solving, academic performance and social skills. Parents also attend weekly training sessions to help develop the skills they need to support their child’s progress and improve their child’s behavior at home. For Christopher, he started each day with the simple task of writing his name. It was part of a daily routine, along with classroom learning, peer interaction and recreation. The structure is similar for each of the age groups, which range from pre-schoolers to teenagers, and the format is based on evidence-based treatments developed by the center’s top researchers. The day-to-day activities seem like traditional summer camp. But it’s the nuances of the behavioral therapy where change arises.

Nationwide, 20 percent of children suffer from a mental health disorder.

In Miami-Dade County alone, 1 in 4 children live in poverty and are two to three times more likely to develop mental health problems. Early diagnosis and intervention can make the difference between healthy development and a life plagued with lingering challenges.

Since its founding in 2010, the FIU Center for Children and Families has helped nearly 7,000 families. Ninety percent reside in Miami-Dade County. The center’s faculty has helped countless more around the world through research breakthroughs and the development of new treatments. In addition to the Summer Treatment Program, CCF offers infant and early childhood services, family and couples counseling, parent training, video teleconferencing therapy, school-based services, and customized treatment for children.

Research remains at the heart of all they do. With more than 40 faculty — including psychologists, psychiatrists, linguists, public health experts, and education researchers — CCF is the largest center in Florida conducting child mental health research. Its researchers have secured more than $70 million in grant funding and are currently addressing a number of questions for children with ADHD, anxiety and substance use. They continue to explore new methods of delivery for proven treatments, including whether parent training can be effectively conducted in families’ homes via the internet rather than in a clinic. The researchers continue to seek answers about what factors put children at the greatest risk for mental health problems. Pelham points out that while great strides have been made in understanding the adolescent mind and treatments for mental health disorders, there is still much to learn.

The center’s faculty members are also preparing the next generation of child mental health providers through training. As part of a partnership with Miami-Dade County Public Schools and The Children’s Trust, they have provided professional development for more than 6,000 teachers and staff in nearly 400 schools.

“Our goal at the center is to provide excellence in research, education and service regarding mental health in childhood,” Pelham said. “Not only serving and involving families in South Florida but also conducting research that informs the nation and the world about the nature, causes and treatment of mental health problems in childhood and adolescence.”

For the Riera-Gomez family, pictured above, their experience with CCF transformed the dynamic of their family. The tantrums became fewer. Kinder words were used in their house. Christopher started opening doors for people. Tensions started to settle. For Christopher, who a year ago was being shadowed by a behavioral aide in preschool, he is now thriving. His parents did not receive a single phone call about his behavior from his teacher during this past school year.

“We’re happy. Christopher is happy,” Tim said. “We’re happy that he’s happy.”  ♦

A mentor could be the answer. The ideal individual has the background and willingness to make suggestions and guide you in the next steps on your journey.

College students often find mentoring programs on campus to help them connect with people such as faculty, alumni and even older students who can offer counsel and feedback. But what about folks who have been out of school for a while?

“It’s never too late to find a mentor,” says Casandra Henriquez ’04, MPH ’06. She is a successful life coach—essentially a paid mentor—who has assisted clients with everything from wellness to business and, most recently, their love lives.

She and her husband identified a pair of mentors—a married couple like themselves—to help them professionally and personally. They looked around carefully for “people who were where we wanted to be. We sought out these individuals, and when we found a good match we literally asked them, ‘Could we be under your wing?’”

Once a quarter the four go to lunch together and have a candid conversation about marriage and careers, she says. And it’s something she encourages others to do, for an important reason: “Greatness rubs off just by being in good company.”

Here are Henriquez’s suggestions for discovering and working with your sherpa.

1) Figure out where your struggle is or what you would like to enhance in your life, whether personal or professional. Everybody has an area in which they can improve.

2) Find somebody who’s doing well in that area and choose to spend time with them. Look around and decide who has achieved the kind of success you would like attain. This could be someone you know or someone you identify through research.

3) Be a resource for the other person. Once someone agrees to mentor you, try to help him or her in return. Share a potential business contact, for example, or pass along an article you think might be useful.

4) Don’t make interacting with you a task. Everyone’s to-do list is already full. So don’t send long emails and don’t ask for a meeting over coffee when you know that will be a stretch for the other person. Instead, understand what works for both of you, even if that comes down to scheduled phone calls.

5) Say ‘thank you.’ Henriquez recommends a handwritten note to acknowledge that others’ time is valuable and you appreciate it. That simple but heartfelt gesture of gratitude, she says, “doesn’t get old at all.”  ♦

Mentors have existed since the beginning of time. The first person to show another how to throw a rock or craft a spear to catch dinner certainly qualifies for the title. And so history repeats itself daily as humans share knowledge and advice, one on one, with those who seek the same.

Mentors today still aid others in securing dinner—now it’s called “finding a job”—but they do so much more. In addition to opening doors, making introductions and going to bat, they help mentees develop skills, cultivate contacts and build networks, understand their own strengths and weaknesses and even map out a path to leadership.

Famous examples abound. The late poet Maya Angelou early on took Oprah Winfrey under her wing. She guided the future celebrity and media maven in many important decisions over the course of more than three decades. The late Steve Jobs counseled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one innovative entrepreneur explaining to another what worked for him when the going got tough. Obi-Wan Kenobi expertly coached Anakin Skywalker and, later, more fruitfully, Luke.

At FIU, as at other universities, the aspirations of young people run thick. You can feel it in the air: untapped potential ready to explode in the interest of doing something great. Harnessing that energy becomes the job of mentors: faculty, advisors, alumni, community members and even peers, all ready to steer, push and champion.

“Student learning in and out of the classroom is essential for 21st century competitiveness,” President Mark B. Rosenberg says. “Mentors provide know-how and how-to skills that complement formal learning and give an additional edge to our students.”

Alumni, too, can take advantage of such concentrated support. Plenty see the value in consulting with professionals such as certified counselor Maria Tomaino. She heads career development activities for FIU’s Office of Alumni Relations—which offers webinars, networking experiences and more for graduates, at no charge—and has met individually with hundreds of alumni grappling with the question, “What’s next?” As they look to change jobs or re-enter the workforce, she holds their hands and walks them through the paces: self-assessments, resume updates, cover letter reviews, LinkedIn profile tweaks. (Appointments can be scheduled at fiualumni.com/career.)

“Feeling supported and having deep learning experiences during college means everything when it comes to long-term outcomes after college. Unfortunately, not many graduates receive a key element of that support while in college: having a mentor. And this is perhaps the biggest blown opportunity in the history of higher ed.”

—Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education

When the magazine team began discussing this issue, we knew early on that we wanted to write about mentoring. We didn’t set out to create a mentoring issue, but the more we spoke about it, the more we realized that the mentoring that goes on at FIU–and in our community on behalf of our students – could not be contained in a single article. Ultimately, we committed to what you hold in your hands, an entire magazine focused on mentoring.

In this issue, we highlight several types of mentoring relationships. Operating under the notion that no one type of mentoring is more important than the other, our team had lively exchanges when discussing which mentoring relationship should be re ected on the cover. Around the time these discussions were taking place in May, Time magazine came out with its annual 100 Most Influential People issue. And there it was, literally right before our eyes, an option we hadn’t considered and one FIU Magazine had never employed: multiple covers. As you’ve discovered, we opted for three front covers – one representing students as mentors, one representing the faculty-student mentoring relationship, and one representing the alumni/community-student mentoring relationship.

What we found was heartening. FIU is very much an institution where students can still get meaningful, one-on-one mentoring experiences. That’s no small feat at a university the size of FIU. Such a dynamic requires a commitment on the part of faculty, alumni and administration to provide these intensely rewarding experiences to our students.

Now for the disclaimer: This issue is not meant to be inclusive of every mentoring effort at FIU. I’m happy to say that would be impossible; we could never afford to print a magazine with so many pages. Rather, we focused on relationships that are representative of the thousands of Panthers who mentor or are mentored in one way or another, day in and day out.

Always Blue and Gold,

Karen Cochrane

The injury bug was not kind to   FIU football  last season.

Again and again, a number of key Panthers went down, hampering FIU’s chances of qualifying for its first bowl game since 2011. In the end, they finished one win short.

But in the process, a number of players were thrust into action and gained valuable experience while their sidelined teammates were on the mend.

The injuries that plagued the Panthers in 2015 may well have resulted in a better team, overall, in 2016. In adjusting for players who sat out, FIU amassed a breadth of experience and depth the program has not seen in years.

The question remains: Will it be enough to lead the Panthers to a bowl game this winter?

Here are six Panthers to watch who may help them get there:

John Smith

Despite injuries piling up on the Panthers last season, the team still found away to remain in the hunt for bowl eligibility late in the season. But the final straw may have been losing Jonnu Smith for the final four games due to a sprained knee.

The 6-foot-3-inch, 232-pound tight end enters his senior season as arguably one of the best receiving tight ends in the nation and has built a reputation for being one of the most difficult receivers for opposing defenders to bring down after making a catch.

He has been a key weapon in the Panthers’ offense the past three seasons and could be attracting the attention of NFL scouts this fall.

“He creates a lot of problems for defenses and to have him back and healthy has been great for us,” says pass-game coordinator and wide receivers coach Kort Shankwelier. “He’s become a very good leader for us. Having a guy like him on the field, he commands a lot respect.”

Alex Wint & Treyon Williams

FIU’s linebacker corps enters the 2016 season as the most experienced group in the Panthers’ defense, and leading the way will be junior Alex Wint – the team’s leading tackler in 2015 – and senior Treyvon Williams.

“They’re the ones running the show out there. They are taking pride in being leaders,” says defensive coordinator and linebackers coach Ron Cooper. “They are very talented, very tough and they stop the run really well.”

Throw in senior Davison Colimon, who missed nearly all of last season after suffering a season-ending injury in the 2015 opener against UCF, and the Panthers’ linebackers could be a force to be reckoned with in Conference USA.

With the defensive line losing most of its starters from a year ago, the linebackers could play a bigger role in the pass rush and stopping the run at the line of scrimmage.

Thomas Owens

Last year was a breakout season for wide receiver Thomas Owens, known as “T.O.” by coaches and teammates.

He led the team in receiving yards (638) and tied the school record for touchdown catches (8) in a season, emerging as one of quarterback Alex McGough’s favorite targets. A prototypical possession receiver with steady hands, he may be able to build on those numbers in his junior season as he continues to build chemistry with McGough.

“He’s improved his route running and having that added dimension makes him a guy who Alex can trust to be where he needs to be and put the ball in his hands,” Shankwelier says.

Anthony Jones

Sophomore running back Anthony Jones showed potential as a playmaker during his freshman season. This year he may have an opportunity to shine some more, particularly on special teams.

In a limited role, Jones averaged 23.3 yards on nine kick returns last season, and this season he will most likely be called upon to take over a bulk of the kick return duties that mostly fell to former player Richard Leonard ’15 over the past few seasons.

And as a rusher, he may also see more action behind lead running back Alex Gardner (see below). With the kind of speed he possesses, it’s not a stretch to see 2016 being a breakout season for Jones.

“His understanding of the offense has picked up tremendously and that’s helped him play a lot faster,” says running backs coach Tim Harris Jr. “With the playmaking ability that he has, we’re excited to see what he can do for us this season.”

Alex Gardner

Establishing the run game will be critical for the Panthers’ success in 2016, and running back Alex Gardner will be key to doing that.

Behind an offensive line that returns plenty of experience, including all-conference center Michael Montero, Gardner will try to build off his numbers from last season: 760 rushing yards and nine touchdowns on 186 carries.

“He’s gotten a lot stronger and that will help him run with a lot more physicality and protect the ball,” Harris said.

He is also steadily climbing the FIU record books. Gardner is currently sixth all-time in career rushing yards, 853 yards shy of the record held by Rashod Smith (2,195 rushing yards from 2002-2004). By the end of the season, he may be within striking distance of becoming the Panthers’ new all-time leading rusher.  

Police officers are trained to protect and serve the public. They are taught to evaluate a dangerous situation in a split second and act in ways that might best keep both the public and themselves safe.

Deaths at the hands of police in recent years, however, have stirred heated debate across the nation concerning police brutality.

“The trends that have been going on in the last three or fours years in the United States, related to excessive force by police officers, as we’re all well aware, have been growing,” said senior instructor of communication Joann Brown, referencing Ferguson, Missouri, where the fatal shooting of Michael Brown (no relation) by Officer Darren Wilson resulted in a $6 million lawsuit against the city and the advent of #BlackLivesMatter.

“Any police force can open themselves up for this. It is a situation that goes between the community and the police. The community doesn’t understand what the role of the police officers are, and why the police officers do certain actions.”

In response to the growing distrust, local police departments proactively reached out to FIU’s Department of Communication, in the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, to create programs that facilitate more effective communication between officers and the South Florida community. The goal is to decrease any preventable loss of lives at the hands of police.

Training police in effective communication

Brown is part of a joint initiative between FIU and the City of Miami Police Department to train officers in cultural sensitivity and conflict de-escalation.

The “Policing Through Effective Communication” project kicked off in Fall 2015, after the City of Miami contracted FIU to devise a plan to train officers and incoming cadets in these areas of communication.

“Miami is a multicultural city. It is a city that has a lot of things going on, and they wanted to be proactive, before we ended up as a Ferguson or a Baltimore or a Chicago or a New York,” Brown said of cities that have seen highly publicized police shootings in recent years.

The eight-hour training takes place at the City of Miami Police Academy. It teaches active listening techniques, how to speak concisely and the value of showing respect and courtesy—all directly aligned with fundamental policing procedures as outlined in the state’s law enforcement training handbook.

Brown’s portion of the training emphasizes cultural awareness. She discusses biases and stereotypes, and she advises officers to keep in mind that different cultures may teach people to respond differently to certain situations, especially in terms of body language.

For example, while Americans may consider it disrespectful for people to look away while someone is speaking to them, some cultures consider it a sign of respect to lower one’s eyes while dealing with someone in authority.

Neighborhood resource officer Constant Rosemond said, “Dealing with the different cultures, sometimes you have to adjust [your behavior] just a bit to make sure that everyone is on common ground. By using the techniques learned in this class, I’m able to work with [civilians] to find common ground and help them to see that we’re all here for their good.”

Rosemond, who has served for 22 years and been on Miami’s force for seven years, said he found the training so effective that he now incorporates the procedures into the curriculum for community classes he teaches to adults and children.

Communication instructor Raquel Perez teaches officers to de-escalate conflict to defuse potentially dangerous situations.

“You’re dealing with a very heightened time in our society where people who may never even have had an encounter with law enforcement, on their first encounter are already anticipating a negative reaction,” Perez said. “So that’s why it’s so important with that de-escalation component that police officers are mindful of their verbal and nonverbal reactions, that they’re mindful of how that empathetic conversation can change the dynamic of an interaction.”

First-year officer Nicania Cange says the skills she learned from Brown and Perez have been so helpful in de-escalating situations in her community that she has not yet needed to use force while on patrol. And she hopes to keep it that way.

Senior advisor to the city manager Milton Vickers, who initially proposed the partnership between FIU and the City of Miami, said there is no question that police-community relations in the United States are in need of repair. But he believes that among the nation’s nearly 800,000 law enforcement officers and 18,000 police departments, it is safe to say many of these departments and officers are committed to the highest degree of professionalism in serving their diverse communities.

“At a local level, we are responsible for making sure that our officers and residents in the City of Miami are working together to maintain a safe living and working environment. Our police officers are a reflection of our community, and it is our priority to provide them with the skills necessary to perform their duties in a professional and respectful manner, taking into consideration Miami’s historical and cultural differences,” Vickers said. “We believe that this model can be duplicated in other jurisdictions in order to change the conversation and improve police-community relations.”

Reaching youth through dialogue

FIU also works with the Miami-Dade County Police Department through a program that brings officers into local high schools to get to know South Florida’s youth.

Developed by communication instructor Antoine Hardy, the program facilitates sessions in high schools where police officers sit in a circle with students and, under Hardy’s guidance, discuss topics ranging from police brutality to interacting effectively with each other to general ways to better the community.

“The main goal is for both sides to learn how to communicate better, but also to feel like they were heard and understood and what they have to say can have some impact,” Hardy said. “I think overall that’s really the main impact of these dialogues.”

“Just being able to have that safe space for communication, discussion, that in itself is everything. It’s what’s missing,” said FIU graduate Rodrigo Quirch ’16, a student assistant in Hardy’s project. “We need a place to talk things out, and that way we can avoid shootings out in the street, or miscommunications that lead to people getting their lives taken.”

Students and police engage in role playing, with each taking the position of the other to act out possible encounters. The idea is to show how teens think police would or should act in certain situations, and then teach them how police protocol dictates their actions in real life.

In one such discussion, in a session at Richmond-Perrine Optimist Academy (RPO), students questioned why police are trained to shoot to kill, rather than shooting to disarm.

As one officer explained, sometimes shooting an assailant in the leg or hand to disarm may not actually stop the assailant from harming an officer or an innocent bystander.

The officers said the sessions have helped them understand how the teens think and react, which can help them better serve their community. “I feel good. I feel that it’s beginning to rebuild the gap between the police and the community,” said Officer Mercy Rodriguez.

Inspired by the dialogues with police, a group of RPO students wrote socially conscious hip-hop music that examines the state of violence in their communities and advocates for change among their generation. (Click the play button above to listen to “Books Up! Guns Down!” by the RPO Playaz.)

Chauncy Cooper, an eleventh grader at RPO and a member of the music group, said the sessions have shown him that not all police are “bad cops.”

“It does make me think differently about both sides of the situation,” said Cooper. “I feel like police brutality is wrong, and I feel like people who disrespect police are wrong, too. I feel like we need to all come together and make the world a better place.”  ♦

Growing up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Ky Nguyen was shy and seldom ventured outside of her social circle. Giving a speech in English in front of a class in the United States would have been a daunting prospect.

Then she enrolled in the Global First Year program (G1Y) at FIU. The program helps international students adapt to college life in the United States both culturally and academically.

The program was created through a partnership between FIU and Shorelight Education, an international company that recruits college students for study abroad and matches them with schools that best fit their aspirations. Students and their families pay for the additional guidance that will help them get the most from their American college experience.

International students tend to be attracted to FIU for its highly ranked programs in international business, hospitality and tourism management and engineering programs. And its location in Miami helps too. Barry Vogel, a managing director with Shorelight, said that South Florida is appealing because it is “the gateway to a lot of the world.”

FIU’s program started in Fall 2015 and to date has welcomed more than 150 international students representing 30 countries. One hundred-forty more students are expected to join the growing program this fall.

Like any other FIU freshman, G1Y students take courses that fulfill core requirements. They also enroll in supplementary courses that teach them to write research papers and argumentative essays at a college level, as well as develop their English language skills. Students who need more help can enroll in the English Language Institute.

The extra coursework also helps them engage with the other students in the classroom and, equally important, with the professor, something that can be difficult for students from countries where discourse or debate with a teacher is uncommon.

Jay Vanparia, a sophomore hospitality managementstudent from India, said it took him some time to get used to classes at FIU as schools in India focus mainly on memorization and information recall. But he appreciates the learning support and on-campus resources available at FIU, a facet of university life not emphasized back in India.

“We don’t really get a lot of resources. And it is really hard to get involved on campus [in India] because, since there are a lot of people, there is a lot of competition, and there is a limited amount of opportunities for everyone,” Vanparia said.

G1Y staff helped Vanparia find ways to participate on campus. He writes for FIU Student Media, and he will serve as an orientation leader for the next cohort of G1Y students and as a peer mentor in an upcoming First-Year Experience course.

Outside the classroom G1Y students are part of a living-and-learning community. As a group, they tour local attractions such as the Wynwood art district and go to Miami Heat and other sporting events to experience South Florida culture. They take part in FIU events like football tailgates to get to know the American college-student lifestyle. They even take guided trips to Target and the mall at the beginning of the semester to see how shopping works here.

“Students who are under the G1Y are spoiled. [Staff] help you with anything,” said Moayad Alhazmi, a sophomore mechanical engineeringmajor from Saudi Arabia. “They help you from the moment you arrive to the airport until you graduate from the program.”

Stephen Fain, a professor emeritus who today manages the partnership with Shorelight, said it’s important to help international students break out of their shell in this way because when they move here, they don’t often find the cultural and social experiences to which they’re accustomed, and it can make transitioning to life at FIU hard.

“All of this is different, and so when they come here, if we left them to their own devices, most of them would simply cluster around the people within the group that are the closest to them and not experience the whole university,” Fain said. “So we try to get them to experience the whole university, which means you’ve got to get out.”

Idarabasi Akpan, a sophomore biology major from Nigeria, got more than she bargained for out of the program. Though she had expected the program would help her make friends in a foreign place, she hadn’t expected her classmates and even the program staff would end up being her family away from home.

“I was in a really bad accident this year. I couldn’t walk or do anything, but they were there for me,” Akpan said. “They drove me to the hospital. They brought me soup. They packed my stuff. Everything I needed, they were there for.”

Nguyen, the sophomore international business major who was once too nervous to speak in front of a class, feels the program was an invaluable experience that encouraged her to get out of her comfort zone. It helped her build the English skills and confidence to stand up in front her peers at her cohort’s progression ceremony to talk about her experience as a G1Y student.

“Before I was a really shy girl. But through the program, I met so many people from so many cultures. I learned how to embrace myself and also how to speak out and reach out to people more.”

She became a global citizen.  ♦

Naomi Ruele – Team Botswana – Swimming (50-meter freestyle)

OLYMPIC UPDATE: Naomi Ruele finished fourth in her heat with one of her best times: 26.23 seconds. She did not advance to the women’s 50-meter freestyle semifinals.

After completing one of the best freshman campaigns in FIU swimming and diving program history, Naomi Ruele will represent Botswana at this year’s Olympics.

This season at the Conference USA Championships, Ruele tallied gold medals in all seven events she swam and set three school records (and the all-time C-USA meet record in the 50-yard freestyle in 22.23 seconds) over the three-day tournament to help the Panthers win their second straight conference title.

Ruele was named Conference USA Swimmer of the Year and went on to become the fifth Panther swimmer to ever compete in the NCAA Championships in March. She will compete in the 50-meter freestyle preliminary heats on Aug. 12. Her heat is scheduled for 12:20 p.m. EST and can be watched live on NBC or via live stream on NBCOlympics.com. Read more.

Yarimar Rosa and Natalia Valentin – Team Puerto Rico – Volleyball

OLYMPIC UPDATE: Underdogs in the competition, Puerto Rico’s women’s volleyball team finished sixth in the preliminary pool. They did not advance.

The former FIU volleyball duo of Yarimar Rosa and Natalia Valentin will be teammates on the Puerto Rico team.

Rosa and Valentin played three seasons together at FIU from 2007-2009, compiling a 79-19 record during that span and helped turn the Panthers into a volleyball powerhouse in the Sun Belt Conference, leading the Panthers to the NCAA Tournament two years in a row.

Rosa set the all-time FIU record in kills (2,083), or non-returnable plays, and earned All-American honors three times during her collegiate career. Much of her success would not have been possible without Valentin, who set up many of those signature Rosa kills and shattered the all-time program record for assists with 4,413.

They have since gone on to successful professional volleyball careers in Puerto Rico and overseas. Rosa, Valentin and the rest of the Puerto Rico team open up the preliminary round on Aug. 6 against the United States at 4:05 p.m. EST. The match will be aired nationally on NBC. Read more.

Angelica Delgado – Team USA – Judo

A first-generation American of Cuban heritage, the 25-year-old psychology and health-care administration student will be competing in her first Olympic Games this year.

Ranked No. 25 in the world and called the “queen of South America” by her coaches, Delgado is a three-time national champion and two-time Pan American Games bronze medalist and won the silver medal at the 2015 Pan American Championships.

Delgado began to study and practice judo at 9 years old at the insistence of her father, Miguel, who was a member of Cuba’s national judo team. She will compete in the Women’s 52kg class and will face Mongolia’s Tsolmon Adiyasambuu (world ranking No. 16) in the Round of 32 at 9:21 a.m. EST. Should she advance, No. 3 seed Misato Nakamura (JPN) would await her in the Round of 16 later that same morning. You can watch her compete via live stream on NBCOlympics.com.

Ronald Forbes – Team Cayman Islands – Track & Field (110-meter hurdles)

For the third consecutive Summer Olympics, Ronald Forbes will be representing the Cayman Islands in Rio this year.

At FIU, Forbes was a two-time All-American and set the program record in the 110-meter hurdles (13.63) at the 2008 NCAA National Championships during his senior season. Months later, he was the flag bearer for his country at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Earlier this year, the alumnus set the Cayman Islands record in the 110-meter hurdles at an event in Clermont, Florida, recording a personal-best time of 13.36 to secure his invitation to this year’s Olympics. The first round men’s 110-meter hurdles will begin on Aug. 15 at 7:15 p.m. The event will be streamed live on NBCOlympics.com.

Thaisa Moreno – Team Brazil – Women’s Soccer

The 27-year-old Brazilian midfielder played two seasons for FIU women’s soccer, leading the team in scoring with seven goals in 2009, including the game-winner against then-Sun Belt Conference rival UALR to help the Panthers break the program record for most conference wins in a season (7).

Moreno made her debut with the Brazilian national team in 2013 and has been a staple for the team ever since, making 29 international appearances and scoring two goals. Last year, she participated in the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Canada and helped her nation win gold at the 2015 Pan American Games.

Brazil’s opening game in group competition against China will be played Aug. 3. They will then play Sweden on Aug. 6 at 9 p.m. EST (airing on NBCSN) and South Africa on Aug. 9 at 9 p.m. EST. View the full women’s soccer tournament schedule here.

Aubrey Smith – Team Jamaica – Track & Field (long jump)

The former FIU men’s track and field standout Aubrey Smith will be participating in his first Olympics, representing Jamaica in the long jump. He will be one of 63 athletes who will compete for during this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

In his two seasons at FIU from 2012 to 2014, Smith left his mark by setting the program’s outdoor record with a 7.80-meter long jump that helped him earn a silver medal at the 2014 Conference USA Championships.

The long jump qualifications begin Aug. 12 at 7:20 EST and will be live streamed on NBCOlympics.com. 

OLYMPIC UPDATE: Underdogs in the competition, Puerto Rico’s women’s volleyball team finished sixth in the preliminary pool. They did not advance.

The paths of volleyball standouts Yarimar Rosa ’10 and Natalia Valentin ’11 have been intertwined from early on. The Puerto Rican natives occasionally played together for their country’s youth national team as teenagers, but mostly they were rivals from different high schools that would challenge each other in volleyball several times a year.

“We could never beat her,” Valentin says with a chuckle of her childhood nemesis. “I don’t know why. We had the best team, but we could never beat Yarimar.”

So when the time came to decide where to play collegiate volleyball, Valentin recognized that joining forces with her one-time competitor might make the most sense. In fact, Rosa had the same idea. She had just finished her freshman season at FIU and reached out to Valentin about the possibility of playing together in Miami.

Soon the pair would be standing on the same side of the court – and making FIU history. Together at the university for three seasons, they helped propel the Panthers into a volleyball powerhouse in the Sun Belt Conference during some of the program’s best years. Rosa and Valentin were instrumental in helping the Panthers reach the NCAA Tournament two years in a row and compile a 79-19 record in their three shared seasons at FIU (2007-2009).

Rosa’s power helped her become arguably the best player in the program’s history, setting the all-time FIU record in kills (2,083), or non-returnable plays, and earning All-American honors three times during her collegiate career. Much of her success would not have been possible without Valentin, who set up many of those signature Rosa kills and shattered the all-time program record for assists with 4,413.

On a personal level, the bond between the two grew stronger, and they maintain an ironclad friendship that makes them nearly inseparable today. A part of them longs to relive the old college days.

“We wish we were back at FIU,” Valentin laughs. “Miami gave us the best. We’re grateful to have gone to FIU.”

Their time under FIU’s former head coach Danijela Tomic also helped instill in them values and principles that have helped them thrive in their professional careers today.

“We learned a lot of small details that make you grow as a person and as a player,” Rosa says. “You need to be so disciplined, make sure you do your work in volleyball and in school. If you need to work on something, you don’t wait for the coach to tell you to do it. You do it on your own.” Valentin adds, “That prepared us for the professional life, in volleyball and in life.”

Now they are getting ready for something really big.

For country

After being instrumental in FIU’s turnaround, the couple sought to do the same for Puerto Rico’s women’s national volleyball team.

Each found success at the club level in Puerto Rico. Playing on separate teams, Rosa was named the Most Valuable Player of the Puerto Rican Women’s Volleyball Superior League in 2012 and 2015, and Valentin won the award in 2014 while also winning Setter of the Year three consecutive seasons.

But at the national level, the two had a chance to do something very special – and on the same side. Over the years Puerto Rico’s women’s team earned moderate success in regional and international tournaments but had never qualified for the Olympics. Rosa and Valentin were on a mission to change that.

“Volleyball is a growing sport in Puerto Rico,” Valentin says. “It doesn’t get the attention of other sports like basketball.”

In late May, the team was fighting for the final available berth into the 12-team Olympic tournament in the upcoming 2016 Rio Olympic Games in Brazil. Their hopes came down to the final game of the World Olympic Qualification Tournament. Energized by playing at home in front of a capacity crowd of approximately 9,000 at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan, the team swept opponent Kenya in three sets to secure a historic victory.

Team captain Rosa pitched in seven points, including a key service ace late in the third set that helped push Puerto Rico closer to victory.

With the small Caribbean island facing serious financial crisis—the debt-ridden, self-governing U.S. territory has instituted a series of punishing austerity measures in recent years—Rosa and Valentin and the rest of the women’s national team provided their nation with a much-needed reason to celebrate.

“During that week we brought everyone together,” Rosa says. “As an athlete, this is all you want. You train all your life and everything you do is to make it to the Olympics. All these sacrifices are worth it when you qualify for the Olympics, to have the chance to represent your island in a big tournament.”

Once they arrive in Brazil, the Puerto Ricans will have little time to revel in the moment. On Aug. 6, the day after the opening ceremony, they will play their first match against the team that the International Federation of Volleyball ranks No. 1 in the world: the United States.

“We’re the underdogs and we want to surprise people,” Valentin says, reflecting upon the chances of an upset. “Either way, this is an experience we’re going to share and cherish forever, something we’ll tell our kids and grandkids.”  ♦

By Joel Delgado ’12 MS ’17 

OLYMPIC UPDATE: Naomi Ruele finished fourth in her heat with one of her best times: 26.23 seconds. Unfortunately, she did not advance to the women’s 50-meter freestyle semifinals.

Naomi Ruele’s dream of one day competing in the Olympics can be traced back to the swimming pool of a hotel in her native Botswana. Growing up, she took every opportunity to accompany her mom, who worked at the hotel, simply to get into the water. And when it was time to go home, she would always protest.

“Once I was dropped into the pool, I didn’t want to get out. I wanted to know everything about swimming,” Ruele says. “I really liked being able to move in the water smoothly, and it came naturally to me. When I try something I have to get it right.”

That early love led to years of training, which led to pursuing collegiate swimming at FIU and, last season, her completion of one of the most successful debut campaigns in the history of FIU swimming and diving. Now, Ruele is preparing for her biggest challenge yet: representing her homeland in the Olympic Games next month in Rio. She will be the first FIU swimmer to compete at the Olympics as a current student-athlete.

“It’s going to be a great experience for me,” Ruele says. “I’m going to be able to compete with the best of the best, see how they work and watch how it could be for me as I look to improve.”

But a couple of years ago, her dream of competing on the world stage was in serious jeopardy.

The injury

During a swimming event in Zambia in February 2014, Ruele injured her shoulder at the touch of the wall at the end of one of her races. She was rushed to the hospital and came back to swim the following day.

Ruele continued to compete throughout the year and even won two silver medals for Botswana at the Africa Youth Games and competed in the Youth Olympics in China. Although she didn’t think much of the injury at the time, the pain in her shoulder continue to plague her.

It wasn’t until she arrived at FIU that fall and underwent a required physical that she learned she had torn her labrum, a rim of cartilage that reinforces the ball and socket joint of the shoulder. That same week she underwent a surgery that sidelined her entire 2014-2015 season.

“It’s a tough enough adjustment to come from another country to go to college and compete athletically,” FIU head swimming and diving coach Randy Horner says. “But then to have a surgery take away your ability to participate makes it that much harder to blend in with the team, feel like you belong and stay focused.”

But Ruele used it all to her advantage. The experience of treatment and recovery altered the way Ruele looked at swimming and provided her with a newfound focus and determination to get back in the pool.

“Getting the surgery really put into perspective and made me realize how much I appreciate being able to swim every single day now,” Ruele says. “I decided then that I wanted to do something and make an impact somehow.”

And make an impact she would.

From rebound to Rio

If there were any doubts about how she would perform upon her return, she quickly quelled them with a series of impressive performances in dual meets last fall to kick off the 2015-2016 season.

“We knew she had a great amount of talent, but it was a guess as to how good she could be. She bounced back faster than expected, and when she got back in the pool she really took off,” Horner says.

As the season progressed, she steadily improved and went on to have one of the most successful seasons in the program’s history. She put an exclamation point on it with a near-perfect performance at the Conference USA Championships in February, etching her name into both the FIU and C-USA record books. Ruele tallied gold medals in all seven events she swam and set three school records (and the all-time C-USA meet record in the 50-yard freestyle in 22.23 seconds) over the three-day tournament.

The performance earned her C-USA Swimmer of the Year honors and helped the Panthers win their second consecutive C-USA championship in the most decisive victory in conference history.

“She’s humble and she’s hungry. A lot of times when athletes get a lot of success and set records, it’s easy for them to get ahead of themselves. That hasn’t happened to her,” Horner says. “She’s handled it well, appreciates her teammates and knows she’s nowhere close to where she wants to be to be satisfied with what her goals are.”

After competing in the NCAA Championships in Atlanta in March – only the fifth Panther swimmer to do so – she stayed in the city to take part in an official FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation – the international governing body of swimming, diving and other water sports) approved time in an attempt to qualify for the Olympic Games in Rio. There she consciously distanced herself from the seriousness with which she had attempted an earlier time trial, in Orlando a few before, in which she came up 0.08 seconds short.

“I went into this race pretending it was just for fun and took the pressure off of myself,” Ruele says. “I just wanted to see what I could do.”

The new approach worked, and she qualified for this summer’s Olympics in the 50-meter freestyle by posting a time of 26.07 – just enough to meet the Olympic Selection Time “B cut” time standard.

“There was a lot of excitement,” Ruele recalls. “I didn’t believe it was happening at first.”

Setting the standard

Competitive swimming in Botswana, a landlocked country of just over two million in southern Africa, is still in its developmental stages, and in many ways Ruele is taking on a pioneer role for the sport in her country. She will be only the second female swimmer from Botswana to compete in the Olympics since the founding in 2004 of the Botswana Swimming Sport Association, which falls under the umbrella of the Botswana National Olympic Committee.

“She is by far the fastest swimmer to ever come out of Botswana,” Horner says. “She is going to set the standard for many younger swimmers to dream big. They’ll see what Naomi has done and see that it’s possible for them.”

For the past several months, Ruele has trained under Horner and FIU assistant coach Ignacio Gayo in Miami with the goal of shaving off time in the 50-meter freestyle as well getting mentally prepared for the world’s biggest sports event.

“I’ve been told it will be quite different from anything else I’ve done,” Ruele says. “I need to go in level-headed, remember that I deserve to there as much as anyone else there and race my heart out.”

Botswana’s recently announced selection of Horner to coach both Ruele and another Miami-area swimmer who represents the country (David Van Der Colff, a student at Nova Southeastern) should help keep her focused and comfortable.

Whatever happens in Rio, Ruele will return to Miami with three years of competitive swimming eligibility remaining at FIU. Horner is excited to see how the Botswana native continues to develop and improve in the pool. And chances are this won’t be the last time we see Ruele at the Olympics, with an appearance in the 2020 Olympic Games a strong possibility.

“If she continues to set those kind of goals, she can do great things,” Horner says. “At the NCAA level, she wants to win an NCAA championship. It seems like a lofty goal, but if you look at where she started a year ago, well, who knows?” ♦

By Joel Delgado ’12 MS ’17 

FIU coach Rita Buck-Crockett years ago achieved what many athletes only dream of: becoming an Olympian.

Buck-Crockett, who arrived at FIU in 2011 as an assistant athletic director and head coach for both indoor volleyball and beach volleyball, was a member of the 1980 U.S. Summer Olympics team that saw its collective dreams dashed by the U.S. boycott of the games in Moscow. She returned for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and helped the U.S. win a silver medal in volleyball. In the lead up to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August, Buck-Crockett sat down with FIU Magazine to reflect on her Olympic experience.

1. FIU Magazine: What did your path to the Olympics look like?

Rita Buck-Crockett: I was just a little girl from San Antonio, Texas, living on a dairy farm and I was blessed to be at the right place at the right time. I didn’t even know there was an Olympic team for volleyball. I just didn’t follow the sport that closely and I didn’t set out to be an Olympian. I was just an athlete and I loved being an athlete.

While I was at the University of Houston in 1978, the national team coach approached me about joining the team and helping them qualify for the 1980 Olympics. At first I didn’t want to leave college – when you’re young, you think of the immediate impact – but once I realized what this really meant, that I could represent the my country, I decided to pursue it.

2. How did you feel when the United States officially announced its boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

It was probably my worst experience as an athlete. I was one of the younger players on that team, which made me fortunate enough to be able to compete in the ’84 Olympics. But at that point, politics came into a world that it should not have. To be able to represent your country, it’s not political. It’s just about the people.

Because of my time on the U.S. team, I’ve been all over the world and I still have friends from Cuba, Russia, Japan, Brazil and everywhere in between. They are your friends for life and they are all good people. I think in that respect, that’s one reason why I love coaching here at FIU. We are allowed to bring in international athletes who want to build our program and I love it.

3. What was the most rewarding part of the Olympic experience?

For me it was the camaraderie with my teammates and all the other Olympians who were a part of it. I’m still in touch with people like Edwin Moses, who was on the track and field team, and some of my teammates. There is a bond there that never goes away. If you’re an Olympian, it’s part of who you are and that will never change.

4. Was there a specific moment from the ’84 Olympics that you will never forget?

The opening ceremonies were just the biggest rush you could imagine. We were one of the last countries to go out for the ceremony so we got to see a lot of it happening while we were waiting to come in. It was just a very awesome feeling going out there and walking out with your teammates and all the other athletes competing for the U.S.

5. What was the level of competition like at the Olympics and how was the experience unique?

It’s a different world. You don’t realize how big the gap between the college or professional level and the Olympics is until you are there. Everything is faster, more precise, and there’s little room for error. And as an athlete there, everything is about character. Wherever you go, you are an ambassador for your country. When you are wearing “USA” on your back, what you do in Cuba, Russia or Japan will affect the people you are representing back home. It’s hard to relate to unless you’ve been there.

6. What advice would you give to FIU athletes who are competing in the Olympics for the first time?

Try and keep everything in perspective. You have to realize it’s not about you, but the country you’re playing for. I realized that this is bigger than me. It’s not my Olympics, it’s my country’s Olympics. For me, I’m one of 12 people chosen for women’s volleyball to go and do the best for my country. When you keep that in mind, your fears go away, your confidence goes up and your pride comes out and you just do what you do. ♦

Ten years earlier, in 2005, economics alumnus Jonathan Bilby ’11 reached the North Pole, too—on the same ship taken by Kadko. The two join an elite echelon of researchers, explorers and military worldwide who have had the opportunity to venture to the top of the Earth.

Then a boatswain’s mate for the Coast Guard in Astoria, Oregon, Bilby got a call recruiting him for the Healy in 2003. They needed a crewman with his level of skill in navigation and ship operations. There was just one caveat: The ship was set to sail north three days later.

“Everyone knows they travel around the world,” he said of the Healy’s reputation for research and exploratory missions. It made the decision to go easy.

“I knew without a doubt that I would be late in returning to college,” said Bilby, who attended Campbell University for a year before enlisting after 9/11. “I extended my military contract for an additional year and a half to make sure that I would be part of this once-in-a-lifetime trip.”

On the ship, Bilby’s duties ranged from logging each day’s wavepoint data to calculating routes for each trip, and more. He also served as an on-ice escort for researchers and explorers, protecting them from polar bears and other threats off the ship.

During his time in the service, Bilby was awarded three Arctic Service Medals, which recognize members of the U.S. Coast Guard for 21 consecutive days of duty ashore or afloat north of the Arctic Circle.

The first night on the Healy is an unforgettable experience for everyone, said Bilby, because the ice scraping against the ship’s hull is so loud.

“It’s amazing anyone gets any sleep at all,” he said. “The ice is constantly moving and revolving. If the ship was not moving forward, the ice was pushing back with flows that could reach two miles per hour.”

It’s one of the many things to which sailors must adapt when cruising the Arctic Ocean. Ice buildup on the deck and windows is comically juxtaposed with 75- and 80-degree temperatures inside the ship, where crewman wear t-shirts with their uniforms and researchers are often seen wearing shorts.

Bilby remembers unusual weather patterns, sometimes characterized by blankets of dense fog. Since the Arctic is classified as a desert with ice covering everything, very little water evaporates to create precipitation. But when it does snow it blizzards, dumping several inches at a time and creating whiteout conditions.

“I hadn’t experienced summer, or even a spring, in three years,” said Bilby, who spent his time off the Healy stationed in Alaska during the winter. “As soon as it got warm enough for the ice to start melting, we’d leave. When you come back it’s winter again. So I had perpetual winter for three years.”

He said sailors must also adjust to the long hours of free time at sea. People on board the Healy would spend hours reading, watching movies and playing bingo for prizes like CDs and DVDs.

“You want to keep yourself as busy as possible, or you just go stir-crazy,” he said. “You could sleep 18 hours a day, but that’s a miserable way to spend six months in the Arctic.”

On the Healy, Bilby met people from countries all over the world, including Japan, Sweden, Canada, Portugal and more. Ships would often pass each other in the Arctic Circle or team up for research missions, like one mission Bilby remembers with the Swedish icebreaker Odin.

The different cultures and customs to which Bilby was exposed on the Healy were eye opening. During his three years aboard the vessel, he picked up several languages, including Japanese and French. When meeting with other countries’ ships, the foreign crewmen would often put together meals from their own cultures using whatever ingredients were in the Healy’s pantry. He even learned that Santa Claus only lives in the North Pole according to American culture.

“I have heard that Santa lives in Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Siberian Russia, and islands north of the Arctic Circle,” he said. “It all depends on who you are talking to that day.”

After retiring from the military, Bilby attended FIU, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 2011. His degree from FIU landed him a job in Orlando, where he now works as an economist for the Southwest Florida Water Management District while earning an MBA at the University of Florida.

But the journey to the North Pole remains unforgettable for Bilby, who said: “As long as you live you will never mistake the Arctic sea ice for anything else, the blue glow of a sun that never sets, or the early red dawn that lights the ice leads [cracks] that stretch on to the horizon.”  ♦

Read more about Kadko’s landmark research expedition in the Arctic.

Golf has always been a family affair for Meghan MacLaren.

Her parents, David and Mary, play the game. So does her younger sister, Rebecca. Growing up in eastern England in the city of Cambridge – located 62 miles north of London – she began playing golf when she was 4 years old and hasn’t stopped playing since.

Over the years, the lessons learned on the course shaped how she approaches other aspects of life, as well.

A quote by American golf legend Bobby Jones – “Golf is the closest game to the game we call life” – has always resonated with MacLaren, and the truth found in that statement has been reinforced with every swing and every stroke she has taken.

“Golf can be a very frustrating game at times and it gives you a lot of lows,” MacLaren says. “But going through that makes the good moments very special. You can never perfect every part of golf but you can always get better, and that’s a massive motivation for me. There is always room for improvement.”

And that motivation drove her to come to the United States in 2012 to pursue a college degree while continuing to pursue her dream of one day becoming a professional golfer.

With hundreds of universities across the nation with golf programs to choose from, MacLaren faced a difficult decision. But great weather, solid facilities and a commitment shown by head coach Joe Vogel ultimately persuaded MacLaren to pick FIU.

“Having a coach who I knew was going to care about what I did with my life was a big factor for me and helped me make the right decision,” MacLaren says. “And being able to practice in good conditions and good facilities in winter, that helps you get ahead of a lot of people.”

It didn’t take long for MacLaren to make the adjustment to the college game in the United States. In her collegiate debut, she finished tied for the lowest score among all the golfers participating in the Wolverine Invitational at the University of Michigan.

Fast forward several months and she was leading the Panthers to their first conference championship in program history with a Sun Belt Conference-best 73.90 stroke average en route to being named the SBC Freshman of the Year.

A big part of that early success was having teammates that helped make the transition to life in Miami much easier for her – some who were also international student-athletes going through the same experience she was.

“Even though it feels like you’re on your own, you’re not on your own because everyone is going through the same thing,” MacLaren says. “That team was very close – we fought for each other and they helped me settle in.”

But it was during her junior (2014-2015) and senior (2015-2016) seasons when MacLaren cemented her legacy as one of the greatest golfers in program history.

Her list of accomplishments during that two-year span included:

• Winning back-to-back Conference USA Individual Tournament titles to join Moira Dunn (1991-1993) as the school’s only three-time individual conference champions.

• Advancing to the NCAA Championship in 2015, finishing 25th overall in a field of 131 competitors.

• Being named Conference USA Golfer of the Year in 2015 and 2016.

• Setting the single season stroke average record (72.43) in her junior season and nearly breaking her own record a year later with a 72.81 stroke average.

• Making back-to-back NCAA Regional Appearances, bringing her career total to three (2013, 2015, 2016).

“It’s been an amazing four years,” MacLaren says. “The more I’ve been home and had time to process it, the more grateful I am for the opportunity I had to be there. It made me a better golfer and a better person.”

For MacLaren, who graduated with an English degree and minored in political science, the FIU experience also introduced her to a world of other possibilities and allowed her to tap into passions outside of golf.

During her final semester, she worked at the FIU Center for Excellence in Writing, helping other students brainstorm, draft and revise papers for their courses.

“Writing is something I’ve always liked. That’s one of the great things about FIU – it wasn’t just about golf and keeping that side of me open was a lot of fun,” MacLaren says. “The longer I was at FIU, the more I realized I wanted to take advantage of the opportunities that were available to me.”

In the end, being at FIU and competing on the course helped her gain clarity about her dream of pursuing a career as a professional golfer, a path she is currently preparing to embark on.

“I realized this is 100 percent what I want to do,” MacLaren says. “I’m excited for the next chapter.”

In late August, she will travel to California to participate in the first of three qualifying tournaments that will determine which golfers will gain membership for the 2017 LPGA Tour.

She hopes to become the first FIU alumna to gain entry into the LPGA Tour since Michelle Simpson ’01, who played in 12 LPGA tournaments between 2004 and 2006. Gaining membership into the LPGA Tour is a tall order and only a handful of the approximately 200 golfers competing in the qualifying process will make it for 2017. But regardless of the outcome, MacLaren can’t see herself being away from the game, and she is moving forward with every intention of making it work. It’s a mindset that has served her well in the past, and that’s what she is sticking with.

“There are so many different paths you can take, but if you question everything that you’re doing, you’ll never put 100 percent into it,” MacLaren says. “An important part of my mindset is to commit to whatever you’re going to do. Otherwise you’re never going to get the best out of it. ♦

Matthew DeGennaro is determined to stop the world’s deadliest animal.

Accounting for as many as 725,000 deaths worldwide every year, mosquitoes transmit a variety of infectious diseases including malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile virus and Zika. While there are thousands of species of mosquitoes, only a small number are known to transmit diseases. As fate would have it, the carriers of disease happen to be the species that prefer the taste of humans. The Aedes aegyptimosquito is among those, a spreader of yellow fever, dengue and Zika. DeGennaro spends his days surrounded by them, trying to better understand why they hunt people and how he might stop them from biting us.

The FIU biologist is the first scientist in the world to create a mutant mosquito — a feat he achieved in 2010 as a researcher at Rockefeller University in New York. While it sounds like a Marvel movie in the making, DeGennaro has no intention of unleashing a new type of mosquito on the world. His mutants serve a greater scientific purpose — they help him better understand what attracts mosquitoes to humans.

DEET, the most common active ingredient in insect repellant, is not enough to safeguard humans.

“Although DEET is safe and effective, we need new tools to prevent mosquitoes from biting us,” DeGennaro said. “Understanding how DEET works will help us develop a new generation of repellents.”

Scientists still are not entirely clear as to how DEET works. They don’t know if DEET alone repels the pests or if it mixes with human odors to confuse mosquitoes so that they lose their attraction to people. Because you can’t exactly ask a mosquito, DeGennaro has gone the scientific route.

First-generation college student

DeGennaro was born in the Bronx and grew up in Rockland County, New York, to middle class parents. His father was an elevator mechanic and his mother worked as an administrative secretary. By the age of 15, DeGennaro had grown tired of high school and knew he was ready for something more challenging. So he enrolled at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts designed for high school students who want to start college early. There he earned an associate’s degree in natural sciences before enrolling at Bard College in New York, where he double majored in the history and philosophy of science and gender studies.

He then headed west, working as a research scientist at the Oral AIDS Center at the University of California, San Francisco, where he studied Epstein-Barr Virus in HIV patients. Returning to New York a few years later, he was hired as a research scientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University and later at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Through these experiences, DeGennaro realized two things about himself — he didn’t want to be a doctor and he was pretty good at being a scientist. So he enrolled at NYU to pursue a Ph.D. with Ruth Lehmann, one of the founders of developmental genetics.

Shortly after earning his Ph.D. in 2008, he landed a coveted postdoctoral research position in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at The Rockefeller University in New York under the direction of Leslie Vosshall. It was a perfect match. DeGennaro was a geneticist looking to study neurobiology in an insect system. Vosshall is known internationally as the scientist who discovered the insect olfactory receptors. By the time DeGennaro arrived in her lab, she had decided to shift her focus from flies to mosquitoes.

“She asked me if I wanted to create the first mutant mosquito. That sounded interesting,” DeGennaro said.

He accepted the challenge and got to work.

History in the making

Mosquitoes rely on their antennae to track down each meal. Along with heat and CO2 sensors, these tiny projections are equipped with 131 odor receptors. These receptors enable mosquitoes to isolate different odors in the air and pick up the most desirable scent to them — unsuspecting humans. That much was known in 2008. But scientists knew little else. To uncover the secrets of the mosquito, DeGennaro and Vosshall turned to the fruit fly. Research had already determined odor receptors in fruit flies are all linked to a single gene. Without that gene, the flies can’t detect odors in the air. The scientists hypothesized that the mosquito’s odor receptors might rely on a similar gene. In less than two years of joining Vosshall’s lab, DeGennaro successfully “tweaked” the targeted gene in an Aedes aegypti mosquito, essentially turning it off.

When the researchers exposed the modified mosquito to human scent, the mutant had lost interest. The mutant also became resistant to DEET. With that single genetic modification, DeGennaro successfully influenced the mosquito’s behavior.

When he arrived at FIU in 2014, he continued his work with mutants and joined the research team in the Biomolecular Sciences Institute in the College of Arts, Sciences & Education. In an institute where much of the work focuses on the treatment of diseases, DeGennaro’s research stands out. Instead of finding cures for patients, he is trying to stop diseases before they ever get to people.

“Mosquito-borne diseases are serious global health problems with high relevance to South Florida,” said Yuk Ching Tse-Dinh, a biochemist and director of the Institute, which is housed in the college’s School of Integrated Science and Humanity. “Dr. DeGennaro’s work may provide novel approaches for controlling the spread of these diseases.”

DeGennaro joins FIU researcher Fernando Noriega and others at the university who are exploring the world’s insects, and in particular, the mosquito. DeGennaro’s fast-growing lab includes 12 undergraduate students, three graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher. The team genetically modifies mosquitoes to influence their behavior, trying to isolate what parts of a mosquito’s genetic makeup makes it thirst for human blood. He says if his team can identify which genes lead mosquitoes to people, scientists should be able to refine and improve upon current repellants and mosquito controls. Because of the important role biodiversity plays on the planet, DeGennaro doesn’t want to rid the world of mosquitoes. After all, it’s only a select few species of mosquitoes that are giving the thousands of others a bad name. He just wants to stop them from zeroing in on people. With that goal in mind, DeGennaro is also working with fellow FIU professor Jamie Theobald to understand how the sense of sight figures into the hunt.

The Zika outbreak

DeGennaro’s efforts have garnered international attention in recent months as an outbreak of Zika has gripped much of South America. Brazil, which will host the 2016 Summer Olympics in August, has been the hardest hit. Zika has been linked to an increase in cases of babies born with microcephaly, a condition that results in abnormally small heads and underdeveloped brains. In adults, Zika is not fatal. Zika’s symptoms can include rash, joint pains, pinkeye and fever, and tend to subside within a week or two.

Zika is transmitted through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is prevalent in warm, humid climates, such as South Florida. More than 1,100 cases of Zika have been reported throughout the United States, including Florida. The World Health Organization estimates that the Zika virus will reach every country in the Western Hemisphere before the end of 2016, infecting nearly 4 million people. Last year, more than 1 billion international travelers were logged, according to Carolin Lusby, an assistant professor of tourism, research methods and leadership in FIU’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management.

“With so much people flow, there is always risk for diseases to travel around the world,” Lusby said.

Currently, there is no treatment for Zika and no vaccine. This reality makes DeGennaro’s work all the more critical. The first and currently the only line of defense is preventing an infected mosquito from biting you in the first place. DeGennaro would argue that preventing the bite of a mosquito should be a priority to combat all mosquito-borne diseases.

His work is pushing science toward a new generation of repellants and mosquito controls that could usher in a new era of disease prevention.

“If we can stop mosquitoes from finding us, we can save 725,000 lives a year,” DeGennaro said. “The key is understanding mosquito behavior.”  ♦

FIU has teamed up with Broward College to share space and open doors to ever-greater numbers of students.

Working side-by-side in a shiny office building, the college and university are serving young people at an outpost located off Interstate 75 in Broward County, about 30 miles north of the Modesto A. Maidique Campus. The site opened two years ago and fills an important niche.

Broward College is FIU’s second largest pipeline of transfer students, after Miami Dade College. While FIU offers only a handful of undergraduate and weekend graduate programs at the location, the university has established a presence designed to encourage and support Broward College students. The hope is that while they are working toward associate in arts degrees, students will think about the next step of the educational journey.

“We want to make sure to reinforce that notion of ‘complete your AA and then come visit us,’” says Marisa Salazar, director of what’s known as FIU at I-75. (Broward College references the location as Miramar West Center, in keeping with its multiple locations within the country.)  “I don’t view us as competitors,” she says of FIU’s relationship with the college. “It’s complementary.”

Agrees Yolanda Brown, until recently the associate dean of partnership centers for Broward College and now a dean of student affairs, who helped get the location off the ground. “I think it’s a great thing, and it’s working very well for us,” she says of the institutions’ partnership. From the first to the second year of the college’s operation there, its full-time enrollment grew by 15 percent, to nearly 2,200. FIU has seen the number of students enrolling in its courses there grow 31 percent in the same time period, to 1700.

“Transfer-ready”

Broward College has classroom and office space on the building’s first two floors, and FIU on the two above. Up there, interested students will find an advisor who specializes in preparing them to transition to FIU when the time comes. (Previously, for 11 years, FIU held primarily evening and weekend classes at the Broward Pines Center but has closed that location.)

“What we’re trying to do is make them truly transfer-ready,” says Janie Valdes, FIU’s assistant vice president for Undergraduate Education. “Basically, we want the transfer process to be the most seamless pathway possible for students.”

That means giving them access to an FIU advisor while they are still taking lower-division courses at the college level. The advisor can help a student select the pre-requisites that, down the road, will set him or her up to go directly into an FIU degree program. Without such early counseling, a student might well complete an AA but not have the right foundational courses to immediately qualify for entry into his or her chosen major, Valdes explains. Such a delay could mean lost time and additional expense as the student works to fill gaps in his or her coursework. FIU has created detailed transfer guides to help students avoid just such problems.

A commitment to transfer students

The FIU at I-75 site serves as a tangible sign of FIU’s long-standing commitment to helping transfer students achieve their ultimate goal. Nearly 9,000 arrive at FIU each year from institutions around the state and beyond. (FIU is sixth in the nation in transfer-student enrollment according to US News and World Report.)

A key way in which the university has made the transition easier and more attractive for Broward College and other local transfer students: the new Connect4Success program (an update of the earlier Dual Admissions Program), which builds upon research studies and incorporates national best practices that support getting young people to the bachelor’s degree.

The program invites high school graduates who choose to start at any of four local colleges (Broward, Miami Dade and Palm Beach State as well as Florida Keys Community College) to simultaneously secure their spot at FIU by pledging to earn an AA within three years and then continue at the university.

While the university whole-heartedly encourages freshmen enrollment at FIU, the administration likewise recognizes that for some students the college-university combination works best, whether for academic reasons or financial ones. The Connect4Success program is designed to keep the prize of a full baccalaureate degree within reach, Valdes says, by removing the perception of a hard break between the first and second halves of students’ higher education careers. And establishing a plan early on to continue their undergraduate learning encourages students to stick with it.

“It was very, very beneficial,” says Carl-Ashlie Michel of the continuity offered by the program. Now an FIU senior majoring in psychology and criminal justice, the Broward College graduate explains that she found motivation to keep up her grades and participate in extracurricular activities because she understood she was on a path she to a full undergraduate degree. “I always wanted to go to a four-year college, and knowing that I just needed to knock out two years and then I would be in the same situation as all of my friends attending four-year colleges, it was awesome.”

Among the perks of entering the Connect4Success program: Besides access to an FIU advisor, students can get an FIU I.D. card, attend FIU athletic events at no charge and use the libraries at MMC and BBC, all while taking their lower-division college courses. (Those in Connect4Success are also eligible for scholarships specific to the program.) In Michel’s case, the early affiliation with FIU allowed her use of the University Learning Center’s tutoring services to help her pass a Broward College statistics course en route to earning an AA.

“A lot of opportunity”

FIU has a proud history of serving underrepresented groups and those who are the first in their families to work toward academic degrees. Its dedication to these populations has made the university a standout nationally. Organizations and publications regularly cite FIU’s success in graduating Hispanic Americans (ranked first in the county for both bachelor’s and master’s degrees) and black engineers (ranked fifth), for example.

In keeping with this spirit of inclusiveness and as part of its current strategic plan, FIU has established goals that include increasing overall enrollment and helping transfer students to earn BA degrees within four years of starting at the university. And FIU at I-75 will play a role in achieving both. The surrounding area is experiencing tremendous growth, with residential development in and around the Miramar location in high gear amidst equally busy commercial construction.

“There’s a lot of opportunity,” Salazar says of the building boom’s potential to boost FIU’s numbers. And she adds, “When you talk about northwest Broward, you’re also talking about a population that values education.” Nearby Weston, for example, is home to a large percentage of high-income professionals, and other cities boast a significant percentage of immigrants looking to help their children succeed.

The undergraduate offerings at I-75 currently are limited to the areas of business, liberal studies, psychology, criminal justice, public administration and construction management. Most students who transfer to FIU will take the bulk of their classes at MMC, at BBC, online or in some combination of the three.

For those who live nearby and have an interest in the available courses, the convenience makes the location ideal. “It’s quiet. It’s not so big,” says senior psychology major Natalie Salcedo, who has taken four courses at FIU at I-75 and appreciates the comfortable study spaces and lack of crowds. The easy-in-and-out makes for a nice contrast to the frenetic atmosphere on FIU’s two busy campus, she adds. “You can kind of do your own thing.” ♦

“The College of Engineering and Computing is actively engaged in cutting-edge research and development for high-impact solutions,” said Ranu Jung, interim dean of the college. “We are educating the engineers of tomorrow, but with all that we are, we are operating at scale. For us to meet our national need and FIU’s mission of student access and success, research excellence, and local to global community service, we must expand.”

The new, centrally located complex would

• Encourage interdisciplinary research activity in key growth areas—biomedical engineering, computer engineering related to cyber security, electrical engineering work on sensors and nanotechnology drug delivery—with academic units based at MMC such as the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, the College of Arts, Sciences and Education, and the Sea Level Solutions Center;
• Attract greater external research funding commensurate with expanded facility capacity, additional faculty hiring and larger, collaborative research projects;
• House the Office of Research and Development’s newly established startup incubator designed to commercialize faculty research and work with local innovators;
• Feature state-of-the-art laboratories for 73 professors, collaborative team spaces and interactive teaching classrooms;
• Contribute to national and state mandates to increase the number of engineering graduates.

As South Florida’s public research university, FIU is dedicated to driving the economic development of the region and the state. FIU is ranked first in the nation in providing engineering degrees to Hispanic and fifth in the nation for African Americans. The university is among the top 2 percent of U.S. research institutions and holds the Carnegie Classification ranking of “R1: Doctoral Universities – Highest Research Activity.”

Through innovative engineering education and research, we are meeting the workforce and technology-creation needs of both the public and private sectors while collaborating with a host of partners.

As national and state leaders call upon educational institutions to increase the number of engineers in the coming decades—as many as 10,000 per year— FIU can and will play a significant role in achieving that goal. And with an enhanced research environment, the university will serve as a resource for startup and existing companies seeking support for new innovations. The major gains for our region and the state will be realized in a growing number of high-quality jobs and an ecosystem that fosters continued growth in a variety of industries.

“Investment in our College of Engineering and Computing will feed South Florida’s aspirations to establish a major innovation hub,” said FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg.

The college today

The College of Engineering & Computing consists of more than 5,800 students pursuing both undergraduate and graduate degrees; and it graduated more than 1,100 engineers in the 2014-15 academic year.

The 181,459-square-foot, state-of-the-art Engineering Center houses unique research laboratories and facilities for its 105 faculty; and the college earned $17.73 million in external research grants in the 2014-15 fiscal year.

Projected return on investment

To the college:

• $49 million in annual external research grants
• 27 university patent applications annually
• 1 viable startup every other year
• 7,500 students
• 1,500 new graduates annually
• 214 faculty
• 331,459 square feet of teaching and research space

To the community:

• 350 additional engineers entering workforce annually
• $78 million infusion of new dollars into local economy (by 2025), based on expanded research funding
• 550 newjobs in South Florida, based on expanded research funding
• Creation of a resource center that will attract and support new tech-based ventures in South Florida  ♦

Seventy students sit in small groups, each at a table with a portable computer monitor and dry-erase board at the ready. After listening to their professor explain how to use conditional statements in computer programming, a number of students scurry to the dry-erase boards and take a stab at writing their own, others huddle together to produce examples in a team, while still others confer with a peer learning assistant who reviews their work and offers advice. Welcome to an active learning classroom at FIU.

In a traditional class, a professor usually lectures while students take notes. But more and more professors have embraced so-called active learning methods. Research has proven that encouraging students to collaborate and apply concepts in class through hands-on activities helps them learn more effectively than lecturing alone.

But one professor alone cannot always facilitate those interactive activities and offer instant feedback. Enter learning assistants: undergraduate students who help their peers interact with and discuss the material. Multiple learning assistants, commonly called LAs, help students in both small and large science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) classes and labs. During the Spring 2016 semester, 161 sections of 47 different courses relied on 259 LAs helping upwards of 10,500 students, making FIU’s the largest such program in the country. The goal: to increase the number of STEM graduates.

“I would fail this class if it weren’t for the LAs,” information technology major Nick Melow says of Java programming. He looks to LAs for the kind of support that can mean the difference between making the grade and bombing.

Eric Rubido serves as an LA in a chemistry class and says he acts as an extension of the professor by addressing difficulties immediately. He adds that the professor he works with explains concepts thoroughly, but the material is difficult and students have questions. “She can’t answer all of them. It’s a moment in time—a minute or two to help each student.”

Embedding instructional aides is a deliberate step to help students succeed in some of the most academically challenging courses and speaks directly to FIU’s BeyondPossible2020 strategic goals, several of which revolve around keeping students motivated so they don’t drop out when the going gets tough. Provost and Executive Vice President Kenneth Furton believes in the program enough that he supports it with funding.

“By having a peer in class that has taken the course, it makes the class less overwhelming,” explains Hagit Kornreich-Leshem, director of the program. “The LA becomes a bridge between faculty and student.”

Adds Laird Kramer, who founded the program in 2008 and serves as director of the STEM Transformation Institute, a multidisciplinary collaborative that aims to develop effective practices in support of turning out well-prepared STEM professionals.”LAs are catalysts for learning. Change is what the LA program is about – trying to change the perception of teaching and learning.”

And LAs help the professor too. Christy Charters teaches programming and meets weekly with her LAs to find out how well students are understanding the material, what they may need more work on and which activities they find most productive.

“I always come out of those meetings with homework to do, but I appreciate it,” she says. “They give you honest feedback you might not get otherwise. It’s a never-ending process to improve your class as much as possible.”

Sat Gavassa Becerra, a visiting instructor who uses LAs in her general biology class, compared her student passing rates before and after implementing active learning. What she found surprised her: a whopping 20 percent increase in the number of students who passed her class.

And, Becerra says, students in her classes see LAs as fonts of all kinds of wisdom, simply because LAs are usually a year or two further along in their college careers. “They ask them questions about their classes, internships, other extracurricular opportunities,” she explains. “It’s more than talking about class content.”

LAs are experts at surviving a class because they just took it, likely only a year or even a semester earlier. Senior computer sciences major Justin Fletcher, considered a coding guru by the students he helps, became an LA because he had previously enjoyed helping friends with their programming projects.

“It’s a lot to wrap your mind around in four months,” he says of the material covered in basic programming classes, adding that he himself would have appreciated the extra attention that comes with the active learning experience.

And says Charters, the programming professor, incorporating active learning and LAs into the classroom sends an important message to students: “You’re not alone, we want you to succeed, and we’re doing everything possible to get you to succeed.”

Read about math LA Randy Juste.

Tiffany Troxler takes a right turn from Miami Beach’s Purdy Avenue onto 20th Street and spots her destination, a perfect example of the consequences of sea level rise.

“Right there,” she says. “Do you see the two steps leading into the Publix? It used to be seven steps.”

It’s hard to fathom it, looking at the stairway, just a couple long, black-and-gray tile steps leading up to the entrance of the supermarket. But the city of Miami Beach has built up the road so high to prevent flooding that the staircase had to be shortened by five steps. Troxler points out other buildings that now sit several feet below the new street level; stairways now lead down to their entrances, patios and front walkways. New drains to funnel away water sit near doorways. Then Troxler points to an industrial-looking, squat structure smack in the middle of the road, bannisters directing traffic around it.

“And that is a pump station. It will be one of 60 pumps all around the beach,” she says. During high tides and heavy rains, when many Miami Beach neighborhoods used to end up swamped, the new pumps should keep the streets dry by pumping out 14,000 gallons of water a minute.

This novel approach to keeping the ocean from swamping neighborhoods is exactly the kind of thing Troxler is working on in the new FIU   Sea Level Solutions Center. The goal of the center, above all else, will be collaborations and tangible solutions to combat the effects of global climate change.

“If you think about it, we put ourselves in this mess,” said Troxler, an aquatic ecologist in the   College of Arts, Sciences & Education  and director of the center. “If we put ourselves in this, we can come up with a way to get ourselves out of it.”

It’s a far more optimistic message than the one coming from some scientists, who have predicted South Florida will become unlivable in a century or less. Consider the 2013 article in Rolling Stone that imagined a future where a hurricane has left Miami under water, nothing more than an adventure vacation for scuba divers.

Troxler sees a far better future where FIU can help to prevent that dystopian vision.

“We’re trying to creatively plan to do what we can now and also figure out what we need to do in the future,” she said.

‘Unlike anything the world has faced before’

Across the university, researchers are seeking answers and developing strategies to ensure South Florida not only perseveres but also serves as an international model for how to adapt in this changing landscape. Their work reaches far beyond the shoreline. For South Florida, trouble also lurks within. The porous limestone beneath our feet makes it easy for salt water from the ocean and bay to intrude into the aquifer that supplies much of the region’s drinking water. FIU ecologist Todd Crowl knows this intrusion is creating a hidden peril.

“The greater South Florida ecosystem is predicated on the balance of fresh water and salt water. When that ecosystem hits its tipping point and an imbalance occurs, that is when this whole thing collapses,” he warns.

Crowl arrived at FIU in 2014 to unify and expand research initiatives focused on two highly threatened resources — water and the environment. His efforts have been formalized under the newly created   Institute of Water and Environment, which includes the   Southeast Environmental Research Center, the scientific work in the Sea Level Solutions Center, as well as a variety of other research groups. The collaborations are about more than the science, though there is plenty of that to go around. Researchers are expected to share what they know with local officials, develop research programs that respond to community needs and engage people of all ages to be part of the solution to the world’s environmental challenges.

As a child growing up in Ohio, Crowl had a front row seat to a major environmental disaster. After being subjected to decades of industrial pollution, the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. That single event, which sparked a nationwide environmental movement, set Crowl on a path of environmental preservation. Over the years, he came to realize that the scientific reasons for why the fire started were very easy to understand. But how people could let the pollution get so bad in the first place was harder to comprehend. Water samples and data sets could not provide an answer. It is why, among a variety of scientific degrees adorning his resume, Crowl also possesses a degree in philosophy. He knows real solutions to complex problems require values and reason to be combined with science and ingenuity. That is why you will find artists, sociologists, writers, biologists, ecologists, architects, engineers and others working side-by-side on the issue of sea level rise at FIU. It is a framework Crowl helped to develop.

The circumstances of sea level rise are unlike anything the world has faced before. There is no isolated disaster. It is a slow, seemingly unstoppable force. Both natural and built environments are at risk. Small island nations and major metropolitan cities are in the path. Globally, we are in this together.

Read more about   South Florida’s climate change solutions

Tackling this together

For FIU, that means every college and school has been activated on the issue. Researchers from nearly every discipline are contributing to the body of knowledge, examining causes, effects, predicted outcomes, best-case scenarios, worst-case scenarios and everything in-between. Students are being deployed during high tides to collect data. Teams of journalists are working to develop communication tools that help residents understand what is happening today and what is likely to happen to their neighborhoods in the future (see app below).

The   Eyes on the Rise  app, created by FIU’s   School of Journalism & Mass Communication  and FIU’s   GIS Center, allows users to input their address in the search bar to view the area’s elevation and how much water might inundate that area at varying heights of sea level rise. Additionally, it serves as a tool for users to report floods.

FIU architects and engineers are designing new innovations that could change how we construct homes, office buildings and infrastructure. Agroecologists are exploring food supply impacts. Experts in business, law and tourism are engaged. Scientists are developing effective water management strategies and storm-surge models. After all, natural disasters will continue to be part of the equation.

Bringing it all together, the Sea Level Solutions Center has quickly become the main communications vehicle for all sea level-related research at FIU. Researchers within the center are collaborating with local governments, businesses and community leaders to accelerate adaptation planning. Faculty members are helping to advance the Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact — a formal agreement among Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties to work together to fight climate change. FIU and the City of Miami Beach have also developed a partnership that provides internship opportunities for students in support of adaptation efforts. And for the first time, FIU is offering an interdisciplinary class dedicated to long-term infrastructure and social resilience within specific communities. During the spring semester, students have dedicated their coursework to studying historic Virginia Key Beach.

The Sea Level Solutions Center is not an advocate for combating the effects of sea level rise – that argument is over, according to Troxler. Instead it will be a hub for information.

“If you think about the problem of sea level rise as an individual, it’s overwhelming,” Troxler said. “Then you think about the problem as a collaboration with people from multiple disciplines, and you can solve it.”   

Read more about Troxler’s class on infrastructure and social resilience

The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It makes up two percent of a body’s mass yet uses 20 percent of its blood and oxygen supplies. It controls the way we think. It controls our movements. It dictates the way we make decisions. And it determines how we recall memories. It is powerful yet fragile.

FIU scientists from across the disciplines — medicine, engineering, arts and sciences — have dedicated their careers to studying mental processes in the healthy and the diseased human brain. They study brain activity, including language, cognition, emotion, action, sensory perception and mental health, while working to develop new technologies in cognitive neuroimaging.

Understanding how the pathways within the brain work to enable the functionality of its connections—electrical, anatomical and physiological — has long eluded us, in part because they could not be easily seen or observed. Until now.

“There’s been an incredible explosion in scientific data that allows us to understand the brain better as genetics, research, physics, imaging and cognitive research have all collided to present an unprecedented opportunity of multimodality and multidisciplinary research,” says Sergio Gonzalez-Arias, M.D., Ph.D., chairman of the Department of Neuroscience at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine. “Our ability to deliver a multidisciplinary environment for research and integrative research allows us to participate in much more relevant research and shortened path to clinical trials and then to treatment.”

Collaboration is making possible advances unheard of just a few years ago. “We at FIU have an incredible group of well-respected and renowned neuroscience researchers coming together, and this provides endless opportunities in today’s research world,” Gonzalez-Arias says. And, he adds, FIU’s location in culturally diverse South Florida further enhances its capacity to contribute to the field. “There are very few regions that have the ability to study one or more different demographics from so many different aspects — cultural, social determinants and early interventions.”

FIU’s strength in neuroscience has not happened by chance. “Our university leadership has put us in an enviable position with our strategic hires and our community partnerships. The first half of the 21st century will result in so much more knowledge about the brain than was discovered in the last half of the 20th century.”

A snapshot of cognitive learning

When Angela Laird, director of the Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging Center, arrived at FIU, she was presented with something she had not seen in more than a decade: introductory physics students that she was expected to teach. Most recently engaged in intensive biomedical research, she decided to find a way to both teach and undertake a study on the young people in her classes at the same time.

“I solved problems with them and I worked with them all semester long and I watched their brains do this magnificent thing where they would struggle and struggle and struggle and get mad at me and then all of a sudden the light bulb would come on and they would get it and they were overjoyed,” Laird says. “And I said, ‘This is fascinating from a brain perspective.’”

A cognitive neuroscientist with a physics background, Laird began imaging students’ brains before and after they took the course to see how undergraduate STEM majors develop critical thinking skills. She had students complete a computer-based multiple-choice task while she and her team studied what the brain was doing.

“When they first start this course,” Laird explained, “these students activate the fronto-parietal network to solve a problem. After the course, they still require the fronto-parietal network.” So while it appeared that nothing had changed, the researchers found something interesting upon looking more closely: One area in the back center of the brain was more active in the post-class students. Oddly, that region, known as the default node network, is commonly associated with non-goal behavior and a resting state.

That prompted a hypothesis: Could this region also be activated when the brain is integrating a lot of information and putting together everything that has been learned within a specific context?

The study results will assist not only those who teach budding scientists and engineers, it may also help clinicians identify the sources of disruption in functional brain networks that lead to conditions like depression, schizophrenia and autism.  

Understanding language acquisition

Children develop language first by learning the speech sounds of their native tongue. In a surprisingly short time they begin to understand speech, and a short time later they produce words and combine them to form sentences. All of this takes place in the context of other kinds of communicative information, which forms the foundation for developing speech, language and literacy.

Although we know a lot about the trajectory of this development, we know a lot less about how the young brain acquires these uniquely human abilities, and how these abilities are impaired in the brain in disordered populations. Anthony Dick, an assistant professor of   psychology  and director of the   Cognitive Neuroscience Program, conducts leading research to answer these questions.

His work focuses on the fiber pathways that support speech, language and literacy and how these are affected by various developmental disorders, such as ADHD, or nutritional deficits such as iron deficiency.

“Medical science desperately needs new models and theories of how the brain functions to support higher-level cognition. With the advent of new methodologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion-weighted imaging, we can now explore how the brain functions in living people,” he says. Dick’s research uses these approaches to see how the living brain accomplishes a variety of tasks, with a focus on language and literacy. And in the case of the developing brain, he emphasizes the importance of early intervention in treating a variety of disorders such as pathology, ADHD and autism. “The availability of novel neuroimaging techniques gives researchers unprecedented opportunities to design focused interventions to take advantage of that early window of intervention.”

The addicted brain

Assistant professor of psychology Matthew Sutherland’s work focuses on the impact of drug abuse on the human brain, specifically nicotine and marijuana.

With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Sutherland uses multiple neuroimaging tools to look at the function, structure and chemical composition of the “addicted brain.” Functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography helps him identify “brain signatures,” or unique patterns of brain activity. An understanding of such signatures could one day help researchers create personalized therapies for mental health conditions.

“When thinking about treatment decisions, it becomes important to understand the brain processes involved in order to provide precise targets for interventions, to identify the best intervention for a specific person and to determine if an intervention is working rather than just relying on a trial-and-error approach,” Sutherland says.

“A cardiologist can put someone on a treadmill and make treatment decisions based on the results of that cardiac stress test. Currently, we don’t have any similar brain-based signatures for addiction or other mental health conditions to inform treatment,” he explains. “And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t work towards that ultimate goal.”

Sutherland is part of a research team working on the multi-year national landmark study on substance use and adolescent brain development. The project will follow 10,000 children through adolescence, considered the developmental stage of highest risk for substance use and other mental health disorders. The goal is to inform prevention and treatment research priorities, public health strategies and policy decisions.

Consequences of toxic poisoning

During 30 years at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and five as chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Tomás R. Guilarte studied the effects of chronic, early-life exposure to lead on brain function and behavior.

Today, the new dean of the   Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work  continues his work on the subject with more than $7.5 million in active grant funding around his specializations in neurotoxicology, neuroimaging and environmentally induced neurological diseases. He uses behavioral, cellular and molecular approaches to reveal the effects of heavy metal exposure on the developing brain, focusing specifically on the molecular mechanisms by which lead poisoning impairs cognitive function.

Childhood lead intoxication currently presents a significant public health problem, not only in the United States—where the Centers for Disease Control estimate more than four million U.S. households could be affected—but around the world. The recent stories of lead-tainted water in Flint, Mich., make clear that dangers persist even after decades of concerted efforts in this country to remove sources of the toxin, among them lead-based paints and leaded gasoline.

“Lead is still found in homes and other buildings around us, affecting the people who are exposed, especially children,” Guilarte said. “Lead exposure still needs to be addressed because it can affect children throughout their lives, with consequences for them, their families, our schools and our communities.”

And while it’s understood that childhood lead exposure results in cognitive function deficits, much less is known about the neurological and mental health consequences. Guilarte’s most recent studies indicate it could result in everything from lower IQ scores to schizophrenia in adolescence and adulthood.

High-tech tools for the neurologist

Malek Adjouadi, a professor of   electrical and computer engineering  and director of FIU’s   Center for Advanced Technology and Education, and his team have created a number of tools to help physicians pinpoint damaged areas in the brain and optimize surgical outcomes.

To better understand and treat epilepsy, the researchers designed computer software that analyzes the data from electroencephalograms, or EEGs, which take electrical readings from several places along the skull. Much like a seismograph measures earthquake waves, the EEG detects the subtle “spike waves” in the brain that could guide the process for locating source of seizures, information that can be used for surgical planning or for MRI-guided therapeutic interventions. The software can both calculate from where the seizures are originating, based on the readings from several electrodes, and accurately trigger the MRI at the opportune time.

“When the detected spike happens, we trigger the MRI to take a picture of the brain in 3-D,” Adjouadi says. “So now we have two modalities telling us exactly the same location that is causing the seizure, and doctors are reassured that the action they will take in surgery is the correct one,” he says. The same protocol holds promise for some patients presenting with depression.

Other collaborations in which Adjouadi is involved include examining ways to potentially stop or slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease in its earliest manifestation through interventions using a transcranial magnetic stimulator. Acquired with the support of the National Science Foundation, the equipment, located in Adjouadi’s campus lab, is the first in the state and performs brain stimulation as a curative intervention for patients with various neurological disorders.

Nanotechnology advances

One of medicine’s most frustrating mysteries is why an ailing brain will rebuff the treatments meant to help it. The blood-brain barrier will allow some particles to pass through, but “The brain balks at attempts to deliver specific drugs,” says Sakhrat Khizroev, a physicist and electrical engineer who has dual appointments in the   College of Engineering and Computing  and the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine. “It is absolutely incredible how the brain seems to understand and to quickly develop multidrug resistance.”

So in 2011, Khizroev helped create a new, non-invasive technology that uses magneto-electric nanoparticles, or MENs, that are able to march through the blood-brain membrane to direct therapies to specific targets.

MENs also enable unprecedented imaging of neural activity in the brain in real time. The brain, notes Khizroev, is essentially a wireless network with 80 billion neurons. “We can go deep inside to pick up those wireless signals.”

In a study that was named one of the 2015 “Top Science Stories of the Year,” Khizroev’s team did just that. They used MENs to wirelessly stimulate selective regions in the brains of mice. The nanoparticles were used to “read” electric fields at a sub-neuronal level, explains Khizroev, who adds that the breakthrough “paves a way to reverse-engineer the brain.” It also has the potential to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

In addition to collaborating with colleagues in the medical school such as Dr. Carolyn Runowicz and fellow engineers, Khizroev is working closely with Dr. Andrew Schally, the Nobel Prize-winning director of The Endocrine, Polypeptide and Cancer Institute, to deliver cancer-fighting peptides to currently incurable gliobastoma tumors in the brain, a pinpoint treatment that minimizes collateral damage to healthy cells.   ♦

Hungry for more “brain food”?  Click here to read about other brain research being done at FIU.

Even before finishing FIU’s graduate program in Health Informatics and Management Systems, alumna Christina Cascante was hired by Mount Sinai Medical Center as a systems analyst, working on testing and other technical issues of the hospital’s electronic medical record system. The job offer came just as federal mandates were ramping up to have doctors’ notes and other health care information digitized.

Cascante graduated in spring 2015 and said that what she learned during the 14-month College of Business program gave her a 360-degree understanding of how IT, health care, business and big data are coming together in a field growing by leaps and bounds.

“I didn’t realize how complex and vast it is, and how relevant right now,” said the 26-year-old, who came to the program with a bachelor’s in psychology as well as experience as a systems administrator for a private medical practice. “The program really opened up my eyes to this whole health care IT industry.”

A growing demand

Employers know they are going to need more professionals like Cascante.

Monica Chiarini Tremblay, chair of FIU’s Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics, knows it as well. She is constantly retooling the program, which launched in 2012, to meet evolving industry needs. Along with Gloria Deckard, the program’s newly appointed faculty director, and a group of national and international experts, Tremblay has reshaped the program so businesses that are gathering and parsing medical data — think hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices, and public health and research institutions — can find experts to deal with the onslaught of information.

With almost every bit of data now digitized, from patient age and profession to diagnosis and DNA profile, the challenge is not only in sifting through the information but figuring out how to tease meaningful patterns from the mass of data — and even understand what questions should be asked.In the last several years, Tremblay has refined the program so graduates can provide meaningful approaches to businesses and researchers overloaded with data.

“We looked at our areas of strength. We are a department of information systems. Additionally, most of us [professors] do research on health care,” Tremblay said. “Information systems are about the intersection of people, process and technology.”

A leader in the field

FIU was the first university in South Florida to offer a health care informatics program, and the only one to house it within a business school with a focus on process, change management and analytics.

One program goal is teaching students how to find the right approach to fit each business. The first step is understanding thoroughly how the business currently functions.

“If you automate something inefficient, you are just doing inefficient stuff faster,” Tremblay explained. A good example is electronic health record programs used in doctors’ offices. The way that many have been designed ­— which often has doctors’ heads buried in a computer screen — do not take into account the traditional face-to-face interaction between physician and patient.

Both doctors and patients complain that, doctors are looking at screens now rather than making eye contact. Some doctors have even hired scribes to take electronic notes so they can focus on the person in front of them.

Key for students as well, Tremblay said, is learning how to ensure that doctors and office workers are on board with a new way of gathering or managing information, while also validating their concerns. Learning to manage change is a core learning objective of the program. “You have to do training and roll out a system that is not painful.”

Going beyond the pie

Data analysis is the third focus. “We need to understand what aggregate data looks and acts like,” Tremblay said. Students are taught how to visually conceive data. It’s far beyond plotting on a graph. Data now is presented in ways that use color, shape and other elements that can quickly and intuitively reveal patterns that lead to insightful use.

Termed visualization tools, they are to traditional pie charts and graphs what the computer is to the typewriter. Software programs such as Tableau allow users to combine, rearrange, update and query data while adding information in real time. It’s a specialty of Tremblay’s and is emphasized in the health informatics program.

If it all sounds rather complex, that is because it is. The program is geared toward nurse managers, hospital mangers, case managers, public health professionals and others whose work is increasingly at the nexus of patient care, IT and big data.

Understanding this kind of knowledge is part of what makes FIU’s grads sought after. Alicia D’Empaire, assistant vice president of Business Intelligence and Decision Support for Baptist Health South Florida, successfully wooed Cascante away from Mount Sinai Medical Center.

“I was looking for someone with a clinical IT background, and someone who has a lot of experience working in health care business, and understands the operational process of the industries,” D’Empaire said.

One must look to the Affordable Care Act to understand why this is important.

As part of health care reform, a program known as Meaningful Use incentivizes hospitals and physicians to implement and use electronic health records technology in a manner that improves patient outcomes, and meets other health care goals.

The technology that allows, for example, both the internist and dermatologist to access the records of Mr. Jones or Mrs. Garcia can also be used to collect and mine reams of data, such as the results of a certain treatment on a large number of patients, or whether prevention programs are correlating with better health outcomes.

At Baptist, one goal was to automate the Meaningful Use reports of 78 physicians practices that are part of Baptist Health Medical Group. “We had a spreadsheet that was updated manually. It took hours to update and the manual process left the data vulnerable to human error,” D’Empaire said.

Cascante, she explained, swiftly moved all the information — from doctors’ X-ray orders to prescription information to patient visits — into Tableau and automated the entire process.

“She was able to provide amazing output,” D’Empaire said. Administrators were then able to get a handle on whether objectives were being met and where improvement was needed.

Turning out top professionals

Cascante said learning how to understand such information was a key part of her FIU experience.

“In a couple of classes, we were given projects to use with this tool [Tableau]. It’s so empowering to have data at your fingertips — which on its own is pretty unusable — but by plugging into Tableau you find all sorts of patterns and variations that could potentially influence some big decisions,” she said.

A developer colleague of Cascante’s also used this visualization tool to help Baptist’s emergency departments better understand work flow: how many patients came in at what times, what days and with what chief complaints. Administrators could mine the data for information on the busiest and slowest days, illness spikes and staffing levels. Colors of red and green were used to describe the department’s dynamics.

“The colors would change depending on the amount of patients coming in the door,” Cascante explained. “The gradient will change [to reflect] patients, month, the time of year — basic information one may look for in this data.”

Since hiring Cascante, D’Empaire also brought on another graduate from FIU’s program and could eventually look for more.

Cascante said that she would not be where she is without having enrolled in the health informatics program.

“I couldn’t be happier,” she said, noting that it was at an FIU event that brought industry representatives to campus where her professional path took off. “It was my very first step in the career world, and it would not have been possible without FIU.”  ♦

The annual Torch Awards celebrated its 15^th anniversary March 19 with a gala honoring distinguished alumni in the FIU community. The event, held at Fontainebleau Miami Beach, raises money for the university’s Alumni Center Building Fund and its First Generation Scholarship Fund, which benefits students who are the first in their families to attend college.

“This event is very important for FIU because it provides an opportunity to recognize outstanding alumni who are really impacting not only the local community but the world in terms of what they’re doing,” said Duane Wiles, executive director of the FIU Alumni Association. “It really helps move the needle for the university when we recognize our grads for all the great things they are doing and will continue to do for FIU.”

In his speech at the gala, President Mark B. Rosenberg said: “Look at the amazing accomplishments of the alumni we are honoring tonight. They’ve done well, and they’re doing good. Indeed, all of our awardees have demonstrated the importance of paying if forward using their success to make a difference in this world and leaving this world a better place than they found it.”

Pictured left to right above, this year’s honorees included:

• Stacey Oddman, M.D. ’94
  Former Chief of Family Medicine, Holy Cross Hospital
  Distinguished Alumni Award, College of Arts, Sciences & Education, School of Integrated Science & Humanity
• Marile Lopez ’91
  Chief Financial Officer, Jorge Luis Lopez Law Firm
  Community Leadership Award presented by the FIU Center for Leadership, College of Arts, Sciences & Education
• Gail Appelrouth ’77
  Guardian ad Litem, Miami-Dade County Juvenile Dependency Court, 11^th Judicial Circuit of Florida
  Distinguished Alumni Award, Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work
• Frank Vilar ’91
  President, OHL-Arellano
  Distinguished Alumni Award, College of Engineering & Computing
• Diana Farmer-Gonzalez ’96
  Principal & Managing Director, Gensler
  Distinguished Alumni Award, College of Architecture + The Arts
• Richard Blanco ’91, MFA ’97
  Poet, Author & Civil Engineer
  Distinguished Alumni Award, College of Arts, Sciences & Education, School of Environment, Arts & Society
• Darlene Boytell-Perez, ARNP ’89, MSN ’96
  Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner, Gastro Health
  Alumna of the Year, Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing & Health Sciences
• FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg
• Alfredo Richard, M.S. ’94
  Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications, NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises
  Distinguished Alumni Award, School of Journalism & Mass Communication
• Ranu Jung, Ph.D., 
  Interim Dean, FIU College of Engineering & Computing, Outstanding Faculty Award presented by the NeuroScience Centers of Florida Foundation
• Jonathan Cameron ’07
  Co-Founder & CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, CameronDowning
  Distinguished Alumni Award, The Honors College
• Yolanda Nader ’79, MBA ’86
  Chief Executive Officer & Chief Financial Officer, Dosal Tobacco Corporation
  Distinguished Alumni Award, College of Business
• Charles Alexandre Kenmogne Kamhoua, Ph.D. ’11
  Research Electronics Engineer, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory
  Charles E. Perry Young Alumni Visionary Award, College of Engineering & Computing
• Cindy Russo, M.S. ’78
  Former Head Coach, FIU Women’s Basketball
  Distinguished Alumni Award, Athletics
• Bruce Blum ’82
  Co-Founder & President, GB Lodging, Inc.
  Distinguished Alumni Award, Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management

Not Pictured:

• Stephen Burns ’78
  Vice President & Leadership Advisor, B.E. Smith, Inc.
  Distinguished Alumni Award, Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing & Health Sciences
• Omar Carrion ’07
  Awarded Posthumously
  Distinguished Alumni Award, Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs

By Joel Delgado ’12 MS ’17 

Historic Virginia Key Beach Park – an 82-acre oasis on a barrier island tucked off the causeway just before Key Biscayne – is one of South Florida’s most unique historic and cultural locations.

The park opened in 1945 as Miami-Dade County’s “colored only” beach while segregation was still a reality in the South, and today serves as an isolated and peaceful refuge just minutes away from the hustle and bustle of Miami.

“What was unique here is that although it was segregated, it was a very cherished spot,” said Guy Forchion, executive director of the Historic Virginia Key Beach Park Trust. “I still believe it’s South Florida’s most beautiful beach. I love how natural it is and how set away it is from everything, even though it’s just a few miles from downtown.”

But sea level rise along Florida’s coast threatens park operations, and this threat is projected to increase in the future. Over the last few months, a group of FIU students took on the task of reimagining the site in an attempt to protect it for future generations of beachgoers and naturalists. They designed a visitor center, museum and research facility for a planned redevelopment project.

Students from multiple disciplines – including architecture, construction management, biology and public administration – signed up for the Sea Level Solutions Center Interdisciplinary Studio course to complete a site analysis and create an architectural design that would help make the park resilient to rising sea levels over the next century, backed up with data to justify the approach.

“The course really is a very easy way to articulate what the Sea Level Solutions Center is about,” said Tiffany Troxler, director of the center and a co-instructor for the course. “It takes an understanding of all the facets of the problem to come up with solutions that are workable. We are taking research and data from different disciplines and using that information to strive toward the solutions that help us adapt to sea level change.”

Read more about rising seas: A legacy not yet written

The students visited the park as a group. In the classroom, they listened to lectures from faculty members representing various disciplines and discussed topics such as storm surge and flooding scenarios, sustainable and resilient plan and design, and cost-benefit analysis.

“We’re learning that there is a lot more to architecture than just the building or the structure we’re designing, ” said Josh Pagano, an architecture student from Italy. He’s attending FIU for the semester as part of an exchange program. “The most rewarding thing about this whole project is simply facing the challenge of it and seeing the design solution come out from investigating all these different factors.”

At the end of the semester, students presented their designs to a panel of faculty and members of the trust. Among the solutions incorporated into the final projects: using mangroves as a layer of protection along the beach to resist storm surge and sea level rise, and building up the lowest levels of the park. Some of the projects preserved the historical aspects of the park – such as a vintage merry-go-round and miniature train – while others repurposed or reimagined them for the future.

“In each presentation, there was some element that was very thoughtful and mindful of everything that we are, where we’re headed and how we can entertain and educate the public,” Forchion said. “That was a major challenge, and I love the way these students have addressed it.”  ♦

Read more about South Florida’s climate change solutions

On a month-long unpaid leave from work at the time, Colombino, pictured above, saw firsthand the devastation that would claim, by some estimates, as many as 300,000 lives. “There was destruction and death everywhere,” she says. “It was chaos.”

And through it all, those three words—“Need a job”—repeatedly penetrated the fetid air and lingered for Colombino. “They were just ringing in my ears.”

She wrote them in her journal even as she wondered what would happen in Haiti when relief workers receded from the streets and clinics in the coming weeks and months. What difference, what change would they—would she—have effected?

Deeply spiritual, Colombino lay awake at night contemplating the realities of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, in hopes that God would give her some direction.

Little could she have known that her soul-searching represented the start of something big, something that before long would garner attention from the United Nations, a super model and an internationally renowned entrepreneur.

A dancer full of grace

Colombino graduated from FIU in 2003 with a degree in dance. (She also holds a master’s in nonprofit management from UCF.) Her fondest memories of her undergraduate years revolve around teaching dance to incarcerated women as part of a program one of her professors, Leslie Neal, had founded at a Miami-Dade correctional facility.

“The program was revolutionary,” she says of the positive impact it had on the prisoners, who visibly softened as they embraced movement. “And it changed my life forever,” she continues. “Through that program, I got to say, ‘No matter why I was born and what gifts I was given, I can help somebody else.’”

And so after a year of working in prison—during which time she also held two other jobs to make ends meet—Colombino set out to offer a similar program of creative therapy to rape victims in South Africa.

“They didn’t trust me at first, and nobody liked me,” she says of those she wanted to help. “I was this foreign woman that came in, and there was a disconnect. Most of them did speak English, but they wouldn’t speak English to volunteers because they were just used to people coming in and out.”

With time, however, Colombino did get through to the women, and they began to talk with her freely, an evolution that the director of the home where Colombino taught found remarkable. “That was the first time since she’d been there, and she’d been there 10 years, that she saw people connect,” Colombino says. “And it wasn’t easy.”

A leap of faith

Back home in Orlando after her stint in Haiti, Colombino could not get the people of the ravaged country out of her mind. Their spirit of hope had moved her, and she continued to think long and hard about how to answer their collective plea for work.

“In Africa, I saw men making sandals out of tires in the streets,” she recalled. “In Haiti, I saw the tires being burned, and I saw people without shoes and people asking for jobs.”

With an idea emerging, she made a dramatic decision: She would quit her job at the local office of United Way, sell her house and move to Haiti.

So with $7,000 to her name, Colombino headed back to the tumult. Eight months after the earthquake, she and four Haitian women sat on the ground beneath a tarp, took razor blades to tires and began fashioning primitive flip flops.

“In the beginning, we never thought it was a business, really,” explains Colombino, who paid the women a wage. “We thought, ‘We’ll make shoes and we’ll give them to these guys out here,’” she says of the barefooted locals who trampled on rebar and other detritus during the ongoing cleanup. The recipients greatly appreciated the crude yet durable slip-ons.

And then, relief workers and missionaries wanted to buy them.

“People who were just trying to help, they didn’t really care what they looked like,” Colombino says of those who offered cash for the goods. “And we were like, ‘Holy cow. We can sell these.’” 

A shift to “beautiful”

Before long, the Clinton Foundation, which had an ongoing presence in Haiti, heard about the workshop and sent over someone to investigate. The representative—a stern French woman, Colombino recalls—made clear in no uncertain terms that she found the footwear both uncomfortable and unattractive.

“I’m not going to lie,” Colombino says, “I did cry.” But then she went down to the port and convinced a cobbler to teach her and the others to make better shoes. It was the first step in a critical shift in thinking—“People want to buy beautiful stuff”—that would lead to continuous improvement of the workshop’s products.

“They’ve gone through 75 revisions in the last six years,” Colombino says, “from being this very basic, heavy, ugly sandal to”—and then the kicker—“a design by Kenneth Cole. Our sandals are sitting in SoHo in New York City.”

Against the odds

That leap from rough handcraft to fashion statement sums up a story of tenacity, hard work and abiding faith, often under the harshest circumstances.

“It hasn’t been an easy journey, but we persevered,” Colombino says as she recounts the professional and personal challenges she has faced in Haiti. “We’ve had a horrible fire. We’ve had theft. We’ve had a flood where we lost all our leather. I’ve had malaria and dengue fever and worms. To be honest, I wanted to quit several times.”

But the positives outweighed the negatives. From the very start, individuals and organizations threw their support to the growing team of Haitian craftspeople. Early on, two Nike employees agreed to Skype in from headquarters in Portland, Oregon, to explain how to build arch supports. The fashion model Heide Lindgren, in town temporarily with a relief team, stopped to visit the ever-expanding workshop—today a compound of four adjoining shipping containers, complete with an on-site boutique that attracts tourists—and eventually returned to Haiti to design a shoe that, unexpectedly, jumpstarted U.S. sales. Fashion mogul Kenneth Cole himself came down for a tour and to “grill” the staff about its practices.

What Cole learned—that the workshop pays wages three times the Haitian average and sources 100 percent of its materials locally—encouraged him to contract for the production of brightly colored sandals for his “Love Haiti” line.

Step by step, changing the world

For Colombino, success is measured not only in the number of shoes sold—3,000 pairs in 2015—and the ability of workers to purchase their own homes and provide for their families, but in the staying power of what she has helped create.

“We watched thousands of charities come and go through Haiti,” says Colombino, who last year moved back to the states to concentrate full-time on marketing and global sales to keep the enterprise sustainable. “But our business is still there.”

Another meaningful barometer: In 2015 the United Nations made its second grant to Colombino’s nonprofit organization, Rebuild Globally, this time providing $46,000 to outfit a mobile workshop—a shipping container on wheels—that will soon provide paid employment for 34 refugee women living in a displacement camp on the Haiti-Dominican border.

Currently employing 22 Haitian workers, Colombino prides herself on having spun off the original workshop into a tax-paying business, Deux Mains, “two hands” in French, that she co-owns with three of the original employees. Ultimately, she says, she looks forward to divesting herself of the company and leaving it all to the workers even as she hopes to use the nonprofit as a vehicle to create new opportunities elsewhere in the world.

A champion of social entrepreneurship, which uses business techniques to find solutions to societal problems, Colombino remains convinced that investing in people through fair employment practices has the greatest potential to transform lives.

“We don’t want our Haitian kids to see a foreign person handing something to them,” she says. “We want them to experience their parent or their relative buying them something and caring for them because that’s how you end generational poverty.”

And while she lauds the intentions of groups that collect and ship sundries to Haiti in efforts to help, “There’s a better way to do it,” she says, “that’s more sustainable and empowers and brings dignity.”  ♦

Photo by Doug Garland ’10

FIU’s Diaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection comprises more than 150,000 items, among them books, sheet music and thousands of records.

The Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation has awarded FIU Libraries a grant to digitize some of the oldest and rarest recordings. The project will make available on the internet the best examples of popular music from various countries between 1900 and 1929. Among the highlighted musical styles: danzón, bolero, rumba and foxtrot.

Librarian Veronica Gonzalez, who specializes in working with the collection, says that digitizing will make the music accessible to those who wish to study, for example, song lyrics as a primary source of information.

“They can do research through music, not just research about music,” she explains. “Research about history, about social issues of the time, politics. Many disciplines can be researched through the recordings.”

The oldest, made in New York in August of 1900, features Cuban soprano Rosalia “Chalia” Herrera singing the Italian “Il Bacio.” The song can be heard in the accompanying video. Other recording in the collection can be heard at the links below.

“El tamalero”
78 rpm sound disc, 10 in. Victor 77844-A. dialogo-comico. Recorded in Havana, Cuba, 1921. Interpreted by Los Negritos de Palatino, Antonio Lima and Maria Piedra. Full File.

“Los impuestos”
78 rpm sound disc, 10 in. Victor 73876-A. dialogo-comico. Recorded in Havana, Cuba, 1922. Interpreted by Regino Lopez and Sra. Plaza. Composed by Regino Lopez. Full File.

“Dulce Habana”
78 rpm sound disc, 10 in. Columbia 2967-X-A. Fox-trot, recorded in Cuba in 1927. Composed by Rosendo Ruiz Suarez. Interpreted by F. de la Riera. Demo file.

“Guajirita”
78 rpm sound disc, 10 in. Victor 81944-A. Tango, recorded in New York in 1927. Composed by Santiago Sampel and Manuel Sanchez de Leon. Interpreted by Mariano Melendez. Full file.

The three sisters who each chose FIU’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine (HWCOM) for their medical degrees have always been close, with just a little bit of what their father calls “healthy sibling rivalry.”

So it comes as little surprise that Valerie, Monica and Jeanette Polcz (pictured above, left to right) followed one another around the state of Florida for their higher education, first regrouping as undergrads at the University of Florida and then all landing spots in FIU’s medical school.

“We’re not snowflakes,” joked eldest sister Jeanette, who’s in her final semester at FIU. “We’re not original.”

But for the HWCOM, which celebrates the tenth anniversary of its founding this year, educating three sisters consecutively is original, indeed. In fact, the Polcz sisters are the only siblings to date to attend the college.

Monica, 26, was the first to come to FIU, graduating with her medical degree in 2015. Her experience convinced Jeanette, 27, and Valerie, 24, to follow.

But it was their father, reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Tibor Polcz, who first sparked the ladies’ passion for medicine. The sisters grew up immersed in the medical field, watching him help families overcome fertility issues.

“I always thought after seeing me working hard and long hours for so many years, they would follow any one of their other interests, thinking the grass is greener somewhere else,” their father said, adding that the girls had always shown an interest in science and math, “but I was wrong.”

Some of Valerie’s first memories are of “Bring Your Child to Work Day” at Polcz Fertility Center in Boynton Beach, Fla., where she was inspired by a hallway lined with hundreds of patients’ photos with their new babies.

“He was a big role model,” said Valerie. “The way that he interacts with his patients, and us being able to see that, was really special, because he just has this great way of being professional but personal at the same time.”

When the girls were children, their mother Irma Muller also worked in the practice as an office manager. So the girls often spent their days off and weekends at the office, and as they grew older, they spent time in their father’s lab learning the science of reproductive endocrinology.

“Growing up, I always thought my dad was one of the smartest people,” said Monica, “and so I’m sure at some point I associated that with medicine.”

Their father has been impressed by the quality of his daughters’ training at FIU.

“The girls have had an overwhelmingly positive experience. The education is high level, no doubt,” he said. “It is not surprising that in a relatively short period of time, the school proved itself to be a world-class center.”

Watch FIU med students reveal their residency matches at the HWCOM’s 2016 Match Day ceremony.

Celebrating ten years of excellence

Since HWCOM’s inception, the college has grown in both size and reputation.

While its inaugural class graduated just 33 students in 2013, this past fall it welcomed to campus its largest: 123 students.

Along the way, the college has achieved important milestones, including the receipt of full accreditation by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education in 2013 and ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the country for Hispanic students by HispanicBusiness.com in 2014. Last year, the college made news by establishing a physician assistant master’s program to meet growing demand.

The college curriculum promotes cultural sensitivity and emphasizes real-world experience by embedding students directly in the community through focused outreach programs that target the needy.

“We truly have a social mission,” said Dr. John Rock, founding dean and senior vice president for Health Affairs, “and that is in the process of educating men and women, we improve the quality of life in the communities we serve.”

And the results of such training have been promising: FIU students perform above the national average on state licensure exams.

Preparing for a life of service

Monica graduated from FIU’s medical school in 2015. Since starting her surgical residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, she has found her happy place in the operating room.

“There, time has a tendency to stand still and nothing else matters,” she said. “I find myself in a state of awe and complete focus, where the only thing on my mind is the patient lying on the table.”

Jeanette found her focus in the military. Before entering medical school, she commissioned for the Army through the F. Edward Hébert Armed Forces Health Professions Scholarship Program, earning status as a second lieutenant.

She completed the Army Medical Department’s Basic Officer Leadership Course in San Antonio the summer after her first year in medical school. The program introduced her to surgery through externships and trained her to take on the role of active duty captain upon graduation from FIU in May of 2016. That’s when she will head off to her top choice for surgery residency, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

“I really can’t think of a better way to give back than by military service,” she said. “It’s nice that I’ll be able to combine my passion for surgery with that.”

Valerie is in her third semester at the college and asserts the most important thing she has learned so far is the value of collaborating with others. “It’s the only way you’re really going to succeed in medical school,” she said.

The constantly evolving nature of medicine makes it difficult for their father to predict his daughters’ futures in the field, but he believes firmly they will transcend any obstacle life throws their way.

“Changes present new challenges, but without them there is no progress,” he said. “I am confident that the girls won’t just quickly adapt, they will be in the forefront.”

Hover over the popups on the image below to read about the brain research being conducted at FIU.

These words have been scrawled on a Post-it note taped to the side of my computer monitor for years. I’m embarrassed to say I had no idea who Thurman was; I knew only that his words resonated deeply with me from the first moment I read them. They still do.

I was inspired to learn more about Thurman when I thought about the common thread running throughout the stories of this issue. Sea-level rise. Arctic exploration. Brain research. Siblings studying medicine. Mining big data. Creating business opportunities for women in Haiti. Disparate subjects to be sure, but all of these stories have something in common: men and women who are following their hearts. Dare I say it? People who have come alive. And their utter dedication to their life’s passions makes this world a better place – and leaves me in awe.

That’s when I decided I needed to learn more about Howard Thurman.

It turns out that this spring (April 10, to be exact) marked the 35th anniversary of Thurman’s death. A native Floridian, Thurman was an influential African-American author, theologian, educator and civil rights mentor who was born in 1899. He was friends with the father of Martin Luther King Jr. and counseled the civil rights giant as he was shaping his philosophy of nonviolence. In 1953, Thurman became the dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, the first black dean at a mostly white American university. He died in 1981.

I think that if Thurman were alive today he would approve of the work being done by the Panthers profiled in these pages. And I know that this is just a small sampling of the meaningful work being carried out every day by the students, faculty, staff and alumni of this great institution.

Are you doing what makes you come alive? If not, what are you waiting for?

Always Blue and Gold,

Karen Cochrane

There’s no doubt among scientists that the climate is changing and the seas are rising, and so the work being done at FIU these days has moved from proof of the problem to solutions. In South Florida, that means fixing three major environmental issues associated with rising seas.

Fighting the seas with fresh water

Back before the massive development of South Florida, fresh water flowed naturally from the north end of the peninsula, making its way through swamps and estuaries and all the way out to Florida Bay. Water that flowed down the peninsula kept seawater from entering the Everglades, creating a natural estuary of fresh and brackish water.

Dams and levees built in the last century changed that. These days, water gets trapped before heading south, destined to be used as drinking water, to feed farms or flushed through canals into the ocean. Now, salt water has begun to invade. If it continues, the seawater could split Florida into two peninsulas, with a bay in the center, swamping the Everglades. Aside from the devastating loss of a natural resource, salt water would drown aquifers that supply South Florida with drinking water.

Luckily, we already know how to fix this, says René M. Price, chairperson of FIU’s Department of Earth & Environment in the College of Arts, Sciences & Education. The answer is comprehensive Everglades restoration that begins with returning to the natural freshwater flow. That means breaking down levees and dams and buying up farms located in former wetlands. “If we work to protect the Everglades, it works to help protect our future,” Price said.

These are plans that began in the late 1990s and are backed by local and federal regulators. But Price said the trick these days has been convincing those in power in Tallahassee to continue with the plans, including expensive buyouts of sugarcane fields.

Among the work Price has done at FIU was producing a paper that predicted when scientists would know precisely how high the seas would rise due to climate change. Currently, computer models are predicting a wide range of futures, from the seas rising a few inches in the next century to several feet, which makes planning difficult. By 2025 or 2030, Price determined, computer models will have the data they need to make an accurate prediction on just how much the seas will rise.

“That gives us 30 years to come up with some possible solutions,” Price said. “And that’s what we’re working on now.”

Protecting wetlands so they can protect us

If you’ve ever been up close to a mangrove swamp, you’ve seen the tentacle-looking roots the plants send into the soil. They create a tangle in and out of the sand, and it works like a screen on a bathtub drain — letting water flow out but keeping soil in place.

And that’s why swamps can provide such protection, says Evelyn Gaiser, an aquatic ecologist and executive director of FIU’s School of Environment, Arts & Society. When a storm hits Florida, the mangroves and grasses and other plants not only keep soil from eroding but they also slow down storm waters that could threaten coastal communities.

Unfortunately, the salt water now threatening the Everglades is killing these mangroves and grasses. If that continues, soil could erode at a far faster rate. If the wetlands erode entirely, and we end up with a bay in the center of the state, a hurricane could cause an unfathomable disaster: a storm surge that could inundate western communities in South Florida and eastern development in Southwest Florida.

“Luckily we have a good solution to this, and that’s restoring the freshwater flow to the Everglades,” Gaiser said.

FIU scientists have taken the lead on championing for the restoration efforts using studies and papers that show the positive effects of the work done so far. They’ve also spoken to regulatory groups and before hearings to show how continued efforts will protect South Florida’s future.

Among the restoration efforts conceived with help from FIU scientists is a series of water retention areas in the Everglades. They will not only provide drinking water but will help divert the flow of water naturally, south toward Florida Bay.

“We need these big, expansive wetlands, and we need a lot more acreage than we currently have,” Gaiser said. “What we currently have does not equal the kind of protection we will need in the future.”

Read more about rising seas: A legacy not yet written

Keeping the floods at bay

To understand South Florida’s potential flooding problems, it’s best to imagine it as a sponge, floating just above the surface of a dish of water. For now, we’re just above the water line, and when a big storm hits, the water can safely seep through our porous soil.

But when the seas rise, things get tricky. Unlike other more rocky coastal areas like New Orleans, it’s not as simple as building levees and holding back the water, explains Ali Mostafavi, assistant professor at FIU’s OHL School of Construction in the College of Engineering & Computing. If climate change puts South Florida below sea level, the water will come up through our sandy soil.

There are solutions that FIU scientists are researching, Mostafavi said, but it’s not simple. “There is no one solution where you can say, if we do this we will fix it,” he said.

The main problem with creating a fix is that we still don’t know how high the seas will rise. With a few inches, there are costly changes we can make to stave off big problems; with a few feet, it’s likely nothing can be done to prevent South Florida from becoming a wetland, Mostafavi said.

With a few inches of sea level rise, seawater will threaten to seep into underground aquifers that provide our drinking water. One remedy: add a desalinization process to our water treatment plants. It’s a pricey solution and one that has to be completed before the seas ruin the freshwater supplies. Those underground aquifers can also be protected by injecting fresh water into them, filling them so that seawater has nowhere to go, Mostafavi said.

If the seas rise more than that, it’ll require a more complicated fix that could involve barriers to divert ground water, replacing locks along canals, and building pump stations throughout South Florida to replace the current system that works on gravity. It’s an exorbitantly costly solution that might not even keep the seawater back, so it’s one that likely won’t begin until we know for sure how high the seas will rise, Mostafavi said.

The key is that FIU’s researchers are concentrating on what can be done now. “Panicking over the worst-case scenario or being laid back about the best case is the worst thing that can happen,” Mostafavi said. “We have to concentrate on what can be done.”  ♦

Read about a class where students redesign a coastal park to face rising seas

Vice President for University Engagement Saif Ishoof works to build public and private partnerships that capitalize upon FIU’s capacity to address pressing local and statewide challenges. The former director of City Year Miami, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reversing high school dropout rates among low-income youth, Ishoof arrived at FIU in the summer of 2015 and serves as a fellow of the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs and the Honors College.

Why FIU and why this job?

I grew up in this community and have seen the evolution of South Florida over the last 40 years. A lot of that change involves South Florida as a gateway to the Americas, a beacon that has welcomed so many from around the world as well as around the country. I am excited about being at FIU, which I think is a symbol for the ongoing evolution of Miami.

What does Engagement with a capital “E” mean for FIU and for South Florida?

We want to connect our students, our faculty and our alumni with opportunities and challenges in the world around us. We want to be able to use our scholarship, our research and our resources to really dig into that. Examples include the work that we’re doing through our partnership with Miami-Dade County Public Schools and our work in leading and driving the largest life sciences collaborative in South Florida.

What other areas do you plan to tackle?

Just recently, we held our first Startup Weekend at FIU. We had 200+ innovators on campus for 52 hours, working at building their dreams, their entrepreneurial visions. We’re excited about our role in supporting research and economic development within the broader innovation ecosystem here in South Florida.

You have a passion for mentoring. What is your approach?

There’s nothing that gets me more excited than being able to be a resource to a young person who’s trying to figure out what’s next in their journey. I think a great mentor is somebody who helps you ask the important questions, holds you accountable, shines a light for you as well as opens doors.

What excites you about young people poised to take charge of the world?

The millennial generation, ages 18-35, is defined by an unparalleled ethos of service, and they are actively changing our world. And our freshmen, who are part of the post-millenial generation, have one value that I think is paramount above all others: empathy. They embrace diversity in its fullest sense, and they have the curiosity and creativity that will allow them to dig into really complex problems. The work of these generations will be indicative of the next 50 years of our university, as well as of our community and our world. As I like to tell everybody, the F, the I, the U stand for “the Future Is Us.”

Jolina Auguste remembers her darkest hours from a distance of more than six years. The January 2010 earthquake that decimated Haiti and killed as many as 300,000 of her fellow countrymen drove her family of four from a rental into a tent and destroyed the little boutique from which she eked out an existence selling cosmetics and soap.

Losing her livelihood caused particular concern for Auguste, who had placed great value on her self-reliance. “I will always have to ask for everything for the rest of my life,” she thought to herself at the time, as the country collectively turned to foreign relief agencies for food, water and other basics in the aftermath of the catastrophe. “It was a huge step backward.”

Auguste, a born leader, nonetheless did not give up hope, nor did she for a moment forget those around her: She organized a women’s group, and their first project was to create an orphanage for children left parentless by the quake. It was there, eight months after the disaster, that she first met a dynamic young American who arrived on the scene and offered financial assistance.

“I would rather you teach me something so that I can learn how to get a job,” Auguste told the woman plainly. “And then I can train others in my community to do the same.”

Julie Colombino, FIU class of 2003, agreed. Herself a volunteer in the days after the earthquake, she had come away from the experience keenly aware of the limited benefits of handouts. With the goal in mind of creating something sustainable, she had returned to Orlando to quit her job and sell her home before coming back to Haiti with $7,000 in cash and the determination to help in a meaningful way.

That good intention first manifested itself on August 14, 2010, when Colombino, Auguste and three other women sat on the ground beneath a tarp and, razor blades in hand, began fashioning crude flip flops out of old tires—something Colombino had seen while doing volunteer service in Africa. Not always pretty, the fruits of their labor were distributed for free to shoeless Haitians. Colombino paid the women a wage, and their little enterprise slowly took off.

Today employing 22 workers at compensation three times the Haitian national average and selling fashionable sandals internationally through the retailer Kenneth Cole, Deux Mains, or “two hands” in French, has come a long way—and so has Auguste.

Having been sent early on by Colombino to a business training program offered in Haiti, Auguste now has part stake in the company and serves as the workshop supervisor. She is the proud owner of a modest hillside home, an accomplishment made all the sweeter in that few Haitians can afford the expense of purchasing land and, in her case, the materials to build a new dwelling by hand, work that relatives pitched in to complete.

A respected member of the community who, along with her husband and their two daughters, has taken in additional youngsters, Auguste has the all-important financial stability to pay for the children’s schooling. (Haiti offers no free public education.) “To live in that kind of security makes me hopeful for an even more beautiful future,” she says.

And Auguste dreams of sharing that same experience with others, of her company one day providing 100 or more jobs that will give her neighbors the opportunity to know the transformative power of work to change both individual lives and the outlook for Haiti.

“Imagine if you spent your whole life without a job. What kind of a future could you imagine for yourself?” she asks from inside the country with the highest poverty rate in the world. Undefeated despite the unfathomable challenges around her, Auguste chooses only to look forward, to see the possibilities.

“I believe that God sends people into our paths for a reason,” she says. “I believe that God sent Julie into my path so that I could find work. The key to the success of this country is through job creation. My hope for my country is that more people would come here like Julie and do what she did.”  ♦

Read more about alumna Julie Colombino, the visionary behind Deux Mains.

As the program director of the Miami-Dade Urban Debate League, a branch of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, Saati hopes to use debate as a way to build reading, research, communication and critical-thinking skills among low-income middle and high school students with the ultimate goal of inspiring them to seek a college degree.

“By touching one student’s life, the Urban Debate League is helping to change the lives of whole families,” Saati said. “By extension, entire neighborhoods and communities are being transformed by the organization’s influence.”

A Miami native, Saati is proof of the positive effect debating has on students. She was a member of her high school debate team at Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart, which helped her foster a passion for debate and an educational foundation that helped her receive a full scholarship to the University of Texas after a recruiter saw her in action.

She then transferred to FIU, where she graduated cum laude with dual bachelor’s degrees in international business and philosophy. As an FIU Honors College student, Saati received additional advising and mentorship, something she believes was pivotal in her completing her degree and something she says helps her now in her current position.

“It was the glue that kept it all together, being part of a community greater than itself,” Saati said.

Until recently, Miami-Dade was the largest urban public school district in the nation not associated with the Urban Debate League. Starting this year, the Miami-Dade Urban Debate League is in 18 of Miami’s urban public middle and high schools.

In addition, the Miami-Dade league has entered into partnerships with local universities, including FIU. The partnership hopes to help students find mentors and scholarships that will help them get to college.

On April 30, FIU will be hosting its first debate — the FIU Panther Challenge — at Academic Health Center 3 (Room 110) with faculty, staff and community members serving as judges for more than 170 participants. The event will feature a keynote speech by Saif Ishoof, vice president for Engagement, a presentation by FIU’s Office of Financial Aid and Admission, and a special appearance by FIU mascot Roary.

Current investigative interviewing guidelines recommend interviewers review all available case information prior to questioning a witness. However, a recent study suggests prior case knowledge may actually be detrimental to the outcome of an investigative interview.

A team of researchers, including FIU legal psychologist Nadja Schreiber Compo, are the first to study blind interviewing through observation, a technique contrary to what is recommended by the National Institute of Justice. The findings were recently published in the journal  Memory , revealing blind interviewers — those with little to no knowledge about the crime — elicited more detailed and accurate information than those who had correct information about the crime prior to the interview.

 “This line of research is directly relevant for real-world witness and victim interviewers who thus far have oftentimes been told to review a case file before conducting a witness interview,” Schreiber Compo said. “Our findings suggest that an interviewer with no background information may at the very least not be at a disadvantage, possibly at an advantage, when interviewing a witness.”

Nearly 350 people participated in the study and were randomly assigned the role of either the witness of a crime, interviewer or blind interviewer. The “witnesses” viewed one of two videos that depicts a crime, each with varied details. The “interviewers” were given summaries of the crime, sometimes with correct information and sometimes incorrect. “Blind interviewers” were given no information prior to conducting their interviews. All interviewers were asked to write reports at the conclusion of the simulations.

Results showed correctly informed interviewers stopped short of collecting all possible details because they were influenced by the information contained in the pre-interview report. Blind interviewers were more likely to begin the interview with a non-suggestive question and recalled more details than the informed interviewers in their reports. Witnesses questioned by blind interviewers reported more information and more accurate details than those interviewed by informed interviewers.

Researchers concluded blind interviewing may be an appropriate and viable strategy for conducting investigative interviews if it leads witnesses to be more forthcoming and interviewers to work harder at gathering detailed accounts to aid the investigation. The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Barry University and funded in part by the American Psychology-Law Society Grants-In-Aid Award.

Schreiber Compo’s research focuses on investigative interviewing and eyewitness memory, especially in the context of vulnerable witnesses such as children or the intoxicated. She is interested in potentially detrimental and beneficial interviewing techniques and their underlying cognitive and social mechanisms to improve the quality and quantity of witness and victim recall. She has trained the MDPD homicide, special victims unit and robbery investigators on best practices for witness interviewing and identification procedures.

Journalism icon Tom Brokaw has called them the Greatest Generation that ever lived. Some were 18 or 20, others 22, at the time they changed the course of history.

On Feb. 12 at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, a group of World War II veterans received the French Legion of Honor – the highest distinction a French or foreign citizen can receive from France. The tribute honored six WWII veterans who received the medal that day and 11 others who had already been inducted; celebrated the alliance France and the United States have always enjoyed; and gave students the incredible opportunity to meet these men – heroes who were willing to give everything for freedom.

The Legion of Honor, “Légion d’Honneur,” created in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, recognizes exceptional service to France. In 2004, France decided to grant all surviving U.S. veterans who fought in France to liberate it from Nazi occupation the Legion of Honor.

“We will never forget what you did for us,” said French Consulate Philippe Létrilliart, who is from Normandy and pinned the medal onto their jackets during the induction.

The veterans who received the French Legion of Honor at the ceremony are: Patsy Capasso, Kenneth Elkins, George Greenberg, Frank Feeley, Julian Wohlfeld and John Gellick, whose son Michael Gellick accepted the medal on his behalf, since he passed away recently.

Florida is home to the largest WWII veteran population and more than 1,500 veterans have received the Legion of Honor during ceremonies throughout the state. The tribute at FIU included students from Honors College Professor John Bailly’s French Study Abroad course.

Every summer Bailly and his students journey across France, visiting historic World War II sites; they often meet with resistance fighters and Holocaust survivors while there.

Before the ceremony began, the students chatted one-on-one with the veterans.

“It’s a very eye-opening experience,” said Audriana Rodriguez, a student in Bailly’s class. “We realize, they [the veterans] paid the price for our freedom.”

Classmate Yina Cabrera shared a lively conversation with veteran Leonard Wolf. “He greeted us with a joke, and he mentioned two books [we should read] by Dale Carnegie.” Carnegie was a 20th century American writer and lecturer who developed famous courses in self-improvement.

Wolf also gave them personal advice: “Stop worrying, be confident and don’t lose faith.” He told them about an experience in which he miraculously left a battle unscathed.

Cabrera said spending time with a Holocaust survivor during the study abroad trip also impacted her life. “It really affects you as a person. It puts life into perspective and we realize how lucky we are.”

The veterans likewise count their blessings and live honoring the memory of those who were lost during the war that ended 71 years ago. Greenberg, who received the medal at the ceremony, said the honor made him think about when he visited the Normandy American Cemetery.

“All I thought about was the waste [of the fallen soldiers’ lives]. You can’t walk out of there without crying.”

“I appreciate it more now than ever,” Wohlfeld said. He recalls when he first got back home after the war and he got off the train station, no one said ‘thank you, soldier.’

For a while, it seemed their efforts had gone unnoticed.

“We are here to celebrate you gentlemen, what you did for France, Europe and democracy,” Létrilliart said. “The very meaning of this gathering today is to pass this memory.”

Feeley really enjoyed getting to meet students as well.

"I talked to the students and the students talked to me, they asked questions. I talked about the war and they told me some of their stuff, too, and what they’re doing – I’m glad I came.”

“At the base, it’s about the connection between veterans and students,” Bailly said. “What these men fought for, students have a connection to it. The freedom we have today, the lives we live are indebted to the Greatest Generation. These men made these sacrifices for human rights, for dignity, and we have the responsibility to take it, run with it and preserve it.”

The Tribute to America’s WWII Veterans was presented by the Consulate General of France in Miami in partnership with the Honors College and the Frost Art Museum.

What attracted you to the Frost Art Museum?

The idea of running an academic museum in the heart of a city with an art scene as thriving as Miami’s was too good to pass up. The city is in a period of enormous growth as a global arts hub, on par with New York and London. In large part it all begins with Art Basel. The confluence of artists, dealers, collectors, curators, museum directors and just those purely interested in the “scene” generates an energy unique to South Florida.

What is your approach to exhibitions?

The Frost has a two-pronged mission: to present a well-rounded slate of exhibitions that does justice to the wondrousness of art throughout history and to present arts education at all levels. That means making students and other visitors feel comfortable and happy in the museum environment. I embrace the challenge of converting non-museumgoers into museum lovers by giving them the tools they need to approach art.

How will you build up programs and attract new audiences?

We’ll experiment a bit but also gather some data on our visitors to find out more about their impressions and experiences. If something doesn’t work, I’ll sit down with my staff and figure out why. I also believe strongly in the power of good advertising. Promoting the museum’s offerings as widely as possible, and in creative and unexpected ways, will attract new audiences.

Do you have a favorite artist or type of art?

My favorite art is the kind that takes my breath away. The British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner does this to me, as does the South African artist William Kentridge, who uses masterful draftsmanship to describe political narratives and poetic musings. I am also keenly interested in architecture and design.

In your free time, what do you look forward to doing in Miami?

Drinking cortaditos, of course, and finding those jewel boxes of restaurants that only the locals know about. I’ve also vowed to learn basic Spanish—if the former mayor of New York can do it while running a city of eight million, por qué no yo?  ♦

By Lindsay S. Malloy

People are outraged by the interrogation of Brendan Dassey, the intellectually disabled 16-year-old whose case is featured in the Netflix documentary  Making a Murderer. I hate to break it to you — but his experience was not unique.

In the United States, police can generally interrogate juvenile suspects just like adults. And they do.

In our recent research, most incarcerated teens reported experiencing high pressure interrogations without lawyers or parents present. More than 80 percent described being threatened by police, including the possibility of being raped or killed in jail (e.g., They said I would be someone’s bitch in prison) or being tried as an adult. One teen revealed police told  

him he would never see his family again if he did not confess, while another claimed an officer threatened to shoot him in the face. More than 70 percent of teens reported that police had “befriended” them, indicating a desire to “help” them during the interrogation. Nearly 40 percent claimed police had refused to allow a break, phone call, or opportunity to speak with a lawyer. While it’s possible the juveniles made false claims to our research team, our findings are consistent with surveys asking police how they interrogate youth and studies of videotaped interrogations.

Why is this problematic? Because juveniles are not adults. They are more suggestible, more susceptible to social influence. They make immature judgments, and evaluate reward and risk differently, weighing immediate rewards (e.g., escaping the stressful interrogation) more heavily than the potential long- term negative consequences of their actions (e.g., incarceration). Their brains are anatomically different. The same characteristics that have made adolescents ineligible for the death penalty enhance their vulnerability in the interrogation room. Teens are no match for the psychologically manipulative interrogation techniques which are known to lead to false confessions. It’s an unfair fight with very real consequences. We know from exoneration cases and the scientific laboratory that  youth are especially vulnerable to providing false confessions. Our recent research revealed alarming rates with over a third of incarcerated juveniles reporting a prior false confession or a false guilty plea, primarily due to police pressure or the belief that they would be treated more leniently as a result. In Brendan’s interrogation, it’s easy to see why he would expect leniency for confessing with detectives telling him:

• “We’ll stand behind you no matter what you did…We’re in your corner…We’re on your side.”
• “By you talking with us it’s helping you because the honest person is the one that’s gonna get a better deal out of everything…Honesty is the only thing that will set you free.”

Teens like Brendan Dassey — with the double whammy of adolescent immaturity and intellectual disability — are especially vulnerable in police interrogations. Unfortunately, his case is not unique in this respect either. Justice system-involved youth are disproportionately likely to have intellectual impairments, which heighten the risk for false confession, perhaps due to the greater suggestibility and desire to appease authority figures typical of individuals with intellectual impairments. In the interrogation context, youth, especially those with intellectual disabilities, may falsely confess to please the police or because their memory or resolve fails them in the face of highly suggestive questions, implications of leniency, repeated accusations, attempts to play suspects off one another, lengthy interrogations, and deceit — all legally permissible, even with intellectually disabled teens. As Brendan tells his mother, “They got in my head.”

For juvenile suspects, their risk often doesn’t end there. Mental health issues are over-represented among juvenile offenders  and among false confessors. Furthermore, nearly 40 percent of teens in our study reported being intoxicated when interrogated by police, further diminishing their decision-making abilities.  In short, typically-developing teenagers lack the sophistication to cope with interrogation tactics, but the youth winding up in interrogation rooms are liable to be even more vulnerable.

We should change how we interrogate youth, especially youth like Brendan Dassey. Our interrogation procedures should reflect their developmental limitations and capacities. Law enforcement, attorneys, judges, and jurors should fully understand how development can play out in a high-stakes interrogation.

I understand the outrage for how Brendan Dassey was questioned. Let’s not forget his 1 million peers who are arrested every year in the United States.

Ali Mostafavi and Nipesh Pradhananga wanted to submit a proposal for a Rapid Response research grant to the National Science Foundation for a project related to the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal. The time-sensitive nature of the proposal – it was submitted within days of the disaster and fast-tracked for review – encouraged Mostafavi to reach out to Ganapati, who he knew had an established track record with NSF in the field of post-disaster recovery.

Connecting across disciplines
Mostafavi’s goal was to examine the impact of the massive quake on buildings, roadways and community access to electricity and water, and he understood that Ganapati’s involvement could help win funding as well as add value to the work at hand. And he was right. The team secured the grant to study infrastructure failures in Nepal, in part because NSF puts a premium on investigations conducted by teams with diverse research interests and academic backgrounds.

“The topics we’re addressing are interdisciplinary in nature,” Mostafavi says. “They have science aspects, engineering aspects, policy aspects and social aspects. If you really want to get to the essence of these problems and develop solutions that help decision making and policy making analysis, [a project] should consider all those aspects.”

Likewise, Ganapati welcomed the opportunity to collaborate because she recognized how her training and perspective as a social scientist could enhance the research.

“We see different things, we notice different things and we have different ways of doing research,” Ganapati says of how the approach taken by those in her field complements that of colleagues in the harder sciences. “I have worked on some quantitative studies,” she says, “but most of my research is qualitative. I like spending time in the field hearing the stories of the people.”

That experience – she conducted a dozen focus groups after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and, while completing doctoral studies at the University of Southern California, did similar fieldwork after the 1999 earthquake in her native Turkey – came in handy while in Kathmandu this past December. There she assisted in 14 interviews with representatives from international relief agencies, private companies and government, and she helped develop questions and activities for a focus group with community leaders.

Related: Digging up data, best practices from Nepal’s earthquake rubble

And although “the current project is not directly up my alley,” says Ganapati, whose expertise is in “shelter recovery,” or how housing is allocated after a disaster, she appreciates the opportunity to expand her horizons on another aspect of recovery. “I’m learning a lot from them,” she says of her engineering colleagues, “but they are also very open to the things I have to say. I really feel like we have a true partnership.”

Moving forward, the three professors together have plans to apply for another NSF grant related to Nepal – the current one lasts for only a year – and are now exploring potential topics.

A voice for the displaced
Even with the current Nepal grant having a focus outside of her primary research area, Ganapati has observed much in that country about the critically important issue of sheltering the displaced. While some positive efforts are being made – albeit too slowly to have settled everyone in appropriate housing prior to the onset of winter – she has seen the unfortunate enactment of policies that do not fully take into account the desires and needs of the people most affected. The latter misstep is not unprecedented in the world of disaster recovery, according to Ganapati.

The same occurred in Turkey after the 1999 quake when the central government built new homes far from the city center in which many survivors had previously lived and worked. Likewise in Haiti, survivors received little help with housing from the government and had to rely almost exclusively on the aid of relief organizations, which could do only so much. And in the United States, Ganapati’s NSF-funded research related to Hurricane Katrina in the South, flooding in the Midwest and drought in Texas confirmed that, more often than not, the combined forces of government, relief agencies and private groups ignore, usually unwittingly, the wishes of the very individuals they try to assist.

“It’s the same story you’re hearing over and over: They feel excluded,” says Ganapati, who through her publications hopes to encourage changes in how post-disaster housing plans and policies are drafted.

“What I see everywhere is that people want to have a voice.”  ♦

Eager tourists stand in the middle of New York City’s Madison Square Park, smartphones and cameras in hand, craning their necks skyward. It’s not an unusual sight for a city that attracts millions of visitors a year to gawk at the impossibly tall skyscrapers and the iconic skyline.

On the other side of their collective gaze, however, aren’t the tops of buildings but dancing, glowing reflections of the walkway beneath their feet and their own faces. More than 200 panels—perforated discs, polished to a golden, mirrored hue—hover 12 feet in the air on steel beams and cover nearly 500 feet of the park’s center walkway.

The structure suggests leaves in a canopy of trees, and the discs bend the sun’s rays to their will. The resulting glow is mesmerizing, and can transport anyone within sight of it—around Madison Square Park, or those looking down on it from the surrounding buildings—to another world. And in a near-feat of magic, the play of light can transform the massive metal sculpture into the invisible—and that’s largely the point, says the artist, 47-year-old Teresita Fernandez ’90.

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Click and drag the image up, down and side-to-side to view the full sculpture.

The sculpture’s name—Fata Morgana—comes from the mystifying, hovering mirage created by looking out at the horizon line of the ocean. “It looks like a floating landscape. It is an optical illusion that distorts the natural landscape,” Fernandez says. “I was interested in this idea of distortion on a grand scale and how I could make a sculpture that appears like a mirage in the middle of NYC.”

“Fata Morgana” is the largest sculpture in the park’s history and received one of the longest runs of any installation there. Its nine-month run concluded in January 2016.

As big as the scope of work is, the concept for “Fata Morgana” was birthed in Fernandez’s small Brooklyn studio. Many of her pieces seek to evoke natural landscapes like caves, glistening bodies of water and the night sky. Like the grandeur of the other tableaus she has sought to bring to life, this one required “a team of fabricators and engineers,” Fernandez says. Installing the structure took more than three months, and the entire process, from conception to installation, took more than three years.

“The first thing I do when I start a new work is ask the very simple question, ‘Where am I?’” Fernandez explains. “I take that question very seriously. So, in a way I start excavating and researching where I am historically, economically, socially, geographically, visually, emotionally, physically—where exactly is this site located? Not just physically, but in people’s imaginations and in history and in the entire context of place.”

Certainly grand visions are nothing new for Fernandez, who recalls watching mystifying sunsets and skies while growing up in Miami. She witnessed “a spectacular colorful sky event every evening,” and she credits Miami as the birthplace of her “thoughts about specificity of place, of flatness, of
explosive color.”

Raised by Cuban immigrants, she spent her high school years drawing and went on to study art at FIU, where she eventually took a sculpture class. She loved the physical and visceral nature of sculpting; how she could mold the industrial to her will.

With an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University under her belt—there she became known on campus for the scale of her sculptures, which sometimes took up entire studios—she moved back to Miami, quickly making a name for herself in the burgeoning art community. Before long, she was invited to group shows and museums around South Florida and in the mid-‘90s presented her first solo show in New York City.

After an artistic residency brought her to Japan, her works began to further increase in size, scope—and exposure. Soon she was living and working out of New York City. Before long, Louis Vuitton was commissioning her to create site-specific large-scale installations for its Shanghai and Paris locations, and museums and private galleries began exhibiting her work, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in D.C., the Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Spain.

Along the way, she racked up a series of accolades, including a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant, and was appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts where she reviewed and offered opinions on public sculptures.

“Teresita is really an artist who is on the cusp of greatness,” Brooke Kamin Rapaport, senior curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy, told the Wall Street Journal, “and I think that Fata Morgana is going to propel her to the highest rank of artists working today.”

Currently engaged in another commission and presenting a solo show at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York, Fernandez takes an approach to her work that, ultimately, has led to her connecting with audiences around the globe.

“For me, art functions as this kind of way-finding,” she says. “As human beings, we have always been trying to find our way, to place ourselves within the world.”

In Fernandez’s case, that place is front and center, at the crossroads of critical success and the appreciation of everyday viewers.

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Click and drag the image up, down and side-to-side to view the full sculpture.

Watching live TV coverage of earthquake destruction in Nepal in April 2015 prompted Ali Mostafavi to make three important phone calls.

The first two he placed to his fellow-professor in the OHL School of Construction. Initially, he wanted only to inquire about the man’s family. Nipesh Pradhananga hails from the South Asian country and his immediate relatives were safe, but in the days ahead several others would be counted among the heartbreaking 8,500 who perished in the disaster and its wake.

“I said, ‘If you need anything, let me know,’” Mostafavi recalls telling his friend before hanging up, “and then I continued watching the news, and I started seeing different images of infrastructure failures.” Waterline breaks, landslides spilling onto roadways—those are the kinds of things the engineer in him noticed.

So, despite the late hour, Mostafavi called him again. “I said, ‘Nipesh, I think we can do something about it. Would you be interested?’ He said, ‘Yeah, of course, let’s do it.’”

That affirmative answer would lead to the third important phone conversation. “The next day I called NSF, talked to them and they seemed to be interested,” Mostafavi says of the National Science Foundation’s response to an idea he had begun formulating just hours before. A program director there expressed interest in providing funding through a special grant that targets time-critical projects and reduces the normal months-long approval process. Soon the two construction management professors would be making their first research trips to Kathmandu Valley.

A third professor, N. Emel Ganapati, in the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs, would also join the team. (See related story.)

Understanding how it all connects
In his busy lab at FIU, Mostafavi has several active projects related to his expertise in how to design and manage interdependent infrastructure systems such as power and water utilities. His work takes a holistic approach to this interconnected “system of systems” with the goal of enhancing resiliency, defined as the capacity to recover from failures.

Nepal makes a good case study, he explains, because it allows him and other researchers to add to the scarce data that exists on infrastructure breakdowns in developing countries and how systems perform in the face of disaster. Understanding how things in Nepal went wrong—and, in some cases, right—could potentially inform stakeholders in both the developing and developed worlds.

Certainly countries such as the United States are not immune to natural disasters nor their often-calamitous aftermath. Mostafavi offers the example of Hurricane Sandy, which pounded the eastern seaboard in 2012, as one in which residents felt the full brunt of “cascading failures.” He points out how storm surge in New York knocked out a power substation, which in turn shut down the pumping station at a waste water treatment plant, which in turn saw dirty water back up into the freshwater supply, which ultimately left citizens in a lurch. Lacking utilities, one affected hospital spent 15 harrowing hours evacuating some 300 patients.

The value of learning to adapt
On their first visit to Kathmandu Valley, the professors met with local officials, heads of utilities, representatives of international relief agencies and residents. The two surveyed the physical damage and spoke with as many people as possible. Their goal: to find out how the failure of “lifeline” systems affected the community’s response process.

Very quickly the pair made two important observations. The first concerned the physical aspects of infrastructure. As Mostafavi explains it, construction based on solid urban development and sound engineering principles fared best, with damage at a minimum. But, as might be expected, structures built of unreinforced masonry—those not embedded with steel and therefore susceptible to collapse under catastrophic conditions—did not withstand the quake. An estimated more than 60 percent of buildings in Nepal consist of the latter, and the 2015 cataclysm delivered a painful lesson.

More eye-opening, and certainly less-expected, was the second observation: The professors found that the community in general displayed a high degree of resiliency. Trained to look for signs and attitudes that point to an ability to rebound—interviews and surveys with both officials and residents are used to glean this important data—Mostafavi came to understand why. Strange as it might seem, people’s ability to successfully bounce back after the earthquake was a direct result of the previously existing shortfall in municipal services.

“The system, even before the earthquake, had a huge supply-demand gap,” Mostafavi explains. Residents could never count on uninterrupted access to electricity or water, and in some cases could not expect utility services for more than 10 to 15 hours per week. Yet the workarounds that individuals and even whole communities had in place to overcome the lack of reliable centralized services ultimately helped them get through the aftermath of the cataclysm.

“The social system adapted,” Mostafavi explains of the accommodations people had made for years. For example, homeowners had installed rooftop water collection and storage tanks and connected their dwellings to generators to run lights and essential appliances. Institutions likewise had their plans in place. An area hospital, for example, had long held contracts with local companies to truck in water as regularly needed, something that automatically continued after the earthquake.

Lessons from Nepal
Mostafavi believes that developed countries should take note of Nepal’s success in that regard. “This verifies the hypothesis that if we move to a more distributed [less centralized] system in designing lifeline infrastructure systems, we improve resiliency in the face of disasters,” he says. “The impacts are reduced.”

On the first anniversary of the earthquake, the three professors will present their findings and conclusions to researchers and officials from around the world at a conference in Nepal. The research team will also organize a workshop at a local university to share practical information with those who live and work in the area.

Back in Miami, in his research lab, Mostafavi continues to work with the data gathered in Nepal and elsewhere to create models based on a variety of worst-case scenarios. His goal: to provide tools that encourage decision makers—whether anticipating earthquakes, hurricanes, drought, flooding caused by sea level rise or any other natural disaster—to undertake needed investments and preparations for the best possible outcomes.

“Because,” he says, “no matter how well we plan, how well we’ve modeled, these events include an unknown component, things that we don’t know we don’t know. They happen and they surprise us in one way or the other.”  ♦

The Panthers Getaway Program offers the ultimate travel experience for proud panthers: convenient, stress-free travel packages, life-long learning experiences beyond the walls of FIU and a vibrant community of travel buddies who spread their Panther Pride around the globe.

Bill Draughon, who heads the Panther Getaway program, says it also plays a crucial role in helping current students. The travel companies with which FIU works make contributions to the FIU First Generation Scholarship Fund, which is matched by the state. “So when alumni book our tours, they are assisting students obtain a college degree,” Draughon says. “We think this is a win-win scenario.”

Tina Vidal ’02 MIB ’04 visited Turkey, Greece, Malta and Italy while on the Mediterranean Cruise in July 2015. “It was great to travel with people from my alma mater and get to know other people that graduated from the university,” she said.

A visit to the Koç Museum in Istanbul was a highlight of the trip. “We got to see some of the most amazing things from history and even toured a U.S. submarine that was used during World War II,” Vidal recalled. And for the film buff in her, Malta had its own charms. A huge fan of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” Vidal was delighted to see firsthand the locations where several of the scenes from the movie were shot.

During their Provence Immersion trip in France, FIU grads David MBA ’79 and Joan Kittridge ’78 attended lectures, tours and day trips. They even enjoyed French conversation classes, something that Joan Kittridge continued once she returned home to Orlando. “I hadn’t [studied] French in 40 years,” she says, “so that got me into it.”

The Kittridges also went on a Best of Tuscany tour, where they too got a taste of the movies. Actor Dustin Hoffman was working in Montepulciano while they visited, and “the whole village was sitting on the Piazza watching the filming,” Joan Kittridge says.

Added David Kittridge, “We had some really tremendous experiences. A lot of times we go on tours, we’re glad we went there, and we don’t need to go back. But we could go back to Florence.”

The Kittridges don’t often have a chance to visit FIU and so appreciated being able to learn about activities at the university through the alumni, faculty and staff who participate on trips.

Vidal agreed that catching up with FIU in that way makes the trips very special. “The more we do that surrounds FIU, the more we, as alums, are connected to the university.”

On a local scale, FIU biology student Sean Charles is examining how mangroves in the Florida Everglades are impacting the ecosystem around them as they gradually move inland from saltwater to freshwater communities. For now, this tactic is helping the plants keep up with salt water intrusion caused by sea level rise.

Wetland ecosystems like the Florida Everglades provide a number of services that benefit people, including flood control, water purification, and carbon accumulation that removes harmful carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Charles’ study specifically looks at how vegetation shifts and sea level rise, combined with ongoing restoration efforts, will impact ecosystem functions, soil elevation and the Everglades’ ability to store carbon. His research project is funded by the Everglades Foundation FIU ForEverglades Scholarship.

“The world’s largest wetland restoration effort is taking place right now in the Everglades,” said Charles, a Ph.D. student in John Kominoski’s Ecosystem Ecology Laboratory. “It’s a very interesting, yet scary, time for this amazing ecosystem, and we have the potential to make a difference. This study will improve our understanding of the risks and opportunities likely to confront the Everglades of the future, as well as coastal wetlands throughout the world.”

In addition to improving what is known about interactions among mangroves and their environment, Charles wants to inform Everglades conservation and restoration. He is also engaging K-12 students in Collier and Miami-Dade counties in a coastal plant restoration project. Known as “Marsh-Mangress,” the public school students will grow mangrove seedlings on school grounds until they are established and ready to be planted at local restoration sites.

“By learning through participating in active restoration projects, students will be engaged in the importance of environmental conservation and will, hopefully, better understand their role in it,” Charles said.

By Eric Barton

It’s happy hour, and there’s a man, a man with a drinking problem, headed to his favorite bar. He turns into the parking lot, and his phone comes to life. It’s an image of a woman, her voice calm and reassuring.

“I noticed you’re headed to the bar,” the woman says, using the GPS in his phone to track him. The man explains that he’s had a bad day and just needs a drink or two.

“How about instead I call a friend for you?” the woman asks, knowing that the man’s friends have talked him out of destructive behavior before. The man agrees, and the woman on his cellphone dials up someone who can talk him out of a bad decision.

This may all seem like something from a far-in-the-future science fiction movie. But a researcher at FIU is close to making it a reality.

Professor Christine Lisetti has developed a medical avatar, an interactive computer program that can help people better understand a host of medical issues and avoid destructive behavior. Next year, the program will be tested in a clinical setting, and Lisetti believes it will stand in when doctors and nurses aren’t available.

Lisetti’s program is far more than a dry computer program. Her team has created an animated character capable of advanced human responses to questions.

“We want to create a social companion you can relate to long-term,” said Lisetti, director of FIU’s Affective Social Computing Laboratory in the School of Computing and Information Sciences. “We want it, or her, to know you long-term and understand your health patterns.”

Lisetti began her work as a graduate student in the 1990s. She helped found what was then a new field of study called affective computing, or programming computers to understand the nuances of human emotion. The field works to develop a simulated emotional intelligence that can interact with a person in a realistic way. In the early 2000s, Lisetti helped develop a road safety program that could detect when a driver falls asleep, technology that’s now being used by car manufacturers.

After joining FIU in 2007, Lisetti began developing a virtual health assistant. It started with a simple question-and-answer program, which could make determinations about a person’s problems with substance abuse.

The next step was designing an avatar, a computerized figure that could be emotionally expressive and have a conversation with the user. Lisetti’s team calls her Lola, and since then, they’ve been tinkering with ways to give her realistic reactions and emotions.

Recent additions have endowed Lola with non-verbal behaviors, something Lisetti’s team has determined are key to making her seem more human. To accomplish this, they recorded video of addiction counselors interacting with clients.

After studying five hours of tapes, the researchers noticed how often the counselors would look down or simply turn their attention to something else in the room, as is common in normal conversation. “It may seem obvious, but when we had her stop staring directly at the user, it dramatically improved the program,” Lisetti said.

Lola can also now understand some of the nuances of human behavior. For instance, she can smile during a light moment of a discussion. Lisetti’s lab has run internal tests on the program, but Lisetti knew that before Lola could be used by medical professionals, the avatar would need to be tested in a
clinical setting.

Just how that would work wasn’t clear until Lisetti had a chance encounter at FIU’s Faculty Club. She shared a table one day with Mark Williams, then-interim dean of the Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work. Fascinated with Lisetti’s research, Williams offered to help put together a clinical trial.

Williams and Lisetti submitted their idea to the National Science Foundation and received a $497,000 grant to conduct the trial, which is expected to begin next year. Similar programs using a text-message-based interface have proven helpful in the past. A text-message system meant to reduce alcohol consumption among problem drinkers worked for half of users after a year, a high success rate for substance abuse counseling. Lisetti thinks the number could be even higher with a computer-based avatar.

Williams thinks the avatar will be beneficial especially for those who don’t have access to in-home medical care.

“For people whose insurance doesn’t cover in-home care, or simply just don’t have access to it, the avatars can serve many purposes,” he said. For instance, the avatar can help remind patients about when and how much medication to take. The avatar can also store other information given to the user by a doctor, so the patient can ask follow-up questions of the avatar once back at home.

Lisetti imagines the avatar becoming a companion that users interact with for years. The benefit is that a computer program never forgets, so the avatar will have the user’s full medical history any time a new issue comes up. If the user, for instance, is diagnosed with cancer, the avatar would know that a previous immune disease might become a problem in chemotherapy.

Lisetti, who says it might be a few more years before the avatar is ready to go live, gets help from five undergraduates who work in her lab, along with a research assistant and one or two Ph.D. students. Affective computing is a profitable field now, and three of Lisetti’s former lab workers this year took jobs at software companies working on avatars.

“We are just beginning to understand all the benefits of this,” Lisetti said. “We are creating a program that can fill many needs.”

We’ve met here so that Marchioni, who earned her Ph.D. in comparative sociology from FIU in 2009, can tell me about her work with Native Alaskan communities in remote villages. But first, she wants to check out the bear.

Luckily (for me, anyway), the bear had already disappeared into the woods. So, in another minute, I’m able to steer Marchioni to a nearby picnic table, and we spend the next hour or so sitting alongside the rushing river and chatting about the path that led her from Miami to Alaska.

The journey has included tagging sharks in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez—part of her undergraduate research—guiding sea kayak expeditions in the Gulf of Alaska and working as a deckhand on crab boats in Chesapeake Bay and on commercial fishing boats in the North Pacific. And the reason she was so interested in that bear? During one of her first seasonal stints in Alaska, she apprenticed with a brown bear hunter.

“I have rarely come upon a student at the Ph.D. level who is so engaged in extreme outdoor experiences,” says FIU professor Dennis Wiedman, who served on Marchioni’s dissertation committee. “She’s an extreme outdoors person who then incorporates it into her scholarship.”

Marchioni first visited Alaska after completing her first year at FIU in 2004. A few years later, she got a job as a deckhand on a sport fishing boat based out of Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula and started doing the initial fieldwork for her doctorate. That eventually led to a successfully defended dissertation on “Attitudes Toward The Marine Environment and Implications for Marine Resource Management in Seward, Alaska.”

Marchioni’s real passion is ethnography, which, she explains, is a way of conducting research that employs participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with people in their own environment. “A lot of it is just learning through doing and really immersing yourself to get the most accurate perspective of the culture you’re working with.”

Marchioni’s dissertation fieldwork gave her the experience for the job she would land two years after receiving her doctorate: cultural anthropologist in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Subsistence. Marchioni explains that, in this case, the word “subsistence” does not mean simply making ends meet. Instead, subsistence is “a real unique right that people in the state have, and people really value it,” she says of the long-ingrained interest in living off the land. “I’ve never met a single Alaskan who doesn’t harvest something for use in their home.”

Her primary job has been to fly into far-flung Native Alaskan communities to conduct harvest surveys and ethnographic studies that document local subsistence practices such as hunting and fishing. State policymakers use the data to develop management practices for natural resources that run the gamut from wild plants and bird eggs to salmon, whale, moose and bear.

After four years working with the state, this past summer Marchioni launched her own consulting business. She now works directly with communities to document native people’s subsistence practices.

One community she’s been working with is a Tlingit Indian tribe in southeast Alaska’s Chilkat Valley. Their village in Klukwan is “one of the most beautiful places on earth,” says Marchioni. “The natural resources are abundant. The culture has been there a long time.  You can see why the Tlingit people went there to begin with.”

One of Marchioni’s key research findings about Tlingit subsistence practices is how not only the harvesting but, more importantly, the sharing of the wild plant and animal harvests underscores the significance of this unique right. Sharing, she says, “really is the crux of subsistence, because that is what is feeding people. But it’s also what is keeping people interlocked and networked. And it’s not just sharing with your family and your friends, it’s sharing with your neighbors, it’s sharing with an elder in the community. It’s what connects so much of Alaska together.”

Then she reaches her arm out in a gesture that encompasses the woods around our picnic table, the shining silver river and the fly fishermen on the riverbank. “This is subsistence,” she says. “Everything, the sport fishing, the commercial fishing. Anytime somebody goes out to get fish to bring home for their freezer, it’s subsistence.”

And I can tell with that one gesture that Meredith Marchioni is not simply a participant observer of what some might consider Alaska’s exotic folkways – this is her life. Sometimes when she’s heading back to Klukwan to conduct more research, as the small plane crosses over the mountains into the Chilkat Valley, she says, “I feel like I’m flying home.”  ♦