URI QuadAngles Spring 2018

QUADANGLES SPRING 2018

The quest to farm yellowfin tuna | 12

Time's up for fieldwork's macho culture, 18 • A psychologist's addiction insights, 22 • The wondrous life of Laurie Rockwell Sharma, 28

QUADANGLES SPRING 2018 | VOLUME 25, NO. 3 FEATURES

12 Big Fish As worldwide demand for sushi-grade tuna grows, a URI professor and an entrepreneur have teamed up to sustainably produce yellowfin. In a huge tank on URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus, they are now successfully breeding them in captivity.

18 The Changing Face of Fieldwork Women are still underrepresented in the extreme research that takes place aboard deep sea vessels, in polar stations, and on remote mountains—but as their numbers increase, a once macho culture is evolving.

22 Change Maker Jim Prochaska has helped people around the world battle self-destructive behaviors. It was a natural calling for the son of an alcoholic.

26 A Challenge, Answered Paul DePace ’68, M.B.A. ‘75, was in his junior year at URI when a car accident cost him the use of his legs. He’s gone on to be an athlete, a coach, and an international activist for sports for people with disabilities.

28 A Passage to India The search for her birth mother led Laurie Rockwell Sharma ’92 to a darker place than she could ever have imagined. What follows is a tale of courage, transformation, and belief in the power of education.

MORE ONLINE

uri.edu/quadangles

See the whole print issue and more.

DEPARTMENTS 2 FEEDBACK 4 PRESIDENT'SVIEW 5 ALUMNIWRITE 6 NEWS&VIEWS 11 PRESSBOX 34 CLASSACTS News from your classmates 37 CLOSEUP Patrick Brown ’14 39 CLOSEUP Amanda McGrew ’09 44 BACKPAGE Photo caption contest On the cover: yellowfin tuna. Left: spring lambs at Peckham Farm, April 2017.

COVER: ISSF PHOTO BY JEFF MUIR. THIS PAGE: SHELBEY GALLIHER

FEEDBACK Write to us: pjack@uri.edu Read more online: uri.edu/quadangles

Here’s to Living Well Well, it took me an exhausting two weeks to reorganize my life after reading the incredible guide to better living/survival. Cost effective pizza, adding a second to my attention span, avoiding all disagreements with my wife, give my second brain a rest, have more fun burgers—those will be my 2018 resolutions, maybe more next year. Happy new year. Great issue, as always.

Ed Quinlan ’71 East Greenwich, R.I. Always glad to receive the latest QuadAngles, I still have my letter opener from the class of 1965 with the phrase “Keep in Touch.” The article starting on page 12, “Life, Better,” was very eye opening, especially the segment on the jailhouse.

I recently met a gentleman who spent 10 years in prison and what he told me about his time there rings true with this article.

What really stands out was his story on people saying they wanted to be your friend—he said he never made any friends

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in prison, it was the smart way to survive in a hostile environment. Another article I could relate to was on page 10—getting rid of old boats, especially fiberglass. Up here in Maine we have many abandoned boats so a solution to their disposal would be great.

Alden “Denny” Wilson ’65 Boothbay, Maine What a superb issue in every way. I especially loved “Life, Better.” So many helpful tidbits.

Susan Bach ’70 Port Angeles, Wash.

The article “Life, Better” was informative and also humorous. I’m writing from India, where I returned to my hometown in South India after getting my master’s in industrial management at URI. Once home, I joined the South India Textile Research Association and worked there for nearly 40 years, serving as head from 1994 until my retirement in 2002. I still have fond memories of my days at URI. Indra Doraiswamy, M.S. ’62 Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

ILLUSTRATIONS: AARON MESHON; PHOTOS: ISTOCKPHOTOS.COM

The Winter 2017 issue had me captured for every page. The “News & Views” and the “Life, better” sections, well, I could not put them down…I just had to read everything.

As my wife and I laid in bed at 6 a.m. on a cold and snowy morning, we reminisced about our URI graduate days (we were both doing masters’ in operations research).

We lived in a rented house in Point Judith.

I had just finished three years in the U.S. Army, was attending URI on the G.I. Bill and had a URI research assistantship at Rhode Island Hospital. My wife, a nurse, worked weekends at South County Hospital. We had a seven-month-old son when I started at URI in September of 1969, and our second son was born a year later at South County. We picked scattered potatoes from fields farmers had already worked, we dug quahogs, visited fishing piers and asked fishermen for the fish they were about to throw back. My wife could cook potatoes and fish in a multitude of

ways…Yes, we lived off the land. We were very rich in so many ways.

Now, we just celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary, and took our whole family on a week’s cruise. Times change, but our URI days are very special to us— and QuadAngles continues to keep our URI memories alive.

Steve L. Priest, M.S. ’65, M.S. ’72 Sunapee, N.H. Apologies to English, But...

Regarding Ann Hood’s essay in the Fall 2017 issue of QuadAngles: Very interesting article, but if you read between the lines, there’s something significant unsaid.

That is, the need to write the essay in the first place. I mean, would a graduate with a degree in, say, accounting, nursing or engineering (just as examples) have to write a piece justifying the usefulness of their education? I don’t think so.

David Jacobs ’67 Niantic, Conn.

The Challenge I found your winter issue quite readable and what we would call content heavy—that being a serious plus. You combined reader interests with URI core material, and that causes the reader to have an interest in reading it—instead of tossing it aside.

My hope is that you can top it.

Vic Farmer ’64 Naples, Florida

QuadAngles is published by the University of Rhode Island Alumni Association. Copyright pending, all rights reserved. The URI Alumni Association informs and engages current and future alumni as committed partners of the University, its mission and traditions.

Executive Editor Michele A. Nota ’87, M.S. ’06, Executive Director, URI Alumni Relations; Secretary, Alumni Association Executive Board Editor in Chief Pippa Jack, pjack@uri.edu Art Director

Kim Robertson

Contributing Barbara Caron Editors Dina M. Dionizio ’91 Shane Donaldson ’99 Dave Lavallee ’79, M.P.A. ’87 Kate O’Malley Marybeth Reilly-McGreen Contributing Johnson Ma Designers Cynthia McMillen Bo Pickard Photographer

Nora Lewis

Digital Media

Kyla Duffy

Editorial Board

Kelly Mahoney ’03, Executive Director, External Relations and Communications Linda A. Acciardo ’77, Director, Communications and Marketing Tracey A. Manni, Director, Communications, URI Foundation

URI Alumni Christina Haas ’05, Assistant Director Relations Staff Karen LaPointe ’77, M.B.A. ’84, Associate Director Kasey Geremia, Senior Specialist Samantha Griffin, Specialist Mary Ann Mazzone, Office Assistant Esther Reynoso ’15, Executive Assistant Caitie Runyon '16, Graduate Assistant Amy Simonini, Assistant Director Samantha Stevens, M.S. '15, Senior Specialist McKayla Stubbs ’16, Specialist Alumni Assoc. Daniel G. Lowney ’75, President Executive Board Susan R. Johnson ’82, Immediate Past President Colleen M. Gouveia Moulton M.B.A. ’98 Vice President Kathleen P. O’Donnell-White ’90, Vice President Steven R. Frazier ’07, Treasurer Alumni Assoc. Laurel L. Bowerman ’77, M.B.A. ’84 Councilors- Matthew T. Finan ’11 at-Large Jordan D. Kanter ’99, M.S. ’00 Mackenzie K. Hofman ’12 Sulina M. Mohanty ’07 John J. Palumbo, Sr. ’76 Joseph F. Penza, Jr. ’69 Perry A. Raso ’02, M.S. ’06 Karen E. Regine ’81 Thomas F. Shevlin ’68 Alumni Assoc. College Representatives: Arts & Sciences, Nancy J.S. Ferrara ’88, M.B.A. ’97 Business, Marianne Gattinella ’79 Alan Shawn Feinstein College of Education & Professional Studies, Kaitlin E. Donahue ’07 Engineering, Anthony J. Rafanelli ’78, M.S. ’85, Ph.D. ’95 Environment and Life Sciences, James D. Marques ’79, M.P.A. ’88 Health Sciences, Marcia A. Costello ’77 Nursing, Silifat “Laitan” Mustapha ’97 Graduate School of Oceanography, Veronica M. Berounsky Ph.D. ’90 Pharmacy, Ewa M. Dzwierzynski ’96 URI Foundation, Thomas M. Ryan '75 Student Senate, Ryan Buck ’18 Student Alumni Association, Timothy J. O’Connor ’18

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 3

PRESIDENT’SVIEW Our current campus community is only one part of a much larger tapestry that weaves together generations of alumni and a legacy of teaching, research, and scholarship.

D

Laurie and her husband, Varun “Timmy” Sharma with students from the school they founded, Salvation Tree.

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QUADANGLES WINTER SPRING 2018 2017

irector of the University of Rhode Island Cancer Prevention Research Center and Professor of Psychology Jim Prochaska has honed a perfect strategy for getting students to pay attention in his class.

“I tell them, ‘This class is about life and death, about how we die from the way we live,” he shares.

“And boom, the phones get turned off.” The story of Jim’s fascinating personal and professional journey—and the profound influence his revolutionary work has had on helping people to change their selfdestructive behaviors— is just one reason I invite you to turn off your phones and settle in with this issue of QuadAngles.

Would it surprise you to know that we had so many wonderful stories to tell about URI alumni and faculty stars that we added four pages to the magazine to fit it all in?

After nearly a decade as president, I’m not at all surprised. Our current campus community is only one part of a much larger tapestry that weaves together generations of alumni and a legacy of teaching, research, and scholarship; its colorful threads represent stories both close to home and on the global stage. They are stories that will fill countless issues of QuadAngles to come.

Laurie Sharma ’92, who grew up in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, knows something about that global stage. Her wildly successful equestrian clothing and gear company, JPC Equestrian, employs thousands of workers in its Indian factories. To change the future prospects of the children of these workers, Laurie and her husband, Varun “Timmy” Sharma, founded Salvation Tree, a school that has grown from 40 to 400 students; its new building will have the capacity for 2,000. Overcoming some truly heartbreaking circumstances in her own childhood and coming of age, Laurie saw a way to turn despair into hope.

Despair might have overtaken Paul DePace ’68, M.B.A. ’75, our director of Capital Projects, when a car accident paralyzed him during his junior year at URI. Instead, he began competing as a wheelchair athlete. We salute Paul in these pages for his recent induction into the Paralympic Order at the Paralympic Awards Gala in Abu Dhabi, and for a lifetime spent helping others.

I like to think that Paul’s remarkable resiliency was at least in part instilled at URI, where, beyond rigorous study of their academic subjects, our students learn invaluable life skills. Just check out the Close Up of Patrick Brown ’14, founder and CEO of niche business Rentsons, with the clever tagline, “Rent young adults to do the work you wish your kids would do.” This young man launched Rentsons out of expediency during his senior year, when he was faced with the reality of needing to earn his URI tuition after his family suffered a financial setback. An entrepreneur and author, Brown is committed to giving back to his community—and inspiring his employees to give back to theirs.

By now I hope your interest is piqued and you are ready to dive into the magazine. So, just one more preview. Like sushi? Then you’ll love the story of the so-called odd-couple of tuna farming, Professor Terry Bradley, M.S. ’79 and serial entrepreneur Peter Mottur ’91, who have partnered to build the only research facility in North America attempting to breed yellowfin tuna in captivity.

I’ll save my commentary on the rest of this eclectic collection of amazing tales—and wait to hear what you think. Happy reading.

David M. Dooley President, University of Rhode Island

PHOTOS: JOE GIBLIN; COURTESY LAURIE SHARMA

ALUMNIWRITE

THE SOUL OF THE SEA

Boston-born Greg Stone, M.M.A. ’89, emptied five SCUBA tanks a day collecting scallops in Maine’s winter waters to help pay for college. He liked diving so much he decided to make a career of it. When he first started his studies, there were no textbooks on marine biology; his professors used to staple published science papers together for their course work.

Today, with advanced degrees in marine policy (from URI) and marine science, Stone is one of the few ocean scientists in the world who combines first-hand diving experiences—from Antarctica to the equator, and from the shallows to 18,000-foot submarine dives that involve spending 10 straight days in underwater saturation habitats—with attendance at gatherings of nations and international business. Paris climate agreement? Stone was there, and at the World Economic Forum’s Davos confab. All the meetings and travel are part of his search to find ways for humanity and the ocean to co-exist and support each other in the modern world.

Stone’s work on sustainable aquaculture, climate adaptation and seamount ecology can be found in TED talks and documentaries for Discovery and National Geographic. Now chief scientist for oceans at Conservation International and special advisor on oceans for the World Economic Forum, he has authored hundreds of publications, including four books. An introductory passage from his most recent book, Soul of the Sea in the Age of the Algorithm, is excerpted here. The book examines the importance of the sea as a driver of human well-being, warns of the current decline in ocean health, and explores solutions through fields such as technology, governance, and innovation. •

PHOTOS: MARCO FRANCHIA; BOOK COVER, LAURA BOWLING AND SAMIRA DESIGN

THE OCEAN AND OUR COLLECTIVE SOUL Whenever we look to our past or present-day cultures that have uninterrupted links to a sustainable relationship with the ocean, we see that the ocean and water have always had special significance.

Some Pacific Islanders even refer to islands and dry land as “holes in our ocean.” The ocean forms the basis for the entire planetary hydrosphere: Water on earth is locked in a perpetual cycle of evaporation from the ocean as pure distilled water, then transportation in clouds for redeposition on land and sea.

The water that flows on land rejoins the ocean, along with the minerals and salts of which it becomes so richly comprised.

When you view the water cycle in this grandiose way, the ocean starts in the clouds, extends down every mountain and river and into the sea. And the magic ingredient is the remarkable water molecule. Water, the universal solvent, is capable of dissolving more different things than any other known liquid, and it is the only substance that exists in all three of its phase states (solid, liquid and gas) on earth.

These remarkable qualities did not go unnoticed by ancient humans, who, throughout the course of their lives, saw how important water was. Their understanding was based on empirical experience and knowledge rather than the scientific research we have today.

The high value they placed on water is represented in the dizzying array of ancient water and ocean gods found in almost every ancient culture for which there is a record, ranging from the Greek and Roman to Slavic, Hebrew, Korean, and Filipino. The Chinese, for example, had Mazu, the Fujianese shamaness and Yu-Kiang, who ruled the sea in the form of a whale with arms and legs. Australian Aboriginal mythology has Eingana, a creator goddess and the mother of all water animals as well as humans. Ezili, in Benin mythology, is the goddess of sweet water, beauty, and love. The Norse, Germanic, and Celtic peoples also all have their own aquatic connections to the metaphysical.

No lesser leader than President John F. Kennedy poetically described his connection to the seas in 1962. …We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back to whence we came.

—Greg Stone, M.M.A. ’89

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 5

NEWS&VIEWS

Behind the Newsweek “She Persisted” Cover

Narya Marcille’s cover design for a January special edition of Newsweek.

Narya Marcille ’05 turned feminism into art, and in the process, scored a career high when she designed the cover for a January edition of Newsweek.

Her illustration features five of the women profiled in the Newsweek special issue “She Persisted: Moments of Courage, Strength and Rebellion in the Fight for Feminism.”

“This was a huge opportunity for me,” says Marcille. “I’m eager to see what comes next.”

Her cover is reminiscent of a poster she created for the Women’s March on Washington last year after she reluctantly decided that, with a newborn, she couldn’t make the trip.

That image went viral on Facebook, was requested by the Library of Congress for its permanent archives, and hangs in the office of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of the women depicted in it. A Newsweek editor saw the poster and liked it so much he asked Marcille to design the “She Persisted” cover.

Landing the job was a coup for Marcille, 35, a stay-at-home mom in North Smithfield who works as a freelance graphic designer while taking care of her two young children.

The Newsweek cover depicts the

five women, all linking arms in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. They are Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren; Ellen Pao, former interim C.E.O. of Reddit who rattled patriarchal Silicon Valley when she filed a gender discrimination suit against her employer—a powerful venture capital firm; Malala Yousafzai, a Pakastani education and women’s rights advocate who, at the age of 17, became the youngest person to win the Nobel Prize after surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, a Nigerian novelist and feminist; and Gina Rodriguez, an American actress of Puerto Rican descent best known for her role in the comedy-drama series Jane the Virgin.

Steven Charny, art director for Topix Media, which publishes Newsweek’s special editions, chose the women he wanted on the cover; Marcille worked for a week on the illustration, including an all-nighter on Christmas. More than 500,000 copies of the issue were printed.

“We’re at an age when women are being celebrated,” Marcille says.

“It’s thrilling.”

TEDxURI Anna LaCroix, one of 14 speakers at TEDxURI on February 10. Selected through auditions, the speakers were a mixture of community members, URI students and professors—from the likes of URI Ocean Engineering Professor Bob Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic, to LaCroix, an eighth grader at Chariho Middle School in southern Rhode Island. They spoke on subjects as various as legal responses to sea level rise, smart textiles for wearable telemedicine, the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, and how to live like you’re dying. LaCroix urged that students as young as middle school be educated about preventing sexual assault. Find their presentations, which were organized around the theme A View to the Future, at uri.edu/tedx.

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PHOTO: NORA LEWIS

Kingston Campus Core Listed on National Register of Historic Places The U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service has recognized the core of the University of Rhode Island’s main campus in Kingston as a historic district, adding it to the National Register of Historic Places.

“This federal distinction recognizes the buildings’ contributions to the history of education, architecture and landscape architecture,” said Jeffrey Emidy, acting executive director of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission.

“While many schools have buildings that share a common architectural vocabulary, few have maintained those common forms, styles and materials over time to the degree found on the URI campus,” said Paul R. Lusignan, a historian with the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service.

The new Historic District includes approximately 29 acres around the grassy, tree-lined quadrangle of the Kingston campus.

The oldest structure in the district is the Oliver Watson Farmhouse (circa 1796), part of the farmland purchased in 1888 to establish the agricultural school that would one day become URI. The district is bound roughly by Upper College Road on the east, Campus Avenue on the south, Lower College road and Farmhouse roads on the west, and the eastern portion of Alumni Avenue on the north. Most of the buildings in the district, particularly those that were built for academic use, are a few stories tall and are constructed of quarry-faced granite ashlar. Some of that stone was harvested from now-closed quarries on campus.

“I am pleased to see our beautiful campus gain recognition and protection through this significant designation,” said URI President David M. Dooley. “We at URI have long cherished the buildings and landscape that comprise an important part of our unique identity and stature in higher education. It is gratifying to see our contributions recognized, and for that recognition to come, fittingly, at the close of our yearlong 125th anniversary celebrations.”

Structures in the University of Rhode Island Historic District Watson Farmhouse (ca. 1796) Taft Hall (1889)

Top: Lippitt Hall is home to URI’s Honors Program.

Above: A view of Washburn Hall and East Hall.

College Hall/Davis Hall (1890/1895) “Old Ben Butler” Civil War cannon (1861, brought to campus in 1892) Lippitt Hall (1897) East Hall (1909) Ranger Hall (1914) Washburn Hall (1921) Bliss Hall (1928) Edwards Hall (1928) Rodman Hall (1928) World War I Memorial Gateway (1922 and 1928) President’s House (1931) Green Hall (1937) Quinn Hall (1937) Eleanor Roosevelt Hall (1937)

Green Hall was the University library at one time and now houses the president’s and provost’s offices as well as enrollment services.

PHOTOS: SHELBEY GALLIHER; NORA LEWIS

Robert L. Carothers Library and Learning Commons (1964, ’75, ’92-’93)

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 7

NEWS&VIEWS $150 million new College of Engineering complex takes shape: The steel structure for URI’s 190,000-square-foot new building is complete.

Funded by voters in two bond issues, along with contributions by individuals and organizations, the structure is the largest project in URI’s history. It is on track for completion by September 2019.

Genome Size Linked to Plant Invasiveness The most significant factor in determining whether a plant will become invasive may be the size of its genome, says an international research team that studies the invasive reed phragmites.

Laura Meyerson, URI professor of natural resources science, reports that “our results are crystal clear. Small genomes are the most important factor in determining invasiveness, at least for Phragmites, but likely for many other species as well.”

The team—which also included Petr Pyšek and the late Jan Suda from the Institute of Botany at The Czech Academy of Sciences—screened 900 populations of phragmites from around the world and chose 100 to evaluate. The researchers grew those plants in a common garden in the Czech Republic, where they exposed them to the same environmental conditions and regularly measured a wide variety of traits, from nutrient content and leaf toughness to plant chemistry and susceptibility to herbivores. Their results were published January in the journal Ecology.

While all of the plants studied were of the same species, Phragmites australis, their genome size varied from population to population.

Meyerson says the results suggest that plants with large genomes can grow only in limited locations. The Gulf of Mexico lineage of phragmites, for instance, which has a large genome, has been unable to move out of the Gulf region, whereas the phragmites native to Europe, which has

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QUADANGLES SPRING 2018

URI Professor Laura Meyerson discusses her phragmites research in a common garden in the Czech Republic.

a small genome, is highly invasive throughout North America.

“Smaller genomes are more nimble,” she says. “They can grow in variable environments and at almost all latitudes.”

The findings of the research team raise the question of why plants with small genomes are more likely to become invasive. She thinks they have the answer.

“The main theoretical reason has to do with minimum generation time,” she explains.

“The idea is that a smaller genome can be replicated more quickly than a larger genome.

So if a plant is in a stressful environment, it can be replicated more quickly than if it had a

larger genome. It needs fewer resources and can use its resources quickly to reproduce before its luck runs out.”

On the other hand, “a smaller genome also means that it may lose genes that are potentially beneficial,” adds Pyšek. “So there may be a trade-off.”

Scientists use flow cytometry, a simple and inexpensive technology, to measure the size of a plant’s genome. The speed and simplicity of the process provides numerous applications for the results of the research, the team suggests. Border security officers, for instance, could quickly screen plants for genome size before they are imported into a country.

“It gives us a cheap tool to measure their invasive potential,” says Meyerson.

The test could also be used to prioritize the management of existing invasive populations of common reeds and other plants with the same genome size characteristics. “Land managers could screen invasive populations for genome size to help them allocate resources more effectively,” Meyerson says. “By determining whether a population has a particularly small genome size, they will know that a particular plant might be more aggressive and should be targeted for removal.”

Meyerson is also conducting experiments at URI to determine how environmental variables like salinity and temperature interact with plants of different genome sizes, and how plant chemistry is affected by genome size.

PHOTOS: ANNE VEEGER; COURTESY OF LAURA MEYERSON

The Stressbusting Power of Meditation Yoga and meditation proved a potent prescription for students who participated in a College of Pharmacy study last fall, reporting decreased stress and anxiety after just six weeks of once-a-week practice.

The study’s 17 participants, all students—half in URI’s intensive pharmacy program— committed to a weekly onehour vinyasa yoga class led by Virginia Lemay, clinical associate professor of pharmacy and a registered yoga teacher. Immediately afterward, they participated in guided meditation facilitated by Ashley Buchanan, an assistant professor of pharmacy and interim director of the Shambhala Meditation Center of Providence.

Questionnaires assessed stress, anxiety and mindfulness levels at the beginning and end of the program.

Student John Hoolahan ’19, co-author of the study with Lemay and Buchanan, says the idea evolved out of conversations he had with Lemay about integrating his spiritual life—he is a Reiki master—with his academic and professional pursuits.

“I was coming out of a time when I was very unsure as to what I wanted to be on this earth for,” Hoolahan says. “This showed me I’m capable of merging these two worlds that I’ve found.”

The study was called “Samyama: Stress, Anxiety, Mindfulness: A Yoga and Meditation Assessment,” using a Sanskrit word that describes a state in which the mind and body are unified in focus on the present moment—what’s often called mindfulness. Lemay presented the findings in poster form at the midyear conference of the American Society of Health System Pharmacists. Attendees were enthusiastic.

“I can’t tell you the number of people who took pictures of the poster,” Lemay says.

Another conference presentation and a paper are planned. The popularity of the study—and a spin-off weekly meditation class—have the trio considering what they might do next. Hoolahan would like to do more research, as well as find a larger place to offer more people yoga, meditation and Reiki.

URI doctoral student Scott Buchanan handles a snapping turtle during his research.

Spotted Turtles in Trouble in Rhode Island A University of Rhode Island doctoral student who surveyed the state for freshwater turtles found that the once-common spotted turtle has been hit hard by habitat disturbance.

New Jersey native Scott Buchanan ’17 was working in collaboration with Nancy Karraker, URI associate professor of natural resources science. He repeatedly visited 88 different wetlands in the state over three years and captured nearly 2,000 turtles of four different species. Just 50 were spotted turtles, a species considered by the state to be of high conservation concern and a candidate for the U.S. endangered species list.

“Throughout their range, populations of spotted turtles have declined extensively, and we can certainly say with a good deal of confidence that’s also the case in Rhode Island,” says Buchanan. The turtles, which live in forest wetlands, did best in locations where there’s little human disturbance. But they’re also vulnerable to poaching.

“Spotted turtles will command a formidable sum in the pet trade, which is unfortunate,” Buchanan says, noting that he encountered people during his research who had captured spotted turtles they intended to bring home to keep as pets but released them at his insistence. “It’s really easy for someone to deplete an entire population of them very quickly.”

Buchanan also found a non-native turtle called a red-eared slider in more wetlands than he found spotted turtles. The slider is a species commonly purchased at pet stores and released into the wild after owners no longer wish to care for them. Wetlands close to human populations, especially those with easy access from roads, are the most likely places to find them.

“They’re an especially detrimental invasive species,” he says. “It’s a good bet that all the sliders we found are turtles that were bought at pet stores. We don’t know if they’re reproducing in the wild.”

As Buchanan prepares to graduate from URI, he will share his data with a region-wide team of biologists collecting information about the three turtle species being considered for inclusion on the U.S. endangered species list: spotted, wood and Blanding’s turtles.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF SCOTT BUCHANAN

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

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NEWS&VIEWS

URI Art history Professor Recreates 17th Century Newport Neighborhood

Ronald J. Onorato, chair of URI’s Department of Art and Art History.

These 3-D models show a Newport neighborhood today (in gray) and what it looked like in the late 1800s.

The models are palm-sized “first drafts,” says Professor Onorato. Larger models will be displayed during an exhibit at URI’s Fine Arts Center in April.

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A neighborhood with 350-year-old houses is razed to make way for urban development, and decades later the imagination soars: What in the heck did those houses look like, centuries ago?

A professor and his students have the answer, thanks to a very 21st century tool: 3-D printing that allows viewers to see the houses and neighborhoods as they existed long ago.

“Virtual House, Virtual Neighborhood” is the brainchild of Art History Professor Ronald J. Onorato, and the reason he is the inaugural winner of The Winnie, a URI grant named after Winifred Brownell, former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a loyal supporter of the arts. It resurrects a 17th century house and neighborhood in Newport, Rhode Island.

The neighborhood—four city blocks framed by Marlborough, Thames, Farewell and Broadway streets—was demolished in the 1960s for parking lots. Only a few historic buildings remain, including St. Paul’s Methodist Church, the White Horse Tavern, and the former Newport County Jail.

Onorato, chair of URI’s Department of Art and Art History, says the project explores new ground in how preservationists can analyze and, ultimately, recreate historic neighborhoods.

“This is another way of thinking about preservation, using traditional research methods and new imaging techniques to reimagine a place that no longer exists,” says Onorato. “Our project is important, too, because it’s a case study of what happened to an important early neighborhood that got destroyed— eradicated really.”

The seed for the project was planted last summer when Onorato discovered the Newport Restoration Foundation archives contained drawings of a 17th century house at the corner of Marlborough and Meeting streets.

Onorato and his team of current and former URI students recreated the 17th century house, a timber-frame post-andbeam with an outside hearth that doubled as a wall. “It’s an important and very typical 17th century building that has all but disappeared from the important architectural context of Newport,” Onorato says.

They are also reconstructing the neighborhood that surrounded the house some 125 years ago. At its peak, the neighborhood—a mix of craftsmen, Italian immigrants and rich Newport families—boasted 50 to 60 buildings. Today, fewer than 20 are left, but their traces remain in land evidence records, old civic and commercial maps, drawings and early photographs.

This spring, Onorato’s students will also try to identify the men, women and children who lived in the houses, as well as the blacksmiths, tailors and other craftsmen who plied their trades in the shops. Students will use old city directories and census reports to identify names and, if possible, animate family stories.

Visit Indonesia with URI Professor Tom Boving, an expert in water quality and supply solutions in developing countries, will lead a 12-day trip to Bali, Flores and Komodo this July through URI’s Office of International Education.

The trip is open to anyone interested and will focus on the challenges countries face in balancing environmental and economic issues, with Indonesia—a country hyper-rich in both natural resources and economic opportunity—as the case study. URI has rich ties with Indonesian universities and in addition to coursework, participants will have time to enjoy local culture, food and art, and explore beaches and jungle. Program fees are $4,950; for more information, search the programs at uri.edu/ international/oie.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF RONALD ONORATO; ISTOCKPHOTO.COM; ALAN HUBBARD

Senior E.C. Matthews (number 0) jumps for two of his 20 points against Duquesne during a tense home game in late January that ended with the Rams winning on a buzzer beater. At press time, the Rams were on a historic run, matching Rhode Island’s longest winning streak in 70 years.

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BIG FISH As worldwide demand for sushi-grade tuna grows, a URI professor and an entrepreneur have teamed up to sustainably produce yellowfin. In a huge, purpose-built tank on URI’s Bay Campus, they are now successfully breeding them in captivity.

BY TODD MCLEISH

When Peter Mottur ’91 was fishing off Rhode Island’s Sakonnet Point in 2006, he unexpectedly hooked a small bluefin tuna, and the surprise and excitement of the ensuing battle provided an adrenaline rush that he remembers clearly to this day. The experience was addictive, and Mottur found himself seeking more and more opportunities to fish for tuna up and down the East Coast.

It also inspired him to learn more about commercial and recreational tuna fishing and the natural history of bluefin, yellowfin and other tuna species. What he learned was alarming.

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Consumer demand for wild tuna has skyrocketed in recent decades as interest in sushi and other popular tuna dishes grows around the world. The commercial Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery generates about $230 million annually in the United States, most of that in New England. But it has declined by about 90 percent in the last 20 years as stocks of the fatty, high-value fish, which grow to more than 6 feet in length and can live for up to 40 years, have plummeted.

“Bluefin tuna is a hard fish to catch, but they’re also really hard to find,” Mottur says. “They’ve experienced a staggering decline.” The result? Increased pressure on

stocks of yellowfin, bluefin’s smaller—but still large, powerful and highly prized— cousin.

Mottur wondered if aquaculture, which now meets the demand for half the world’s fish consumption, could be a more sustainable approach. So he turned to his alma mater, seeking an aquaculture expert, and landed in the office of Professor Terry Bradley, M.S. ’79.

“I’ve always enjoyed working with fish,” says Bradley, who joined the URI faculty in 1984. “They’re fascinating creatures; there’s so much diversity and variety.” The professor, meanwhile, had reached similar

ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM; PHOTO: AYLA FOX ’11

Scientists are concerned that the yellowfin fishery is under increased fishing pressure, yet global demand for sushi-grade tuna continues to grow exponentially.

URI Fisheries Professor Terry Bradley, M.S. ’79, at left, with aquaculture entrepreneur Peter Mottur ’91 at their yellowfin tuna research facility on the Narragansett Bay Campus.

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Bradley and Mottur agreed to focus on YELLOWFIN tuna, which reach maturity at 2 to 3 years old.

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conclusions to Mottur about the sustainability of wild harvests. “Having worked on fishing boats and seeing catches decline, and how difficult it was to make a living, I figured aquaculture was the way to go.”

Bradley’s URI aquaculture research experience has been extensive and varied.

He studied several factors important to raising salmon— including the physiological process they undergo when migrating from freshwater rivers to the ocean and the olfactory receptors they use to navigate from the ocean to their natal stream—and is a partner in a New Zealand salmon farm.

He also developed an acoustic conditioning system so salmon that escape from their ocean-based pens can return when they hear an underwater “dinner bell.”

In addition to his work with salmon, he conducted research on transgenic trout that put on more muscle at a faster rate than ordinary trout, and pioneered an aquaculture system for raising black sea bass. But he had never experimented with tuna. He was excited to give it a try.

“Tuna are a finite resource. There just aren’t enough wild fish out there,” he says.

According to Bradley, companies in Australia, Mexico and several Mediterranean countries are doing what he calls “tuna ranching” by capturing wild juvenile tuna, putting them in pens and raising them to harvest size.

“Rather than farming, they’re capturing wild fish and fattening them up,” says Bradley. “It’s still depleting the wild population, and has had a long-term impact on tuna stocks. What we’re trying to do is produce fish in captivity—and take the pressure off the wild stocks.”

The challenges of raising tuna in captivity are many. Only a few organizations have successfully bred tuna in land-based tanks, including Kinki University in Japan, Clean Seas in Australia and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATCC) in Panama.

“The key is to provide the right conditions so they’ll spawn on a regular basis,” explains Bradley. “You have to provide excellent water quality—they won’t tolerate anything else. And they’ve never seen any type of obstruction in their water before; they’ve never had a limitation on where they can swim, so living in a tank is a totally new experience for them.”

Since bluefin tuna don’t reach sexual maturity until they are at least 8 to 10 years old, Bradley and Mottur agreed to focus on

yellowfin, which reach maturity at 2 to 3 years old. They embarked on a long-term research partnership, now in its sixth year and bearing tiny fruit: their first yellowfin tuna eggs, collected just recently.

Mottur is something of a serial entrepreneur who has had success in several ventures. Although he earned a marine science degree from URI, his first jobs were in the broadcast industry, producing television documentaries for ABC, Discovery, A&E and other channels. He later started his own production company, where he developed a technology to control robotic cameras and stream the video over the internet and other private networks.

“My customers were initially a lot of broadcasters that used our technology to control cameras set up in remote locations,” he said. “Then we got a lot of interest for military and other high-end security applications.” Mottur eventually sold his business and started another company, Vizsafe, where he developed a crowdsourcing and communication platform for sharing information to improve safety and security at sports and entertainment venues, as well as other large facilities. While he continues to run Vizsafe, he formed Greenfins in 2011 to focus on sustainable tuna aquaculture.

The first step was to construct a test tank large enough to hold yellowfin tuna so that Bradley could begin to study how to rear and breed them. Built in the Blount Aquaculture Research Lab on the Bay Campus, the 20,000-gallon tank was completed in 2013, and Mottur and Bradley went to sea to capture wild tuna for the tank.

“The original strategy was simply to see if we could keep them alive,” says Mottur.

“There was a lot of trial and error in the husbandry, and it took us a couple of years, but we eventually got good at it.”

However, they knew that this test tank was not going to be large enough to facilitate a breeding program. As highly migratory fish that swim thousands of miles every year, yellowfin do not adapt well to long-term confinement in tanks. Some of the test fish contracted a condition called puffy snout syndrome, in which a growth occurs on the heads of captive tuna.

Taylor Voorhees, M.S. ’15, studied puffy snout for his master’s thesis. He spent two years observing the behavior of the fish, monitoring the tank conditions, collecting tissue samples, studying fish diseases, and surveying other facilities around the world.

“We already have potential clients looking for juvenile tuna that they can put into sea cages to raise them to harvest size,” says Bradley. “They are anxiously waiting for juveniles, and we’re trying to get to the point where we can supply them.”

Yellowfin caught at sea are now living, and spawning, in a 120,000-gallon tank, purpose-built after the teams’s first tank proved too small.

“We figured out a lot of things that puffy snout wasn’t, a few things that it was, and a few things that it is likely to be,” says Voorhees, who now works for the Seafood Watch program at Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.

Voorhees’ top finding: the size of the tank plays an important role in susceptibility to puffy snout. He concluded that it is unlikely that a tuna with puffy snout syndrome would breed in a tank the size of the one in the Blount Lab. So Mottur and Bradley began working with URI to build a dedicated facility with a larger tank. Greenfins provided approximately $1.7 million in private funding to construct a new building at the Bay Campus to house a 120,000-gallon tank.

Completed in early 2017, it has solved the PHOTO: ERIC SAVETSKY ’87, M.C.P. ’98

problem of puffy snout syndrome and many others, allowing Bradley’s tuna husbandry research to progress rapidly.

“The conditions are right, and the fish are spawning,” says Bradley. “We’re collecting a limited number of eggs at this time and transferring them into incubators, and we anticipate more spawning soon. It takes one or two days for them to hatch, and then we transfer the newly hatched larvae into a larviculture system. That’s where the real challenge starts—getting the larvae to begin feeding so they get the proper nutrition.”

The early days are critical. “They have such a high metabolic rate and they grow so fast that if there’s any slowdown in feeding, they die very quickly. We’re still developing the techniques to bring them through the process.”

“The conditions are right, and the fish are spawning,” says Terry Bradley.

Mottur formed Greenfins in 2011 to focus on tuna aquaculture.

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This is the only East Coast research facility where yellowfin tuna are held in captivity, and other scientists are closely watching the project.

Tuna are such powerful swimmers that they’re a potential model for underwater robots.

As Bradley focuses on tuna husbandry practices, Mottur devotes his attention to the technology involved in running the facility.

“One thing I realized is that there’s a lot of parallels between my systems integration work and this tuna work,” Mottur says.

“When developing and managing an operation like this, technology plays a huge role.

There are sophisticated systems running life support, water quality monitoring, visual monitoring. We’re trying to create conditions conducive to spawning, and technology is helping us optimize those conditions. A relaxed fish is a happy fish, and a happy fish is going to be inclined to spawn.”

Because it is the only East Coast research facility where yellowfin tuna are held in captivity, other scientists are closely watching the project—quite literally,in a couple of cases.

Harvard University Professor George Lauder, for instance, has a series of high-speed cameras set up around the tank.

Lauder studies biomechanics and bio-robot-

ics, and he is investigating the way the yellowfin move in an effort to design underwater vehicles with improved aquatic pro- pulsion systems.

“When humans build things that move through water now, they have propellers, but fish don’t have propellers,” he points out. “They have a bending, flexible body, fins they can control, and they’re quiet and efficient moving through fluid. If we can better understand what fish are doing, we can develop underwater vehicles that can perform better.”

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His cameras are capturing images that will help him create a computer model of a swimming yellowfin, which he’ll use to design an oscillating propulsion system similar to the tuna’s tail.

Then there’s Jesse Daily, a research scientist at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport. He brings 30 cameras at a time to the tuna tank to capture images of the fish at multiple angles so he can reconstruct how they swim in three dimensions.

His aim is to create what he calls “a bioinspired robot” that can swim with the efficiency of a yellowfin—which would be no mean feat, given that yellowfin have been clocked swimming as fast as 50 miles an hour and can cross enormous distances, sometimes entire oceans.

“The current robots in use struggle with range—we want them to go farther,” Daily says. “If we can come up with a robot that can swim or propel itself in a more efficient manner, that will give us more range.”

Daily isn’t confining his research to tuna. He is also studying the swimming of puffer fish, which are excellent at what’s called “station keeping.”

“If you need to stay in one place for four hours, you swim like a puffer fish,” he says.

“But if you need to go somewhere fast, you swim like a tuna.”

Lauder and Daily both say they feel lucky to have access to the facility, which is within driving distance of their research labs.

“Tuna are known for dying in captivity, so having someone who can actually keep them alive is extremely rare,” says Daily. “It’s close by, it’s new, it’s state-of-the-art, and most importantly, it’s one of the only places of its kind in the world.”

Bradley and Mottur have created a collegial environment for other researchers.

“They have built something with a cooperative spirit, which has been wonderful for us,” says Lauder. “I cannot emphasize enough how great it’s been that they’ve opened their doors to us. As long as I’m welcome, I’ll be going there often.”

Harvard University Professor of Ichthyology George V. Lauder is creating a computer model of a swimming yellowfin, which he hopes to use to design a similar, oscillating propulsion system for underwater vehicles.

Of course, URI researchers enjoy the most convenient access. After less than one year of operation, the facility—official designation is the Greenfins Aquaculture Tuna Center of Excellence (GATCE)—has more than met its initial goals of creating unique research opportunities and providing handson experience for students. Almost a dozen URI graduate and undergraduate students currently work or conduct research at the facility.

Bradley and Mottur believe the facility may also have considerable commercial potential. Once they can demonstrate that they can breed tuna and rear their larvae to a size that can be shipped to other facilities, they are certain they can find industry partners.

“We already have potential clients looking for juvenile tuna that they can put into sea cages to raise them to harvest size,” says Bradley. “They are anxiously waiting for juveniles, and we’re trying to get to the point where we can supply them.”

The market has been tested in Japan, where a single, eight-inch juvenile tuna raised in captivity goes for $100 to $125.

“We’re proceeding as rapidly as possible,” Bradley says. “But it takes time, and we’re still fine-tuning the system.”

Mottur is already thinking ahead to the next steps, and one alternative is to skip the intermediaries and build a “grow-out facility” in Rhode Island to raise the fish to market size. He envisions creating a new sustainable industry in the state that could create dozens of green technology jobs.

He also believes that there may be an opportunity to offer excess tuna larvae or juveniles from the URI facility to restocking PHOTOS: ERIC SAVETSKY ’87, M.C.P. ’98; COURTESY GEORGE LAUDER

Lauder’s high-speed cameras track the way the fish move through the tank.

programs to rebuild the wild tuna population. “A mature female yellowfin tuna can produce 350,000 eggs a day,” he says.

But for now, Mottur and Bradley are focused on building a research and education program that will be a boon to URI and the state of Rhode Island.

“This facility could be a real lure to attract students to URI,” Mottur observes.

“This is a one-of-a-kind program that no other university offers, so it should become a good way to attract and retain good talent.” •

Excess tuna larvae could be used to help rebuild wild stocks

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Women are still underrepresented in the kinds of extreme research that bring scientists to mountainous, polar and deep-sea environments—but their numbers are increasing, bringing change to a male-dominated culture.

BY ELLEN LIBERMAN

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atiana Rynearson was 28,000 feet above the ground, somewhere over the Southern Ocean, when she felt the sudden fullness of milk in her breasts. Four-and-a-half months after giving birth to her second daughter, Rynearson had headed off to the McMurdo Station in Antarctica for a research cruise. Now she was Kingston-bound, hoping her daughter would resume nursing despite the interruption.

Rynearson, a URI professor of oceanography, studies how diatoms—planktonic algae that play a key role in the marine food web—are shaped by evolutionary and ecological processes, such as climate change. It had been a hectic three weeks at sea for her research team: setting up the shipboard lab, collecting samples from the ice edge in the Ross Sea to the subtropical front, stowing their instruments and packing the cultures for the journey back.

The remoteness of their location meant they were riding a C-130, a military transport aircraft with few amenities in its belly.

They are loud and cold airplanes, with nylon and aluminumframed slings for seats along the sidewalls. Many times the bathroom is just a portable toilet set up behind a screen.

Rynearson, 45, has been doing fieldwork on research vessels for 22 years, since her undergraduate days. She knows how to adapt without a fuss. That day, she fished her breast pump out of her bag and situated herself—on the floor between two pallets stacked near the bathroom. She rigged some privacy by tenting her down jacket around her body.

“People had to step over me to get to the bathroom. I thought, ‘Well, it’s not going to kill them if they see some breast,’ ” she recalls.

“It wasn’t pretty. But it worked. I’m not looking for their approval— nor do I care. I don’t ask for permission.”

Call it the changing face of fieldwork.

URI professor of oceanography Tatiana Rynearson studies how diatoms, a key species of planktonic algae, respond to climate change.

For as long as humans have sought to understand the physical world, there have been women scientists. In ancient Greece, the study of natural philosophy was open to both genders. But, as science transitioned from an amateur to a professional pursuit, women were barred by cultural notions about their intellectual and physical inferiority. The exclusions were particularly acute in scientific fieldwork, the backbone of so many disciplines. Women were thought to be too delicate to hack through jungles or climb mountains, and too distracting to the male scientists doing the important work.

PHOTOS: OLIVIA AHERN

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Collecting samples, excavating artifacts or recording cultural folkways in the world’s corners is often physically demanding work, done under extreme conditions that impose different challenges on women—and not all of those challenges are due to the environment. A partial list: attending to bodily functions, maintaining personal safety in hostile circumstances, having a domestic partner who supports the time away from home, battling gender biases, and coping with sexual harassment.

“Of course, the Coast Guard had to make a decision. And they finally did. They decided that I could go, and they were very unhappy about it,” she recalled. “And, of course, within the first two hours, I’ll bet you every single person—crewman—on that ship, walked by the lab I was going to be in to see what this woman looked like.”

While the gender gap in science is slowly closing, women are still vastly underrepresented. A 2010 U.S. National Research Council study found only

Dawn Cardace, far right, in the Philippines.

In 2014, a survey on sexual harassment in fieldwork found that 64 percent of the mostly female respondents had experienced sexual assault, sexual harassment or inappropriate comments about their appearance and intelligence. Most incidents occurred when they were young or in positions junior to their harassers. Launched by a quartet of bioanthropologists and reported in the journal PLOS ONE, the survey drew responses from more than 660 scientists in 30 countries, with 20 percent reporting unwanted physical contact or sexual advances; 22 percent of that group reported that it would have been unsafe to fight back or refuse.

And, indeed, there was a time—not that long ago—when a female scientist doing fieldwork had to ask permission just to be there.

Rynearson points to Rita Horner, a pioneering University of Washington oceanographer. In 1973, she was the first woman scientist allowed on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker to continue her studies of phytoplankton in the Arctic. In a 2000 interview recorded for an oral history of polar exploration, Horner recounted how that particular barrier broke.

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36 percent of assistant professors and 27 percent of tenure candidates in biology were female—despite more women than men earning doctorates. According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, less than 30 percent of the world’s researchers are women. Men are still more likely to receive tenure and earn more money than their female counterparts.

But enough women researchers have reached the point of leadership in their careers to make fieldwork a more inclusive experience.

In 2003, when Dawn Cardace earned her master’s degree in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, the National Science Foundation published “Where are the Women GeoScience Professors?” The study showed that women comprised less than 15 percent of geoscience faculty in U.S. universities and colleges.

Cardace’s fieldwork has taken her from Carlsbad Caverns, where she labored through coffin-tight spaces mapping caves

for the National Park Service, to Costa Rica, where she cored mud samples in the seafloor off the coast. Along the way, she’s had her share of working in male-dominated spaces.

“There’s a machismo present in most fieldwork,” she says. “It’s a man-up thing: you’re wearing sturdy clothes, you’re expected to carry heavy loads, and there’s a bit of a race to the top of the hill. There’s a competitiveness that doesn’t have to be there.”

Now a URI associate professor of geosciences, Cardace studies the interactions between geology and microbiology in ophiolites, sections of the Earth’s oceanic crust that have been lifted above sea level and positioned on surface rocks. And when she leads her lab to the Coast Range Ophiolite Microbial Observatory at the McLaughlin Natural Reserve in California, she makes sure that everyone gets sufficient rest and that women on her team have privacy when they need it.

“It can be socially awkward to request the time you need to take care of your body in a male-dominated field setting,” Cardace explains. “I have students who don’t drink water—they purposely dehydrate so they don’t have to pee. I tell them that I expect them to drink water. I expect them to hike to the top of the hill and make it through the rest of the day. I will structure a way for everyone to take those breaks.”

Sometimes, female scientists in the field find that gendered assumptions are thrust upon them. Associate Professor of Anthropology Kristine Bovy gave up fieldwork after having children—partly because there was a rich trove of already collected material in need of analysis, and partly due to family logistics. But earlier in her career, sifting through shell middens in the Pacific Northwest on the hunt for clues of human and animal interaction, she sometimes found herself assigned to the den mother’s role.

“I would deal more with the organizational aspects, like monitoring the food,” Bovy recalls. “And if students had some personal issue, they were more likely to come to me, partly because of my personality and partly because women are more expected to have that nurturing side.”

As women in the field continue to transition from curiosities to senior scientists, the sexism that has warped some careers has begun to lessen. Assistant Professor Soni M. Pradhanang treks Nepal from the brutally hot southern plains to the thin

PHOTOS: COURTESY DAWN CARDACE; SODARSHAN RAJBANDARI; COURTESY GSO; DANIEL COLE

reaches of the highlands, studying changes in water resources. Her fieldwork involves helping villagers install irrigation systems and interviewing them about water management, as well as weather and agricultural trends that indicate climate change.

She has seen rural communities become more welcoming to women scientists.

“Definitely, the acceptance is more than in the past,” Pradhanang says. “There used to be a time of frowning—why do you not have a male friend with you? Now when I’m out doing my fieldwork, there is an excitement. Oh, it’s another woman! It’s good to see more women in this kind of field. The next wave is going to be bigger.”

And institutions, such as the UniversityNational Oceanographic Laboratory System, a consortium of 58 academic institutions and national laboratories involved in oceanographic research, have been working on ensuring that each organization has transparent policies related to pregnancy, nursing mothers, and sexual harassment at sea, aimed at improving conditions for female researchers.

Left, Associate Professor Bethany Jenkins most recently led a team of 13 on a 37-day Southern Ocean expedition that departed from Ponta Arenas, Chile, in fall 2016.

Below, Lauren Zeffer ’18, a wildlife and conservation biology major, monitoring aquatic life in the salt marshes of Fire Island.

And that, researchers say, is better for science.

“It diversifies the whole endeavor,” says Rynearson. “When I first went out to sea, there was definitely a macho atmosphere on the ships and I find that’s largely gone away. Twenty years ago, most of the senior scientists were male and there were a lot of female grad students. That’s all changed now, and it allows everyone’s ideas to percolate to the forefront.”

Young scientists like Lauren Zeffer ’18 expect to do their future field research free from such distractions. The URI senior spent last summer inventorying nekton and vegetation at the Fire Island National Seashore as an intern in the National Park Service Northeast Region Geoscientist-in-the-Parks program. Working with Assistant Professor Soni M. Pradhanang, second from left, discusses gender roles with women planting rice in Nepal’s Gandaki Basin. two male biotechnicians, She says conversations like this allow her to educate women Zeffer, a wildlife and conwithout taking up time they need to devote to farming. servation biology major, cruised the coastal barrier “They’ve worked so hard with staff that network, monitoring aquatic life in the salt any incident is the exception rather than marshes for eight hours a day. Formal study the rule. The climate is different,” says in the biological sciences is a natural fit for Associate Professor Bethany Jenkins, who, Zeffer, who grew up in North Babylon, in part, studies how changes in the AntarcNew York, exploring the beaches of Long tic environment influence diatoms’ uptake Island. of iron. Fieldwork on research ships is an “I came from a family that promoted all-hands-on-deck situation, with women science, so I think it’s pretty exciting,” she working alongside male colleagues and says. “You need strong women in the field crew in a genderless uniform of Carhartt and I think it’s becoming more equal. In the coveralls and a knit cap. past it was always the men doing the physi“We joke that orange is the new black,” cal labor. Now there are more women biolshe says. “Every human has different ogy majors. They are evening out the playstrengths. We work as a team and we ing field and showing that women can do depend on each other.” the dirty work.” • UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

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James O. Prochaska 22

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Change Maker After a childhood scarred by addiction, Jim Prochaska has dedicated his life to figuring out how people can change for the better. Interventions based on his theories—which remain some of the most widely cited works in psychology—have helped therapists around the world assist patients with problems like giving up smoking, improving diet and exercise, and breaking addictions to alcohol and drugs. At 75, he’s still teaching, and still changing lives.

BY PAUL KANDARIAN James O. Prochaska grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, in the 1940s and 1950s, surrounded by automobile factories. It was, he says, a place to “appreciate the wisdom of ordinary people,” such as seamstresses, mechanics, barbers, and cooks.

His mom was a part-time waitress, his dad a worker on an assembly line. His father was also, sadly, a man Prochaska would watch slowly succumb to alcoholism.

“I often felt helpless, and I hate feeling helpless,” says Prochaska, now 75, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Cancer Prevention Research Center and a long time professor of psychology. “When my father was good, he was wonderful. When he was bad, he was very, very bad. He had a number of demons, including violence, alcoholism, and being bipolar.”

It was that feeling of helplessness that prompted him to pursue a career in psychology, one that would include creating a revolutionary model for the decision-making that allows people to implement positive change. Called the Transtheoretical, or Stages of Change, model, it was born in the 1970s from studies that examined why some smokers were able to quit, while others failed. Since then, Prochaska has developed applications to health-related behaviors— smoking, diet, exercise, and safe-sex practices—and to mental health-related problems, such as alcohol and drug abuse, stress and distress. He also developed interventions that can help accelerate changes in problem behaviors, as well an integrative model of psychotherapy.

PHOTOS: NORA LEWIS

Along the way, he has earned a raft of awards, including being named one of the Top Five Most Cited Authors in Psychology from the Association for Psychological Science, an Innovator’s Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a Medal of Honor for Clinical Research from the American Cancer Society—the first psychologist to win one. It’s no exaggeration to say that he’s a giant in the field, and that his work has had a profound effect on thousands of lives. To that end, Prochaska also founded, with his wife Janice, a company called Pro-Change Behavior Systems in 1998. He sums it all up by saying he and his wife “continue with our mission of enhancing the health and happiness of as many people as possible.”

Among the lives he has touched are hundreds of students. “He’s an incredible mentor, a brilliant man, prolific writer and a role model for countless students,” says one former student, Sara Johnson, M.S. ’95, Ph.D. ’98, who is now CEO and president of Pro-Change Behavior Systems after buying the company from the Prochaskas in 2015. “He is the reason I chose URI for graduate school.”

But as his adult life was getting started, with his difficult childhood still fresh, Prochaska experienced what he calls “a series of false starts.” He’d played football at Fordson High School in Dearborn, where he met Janice, then a majorette, in the band room of the school. He played football in college as well, and initially thought he would become a minister. But the Presbyterian college he had won a scholarship to UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 23

attend, Muskingum College in Ohio, wasn’t a good fit. “I didn’t realize how conservative it was,” Prochaska says. “We had 2,000 students; 30 of us were for John F. Kennedy and the rest were for Nixon.”

He dropped out to travel with migrant workers, writing a column about the experience called “Bohemian by Birth.” A couple of years later, still deep in the grip of counterculture, he realized he wanted to go back to college. Ohio State had its allure— but at a dinner where legendary Buckeyes coach Woody Hayes was holding court, he heard the coach say he’d have “no long hairs on his team.” Prochaska remembers that, “Everyone just looked at me, and that was that.”

So he ended up at Wayne State University, a public-research facility back in Michigan that Prochaska describes as being, at the time, “known as a Communist college.” It suited his needs; he’d also go to Clark University and the Merrill-Palmer Institute, but Wayne State is where Prochaska earned his bachelor’s degree in 1964, his master’s in 1967, and his Ph.D. in 1969.

The deep dive required by so much study in psychology changed him. “I went into therapy at Wayne State,” he remembers. “It was a requisite at the time, but I was battling with my own depression.

Being in therapy was part of getting your Ph.D., and I wish we still did that. It’s a great way to get a deeper sense of ourselves.”

He was afflicted with self doubt. In his stint in therapy, he says, “I remember telling my therapist I should have gone to Harvard, that I’d never do anything great at

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His road has led him to the University of Rhode Island as he and his wife, he says, “continue with our mission of enhancing the health and happiness of as many people as possible.”

a state school. He looked at me and asked, ‘Why not?’ ” The question, or perhaps challenge, stuck with him, guiding him over the years.

It’s message, he came to believe, was that you could find whatever you need inside yourself—you didn’t need to wait for it to come from the outside.

“That’s a message I still share with my students,” Prochaska says. “You can go to a state university and do great things.

Why not?”

He and Jan married in 1966, and after he got his Ph.D., he started looking at places outside of his Midwest comfort zone.

“I didn’t know about URI, so I came and interviewed,” he says. “They were starting a Ph.D. program. It seemed such a welcoming atmosphere, and Jan and I both loved it. I thought as new faculty, I could impact the school’s new Ph.D. program.”

After he had won tenure, and had a family and a place in the woods and what should have been feelings of security and happiness, the familiar shroud of depression reared its ugly head once more. He told himself he should have gone to Penn State to do great things. But then the therapist’s voice from the past returned, and he asked himself why he couldn’t do great things right here.

“That was a crisis point in my life,” he says. “I was reading a philosophy of science book that said the best science is done by those passionate about their work, and I was passionate about personal freedom and saw this as freedom to change my own behavior. I threw myself into that, and the rest followed.”

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“I tell them ‘this class is about life and death, how we die from the way we live.’ And boom, the phones get turned off.”

“Working on studying health behaviors with him is like studying DNA with Crick and Watson.”

What followed was the origination of The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of behavior change, an integrative theory of therapy that assesses an individual’s readiness to act on a proposed new behavior, and provides strategies to help implement the change. It is a roadmap for moving through what Prochaska and his fellow researchers identified as the five stages of behavior change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.

Its international adoption is doubtless in part because it can be applied to so many areas of life. After all, as health researchers know so well, many major illnesses—cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, to name a few— result from preventable behaviors: smoking, bad diet, and inactivity.

The model is only one part of a storied career. While at URI, Prochaska has served as principal investigator on more than $80 million in research grants on the prevention of cancer and other chronic diseases, authored more than 400 publications on behavior change for health promotion and disease prevention, and published four books on change, including the most recent, Changing to Thrive, with his wife in 2016.

“The University and country are fortunate he chose the profession he did,” says Johnson, CEO of Pro-Change Behavior Systems, now an adjunct faculty member in URI’s psychology department. “He’s not pretentious at all, and genuinely cares about enhancing health and well-being for everyone.”

“One thing I think of in knowing him is that it must be great going to sleep at night

knowing you’ve done things to change the behavior of hundreds of thousands of people that’s made their lives substantially better,” says David Faust, URI professor of clinical psychology. “And he’s so positive and encouraging with his students, he makes them feel excited and inspired.”

One such student is Luke Daniels, 25, who is in URI’s Ph.D. program in clinical psychology and came to the university specifically to be mentored by Prochaska.

“We bounce ideas off each other—and that’s amazing to me, bouncing ideas off Dr. Jim Prochaska,” Daniels says. “Working on studying health behaviors with him is like studying DNA with Crick and Watson.”

The latest challenge, and opportunity, for Prochaska and his colleagues is that URI’s new Academic Health Collaborative is bringing together a diverse assortment of disciplines all focused on human health and wellness, including the Colleges of Health Sciences, Nursing, and Pharmacy.

Prochaska has helped take the lead in designing the collaborative’s Institute for Integrated Health and Innovation.

The new institute will house Prochaska’s Cancer Prevention Research Center, which he’s directed since 1989. It’s where the research “needs to be,” he says, “part of this

whole new transformation. I’ve spent three years on planning committees and it’s all led us to making a terrific plan a reality. I want to contribute and be confident things are functioning the best they can.”

At 75, he has no plans to quit soon, saying “I wouldn’t retire anyway; I’d repurpose.” The most important thing, he says, is continuing his mission. “The cancer research and the Academic Health Collaborative and the new institute, it’s all about enhancing health and well-being for as many people as we possibly can,” Prochaska says. “It’s still very exciting and rewarding.”

Most of all, he lights up when he talks about his work as a teacher. Yes, it can be a challenge to get modern students to look up from their smartphones, but as usual, Jim Prochaska has a strategy. “I tell them, ‘This class is about life and death, about how we die from the way we live,’” he says.

“And boom, the phones get turned off.” • Professor Prochaska invites readers to a Sept. 13 event at which he’ll present stories and discoveries from his work, particularly at the Cancer Prevention Research Center, that produce unprecedented impacts on people’s health and wellbeing. More info: uri.edu/research/cprc.

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 25

PARALYMPIAN A CHALLENGE, ANSWERED Paul DePace ’68, M.B.A. ’75, was in his junior year at URI when a car accident cost him the use of his legs.

He’s gone on to be an athlete, a coach, and an international activist for sports for people with disabilities—while shaping a 40-year career at the University of Rhode Island.

BY PIPPA JACK

Paul DePace is URI’s director of capital projects. “It’s a personal goal that URI is accessible to people of all disabilities,” he says.

DePace readies himself before competing in shot put at a national wheelchair sports meet in the 1970s.

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It’s 1957, and Paul DePace wears a tie every day to George West Junior High in Providence’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Ties are not required, which may be part of why he takes a bit of ribbing from his classmates. But his parents’ clothing store is nearby and his father wears a tie every day, so the kid with track ambitions runs across the street from his parents’ home and directly into school every morning, usually a little late, necktie flying.

It’s 1965, and DePace has joined Chi Phi, the fraternity that used to sit on Upper College Road. “I was learning a lot of things,” he says, “just not in class.” The price of that education: the letter the Dean of Students writes to his parents putting him on social probation.

It’s 1966, and DePace is taking a year out of college, searching for focus.

It’s early 1967, and DePace comes to for a brief moment, lying alone on the side of a snowy road in Narragansett. Then there’s

the feeling of warm oil on his forehead, and he opens his eyes to find himself on a hospital bed, a priest bending over him to administer last rites. “I’m not going anywhere,” DePace tells him, “and I don’t use oil on my hair.”

The next time he opens his eyes, his parents are there, and so are the doctors.

It was a mere 18 months later when DePace graduated, triumphantly, from URI, an achievement he sums up as having gone “from the Dean of Student’s disciplinary list to the Dean’s list.” The phrase, with typical humor, vastly undersells the determination that carried him through a brief summer of rehab, his parents and friends rallying around, never allowing himself to wallow; and the renewed vigor he brought to his course work when he returned to finish his last year as a commuter. He went on to score an engineering position at Raytheon right out of college. His career took him next to Electric Boat, then, with PHOTOS: BY NORA LEWIS; COURTSEY PAUL DEPACE

As Chef de Mission at the 1992 Summer Paralympics in Barcelona, DePace led Team USA’s athletes and coaches into the arena. “Of course not all of the people with disabilities we touch will become Paralympic athletes,” he says, “but through our work they gain confidence and skills that will serve them in life.”

his M.B.A. and professional engineer’s license under his belt, to a job at his alma mater, where he started as director of URI’s physical plant. In the 40-odd years since, he’s overseen about a billion dollars’ worth of construction and renovation, adding a million and a half square feet to the University’s footprint, all of it wheelchairaccessible—even before the ADA came into law in 1990. There aren’t many buildings on campus that DePace, now director of capital projects, hasn’t touched. During the Blizzard of ’78, while his staff plowed and worked at getting the University’s power restored, he slept on the floor of his office for four nights. He was around for the creation of the old Visitors Center, which is now being replaced by the Welcome Center, “which is how I know I’ve worked here a really long time, to be demolishing something I built.”

But his engineering career is just one facet of DePace’s life. Back in the summer of 1968, just a few days after graduation, he impulsively drove up to the Crotched Mountain Rehab Center in New Hampshire, where he sat, alone, on the sidelines at his first wheelchair sports meet. It was a friendly, if unsophisticated, event, and the next year, he was back. He competed in pretty much any sport he thought he had a chance at: discus, javelin and shot put (in the absence of other ways to secure his wheelchair when he threw, a large friend had to anchor it from below). Long-buried track-and-field ambitions joyfully resurfaced. In 1971, he went further, forming a wheelchair basketball

team; soon he added powerlifting, a sport that took him to international competition before shoulder injuries sidelined him in the 1990s. Competing or not, sports for people with disabilities had “gotten into my blood, and there was no cure.” So he started coaching, as well as taking on local activist and administrative roles.

He was operating in a context of sweeping historical change. After World War II, the combination of improved transportation and the advent of penicillin meant that instead of perishing on the battlefield, injured soldiers came home, still young and active. At Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, England, in the late 1940s, sports for people with disabilities was born.

Over the following decades, both in the U.K. and the U.S., a quiet but profound social revolution ensued. The first Paralympic Games were held in Rome in 1960. Advances were slow; it was 1976 when the first Winter Paralympic Games took place in Sweden.

More victories have followed, and DePace has been at the frontlines. The first time he went to see the Summer Paralympics was Toronto in 1976. The Olympics that year took place in Montreal, but the Paralympians weren’t considered part of the Olympic fold, and had to raise all the money they needed to compete. But aspiring Paralympic athletes kept showing up, and so did DePace. His mother once told him “never to join an organization I couldn’t become president of,” and it’s advice he internalized, leading successively larger organizations as they lobbied for

access, for changes in law, for parity in support. He was a founding member and president of People Actively Reaching Independence (PARI), formerly Paraplegia Association of Rhode Island, and president of International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports Federation (IWAS) for 16 years.

By Atlanta (’96), he was a member of the Paralympic Games Organizing Board. At the 2000 games in Sydney, the U. S.Olympic Committee took over responsibility for the 500-or-so American athletes and coaches that compete each year in the Paralympics.

DePace has traveled the world and earned all sorts of accolades. He carried the torch in Salt Lake City and Athens, served as Chef De Mission for the Barcelona ’92 games, was inducted into the Wheelchair Sports Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and most recently, in late 2017, was named to the Paralympic Order for outstanding service to the Paralympic cause at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi. Along the way, he has logged some 700,000 frequent flier miles, and seen “all the wonders of the ancient world—the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, the Acropolis—and a lot of hotel conference rooms.” And then there are all the stories, like the time he was assigned a security detail in Athens that included a driver, a squad car with two more cops, and a motorcycle tail. When it became clear DePace wasn’t a target for the terrorist threats flying around in 2004, the five spent their time enjoying fabulous meals at the officers’ family homes.

It’s all been richer, more jet-setting, more significant, than that geeky, chronically late middle schooler in Mount Pleasant could ever have dreamt. He’s winding down the travel now, and was happy to step down to the president emeritus position on the IWAS Board. But looking back, there isn’t a thing he would change—not even that January night when his car spun out and hit a stone wall. “It opened up a whole new opportunity for experiences I wouldn’t have had otherwise,” he reflects. “I wouldn’t have met the love of my life, I wouldn’t have had lasting relationships with people all over the world. It was get focused or be lost. I think it was a surprise to everyone when I decided to get focused.”• UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 27

The incredible, tragic, wondrous story of Laurie Rockwell Sharma ’92, who once struggled to find a reason for living, and of the families she lost, the families she found, and the families she is making now.

BY MARYBETH REILLY-MCGREEN

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The two sobbing boys, naked but for a scrim of grime, wrapped their arms and legs around Laurie Rockwell Sharma ’92 and held fast. “One was maybe a year old and the other, maybe 3. And they looked up at me with their big brown eyes and they were saying something, and I didn’t know what they were saying,” Laurie remembers. “And I looked down at them and it just broke my heart.”

The year was 2006, and it was Laurie’s first trip to India as the new lead designer at JPC Equestrian, a company that manufactures equestrian clothing and gear. She looked to Varun “Timmy” Sharma, JPC Equestrian’s owner and her future husband, for guidance. “I looked around to see if there was a parent around caring for them. There was nobody. I remember asking Timmy, ‘What is this? Isn’t anybody doing anything about it?’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘No. This is just every day in India.’”

Twenty million of the world’s 100 million street children live in India, a country that is home to one third of the planet’s poor. The toddlers who clung to Laurie were likely already in the thrall of one of the begging gangs for which India is notorious. A foreigner—especially a fairhaired Western lady with kind eyes—was a good mark. To natives, on the other hand, the appearance of the two apparently abandoned, sobbing children sounded no

alarms. If anything, the kids were a nuisance, representative of a problem that is both too big and too commonplace. Gangs in India are said to maim children, or place babies in the care of toddlers, to stage more pathetic tableaus. The more pitiable a child can appear, the greater the likelihood of remuneration.

Timmy explains that a childhood in India had left him “jaded, almost dismissive. Her reaction was so unexpected.”

But for Laurie, the horror was new, and real. “I said, ‘Well, somebody has to do something,’” Laurie remembers. “And Timmy looked at me and said, ‘What is one person going to do?’”

The answer arrived on a Sunday afternoon in early 2010, when Timmy and Laurie were hosting a luncheon for JPC Equestrian’s factory employees and their families. Little did they know that three thousand people would show up. While joyous, it was a chaotic event; the attendees had never seen such a feast, and rushed the tables. Timmy and Laurie found themselves preoccupied with their factory workers’ children. “I was seeing all these amazing, adorable kids,” Laurie says.

“They had no education. They couldn’t even write their own names.”

“I saw the impact we could have in our own orbit,” Timmy adds. “Typically Indian children end up in the same professions as their parents. But I thought, if PHOTOS: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM; COURTESY OF LAURIE ROCKWELL SHARMA

Laurie Sharma with students from the Salvation Tree School.

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 29

the right opportunity presented itself, who knows what could happen?”

The pair made a decision that day.

They envisioned a different future for the children, a future with the potential to free them from low-level industrial work—and a chance to escape a thousands-year-old caste system that would otherwise tether them to the fates of their parents.

They would start a school.

But first, the story of the girl who lost her mother. Twice.

Because to understand why Laurie was riven by the sight of those two, abandoned beggar children—and why she and Timmy have now invested $10 million of Far Left, Laurie Sharma; near left, her biological mother, Jeanne Robinson. Above, the letter Robinson wrote on Laurie’s tenth birthday.

their own money into their school outside New Delhi—means looking more than 40 years back, and half a world away.

Laurie grew up in Portsmouth, R.I., the third and youngest child of adoptive parents. Her two older sisters were her parents’ biological daughters. Laurie’s parents, the Rockwells, were good people, good providers, but despite that, Laurie felt an otherness. And she felt it keenly.

She knew what it was like to be a child alone in the world.

“I was very huggy, touchy-feely, and my parents weren’t,” Laurie says. “I struggled with why I was born. I knew my life had to mean something. From a very young age, I was searching for love and

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acceptance. I dreamt about my mother’s love and finding her.”

When Laurie’s adoptive mother died in 1999, her adoptive father asked if she wished to find her biological mother. Laurie, then 29, jumped at the chance. There wasn’t much to go on—just the name and phone number of the adoption agency.

The woman who answered Laurie’s call wasn’t hopeful. The address she had on file was 30 years old, but she promised to write to see if anyone there could help.

And the agency had something else: a letter from Laurie’s mother, Jeanne Robinson. Just a teenager when she got pregnant with Laurie, Robinson had written the letter on Laurie’s tenth birthday, 19

years earlier. It spoke movingly of how she loved and longed for the daughter she had given up.

Laurie was elated. By early 2001, she had an appointment to go to the adoption agency in person. Once there, she learned that Robinson’s ex-husband had responded to the agency’s letter. He recounted how Robinson had gone to her mailbox every day hoping to find a letter from Laurie. But it was too late for a happy ending—Robinson was dead, murdered by her fiancé, Edwin B. Edwards, just a few months earlier. It had happened after the wedding of Robinson’s daughter, a half sister Laurie had never met. “He grabbed a flashlight from the trunk of his car and hit her in the head several times with it. As she fell to the ground, he jumped into his car and reversed it over her body,” Laurie remembers, her voice thick and wobbly. On the day Laurie arrived at the agency and received this news, the Providence Journal’s headline story was that Edwards had been found guilty of first-degree murder.

The paper ran a picture of Robinson with the story.

“You look just like your mother,” the lady from the agency said.

But Laurie’s birth mother was gone, again, just as she believed she was finally within reach. In an instant, yearning turned to mourning.

There was some happiness to be had, some coincidences to marvel at. Laurie met her mother’s family, as well as her biological father. “I learned that I’d waited on my grandfather while a cocktail waitress at Christy’s,” she says. “And I was close friends with a guy who turned out to be my cousin.”

Laurie put her tenth birthday letter in a cabinet that used to belong to Robinson.

She had that, and Robinson’s photo, and a new family. Those things couldn’t take away the bitterness, but they helped.

And she had her horses.

For as long as Laurie can remember, intertwined with her yearning to find her birth parents was another powerful desire: to ride horses. “It’s something I was born with for sure,” she says. “The bond they have with you, and the love they have— they show it. On top of my Christmas list every year was a pony. I looked for friends who had horses. The smell of a horse was a drug to me.”

She recalls attending the International Jumping Derby in Newport, R.I., when she was nine years old, at the invitation of a friend whose sister was competing. But Laurie’s desire to be the girl in the saddle was so strong that she couldn’t enjoy it— she wept through the event.

Her route to middle school each day took her by a horse farm. She begged the owners to let her clean stalls in return for lessons. They agreed, but Laurie’s mother forbade it. Laurie was crushed. “I had such a passion for it but I just . . . it was like a balloon that just got farther and farther away.”

She wasn’t able to join the equestrian team at URI—she had already committed to soccer, and the two sports shared the same season. But after college, she found a way. A friend at Christy’s had a horse barn and accepted her offer to muck stalls in return for lessons. By 2001, burdened by the preceding year’s deaths—the mother she had known but been unable to connect with, and the mother who had loved her so fiercely but whom she’d never met—she found solace in her old passion. She plunged herself into the equestrian world, competing in, and winning, riding competitions with her horse, Bailey. But the financial pressures were serious. “I had to become an entrepreneur,” she says, “because I knew I had to support her.”

The million-dollar idea came quietly, while she was doing laundry: she decided to embellish her saddle pad with ribbon trim. She bought a sewing machine and taught herself to sew. Her creations soon caught the attention of people at the horse shows, and she found herself taking orders while in the saddle. Encouraged, she founded her company, Equine Couture; the line caught the attention of major companies in the equine industry,

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF LAURIE ROCKWELL SHARMA; ©ANNE GITTINS PHOTOGRAPHY

Clockwise from top left: Timmy playing polo; ParisElla and Laurie; scenes from the Sharmas’ factory in India.

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Above, the Salvation Tree School under construction; below and top right, Laurie’s daughter, ParisElla, and students at the school.

among them JPC Equestrian. In 2006, at a trade show, Timmy proposed they merge businesses. In 2010, they started their school; and in 2011, they partnered for life.

They called their school Salvation Tree.

The Sharmas found a small school building to lease and opened the doors in April, 2010. That first year, there were 40 students. A class has been added every year since and by 2015, enrollment had grown to more than 400. The school was outgrowing its home.

So that year, Laurie and Timmy purchased 2.5 acres of land near their factories in Greater Noida, southeast of New Delhi in the northern part of India, and began construction of a 160,000-square-foot facility. In 2017, it welcomed not just the factory workers’ children, who continue to attend for free, but also a new cohort of tuitionpaying students.

Salvation Tree is a Christian school in a country that’s 84 percent Hindu, a religion that practitioners call a dharma, or way of life. From the beginning, it was important to Laurie that everyone know the school followed Christian values, even though they might sometimes be at odds with deeply embedded aspects of Hindu life. That became especially true for the new, wealthier families. The mixing of social classes that happens in Salvation Tree’s schoolrooms isn’t often seen in India, and some tuition-paying parents initially complained.

Laurie asked to address them: “I told them how God had blessed us and that because of that, we’re here to impact your lives and your children’s lives. I said we believe God created us all as equals, 32

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which is why we don’t believe in the caste system.”

She got a standing ovation. There were no further complaints. “It was like they were starving for someone to stand up for what’s right,” Laurie says. “There have been a thousand tremendous moments like that.”

There have been plenty of moments of frustration, too.

Laurie and Timmy have promised to educate their employees’ children through high school, and then pay for university elsewhere. While it’s a significant financial commitment, the university bill won’t be too staggering: Only four of the original class remains. The rest were pulled out of school by their parents to take care of younger siblings, or to go to work to help support the family. Laurie pleaded with the parents of one particularly gifted girl to allow her to stay in class, but failed to change their minds. “It breaks your heart,” she says.

Poverty and sexual discrimination have a symbiotic relationship in India.

Female children are often excluded from the opportunities offered to their brothers. Sometimes, in fact, they are denied life itself—illegal gender tests are popular and female infanticide is widespread, according to The Borgen Project, a humanitarian organization that monitors global poverty. The British Medical Journal contends that 12 million Indian girls have been aborted in the last 30 years.

Vaibhav Kapoor has a vision of a different India, one in which his daughter is an educated professional. “As a parent, I want the best for her,” he says. “Whatever she decides to do, we would help her to pursue that.”

Kapoor’s daughter attended a different fee-paying school before moving to Salva-

tion Tree. He credits the Sharmas with “great thought and vision. This is definitely something that is needed in our society. Education is the backbone of any country.”

JPC employee Mukesh Jha, whose children are the beneficiaries of a free education, calls the opportunity lifechanging. “My kids are doing very good in school and by the right education they will become independent and confident in their life,” he says. “As I got this opportunity, so I am confident enough that my kids will certainly do better in their life. This is the best virtue for my kids and me.”

The new school building is still under construction, and won’t be finished until 2020. At that point, it will have the capacity for 2,000 students, and the Sharmas expect to fill it.

While this is a happy ending, it is no fairytale.

“When you go to India, there’s lots of smog. The sky isn’t that blue. And it’s hard to see all these kids and families on the side of the road with nothing,” ParisElla says. “Literally nothing. But they still have smiles on their faces.”

ParisElla intends to run the school someday—and be a pediatrician. She’s 11, and anything is possible. She’s already been to India more than a dozen times and loves it. Like Laurie, she would like to live there one day.

India takes its toll on the body and the spirit. But the dust that’s so thick it’s hard to breathe, the smells that sting the eyes and nose—these can be endured. Much harder for Laurie are the tragedies she’s been made a part of. There was the woman who thrust her child at Laurie pleading, “Please take my child to PHOTOS: COURTESY OF LAURIE ROCKWELL SHARMA; NORA LEWIS

America.” There was the man who dragged himself towards her, his arms doing the work of missing legs, begging for something, anything, money, food, water. It was summer in India and the temperature was 120 degrees—at night.

Tires had melted into the pavement that day.

“I thought, ‘This is hell on earth.’ I just wanted to bring him into my house and give him a bath and a bed,” Laurie remembers.

“And then what?” Timmy had asked her.

She had to content herself with giving him a bunch of bananas.

Hardest of all to bear might be the girl who lingers outside Laurie’s home in India. Bindia, maybe 15, last name unknown, routinely stands outside Laurie’s house peddling necklaces. Day in, day out, Bindia’s been doing this since she was a toddler. She makes a lovely presentation, with her very proper: “Hi, ma’am.

How are you today?”

Over the years, Laurie has seen Bindia harden, getting into fights with other street children who dare approach her American lady. “She sees me as a dollar sign,” Laurie says, and sighs. Laurie is hers, but Bindia is not Laurie’s. Bindia has made that clear, politely declining Laurie’s repeated offers of an education, of clothes, of food, of a future—if only she would come to Salvation Tree School.

For Laurie, the sight of Bindia evokes that familiar feeling of loving-sadness that’s been with her since her first visit to India in 2006. She cannot save this child, no more than she could the man with no legs, the baby thrust at her, the naked beggar boys.

“She always says, ‘No, ma’am. No, ma’am. I can’t leave here.’ Bindia’s very smart. She taught herself English.

Jackie Romero-Bourassa, a sophomore pharmacy major, is a member of URI’s equestrian team. Equine Couture will supply the team with new jackets this year.

Yet people are so set in their ways, and it’s hard to change things,” Laurie says. “What you see takes such a toll on you. You see some gruesome stuff. But then I see a greener tree or a speck of blue sky. And I know something is starting to change.”

Laurie is changing, too. She is no longer tormented by the “whys” of her past. What came before was a necessary precursor for her life now.

“I struggled and wrestled with why I had the childhood I had, and if it was for this reason, then it was well worth it,” Laurie says. “God has ignited this fire within me to help these children. This is why I was born.” •

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CLASSACTS Ricki Lepkowski ’11, M.S. ’12, married Patrick Lyons ’11, M.S. ’12, on September 23, 2017.

Marilyn Romano Pellini ’59 and her new book, Dear Al, A Widow’s Struggles and Remembrances Julien Ayotte ’63, M.B.A. ’68, of Cumberland, R.I., has released his fourth novel, “Disappearance”.

Colonel Karen Lee Jennings ’80, U.S. Army, Retired, was the first female officer inducted to the URI ROTC Alumni Hame of Fame along with 25 other alumni.

STAYED CONNECTED

URI Alumni Association @URIAlumniAssoc | #URIAlum flickr.com/urialumni URI Alumni Association alumni.uri.edu

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TOP PHOTO TAKEN BY TIFFANY AXTMANN

KEEP US UP TO DATE ON YOUR NEWS! Submit your class note at alumni.uri.edu/note

’56

Etta Rae Lisker Blazar writes: “November 2017, I flew down to Florida to visit with roommates Ruthie Kananack Rutchik, and Sandra “Cookie” Sadow and her husband Arthur, for a short trip of a few days. Talking and hugs and loud laughter and a great deal of reminiscing were the result of the few days of being together. It was wonderful and we remembered lots of good friends we had along the way in and around Eleanor Roosevelt Hall. The 1956 graduation was a long time ago but when we three laughed together, the years melted away.

Good friends are wonderful and we know how lucky we are to still be the Roosevelt Hall trio.”

GIVE THE GIFT OF A LIFETIME To order a brick or for more information: alumni.uri.edu/centurywalk or 401.874.2242.

Century Walk bricks are placed on the Quad—the heart of campus—as permanent tributes to graduates and friends of URI. Personalize your gift to include name, class year, sorority, fraternity, club, athletic affiliation, or anything meaningful to you.

’59

Marilyn Romano Pellini has published a book in the form of letters to her husband about the difficulties of being a widow, titled Dear Al, A Widow’s Struggles and Remembrances. “I have been writing the book for over six years after my husband died in a tragic fishing accident on Cuttyhunk Island off the coast of Massachusetts,” Pellini writes. “He fished often. He fished alone, even though I protested vehemently. Fishermen don’t want anyone knowing their fishing secrets.

He had a particularly dangerous way of approaching his sport. He would don a wetsuit, sling his plug bag around his neck, and with his rod in one hand, swim to rocks many yards out in the ocean, so he could cast directly into the schools of fish. In 1984 he caught the second largest striped bass recorded in the world, and was shooting for number one.

Al was well known in fishing circles all over the East Coast. I am so hoping my book will help other widows and widowers accept and adjust to this new life they have been dealt. It is so helpful to know what someone else has been through. It also helps to know you are not going crazy, because the death of a mate is so all encompassing.” (See photo, page 34)

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Julien Ayotte M.B.A. 1968, of Cumberland, R.I., released his fourth novel, Disappearance, on November 7. Visit www.julienayotte.com to learn more. (See photo, page 34)

’69

Stanley R. Light has been elected as Department Commander of the Department of Massachusetts Jewish War Veterans of the USA. He also is a member of the National JWV Legal Advisory Task Force. Light served in the US Air Force during Vietnam.

He is the current Commander of Springfield-Freedman Post 26 JWV, and has served as both Junior Vice Commander and Senior Vice Commander of the Department of Massachusetts JWV. He graduated from WNEU School of Law in 1977.

A member of both the Mass. and R.I. Bar, he has since maintained his private law practice in Springfield, Mass.

’71

Clara Mounce is receiving the posthumous honor of having her local library in Bryan, Texas, named after her, writes her daughter, Bethe Mounce. “It is a thank you for 30-plus years of community service as the local librarian,” Bethe writes.

’78

Robert Boucher writes: “I just had to thank all alums for your response to my first book Boyhood at Twilight.

I really did not expect all the emails and the kind and encouraging words.

I was so encouraged that I’ve gone and written a second book: My Corner and the Tossed Towel. I can only hope that it garners half as much interest from you folks as the first

book. Again thank you! I guess if you continue reading I’ll have to continue writing. It’s a great equation! Have a wonderful winter and always keep an eye out for spring. Go Rams.

Boyhood at Twilight and My Corner and the Tossed Towel are available on Amazon (digital form). Email me at robert.boucher.writes@gmail.com.”

Paul H. Viau, Jr. recently earned his Doctor of Education degree at the University of Central Florida. His dissertation, entitled “Second-year to Third-year in College: Identifying Factors in the Decision Not to Return,” looked at the reasons that students who complete two full years of college work, and are eligible to return for their third year, choose not to continue their education at their native institution for their third year.

His degree was awarded in August of 2016.

’80

Colonel Karen Lee Jennings, U.S. Army, Retired, was one of 26 University of Rhode Island Reserve Officer Training Corps alumni honored during the Chapter’s biannual Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Veterans Day—the first female so honored. Inductees were recognized for having made significant achievements in the military, in their communities, and in their private lives. Also inducted were Jennings’ father, Colonel Francis George Lee Jr., U.S. Army, Retired, ’57; and her late grandfather, Captain

Francis George Lee Sr., U.S. Army, ’30. Other inductees included: Colonel Richard R. Alix, U.S. Army, Retired, ’61; Colonel Guy E. Champlin, U.S. Army, Retired, ’68; Colonel Robert H. Clegg, U.S. Army, Retired, ’69; Colonel Peter J. Cofoni, U.S. Army, Retired, ’55; Captain James E. Connerton Jr., U.S. Navy, Retired, ’58; Dr. Paul A. Croce, Captain, U.S. Army, ’62; Colonel Francis J. Cuddy Jr., U.S. Marine Corps, Retired,’66; Lieutenant Colonel Joseph V. D’Ambra, U.S. Air Force, Retired,’66; Major Anaclethe P. DeCesare, U.S. Air Force, ’41; Lieutenant Colonel Jason C. Glick, U.S. Army, Retired, ’95; First Lieutenant James B. Gorral Jr., U.S. Air Force, ’49; Lieutenant Colonel John J. Gutter, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired, ’63; Colonel Richard H. Kenyon, U.S. Army, Retired, ’60; Colonel Scott R. Larson, U.S. Army, Retired, ’72; Colonel Robert E. Lees, U.S. Army, Retired, ’53; Second Lieutenant Robert J. Manuel, U.S. Army, ’51; Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Schaller, U.S. Army, Retired, ’62; Colonel Joseph F. Short, U.S. Army, Retired, ’56; Colonel Richard A. Stansfield, U.S. Army, Retired, ’63; Lieutenant Colonel Peter L. Tancredi, U.S. Army, Retired, ’68; Lieutenant Colonel Herbert M. Tuttle, U.S. Army, Retired, ’64; Colonel LaMont J. Wells, U.S. Army, Retired, ’74; Brigadier General Harry G. Woodbury Jr., U.S. Army, Retired, ’38. (See photo, Page 34)

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 35

THE 2018 HENLEY WOMEN’S REGATTA will be held JUNE 22–JUNE 24, 2018, in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England.

Don’t miss this historic opportunity to support the URI Women’s Rowing Team as they head to the Henley for the second time.

For more information about the Henley Women’s Regatta,

hwr.org.uk

’94

An event will be held at The Leander Club in Remenham in the English county of Berkshire, adjoining Henley-on-Thames, on June 20, 2018. The Leander Club, founded in 1818, is one of the largest and oldest rowing clubs in the world. More information and registration will be available soon at alumni.uri.edu.

Questions? Please contact Amy Simonini in Alumni Relations

at 401.874.5808 or asimonini@uri.edu. ’82

November 2017 reunion of members of Alpha Xi Delta Sorority. (See photo, below left.)

’83

Andrew Gaynor ’98, Lars Guck ’91, Jon Ziskind ’95, Chuck Allen ’91, Jamie Hilton ’83 placed at the International Six Metre Class World Championship of Sailing in Vancouver, British Columbia, in September, 2017.

(See photo, below middle.)

’85

Dr. Gilman (Whiting) Brown, a previous Colloquium speaker, received the Purdue College of Education’s Distinguished Education Alumni Award this October.

According to the College of Education’s Website, the Alumni Award is an honor given every two years to a select group of alumni whose achievements and service warrant special recognition. In addition, on November 11, 2017, Dr. Brown—who is a graduate of both URI and Rhode Island College

Members of Alpha Xi Delta ’82 and ’83: Sharon Sienko Burton ’82, Robyn McCormick Graham, Carol Bouchard Awiszus ’83, Becky Ferri Orr, Mary Menucci Small ’82, Diane Gomes Gaj ’82, Mary O’Neill Murray, Paula Sadlier Fontaine ’82.

36

QUADANGLES SPRING 2018

worked for various YMCA associations throughout Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Binder holds a dual Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and in political science from St. Mary’s College, Maryland, and a Master of Arts in education with a focus on management and training from the University of Rhode Island. “Our new board members are committed to advancing our mission of stimulating economic growth throughout our destination by continuing to attract both leisure and business travelers in an increasingly competitive travel marketplace,” said Evan Smith, president and CEO of Discover Newport.

(M.A.T. ’94)—was again honored as the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Alexinia Baldwin Gifted And African American Male Award at the 65th Annual National Association for Gifted Children.

’93

Karen Binder will represent the town of Bristol on the Discover Newport Board of Directors. Binder is the Executive Director of Blithewold Mansion, Gardens & Arboretum in Bristol, a post she has held since July 2004. Prior to Blithewold, Binder

From left to right: Andrew Gaynor ’98, Lars Guck ’91, Jon Ziskind ’95, Chuck Allen ’91, and Jamie Hilton ’83 in Vancouver B.C. for the 6 Metre World Championship.

Elisa M. Santoro Witzenburg has joined the firm Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, P.C. as an associate in the Trusts and Estates Department in Garden City, Long Island, N.Y. Santoro focuses on estate planning for high net worth clients including the preparation of wills and a multitude of trusts designed to minimize estate and gift taxes.

She handles all facets of estate and trust administration, including the preparation of estate tax returns, and estate and trust accountings, as well as will and accounting contests and guardianship proceedings. In addition, Ms. Santoro has extensive experience in residential and commercial real estate matters and all aspects of land use and zoning proceedings. Patricia Galteri, Managing Attorney and Chair of the firm’s Trusts & Estates Department said, “Her arrival reflects the firm’s continuing commitment to providing top quality services to its clients, and we look forward to her contributions.” (See photo, below.)

Dana M. Horton is one of seven new partners at the firm Robinson+Cole.

She is an insurance litigation attorney

Elisa M. Santoro Witzenbug ’94

PHOTO COURTESY PATRICK BROWN

CLOSEUP

King of Odd Jobs Patrick Brown ’14

In the summer after his freshman year, Patrick Brown’s family suffered a financial crisis that threatened his ability to finish his degree in communication studies. With his last $40, he made flyers announcing that his labor was available: gardening, chauffeuring, grocery shopping, whatever his neighbors needed.

The need was great.

The Sigma Pi president became so busy he recruited fraternity brothers, and in the process, created a business: Rentsons. Tagline: “Rent young adults to do the work you wish your kids would do.”

After URI, Brown created Aqua, a company specializing in water special effects for concert tours. But life on the road didn’t fit; he missed his community and the stability of a routine.

At 24, Brown says, “I had a quarter-life crisis and bailed.”

He relaunched Rentsons, staying true to his college model:

“Neighbors” (clients) can rent hourly labor from “sons” and “daughters” ages 16 to 26 for yard work, painting, swingset assembly, wood chopping—even pet turtle searches (yes, it happened).

Business is good; he has 70 employees and counting, with plans to be in Boston, Cape Cod, and Buzzard’s Bay by summer and across the East Coast by 2019. Rentsons has a core value: encouraging employees to consider entrepreneurship.

They all get QuickBooks Self-Employed and Acorns, a tool that automatically invests spare change, plus a journal and Brown’s book, Life to the Full. He wants them to think about community, investing, giving back, and, of course, their futures.

“My passion is to see communities unite,” Brown said. “And, to see kids with great jobs.”

BY MARY ELIZABETH REILLY-MCGREEN UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 37

with over 15 years of experience representing and advising insurance companies in large loss property subrogation matters, property insurance coverage disputes, and bad faith claims. Her experience includes handling proceedings from inception through resolution in state, federal, and appellate courts. Horton represents insurers who have compensated their customers for damage pursuant to their property insurance policies, and she pursues recovery from responsible third parties. She also has extensive experience litigating and advising insurers on coverage issues and defends insurance companies in extra-contractual claims and bad faith litigation throughout New England.

Horton is a member of Robinson+ Cole’s Insurance and Reinsurance Group and works primarily in the firm’s Providence office.

’95

Eric Lalime, a senior vice president and financial advisor for Merrill Lynch based in Paramus, N.J., was recently recognized on the Financial Times “401 Top Advisors” list. In total, 55 Merrill Lynch advisors were recognized this year and Lalime was among the best. The Financial Times created this list of elite professionals who specialize in advising on US employers’ defined contribution (DC) plans from across the country.

As the Financial Times noted, “The FT 401 represents the best advisers who specialize in advising DC plans

offered by corporate, non-profit and government employers...

Retirement plans are becoming more complicated, even for advisers with experience and teammates.

The FT 401 provides a snapshot of leaders and best practices.”

’01

Ray Cormier has been promoted to director of operations of Groton Operations at Electric Boat, reporting to VP Jim Gildart. He succeeds R.C. Miller, who has retired after 15 years of service. In his new post, Cormier will be responsible for all Operation’s construction activities for inside and outside machinists, electricians, carpenters, painters and sheet-metal trades. “At this time of tremendous growth, opportunity and challenge, Ray will focus on building capable, high-quality submarines for the Navy on-time and on-budget, while developing the shipbuilders of tomorrow,” said Gildart. Cormier holds a URI Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. He is also a graduate of the company’s Business Leadership Program.

’03

Mark Torok, M.S. ’05, M.B.A. ’11, of Wakefield, R.I., opened Anchor Physical Therapy in May 2017. His outpatient clinic, located in Wakefield, specializes in the evaluation and treatment of general and complex orthopedic conditions utilizing nonsurgical, pre-surgical and postsurgical physical therapy interventions

URI Talent Development Program 50th Anniversary Celebration Saturday, October 6, 2018 Omni Hotel, Providence, Rhode Island 38

QUADANGLES SPRING 2018

Kemi Omisore ’10, M.P.A. ’12, of Afrobeat Fit.

as well as sports rehabilitation. Anchor Physical Therapy provides comprehensive and evidence-based rehab as members of the community healthcare team while playing an integral role in the musculoskeletal and neuromuscular health and wellness of patients. (See photo, above right.)

’08

Dr. Kellye Donovan, Pharm. D., is once again a student at URI, pursuing her second doctorate in Pharmaceutical Sciences.

’10

Kemi Omisore, M.P.A. ’12, is currently the owner, choreographer, and sweat coach of Afrobeat Fit. Kemi is of the West African diaspora; hailing from Nigeria and Liberia, but born in the United States. Since graduating from the University of Rhode Island, she started Afrobeat

Mark Torok, M.S. ’05, M.B.A. ’11, of Anchor Physical Therapy.

Fit. They are sweat sessions where music and movement derive from West Africa and the U.K. Sessions vary from college takeovers to conferences, corporate, and community sweats. They come with coaches, live DJ’s, photo booth fun, giveaways and lastly a sense of solidarity amongst globally scattered nations. In 2017, Afrobeat Fit hosted over 100 sweat sessions, and brought the sweat to various colleges and summer festivals around the Northeast. Colleges include Harvard (Black Health Matters Conference), College of the Holy Cross and URI. Afrobeat Fit also has a special emphasis on altruism, community and inclusion, and hosted over 20 events throughout the year where patrons would either “dance to donate”, or attend for free or at a discounted rate. More at AfrobeatFit. com. (See photo, above left.)

Mark your calendar and plan to join us in October to celebrate this milestone event together! We’ll be sending out more details and registration information this summer.

More information: Sara Potter at Talent Development at 401.874.2901 or scpotter@uri.edu.

PHOTO: ALEXIS HUNLEY

CLOSEUP

Dating for Athletes Amanda McGrew ’09

When you’ve lived the highs and lows, the intensity, and the long-term commitment of collegiate athletics, it gives you something in common with other athletes. That’s the realization that came to Amanda McGrew, whose life has been shaped by basketball. Hoops brought the Santa Monica, Calif., native across the country to Rhode Island, where she played for the Rams from 2005-09.

Now a physical education teacher back on the West Coast, and single, the dual-degree holder—finance and marketing—has started a new venture that ties her worlds together: Playoff Dating App. Available on Facebook, the app aims to connect collegiate and professional athletes all over the world, pairing users based on location, sport, and interests.

“Athletics has always been a huge part of my life, the biggest factor that has shaped all the decisions I make,” McGrew says. “Whether you’re still an athlete or not, dating someone who shares that perspective is invaluable.”

McGrew is teaching PE and coaching basketball full time, and says the app has “completely consumed my life—but my life revolves around sports anyway, so it doesn’t feel out of place when other coaches ask me about it.” So does the online matchmaker have time to date herself? McGrew says she’s just trying to get her business off the ground while “keeping my sanity and quality of life.” There have, however, been personal rewards: Friends have used the app to meet people. “I get excited about creating something that might have a positive impact on people’s lives.”

BY SHANE DONALDSON

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

39

’13

Andrea (Sciamacco) Duffney, M.B.A ’14, has been promoted from CPA to senior tax specialist at the accounting firm of Sansiveri, Kimball & Co, LLP. (See photo below.)

’14

LEGACY Celebrate Your URI Legacy with Us! Commencement Weekend Legacy Family Brunch Saturday, May 19, 2018 • 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Alumni Center, Kingston Campus

leg•a•cy noun \ıle-gə-sē\: a student or alumnus/a who has

a parent, grandparent, or sibling who graduated from URI.

By definition, legacies are extraordinary families who have given continued support to URI for generations. Each year, we invite graduating legacy seniors and their families to our Legacy Family Brunch during Commencement Weekend. Save the date for this year’s event—it’s a tradition you helped build!

Learn more | alumni.uri.edu/legacy

Lauren Killea ’09, GSO ’14 to Steven Morehouse on September 13, 2014.

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QUADANGLES SPRING 2018

Jessica Nalbandian ’13 to Andrew Palmer ’15 on Saturday, August 5, 2017.

Jordan Rossi ’14 has been promoted from CPA to senior accountant at the accounting firm of Sansiveri, Kimball & Co, LLP. (See photo below.)

Weddings Lauren Killea ’09, GSO ’14 to Steven Morehouse on September 13, 2014 (See photo below.)

Ricki Lepkowski ’11, M.S. ’12 to Patrick Lyons ’11, M.S. ’12 on September 23, 2017 (See photo, p. 34) Jessica Nalbandian ’13 to Andrew Palmer ’15 on Saturday, August 5, 2017 (See photo below.)

Esther Reynoso ’15 engaged to Conor O’Donnell on January 2, 2018

Births Lauren Killea Morehouse ’09, M.S. ’14, and Steven Morehouse, twin daughters Elliana and Myles on October 25, 2016. (Photo below.)

Dr. Kellye Loethen Donovan P.M.D. ’08 and Daniel Donovan ’01 welcomed a son, Connor Philip

Donovan on October 22, 2017. at South County Hospital, R.I. (Photo below.)

In Memoriam Dr. Mary S. Ravin ’44 of Sherman Oaks, Calif. On November 17, 2017 Pauline “Skipp” Hill Shafer ’45 of West Lafayette, Ind. on February 25, 2017 Dr. Constance Child Whitaker ’46 of Delaware, Ohio on October 8, 2017 Clayton Arthur Kemp ’48 of Farmington, Maine on May 7, 2014 Richard “Dick” Baker ’49 of Fishers Island, N.Y. on October 21, 2017 Robert A. Eley ’49 of Anthem, Ariz. on May 11, 2017 Jane T. Johnson ’49 of Stow, Mass. on January 12, 2017 John J. McLaughlin Sr. ’49 of Warwick, R.I. on November 1, 2017 Walter Leonard Bergman ’50 of Hartford, Maine on October 5, 2012 Arthur Bernard Klein ’50 of Highland Park, Ill. on November 15, 2017 Robert H. Stevenson ’50 of Barrington, R.I. on November 17, 2017 Elton R. Tullie ’50 of Naples, Fla. on March 17, 2016

Connor Philip Donovan, born October 22, 2017. He joins big sister Mackenzie Katherine.

Elliana and Myles Morehouse, born on Oct. 25, 2016. It was only fitting to take a picture with mom’s oar and the onesies the rowing team sent to them!

Andrea (Sciamacco) Duffney ’13, M.B.A. ’14 was promoted to Senior Tax Specialist at Sansiveri, Kimball & Co, LLP.

Jordan Rossi ’14 was promoted to senior accountant at Sansiveri, Kimball & Co, LLP.

COPYRIGHT WHAT CHEER PHOTO 2017

Wendell Whaley ’50 of Hendersonville, N.C. on April 14, 2015

ALUMNISCENE

Ernest “Ernie” Dion ’51 of Bristol, R.I. on May 2, 2017 Howard C. Lewis ’51 of Warwick, R.I. on December 13, 2017

October 21, 2017 Legacy Family Reception

Dr. Peter Rizzi ’51 of Plymouth, Mass. on December 31, 2017

“URI and my family are synonymous. We all bleed Keaney Blue. My parents and I had a great time at the Legacy Reception followed by an entertaining evening with Whoopi Goldberg.”

Nancie (Sibley) Bodell ’52 of Middleton, Mass. on October 19, 2017 Faith Kipp Brown ’52 of Asheville, N.C. on October 6, 2017

—Deb Shaw ’92

Sanford S. Cohen ’52 of Bethesda, Md. on April 16, 2016

Pictured (L to R): Loretta Shaw, M.A. ’82, Richard Shaw ’61, and Deb Shaw ’92

Philip E. Moore ’52 of Surprise, Ariz., on March 27, 2017 Theodore Zachadnyk ’52 of Cumberland, R.I. on October 23, 2017 Dorothy O’Connell Brennan ’53 of Attleboro Falls, Mass. on January 2, 2018 William R. Hutcheon ’53 of Wakefield, R.I. on November 5, 2017 Robert “Bob” Burns ’54 of Barrington, R.I. on February 15, 2017 Frank Carr ’54 of Middletown, R.I. on March 6, 2016 Theodore Irving Blume ’55 of Roslyn, N.Y. on August 30, 2017 Charles E. Morris, Jr. ’55, M.A. ’65 of North Kingstown, R.I. on November 23, 2017

October 21, 2017 Young Alumni Homecoming Social “It was great catching up with old friends and meeting other young alumni at the Homecoming social. I also really enjoyed checking out some of the new places that have opened up around campus, like Whalers, too.”

—Britny Rogala, Pharm.D. ’13 (Pictured with Elise Fitzgerald ’10)

Eugene H. Benben ’56 of Holyoke, Mass. on October 11, 2017 Charles Wiesner, Jr. ’56 of Glastonbury, Conn. on July 25, 2017

November 11, 2017

Stephanie R. Blecharczyk ’57, M.S. ’61 of East Boothbay, Maine on December 21, 2017

ROTC Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

Domenic Colarusso ’57 of Providence, R.I. on March 17, 2017

“I really enjoy working with the ROTC Alumni Chapter. My late husband Jack was a career military officer and the ROTC Alumni Chapter helps to keep me in touch with that very important part of my life.”

Frederick William Roth Jr. ’57 of Harwich, Mass. on August 14, 2017 Richard A. Fortin ’58 of Lincoln, R.I. on November 16, 2017 Carol Sherman Carr ’59 of Middletown, R.I. on March 9, 2017 Donald James Hey ’59 of Cranston, R.I. on December 4, 2017

—Jane M. Stich ’62, M.A. ’69, M.B.A ’83 Pictured ( L to R ) Major Gregory Couturier ‘02, M.B.A. ‘07; Jane Stich ‘62, M.A. ‘69, M.B.A. ‘83; and Lieutenant Colonel Brian Mehan.

Aldo Robert Sammartino ’59 of Wickford, R.I. on October 8, 2017 Dennis W. Flowers ’60 of Cumberland, R.I. on May 18, 2016 Arthur R. Gamache ’60 of Tewksbury, Mass. on October 16, 2017

If you attended a URI alumni event and would like to share a photo and a reminiscence, we’d love to hear from you!

Please write to us at alumni@uri.edu.

Learn more I alumni.uri.edu UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND

41

Preparing for a Career Discussion with Your Manager

Louis M. Damiani ’69 of Naples, Fla. on October 16, 2017 Leslie C. Hyde ’69 of St. George, Maine on December 25, 2017 Col. Eugene L. Manner ’69 of Chesterfield, Va. on November 13, 2015 Dianne Elizabeth Parisi ’69 of Bristow, Va. on October 13, 2017 Edward R. Rendine ’69 of North Providence, R.I. on December 31, 2016 John “Jack” Fay, M.A. ’70 of South Kingstown, R.I. on July 16, 2014 Joyce Marie (Montaquila) Honour ’70 of Cranston, R.I. on December 23, 2015 Anne Q. Dillon ’71 of Tannersville, Penn. on November 7, 2017 Martin Fagot, M.S. ’71 of St. Louis, Mo. on October 20, 2017 Gloria Decastro Heisler ’71 of Providence, R.I. on December 3, 2017

The first step in knowing we want to have a career discussion with our manager, is simply knowing we need one! Triggers knock on our door, telling us it is time to talk: job challenge no longer exists, learning has ceased, appetite for a new role or desire for expanded responsibilities in the current role ensues. Unfortunately, often the road ends here. “We” are our own interference. Fear, assumed lack of support, consequences, are examples of interference we create, and career discussions do not happen.

How do we lift ourselves to conduct a career discussion?

Alumni may call Alumni Career Services at 401.874.9404 or email our Alumni Career Advisors: Audra Lavoie: audraryane@uri.edu Karen Rubano: krubano@uri.edu

Read More | alumni.uri.edu/careerservices Dr. Robert L. Laurence, M.S. ’60 of Waynesboro, Va. on December 28, 2017

Frederick M. Moorhouse Jr., M.B.A. ’65 of Amity, Maine on February 1, 2017

Vincent D. Morgera Esq. ’61 of Providence, R.I. on June 4, 2017

Dennis H. Abbott ’66 of Homosassa, Fla. on December 2, 2017

Denise Nolan ’61 of Highland Park, N.J. on February 10, 2014

John H. “Jack” Musto ’66 of Bonita Springs, Fla. on July 21, 2017

Olga K. Ingelse ’63, M.S. ’81 of Rockville, Md. on August 31, 2017

Joseph L. Sullivan, M.A. ’66 of Rumford, R.I. on November 18, 2017

Edward “Ted” Singleton ’68 of Lakewood Ranch, Fla. on October 8, 2017

George Thomas Matook ’64 of Johnston, R.I. on October 27, 2017

Patricia (Belden) Carlson ’67 of Wickford, R.I. on October 21, 2017

Judith A. Beagle ’69 of New Britain, Conn. on January 4, 2017

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QUADANGLES SPRING 2018

Shirley Knowlton Williams ’67 of Naples, Fla. on April 15, 2017 John M. Georges ’68 of Portsmouth, R.I. on November 8, 2016 Andrew J. Sherry ’68 of Barrington, R.I. on July 24, 2016

Clara Mounce ’71 of College Station, Texas, on December 21, 2016.

Edmond J. Lemoi ’72 of Cranston, R.I. on October 4, 2017 David L. McEvoy ’73 of Summerfield, Fla. on November 27, 2017 John C. Siebert ’73 of Martinez, Calif. in May, 2017 Patrick Keogh ’74 of Johnston, R.I. on October 23, 2017 John F. “Jack” Mello ’74 of West Warwick, R.I. on November 13, 2015 Louis P. Morrocco ’74 of Cranston, R.I. on December 26, 2017 Gregory Paul Murphy ’74, M.S. ’78 of Hopkinton, Mass. on July 27, 2016 Richard A. Toupin ’74 of Narragansett, R.I. on November 11, 2017 Robert J. King Jr. ’75 of Westerly, Mass. on October 7, 2017 David L. Terry ’75 of Wakefield, R.I. on November 27, 2017 Dr. Joan Ziegltrum ’75 of Olympia, Wash. on October 8, 2017 James Henry Gray ’76 of Fountain Valley, Calif. on October 7, 2017 Dianne Donnarumma ’79 of Alpharetta, Ga. on January 10, 2017 Dr. Thomas H. Brannigan ’80 of Sun City Center, Fla. on November 20, 2013 Susan Kander Doherty ’81 of Round Hill, Va. on October 22, 2017 Stephen J. Reynolds ’81 of South Attleboro, Mass. on December 12, 2017 Lorraine L. (Faucher) McNally ’83 of Wakefield, R.I. on November 26, 2017

Marie Pauline (Dion) Delvecchio ’84 of Warwick, R.I. on October 25, 2017 William F. Walsh III ’84 of Lincoln, R.I. on June 12, 2015 Carol Cannon Cronin, M.A. ’87 of Narragansett, R.I. on October 20, 2017

COME BACK TO KINGSTON!

Stephen R. Hiebner ’89 of North Kingstown, R.I. on October 15, 2017 John D. Hohman, Jr. M.C.P. ’89 of Lititz, Penn. on October 20, 2017 Kara A. Balabanis ’91 of Weston, Mass. on December 30, 2017 Theresa A. Downey, Ph.D. ’93 of Lynn, Mass. on July 26, 2017 Keri Lynn Miller ’02 of Warwick, R.I. on October 19, 2017 Krista Clayton ’08 of Lakeland, Fla. on December 24, 2017 Erica J. Phillips ’10 of East Schodack, N.Y. on October 22, 2017 Elizabeth Marie Gooding ’12 of Warwick, R.I. on October 6, 2017 Travis C. Greene ’12 of North Kingstown, R.I. on January 3, 2018 Tyler S. Ayan ’17 of Marion, Mass. on June 24, 2017

Faculty and Staff In Memoriam Ward Abusamra ’77, Professor of music and honorary degree recipient, of South Kingstown, R.I., on October 29, 2017 Josie Prescott Campbell, M.A. ’68, Professor of English until 2010, of Portsmouth, Va. on October 24, 2017 Professor of Zoology and Parasitology for 46 years and Professor Emeritus and Honorary Alumni ’84, Dr. Kerwin E. “Kerv” Hyland, Jr. of Exeter, N.H. on November 24, 2017 Dr. William F. Kelly ’87 Professor of elementary education and honorary degree recipient, of Wakefield, R.I., on October 9, 2017 Dr. Douglas Wardwell, an adjunct professor in the Department of Communication Studies, of Myrtle Beach, S.C. on November 4, 2017 CORRECTIONS FOR WINTER IN MEMORIAM Anthony Chrones ’53 of Cranston, R.I. on June 22, 2017 William H. McDevitt ’62 of Warwick, R.I. on June 24, 2017 Norman G. Gadoury, Jr. ’76 of Providence, R.I. on August 7, 2016

May 18-20, 2018

Class of 1968 • 50th Reunion If you graduated in 1968, don’t miss your 50th Reunion, which takes place during commencement weekend.

Event details: alumni.uri.edu/50threunion

For more information, contact Christina Haas ’05, Alumni Relations, 401.874.7402 or christina_haas@uri.edu.

June 8-9, 2018

Golden Grad Weekend

Alumni who graduated more than 50 years ago are invited to this very special reunion.

Event details: alumni.uri.edu/goldengrad For more information, contact Samantha Stevens, M.S. ’15, Alumni Relations, 401.874.4604 or smstevens@uri.edu.

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 43

BACKPAGE

it Subm y sb entrie 5, 1 April 2018

PHOTO CAPTION CONTEST

Have a funny idea for what’s going on in this photograph from the University of Rhode Island library archives? Email your caption to pjack@uri.edu, or respond at uri.edu/quadangles.

WINTER WINNERS: ROOTS ARE OUR ROOTS This image from the winter issue is titled “Study of Grasses Circa 1892” in our archives, and is one of the oldest photographs we have. It goes right back to URI’s roots: 1892 was the year the State Agricultural School became the Rhode Island College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, and the wonderfully dressed men pictured may well have been among the college’s very first graduating class of 17 students.

Students at Kingston have studied turf grass every year since then. Perhaps it’s the program’s longevity that helped this photo elicit the biggest response we’ve had yet for a caption call— upwards of 60 entries. Thanks to all who participated.

RUNNER UP:

“Yup, grass, definitely grass!”

WINNING CAPTION:

“Nobody move— I lost my contact lens.”

—Peter M. Vieira ’73

—Mark Simon ’68

TWO HONORABLE MENTIONS:

“How come their grass looks greener than ours?”

—Suzanne Oringel Grossman ’59

Outstanding in their field.

—John Gerber ’73

40 44

QUADANGLES SPRING 2018

PHOTOS: COURTESY URI SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

URI students are bursting with intelligence, creativity, and ingenuity. A gift to the URI Annual Fund allows them to nurture all of that great potential and frees them to focus on their education without financial worries.

Give them a place to blossom.

Make a gift. Make a difference. Give online at urifoundation.org/giveonline, call 401.874.4786, or send a check to URI Foundation, P.O. Box 1700, Kingston, RI 02881.

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Alumni Association University of Rhode Island

Alumni Center 73 Upper College Road Kingston, RI 02881 USA ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

an evening of grapes grain

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Au Silent Raffles and

June 9, 2018 • 5–7:30 p.m.

President’s House Lawn URI Kingston Campus Ninth Annual Benefit for URI Women’s Athletics Hosted by Lynn Baker-Dooley

Enjoy a wide selection of fine wines, specialty beers, and select foods provided by area businesses.

Honorary Chair Kimberly Nelson ’81, D.V.M. $125 per person Must be 21 years of age to attend.

For sponsorship opportunities, proxy bidding or event information, call Shana Greene at 401.874.2024.

Special thanks to

uri.edu/grapesgrain