UIC Magazine Winter 2021

UIC and UI Health are providing critical leadership in the midst of a crisis—and their efforts may help create a better future.

Call to Action

Winter 2021

Connecting Alumni and Friends to the University of Illinois Chicago

Alumni Exchange

Join us in the UIC Alumni Exchange Connect with experts and thought leaders from across UIC and chat with fellow alumni as you learn, grow, explore and even escape from the everyday with Alumni Exchange.

Register now for an exciting lineup of 2021 events.

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PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA '08

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Call to Action

UIC and UI Health are providing critical leadership in the midst of a crisis—and their efforts may help create a better future. BY CINDY KUZMA

PHOTO: ERIKA CH ÁVEZ

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A Tale of Two Rivers

UIC’s Freshwater Lab explores the inequalities of Chicago’s freshwater resources. BY STEVE HENDERSHOT

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FROM THE CHANCELLOR

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UIC TODAY Barbara Ransby a Freedom Scholar, new contraceptive for women and NASA taps UIC planetary scientist.

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IGNITE Emergency funds help keep students on track and protect health care workers.

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Seeds of Change UIC’s Heritage Garden envisions a diverse, sustainable and just society.

BY BRIDGET ESANGGA

UNIQUELY UIC Raja Talati adopts telemedicine and tracks COVID-19 patients over time.

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LETTER TO ALUMNI

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Unstoppable

UIC students forge a brighter future with some of academia’s most prestigious awards. BY JULIE B. SEVIG

CLOSING NOTE Senior Adit Bhagat on discipline and achievement.

@UICAlumni @UIC_Alumni @UICAlumni go.uic.edu/linkedin advance.uic.edu

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATION: ETHAN G. BROWN

PHOTO COURTESY: UIC HERITAGE GARDEN

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CONNECTING ALUMNI AND FRIENDS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS CHICAGO EDITORIAL BOARD Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez Caryn Schultz Korman Jessica Olive Tom Wamsley Managing Editor: Bridget Esangga Senior Art Director and Designer: Ethan G. Brown Designer: Rebecca Ruhlman Cover Photo: Joshua Clark BFA '08 ADVANCE.UIC.EDU CONTACT INFORMATION:

UIC MAGAZINE: uicmag@uic.edu UIC ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: (312) 413-8272, uicalumni@uic.edu OFFICE OF THE VICE CHANCELLOR FOR ADVANCEMENT: (312) 413-8272, advance@uic.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: (312) 413-8272, uicmag@uic.edu

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acing a multilayered crisis over recent months that included the greatest public health battle of our time, civic unrest and a divisive political climate, I will confess that anxiety and unease occasionally consumed my consciousness. The overall safety and well-being of our community weighed heavily on my mind—and my soul.

As the head of this university, one I genuinely love championing, it was daunting to consider how we might attack the present, let alone the future.

And yet, time and again, I saw the UIC spirit rise, and inspiration overtook any malaise circling around my mind. Rather than complex problems triggering discord and division, I saw our university rally. We crafted prudent solutions and embraced collaborative, purposeful action. We persevered and doubled down on our mission to educate, drive scholarship, unlock opportunity and address societal needs.

Amid pandemic-induced uncertainty, we shifted our models of operation and created multiple contingency plans addressing financial and operational concerns. We installed protective health measures and provided expert guidance in policy and advocacy to a public clamoring for credible insights. We also pursued clinical solutions to a new viral enemy. In fact, our faculty have captured more than 50 awards for COVID19-related studies and developed more than three dozen COVID-19 research protocols, including seven clinical trials.

With the pandemic amplifying health disparities, UIC led COVID-19 response and relief efforts. We established community testing sites and provided care to some of our region’s most vulnerable populations.

We distributed meals to COVID-19 Medicaid patients and dispensed some 7,500 COVID-19 community kits containing masks, hand sanitizer and educational material to neighbors in need.

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As social unrest mounted and called for the once-and-for-all end to systemic racism, we listened intently to our community. We heard their frustration, pain and angst.

While UIC has long been hailed as one of the nation’s most diverse, civically minded universities, we recognized the opportunity to do more and acted. We implemented initiatives to diversify our faculty and student ranks and created an Office of Community Collaboration to facilitate more community outreach. We formed the UIC Public Safety Board to provide public safety recommendations for the campus, particularly those pertaining to racial equity and social justice. And we are investing in more mental health and academic support services for our students with a commitment to bring on campus a new cohort of professionals in these areas who reflect the demographics of our students.

The year 2020 demanded thoughtful action, and the UIC community responded in earnest. Such spirit and grit continue to motivate and inspire me, and I hope it ignites you as well. We will emerge stronger than ever before and contribute to a safer, more equitable world.

After all, we have consistently demonstrated our ability to do just that.

—MICHAEL AMIRIDIS CHANCELLOR, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS CHICAGO

chancellor@uic.edu (312) 413-3350 @uicamiridis chancellor.uic.edu

FROM THE CHANCELLOR

PHOTO: SCOTT THOMPSON

Inspired

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UIC TODAY

This season, the UIC men’s basketball team joined NCAA student-athletes, division chairs and committee members in taking a pledge to be “Champions of Unity.” Student-athletes began wearing a patch when the season safely began in November to serve as a symbol of stronger unity and support among the NCAA’s schools and student-athletes on the court, on campus and in their communities.

UIC ranked among the top 30 ethnically diverse and economically diverse universities in 2021.

PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA '08

IMAGE COURTESY: EVOFEM BIOSCIENCES

—U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT BEST COLLEGES RANKINGS

UIC TODAY

New Birth Control for Women

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a contraceptive gel called Phexxi, which was developed by UIC researchers and can be used by women on-demand at the time of intercourse. The gel—which is a combination of natural compounds—works by keeping vaginal pH levels in a range that is inhospitable to sperm.

“Many women feel that hormonal, long-acting birth control is not a viable option, and there are women who struggle to access prescription or implanted birth control due to lack of insurance or access to health care,” said inventor Donald Waller, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the UIC College of Pharmacy. “There is a need for in-the-moment options that give women control, and I think many women will appreciate that such an option now exists and does not rely on steroid hormones.”

The contraceptive is the fourth pharmaceutical developed by UIC researchers to achieve FDA approval.

“This is a great example of UIC’s tremendous strength in drug discovery and innovation. It really illustrates that our faculty members not only conduct groundbreaking research but are also passionate about taking that research to the point where it can have a positive impact on people’s lives,” said TJ Augustine, vice chancellor for innovation at UIC. —Jacqueline Carey

UIC Joins IMSI UIC mathematicians and statisticians will join colleagues from leading research universities in Illinois to form the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation.

Funded with a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the University of Chicago-based institute will apply powerful mathematical ideas to urgent contemporary scientific and technological challenges, while enriching scientific research and workforce development in Chicago and Illinois.

The researchers from UIC, University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will build a program that considers problems in a range of fields already being studied across the four partner institutions, including climate change, health care, quantum information theory, artificial intelligence, data science, economics and materials science.

UIC will play a key role in the institute’s mission to increase diversity in the mathematical sciences. Through an expansion of University of Chicago's Young Scholars Program, UIC will host a summer program for middle school and high school students beginning in 2021.

“This expansion of the Young Scholars Program at UIC will focus on excellence and inclusion, and it will allow many more students from schools throughout Chicago to participate,” said Brooke Shipley, UIC professor and head of mathematics, statistics and computer science and co-principal investigator of the grant. —Brian Flood

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Ransby, a ‘Freedom Scholar’

PHOTO: DON J. USNER

Acclaimed historian and UIC professor Barbara Ransby was named to the Freedom Scholars, a national group of progressive academics at the “forefront of movements for economic and social justice.” Ransby and 11 other members of the inaugural scholarly cohort will each receive $250,000 over two years as part of a $3 million investment in social and economic justice scholarship by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and the Group Health Foundation.

The Freedom Scholars awards were established to enhance the financial resources available to scholars leading abolitionist, Black, feminist, queer, radical and anti-colonialist studies. Ransby is a professor of Black studies, history and gender and women’s studies; a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences distinguished professor; and an award-winning author. In July, she became the first endowed John D. MacArthur Chair at UIC and only the second in the history of endowed MacArthur chairs in the University of Illinois System. She also directs the Social Justice Initiative at UIC, which promotes connections between academics and community organizers working on social justice. The Freedom Scholar resources will support the Social Justice Initiative’s Portal Project to bring community fellows and visiting scholars to campus.

“As a historian who writes about radical Black women, I take inspiration from my subjects’ fierceness and fortitude. In this moment, I am excited to launch and lead the Portal Project, which will convene cutting-edge scholars and front-line activists in conversations about how to change a world deeply in need of change,” said Ransby, who has been at UIC since 1996. “Carmen Rojas [president of the Marguerite Casey Foundation] is a visionary leader in philanthropy. Her initiative will facilitate game-changing scholarship in the areas of social and racial justice.” —Brian Flood

NASA Taps UIC Planetary Scientist

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PHOTO: NASA/JPL-CALTECH

Andrew Dombard, UIC professor of earth and environmental sciences, has been selected to join the gravity/radio science team for NASA’s forthcoming Europa Clipper mission. The expedition will explore whether there are favorable conditions for life on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, which contains a salty global ocean under its icy surface, with more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

Dombard was selected based on his proposal to use line-of-sight gravity anomalies to look at the water-rock interface of Europa’s ocean world. “We will be looking for indirect evidence of volcanism on the rocky floor under the ocean. Hydrothermal systems near undersea volcanoes are great places to find microbial life on Earth, and perhaps the same could be true for Europa,” Dombard said. In support of the research, Dombard and graduate students will use computational resources and data-related services based in the UIC Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research. Following the recent launch of Perseverance to Mars, the Europa Clipper is NASA’s next flagship-class mission and expected to enter the Jupiter system in the early 2030s. —Brian Flood

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UIC’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) received $22 million in new funding from the National Institutes of Health to continue its work supporting critical clinical and translational health research programs. Since 2009, the CCTS has provided multidisciplinary training and support to hundreds of faculty, researchers and staff at UIC who are involved in research that bridges the gap between scientific labs and patient care or community needs.

“The continued funding of the CCTS underscores UIC’s deeprooted commitment to translational discovery that directly benefits our patients and communities,” said Dr. Robert Barish, vice chancellor for health affairs at UIC. “Never has the value and need for clinical translational research been more evident and important as during the current COVID-19 pandemic, when teams of researchers have been pulling together to address the critical health needs of the population,” said Dr. Robin Mermelstein, codirector of the center and UIC professor of psychology.

“The center provides support at every level of the research spectrum, from basic science through community engagement and implementation, and fosters collaborations between different disciplines with infrastructure, training, expertise and pilot funding as well as through conferences focused on critical research topics designed to bring researchers from all disciplines together,” said Dr. Richard Novak, codirector of the center and UIC professor and head of infectious diseases. The funding will be provided over five years. —Jacqueline Carey

UIC is among the top 10 best value universities and the top 25 public universities in the U.S. —2021 EDITION OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL/TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION RANKINGS

COURTESY: UIC

UIC TODAY

Class Sparks Wearable Tech

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Hananeh Esmailbeigi, clinical associate professor and associate director of undergraduate studies in the bioengineering department, envisioned her course Wearables and Nearables Technology Laboratory as a way for students to tap into the growing wearable technology trend filling the market with portable fitness trackers and other devices. After the class went online, bioengineering, mechanical engineering and computer science students teamed up virtually and collaborated to help each other produce wearable technology devices.

They learned about all aspects of portable electronics, from designing and manufacturing circuit boards to bioengineering and user interface, creating products that safely interact with the body. “[Wearable technology is] quantifying pretty much every aspect of our lives these days,” Esmailbeigi said.

—Carlos Sadovi

COURTESY: UIC

$22M for Translational Research

CREDIT

PHOTO: AL FOE W. FOE

This image of the Masjid Agung Sang Cipta Rasa, a 15th-century mosque located in Cirebon, Indonesia, was taken by anthropology doctoral student Aldo W. Foe. It took second place for still images in UIC’s Image of Research 2020 interdisciplinary exhibition.

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A Helping Hand Emergency funds help keep students on track and protect health care workers.

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IGNITE

ike so many UIC students, first-year PharmD student Kara Brown felt the impact of COVID-19.

The stress. The uncertainty. The upheaval.

Fortunately, John Plachetka, BS ’76, PharmD, and his wife, Clare, stepped in, providing 50 scholarships over the next year to UIC Pharmacy students facing immediate financial hardships.

“I am a mother of two, and every little bit helps during these trying times,” Brown says.

Amid the pandemic’s tumult, the generosity of the Plachetkas and so many others fueled the determined work of UIC students and health care staff.

Recognizing that students—half of whom arrive at UIC eligible for Pell Grants—would face job losses, mounting family demands and remote learning challenges as a result of COVID-19, UIC granted emergency financial assistance to more than 14,000 students in 2020. The average award, pulled from a $14.3 million pot created by private donations to the U and I Care Emergency Fund and the federal government’s CARES Act, tallied $1,000.

“We understood many of our students were feeling pain, and while we could not eliminate every financial difficulty, we tried to mitigate some stressors to help students push ahead,” Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Rex Tolliver says.

“We understood many of our students were feeling pain, and... we tried to mitigate some stressors to help students push ahead.”

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—Rex Tolliver

Through the UI Health COVID-19 Crisis Response and Health Care Delivery Fund, meanwhile, 227 donors contributed nearly $263,000 to a campaign that brought critical medical supplies such as air purifying respirators and isolation carts to UI Hospital as well as its walk-up clinics and community testing sites. UI Health also received substantial in-kind donations, including more than one million pieces of personal protective equipment, 5,600 cleaning supplies and 7,100 meals for health care workers.

Dr. Janet Lin, an attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine and member of the UI Health incident command structure, says the earnest support of donors helped allay significant supply chain challenges and enlivened staff.

“In an anxiety-provoking environment, our team members continued showing up for work, and to have others show gratitude and appreciation for those dedicated efforts was immensely important and meaningful,” Lin says.

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Vince Ta (Tạ ạ Nguyên Vươ ương) delivered critical PPE to UIC’s campus on behalf of Chicago’s Vietnamese community and nail industry on April 2, 2020.

IGNITE: The Campaign for UIC

GOAL:

$750M

80% PROGRESS:

$598.3M

PROGRESS AS OF 1/19/21 PROGRESS AS OF 1/19/21

Amid the greatest public health challenge of modern times, the generous spirit of donors helped UIC continue to fulfill its mission to students and its city.

“I continue to be amazed at the outpouring of support from across all corners of our university community,” says Dr. Robert Barish, UIC vice chancellor for health affairs.

“The generosity that has come from our UIC family— including faculty, staff, neighbors, students, alumni and university leadership—has both sustained our health care workers throughout the pandemic and bolstered their morale, while also providing resources to students struggling amid the pandemic’s challenges.”

Each contribution counts toward the IGNITE campaign’s $750 million goal, and its aim to not only deliver real solutions to the world’s most crucial challenges and expand access to comprehensive, compassionate health care for populations across the state of Illinois, but also to ensure all barriers are removed for every hungry mind to study at UIC. —Daniel P. Smith, BA '03

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These emergency funds are part of IGNITE, a $750 million campaign to support student success, empower faculty, drive discoveries and connect UIC to communities as we forge the future of urban public education. Learn more at ignite.uic.edu.

CalltoAction UIC and UI Health are providing critical leadership in the midst of a crisis—and their efforts may help create a better future.

UIC Nursing students Norah Kilpatrick, Jennifer Neely and Casie Combs set out with a cart full of COVID-19 testing supplies to begin their volunteer work with the Unsheltered Chicago Coalition at Hotel One Sixty-Six.

By Cindy Kuzma

PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA ‘08

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uring the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the phrase “we’re all in this together” dominated the cultural conversation. But faculty and staff at UIC and UI Health knew the sentiment was oversimplified. Because of UIC’s longtime commitment to serve the underserved, they understood that the disease would likely disproportionately affect communities of color, the poor and all the city’s most vulnerable populations.

Data soon illuminated the disparities. A May report from the Chicago Urban League’s Research and Policy Center found that while Black residents make up 30% of the city’s population, they represented 60% of COVID-19 deaths. As of mid-November, the infection rate among Latinx residents was about 6%, more than twoand-a-half times that of white Chicagoans. And a Bloomberg CityLab analysis found the same neighborhoods struggling with poverty and pollution, including predominantly Black areas on the South and West Sides, were also hit hardest by the virus.

UIC and UI Health clinicians, researchers and policy experts didn’t wait for the numbers—they swiftly leapt into action to lead COVID-19 response and relief efforts. From advising public health departments to shoring up supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) to pioneering new testing, treatment and contact tracing methods, these projects aim to mitigate the current outbreak—and to repair broken systems and better serve all citizens for years to come.

PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA ‘08

Rebecca Singer, clinical assistant professor of nursing at UIC; Dr. Thomas Huggett, physician at Lawndale Christian Health Center; and Dr. Stockton Mayer, UI Health infectious disease specialist, review the testing plan for the Unsheltered Chicago Coalition at Hotel One Sixty-Six.

Caring for the Whole Community

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ew populations have been more severely affected by COVID-19 than those experiencing homelessness. In March and April, about one-fourth of people staying in shelters were COVID-19positive, according to Dr. Evelyn Figueroa, UIC professor of clinical family medicine, family medicine residency program director and community activist.

Dr. Stockton Mayer also works regularly with people experiencing homelessness at a needle exchange and HIV testing site on the West Side, part of the School of Public Health’s Community Outreach Intervention Project. As the pandemic’s impact rose in March, Mayer—assistant professor of clinical medicine in the College of Medicine—began asking questions. Where should people isolate if they don’t have a home? And how could they access testing and medical care?

He approached the city for guidance, and public health officials responded by connecting a group of health care providers seeking the same information. Several institutions—including UI Health, Rush University Medical Center and Lawndale Christian Health Center— formed a group called the Unsheltered Chicago Coalition.

The coalition transformed Hotel One Sixty-Six, an upscale Gold Coast property, into what was called a “shield center.” People who had no place to quarantine or isolate received a room, food and

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medical care. Mayer and other medical professionals would go out to the shelters and other sites where individuals had been exposed to provide further testing.

At first, UI Health and UIC assisted on a volunteer basis. In June, the city officially contracted the group to provide testing for the shelter system, long-term care facilities and other places where people live in groups. That’s when UIC Nursing Assistant Professor Rebecca Singer joined the effort. She harnessed her experience in humanitarian relief to begin leading a group of volunteers and employees, including many UIC students in the Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Dentistry.

Most days of the week, they travel with testing equipment to a site deemed high priority by the city—usually a shelter or long-term care facility, or perhaps a jail, behavioral health center or similar setting. Once they arrive, in full protective gear, they must overcome significant barriers.

“These are people with a deep distrust of the health system, and for very good reason. Our systems haven't served them,” Singer says.

The team works to make connections and allow autonomy, offering people choices about whether to be tested and how much data to divulge. “We try to engage on a personal level to convince them we are trying to help their community, not hurt their community.” By mid-

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October, the group had performed more than 10,000 tests and had a contract to continue through the end of 2020.

While all this was happening, the outbreak was intensifying at Pacific Garden Mission (PGM), which has the capacity for 950 people.

At one point, 70% of those in the building were COVID-19-positive.

Figueroa stepped in at the end of March to form the PGM Emergency COVID Medical Response Team. She began by insisting on masking, handwashing, surface sanitizing and other basic infection control measures, simple steps which nonetheless required significant behavior shifts. She took great pains to protect her team, creating a “wall of PPE” where each person could hang their own equipment. “People knew I was going to fix their mask if they got near me,” she says.

She also oversaw the setup of four COVID-19 isolation units.

In addition to people from the mission who tested positive, these facilities were also able to accept others with nowhere to go after they were released from the hospital. Eventually, they’d care for more than 200 people with COVID-19.

During those intense weeks, Figueroa was struck by how many other basic services were interrupted, including housing support, funds for medication and access to food. “It was disempowering to a community that already is so invisible, and it was hard not be able to help more,” she says. But it only intensified her commitment to focus on the social determinants of health in her medical practice, as well as her devotion to the Figueroa Wu Family Foundation, which operates a food pantry in Pilsen. “It’s all showed me this is where I’m supposed to be, the work I’m supposed to be doing,” she says.

Around the city, many other UIC-related efforts arose to fill Chicagoans’ unmet needs. Pregnant women face significant risk from the disease, but wearing masks when they’re at the hospital for delivery protects them. Masks for Moms—a partnership between the UIC Center for Excellence in Maternal and Child Health, Black Girls Break Bread and other community organizations—collects and distributes homemade masks to moms-to-be.

UI Health’s Mile Square Health Center—a network of federally funded community-based clinics—not only provides COVID-19 testing and medical care, but has also taken steps to support its communities in other ways. Connections with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Jewel-Osco and Mariano’s have yielded food boxes for COVID-19 positive Medicaid patients and their families. Other partners, including University of Illinois Cancer Center and the Residential Association of Greater Englewood, have assembled community kits packed with masks, hand sanitizer and educational materials. Through these efforts, thousands of boxes of food and supplies have reached residents in need.

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Help for the Helpers COVID-19 has left few health care workers unaffected, whether they’re working on the front lines or coping with the pandemic's reverberations through the medical system.

Fortunately, the more than 8,500 health care workers at UI Health now have additional support, thanks to the generosity of University of Illinois Board of Trustees Chairman Don Edwards and his wife, Anne Edwards. In May, the couple pledged $100,000 to establish the UI Health Employee Relief Fund.

Clinicians and staff whose lives and finances have been affected by COVID-19 can now request support through the fund, which is administered by the University of Illinois Foundation in partnership with UIC’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs. If employees have passed away, their family members can also apply for assistance.

Advancing Prevention and Treatment

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About 75% of the participants from UIC were people of color, who are both disproportionately likely to be infected with COVID-19 and to experience worse outcomes. “We needed to know if these approaches are going to work in people of color,” Novak says. “And if Black and brown people did not participate in these studies, we wouldn’t know for sure.”

This imperative compelled 68-year-old Chicagoan Bonnie Blue to sign up. Initially, she wanted no part. She was well aware of historic incidents of mistreatment by the medical community toward Black people, including the Tuskegee Study, in which Black patients went untreated for syphilis. Plus, she’d heard too many recent stories of disparities in treatment among her friends and family.

Yet she kept a close eye on the pandemic’s progression, especially in communities of color. “I could not separate those rising numbers from mom, dad, uncle, sister,” she says. “These are individuals, human beings, not statistics.” The image of the first woman who died in Chicago lingered in her mind, as did the stories of babies born to infected mothers.

When her grandson told her he was expecting a child, she felt compelled to act. She researched her options, filled out a survey through the NIH, and soon received a call from UIC. On Aug. 24, she became the first person to receive an injection. “I don’t look at it as an obligation—it’s a privilege to be able to participate in something that may help humankind to survive,” she says.

PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA ‘08

ther faculty and staff have stayed busy in the labs and clinics, studying the biological basis of the disease and various prevention methods and treatments in hopes of bringing the disease under control. Among the most urgent needs was a vaccine against COVID-19. Investigators at UIC had long been involved with vaccine trials, including those for HIV, a disease Dr. Richard Novak has spent most of his career studying and treating.

“When this particular pandemic broke, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) came to us because they knew we already had the infrastructure and experience to do this kind of work,” says Novak, professor and head of infectious diseases at the College of Medicine.

In August, UIC began a phase 3 clinical trial of a vaccine developed by the biotech company Moderna. The vaccine uses RNA, a molecule related to DNA, which instructs the body to produce antibodies against COVID-19. Then, people who are exposed to the disease can mount a defense against it, without getting sick.

The trial, led by Novak, confirmed how well the vaccine works.

Participants received either the vaccine or a placebo and reported back every week on whether they’ve developed symptoms. If they do, they’ll receive a COVID-19 test; their blood will also be checked regularly for antibodies. They’ll be followed for two years, though the results are already known, due to the surge in COVID-19 this fall. The vaccine was shown to be 94.1% effective in preventing COVID-19 disease, and was given emergency use authorization from the FDA on December 18.

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Dr. Richard Novak, lead investigator for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial at UIC.

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“It’s a privilege to be able to participate in something that may help humankind to survive.”

PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA ‘08

­—­Bonnie Blue

Bonnie Blue waits for the second shot at UI Health. Blue was the first participant in UI Health’s clinical trial of the Moderna vaccine.

The vaccine trial was then one of seven clinical trials offered at UIC—among more than 50 COVID-19-related research studies using human subject volunteers, according to Dr. Joanna Groden, UIC vice chancellor for research.

Novak is also overseeing trials of the antiviral drug remdesivir, both on its own and in combination with an immune-modulating medicine called baricitnib, as well as in combination with interferon beta. He is the principal investigator of a new phase three clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed by Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. And, he’s senior investigator on a study helping the company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals test preventive therapies called monoclonal antibodies, on which Dr. Jesica Herrick, associate professor of infectious diseases in the College of Medicine, is principal investigator.

“Instead of giving a vaccine which induces your body to make antibodies, these treatments infuse antibodies directly,” Novak says. “We call this passive immunization as opposed to active immunization, and we have good reason to believe it works, especially for mild to moderate disease.”

University investigators are also testing options for more serious cases. Dr. Jerry Krishnan, professor of medicine, is leading a study in hospitalized patients of a drug called sarilumab, previously approved to treat rheumatoid arthritis. This therapy targets cytokines, small proteins produced during the immune response to COVID-19, and may reduce the risk of more severe complications and death.

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Krishnan is also working to better understand the progression of the disease, leading the UIC arm of a project called Predictors of Severe COVID-19 Outcomes, or PRESCO. And, he’s co-leading a series of three clinical trials called ACTIV-4, to study how blood thinners could reduce clotting, a common complication in people with COVID-19. Other researchers are studying the experiences of health care providers treating COVID patients, as well as the use of convalescent plasma as a therapy.

As of early December 2020, UIC investigators have received more than 100 externally sponsored research awards for COVID-19-related studies, Groden says—totaling approximately $32 million. Some of these COVID-19-related projects contributed to a record-breaking total of $410 million in research funding for fiscal year 2020, which ended on June 30. The first quarter of fiscal year 2021, which includes July to September, UIC COVID-19-related research funding totaled $24 million. Groden’s office, too, has gone into overdrive, ensuring that all research processes move smoothly, and that labs and clinical investigators have what they need to succeed.

“Our office works hand in hand with faculty and other researchers to promote their ability to ask important questions and compete for funding to support their research programs,” she says. Even research not directly related to COVID-19—for instance, studies on better visualizing data or developing education technologies for specialneeds students—will benefit populations affected by the pandemic.

“These big discoveries will change people’s lives.”

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Containing the Cases—and Shaping the Conversation

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Graduate student Ellis Luo collects saliva samples at UIC’s COVID-19 testing site.

PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA ‘08

Student-athletes and Athletics staff line up for COVID-19 testing at the UIC Dorin Forum.

PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA ‘08

he university’s College of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases and School of Public Health have long led the nation in educating the next generation of professionals while caring for both the campus and the surrounding community. So when a public health crisis erupted, officials quickly put their experience to good use.

“UIC and UI Health were early in implementing universal masking and mandating face coverings in March,” says Dr. Susan Bleasdale, acting chief quality officer and medical director of infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship. “And we continued to be at the forefront in planning return-to-campus measures.” The health system and health science colleges remained safely open throughout the pandemic, and campus leaders recognized a well-designed response plan was needed for the rest of the campus to return.

Through the late spring and summer, a multidisciplinary expert group including Bleasdale and Professor of Epidemiology Dr. Ronald Hershow participated in a series of intense meetings about how to ensure a safe learning environment for students and staff. In these sessions, they crafted a surveillance testing strategy using saliva tests that delivered results within hours. A separate team of infectious disease and environmental health and safety experts reviewed all campus spaces to ensure physical distancing and adequate air handling.

“The idea of this program was not to test people who were having symptoms of COVID; it was to generally test the campus population for COVID,” Hershow says, providing an early warning about cases on campus and a chance to stop them from spreading.

Beginning in mid-August, saliva testing became available to high-risk student groups, including athletes, those in the performing arts and dormitory residents. Students who test positive are notified within 24 to 48 hours and given support to isolate and seek treatment if needed. As capacity has increased, testing has become available for others on campus and ultimately will be part of a regular screening program for on-campus students and staff.

“Anytime you have a rapid test, it has to be tied to rapid action,” Bleasdale says. “That’s why it makes sense to tie surveillance testing with a contact tracing team.” Contact tracing involves determining who an infected person may have exposed during the time when they were contagious—for instance, roommates, classmates or teammates. Those people must then be notified and instructed on quarantining and testing.

Many universities have relied on their local health departments for contact tracing. But UIC took a different path and built its own system for students based off its employee health contact tracing program for staff. Hershow hired two alumni who completed their master’s degrees in epidemiology in 2019 to head up the UIC COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Epidemiology Program (CCTEP): Ellen Stein MS ‘19, who’s now the program’s director, and Jocelyn Vaughn MS ‘19, research data scientist.

In about two months, they built the program from the ground up, hiring around 20 contact tracers to start. Most were graduate students in public health. “They know the campus; they know the high-traffic areas; they understand the particular stresses of being students,” Hershow says. “While you’re following the contact, you’re calling them every day asking them if they’ve developed symptoms.

We’ve had our contact tracers also ask about things like what they watched on Netflix the night before.” That’s not because they’re tracking entertainment trends—rather, they’re building connections so students feel comfortable sharing information, which is then treated with strict confidence.

Stein says connection is crucial in the success of a delicate task like contact tracing: “We've seen that rapport factor borne out and be essential in our ability to conduct thorough investigations and gain the trust of the people we’re interviewing,” she says. In fact, they’ve had about a 93% success rate in reaching people with COVID-19.

“We can then get accurate information about who may have been exposed to them and take the appropriate public health steps.”

The students working as contact tracers are also planning research using the data; eventually, knowledge gained from the program could help public health experts everywhere in their efforts to contain COVID-19, Stein says.

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PHOTO: JOSHUA CLARK BFA ‘08

Nursing student Jennifer Neely, left, chats with College of Medicine PhD student May Barakat while volunteering for the Unsheltered Chicago Coalition.

Of course, UIC experts are already sharing their knowledge and resources with the greater community, including advising those making critical public health decisions. In April, a group of 27 scholars across the university system—including Dr. Lisa Powell, distinguished professor and division director of health policy and administration—prepared a policy report detailing the pandemic’s impact on Illinois finances.

The College of Medicine has an intergovernmental agreement with the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) to provide support and assistance during the COVID-19 response. Bleasdale leads a team that includes infectious disease and infection prevention experts from the Division of Infectious Diseases and epidemiologists from the School of Public Health.

Early on in the outbreak, a UIC team including Dr. Mahesh Patel and Dr. Scott Borgetti provided on-site investigations of the first outbreaks at long-term care facilities within Illinois. The UIC infectious disease team has provided ongoing outbreak support for long-term care, Department of Corrections, day care centers and other congregate settings. The team has provided mitigation guidance, testing strategies for containment and reopening guidance throughout the pandemic.

Christina Welter, clinical assistant professor of health policy and administration, worked with IDPH on an incident command system to organize and prioritize planning; meanwhile, Steven Seweryn, clinical assistant professor in the epidemiology and biostatistics division, helped build a plan for synthesizing and communicating vast amounts of data.

And it continues with on-the-ground efforts. The School of Public Health co-leads a $56 million city-funded contact tracing program, which will focus on communities most impacted by the pandemic.

And with a grant from AbbVie, the Community Outreach Intervention Projects—the same HIV/AIDS prevention effort Mayer works with— has also hired staff members to serve as COVID-19 ambassadors in neighborhoods like Auburn Gresham and Little Village. They distribute masks, promote social distancing and help connect people to essential health resources if they do become sick.

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The College of Medicine and UI Health also have a contact tracing program with the Chicago Department of Health to expand their capacity and allow for more rapid contact tracing. “It makes sense that these are our patients whom we can quickly notify and identify contacts to guide on quarantine and testing to slow the spread of COVID-19,” Bleasdale says.

Nurturing Hope for the Future

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hether they’re working directly with patients, overseeing contact tracing or research funding from their home offices or conducting clinical trials, UIC faculty and staff admit these efforts haven’t been easy. Many have added COVID-19 responsibilities to their existing workloads. Figueroa says she often cried on her way to and from the shelter; Bleasdale wishes for added hours in the day to juggle all her duties.

Though the work is often grueling, it’s also intellectually engaging, providing those in infectious disease, public health and adjacent fields an opportunity to serve their highest purpose. “This epidemic reminds me every day of why I chose to go into infectious disease epidemiology,” Hershow says.

Interdisciplinary and inter-institutional teams—rare in health care—have joined forces, breaking down silos once hindering progress. “We say that these problems are intractable; we can’t possibly house homeless people or provide good care,” Singer says.

“If there’s a silver lining of COVID, it’s that we’ve shown we can change for the better.”

Plus, many students have signed on as contact tracers, testing administrators, and in other roles, inspiring a broader hope for the future. “They’re all stepping up and trying to make a difference,” Singer says. “As an educational institution with a mission to achieve equity and serve a diverse student body, we are teaching our students: ‘This is what you do; this is how you serve.’”

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COURTESY: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, HAER ILL, 16-CHIG, 120-

a tale of two rivers UIC’s Freshwater Lab explores the inequalities of Chicago’s freshwater resources.

By Steve Hendershot

T

o look at a map of our corner of the world is to wonder at the Great Lakes.

One need not know the name of the State of Michigan, for example, to know its silhouette, surrounded by 21% of the world’s fresh water.

That same freshwater resource informs Chicago’s history. Fresh water catalyzed the city’s astonishing 19th-century growth, a surge from 4,000 residents to more than a million within 50 years, placing Chicago among the world’s largest cities. The 1848 canal that connected the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River is what put Chicago on the map.

Yet that canal illustrates another aspect of our history with water: we have a long record of manipulating it, from the reversal of the Chicago River in 1900 to the reckless, toxic, gross pollution that precipitated that feat of engineering. Indeed, the story of our fresh water has as much to do with people— with what’s been done with this extraordinary natural resource—as it does the water itself.

Unfortunately, some dark themes bubble up from the tales of influence and imposition.

“For so long, people had this attitude that you could just do whatever you wanted” to the Great Lakes and its rivers, says Rachel Havrelock, founder and director of the Freshwater Lab at UIC. “Our fresh water, and the people living near it, were deemed expendable.”

So Havrelock is fighting back—with storytelling. The Freshwater Lab, which she founded in 2015, aims to translate and elevate water issues so they capture the imagination of the general public.

“My guiding vision for the Great Lakes watershed is that we can tell stories that

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awaken in people a sense of place and an identity that’s both in tune with the water and also has an awareness of the other communities in the watershed—because not all of us are experiencing the watershed in the same way,” Havrelock says.

The Freshwater Lab launched just as the clean water crisis in Flint, Michigan, was erupting, bringing the notion of environmental justice to the fore. In the five years since, the lab has taken up issues ranging from lead poisoning to algae blooms, water shutoffs, invasive species of carp and, most recently, the Chicago River—all while attempting to convince a cohort of urban college students, many of them students of color, to care about water issues.

That’s not the traditional environmentalist demographic, which is one reason the Freshwater Lab is getting attention.

“It brings perspectives of people who experience their environment differently— who experience environmental issues from a perspective of scarcity or pollution or polluting industry in their backyard,” says Tim Eder, environmental program officer for the Flint-based Mott Foundation, which has supported the Freshwater Lab through a series of grants.

That diversity of viewpoints and experiences is invaluable to a more complete understanding of Great Lakes waterways, one that encompasses not only the wooded shorelines that ring Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, but also the straight, gray corridors of the Chicago River as it stretches along its man-made path through industrial southwest Chicago.

But that’s hardly the extent of UIC students’ contribution.

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The Backward River Project

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COURTESY: ANISH TAILOR

A

nish Tailor arrived in Chicago in 2018 to pursue a master’s degree in urban planning and policy at UIC, without the slightest interest in or concern for water. Water infrastructure just wasn’t a topic urban planners paid much attention to, in his experience.

But he found his way to Havrelock’s Freshwater Lab course because it had a reputation.

“Other students kept saying it was the best class they’d ever taken, so I just said, ‘Maybe it’s worth taking a class with a professor who’s really passionate about the subject matter, and even if it might not be exactly related to my degree program, the experience is still worth it,’” he recalls.

Tailor already was an accomplished professional, with an undergraduate degree in finance and a master’s degree in international trade and investment policy. He had worked as an analyst for the International Monetary Fund, as well as for government-backed mortgage lender Fannie Mae, and had also worked abroad in both Mumbai, India, and Singapore.

Tailor expected a course that was interesting but off-topic, and his résumé suggested Havrelock was getting a left-brained numbers-cruncher. Not so.

As Havrelock explained the connections between water policy and civic outcomes —aided by a procession of guest speakers ranging from tribal leaders to journalists and environmental-justice advocates, as well as field trips to landmarks of Chicago’s water infrastructure such as the Jardine Water Purification Plant—Tailor quickly grasped that the Freshwater Lab overlapped substantially with his interests in urban planning.

“I had never thought about where water comes from, or where it goes, because nobody talks about that in urban planning,” he says. “It just shifted my perspective in many different ways.”

Yet Tailor’s response to this awakening wasn’t to open a spreadsheet, perform a regression analysis or draft a policy proposal.

Instead, he created a podcast.

It’s a show called Fresh Water Radio.

The initial episode contrasts Chicago’s new downtown riverwalk with an urban riverwalk in Toulouse, France, and includes an interview with a community activist as well as the architect who led Chicago’s Riverwalk project, Carol Ross Barney. The discussions follow the flow of the Chicago River from the completed, acclaimed downtown portion to southwesterly sections that remain afflicted by generations of pollution and misuse.

The show is one of the centerpieces of the Freshwater Lab’s latest project, a multimedia storytelling experience called the Backward River, which examines and critiques the history, legacy and outlook of the Chicago River. The project came together during 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the Freshwater Lab’s spring semester course and forced Havrelock’s

team to collaborate virtually through the summer and fall.

“It was almost like a support group,” Havrelock says of the virtual meetings.

Much of the Backward River’s content is historical, but the tone and direction of the project were influenced by the events of 2020. As Havrelock and the students helped one another process the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the protests and violence that unfolded across the nation in the weeks that followed, they became enamored with the concept of “slow violence” as it relates to the Chicago River: the notion of silent, subtle harm gradually inflicted on communities and natural resources over generations, owing to choices that prioritized industry and commerce over community healthfulness and environmental conservation.

The opening segment of the Backward River, for example, portrays the different branches of the river as people—or caricatures of people, at least—and is designed to highlight the ways in which the river’s different sections influence and align with the city’s racial segregation and dispersion of wealth. The various branches are brought to life via audio monologues

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Left: UIC student Anish Tailor. Below: Rachel Havrelock, founder and director of the Freshwater Lab and associate professor of English at UIC.

“My guiding vision for the Great Lakes watershed is that we can tell stories that awaken in people a sense of place and an identity...”

— Rachel Havrelock

sewage on a straight path southwest to the Mississippi River, and that facilitates barge traffic from the oil fields of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the section that best exemplifies how Havrelock and her team have come to think of the river as a whole— not as a natural river at all, but rather as a pipeline designed solely to transport oil and waste.

The Backward River is partly a history lesson, telling the story of the city’s attempts to manipulate its water by reversing the river’s flow, building canals and adding the Deep Tunnel, an enormous underground system designed to control against overflow.

It’s also a story of environmental inequity, comparing the relatively natural and recreation-friendly riverbanks of Chicago’s whiter and wealthier North Side with the forbidding, industrial, polluted character of the Sanitary and Ship Canal. In addition to Tailor’s and Ortiz’s audio projects, Citlalli Trujillo, an undergraduate biochemistry major, interviewed people who live close to

the river’s southern branches near her Pilsen home. The project also opens its lens to consider the broader impacts of Chicago’s water system, ranging from its effects on a toxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico to the role it plays in facilitating a path for invasive species such as Asian carp to migrate from the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes.

Havrelock understands the project’s narrative cuts against some of Chicago’s seminal civic stories. That’s the point.

“People really navigate their way and come to understand their geography through stories. And the way we understand our place in Chicago is the result of a set of public, civic stories—that we’re the city that can do anything, including reverse a river’s flow,” Havrelock says. “What we’re trying to do now is tell a different story that starts with an honest assessment of our existing infrastructure, so that we’re prepared to do something different in the future.”

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PHOTO: JASMINE SHAH

recorded by Tailor and written by Tristen Ortiz, an undergraduate English student and Chicago native. The river’s downtown Main Stem is depicted as a puffed-up, insecure civic booster who takes pride in his status and fame while downplaying pollution; the North Shore Channel is a virtue-signaling but ultimately self-interested North Shore liberal who thinks nothing of flushing her treated sewage downstream. The river’s southernmost and most utilitarian branch, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, is a maniacal, moustache-twirling robber baron bent on profit and exploitation.

Ortiz, like Tailor, had no pre-existing interest in water. Instead, he met Havrelock in a different course, and she persuaded him to join the Freshwater Lab despite his misgivings.

“I had just taken a year off, and she was asking me to take this 400-level course.

I didn’t know if I was ready for that,” recalls Ortiz. “But once I was there, I found my niche.”

The heart of the Lab’s Backward River project lies with that final branch of the river, the Sanitary and Ship Canal. This is the grim, murky waterway with worn concrete embankments that carries Chicago’s treated

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PHOTO: ERIKA CH ÁVEZ

Bringing Water Issues to New Audiences

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achel Havrelock grew up in Detroit, but her interest in the Great Lakes watershed stems from her extensive research in the Middle East, where her investigation into regional conflicts led her to examine the politics of oil pipelines and water-rights issues. She moved to Chicago to join UIC’s faculty in 2004 after completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and soon made connections between the oil-and-water conflicts she had studied abroad with those surfacing in the Great Lakes. The Freshwater Lab was born after the Flint water crisis spurred her to action.

Its signature project—at least prior to the Backwater River—was Freshwater Stories, a 2017 collection of essays and articles that frame Great Lakes water issues from the perspective of a particular, discrete topic such as recreation, mining or drinking water. Taken as a whole, Freshwater Stories serves both as a reminder of the region’s extraordinary natural resource and as a catalog of the threats to its health.

The Freshwater Lab’s uniqueness goes beyond its focus on environmental justice

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and environmental-resource stewardship.

Havrelock is an English professor, and the lab’s focus on storytelling makes it unique in a field that’s traditionally the domain of engineers and doesn’t attract much generalinterest attention. That dynamic not only neglects lots of potential stakeholders but can create an echo chamber when it comes to infrastructure decisions.

Bold decisions “won’t happen when you have engineers sitting in their offices making the decisions,” says Krishna Reddy, a UIC professor and director of the university’s Sustainable Engineering Research Laboratory. He is also a Freshwater Lab affiliate.

“Every stakeholder that is affected by water issues should be educated and brought on board, and Rachel does a great job at that,” he says.

Perhaps her chief strategy for drawing more people into the discussion about water is to make the issues more accessible and to demonstrate how they affect everyday life for various Great Lakes communities.

To do that successfully means telling a compelling story.

“Story is absolutely necessary to understanding the local impacts of global change,” says Kathleen Blackburn, a Freshwater Lab research associate and PhD student in the Program for Writers at UIC. Blackburn, a contributor to the Backward River project as well as Freshwater Stories, also recently coauthored with Havrelock an article for Midwest-focused Belt Magazine about the legacy and current state of the barge industry along the Chicago River—a sort of preview of the Backward River project.

For Havrelock, a focus on multimedia storytelling and guest speakers flows out of an observation about changing learning styles—an observation that relates to classroom learning and campaigns to educate the public.

“I had a real revelation some years ago, that we are moving out of the era of the lecture. I was getting to that point in my own teaching of standing up there and asking, ‘Nobody did the reading?’ And I recognized something had changed,” Havrelock says.

In response, she adopted the laboratory model, “bringing a range of voices and then

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PHOTO: ERIKA CH ÁVEZ

PHOTO: ERIKA CH ÁVEZ

In addition to bringing freshwater issues into the public consciousness, the Freshwater Lab also aims to train more students for environmental careers— especially urban students and students of color, because their perspectives are underrepresented in the field. To that end, this year Havrelock debuted an internship program in which students are placed with nearby nonprofits such as the Environmental Law and Policy Center, the National Audubon Society and the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.

This was a strange year to launch an internship program, and a strange year in which to be an intern. But the students’ experiences were strong, regardless—Max Wright, for example, who interned with the Illinois office of Food & Water Watch, reported that he expected his sense of engagement to flag amidst the pandemic, but instead he rallied at the chance to “feel a part of something bigger than myself.”

In future years, Havrelock hopes to expand the internship program by sending students beyond Chicago to gain a broader perspective on Great Lakes environmental issues. For now, she and her supporters are satisfied with a successful kickoff amidst challenging circumstances.

“What [Havrelock] was able to accomplish even at the dawn of a pandemic was pretty amazing,” says Kiersten Kranberg, director and cofounder of the KBIH Family Foundation, which began supporting the internship program this fall.

just turning to the students and saying, ‘Okay, what are your talents? What do you care about? And if the sky was the limit, what would you do?’ And I think there is real magic in that approach.”

Indeed, it’s drawn students with no prior interest in water to Havrelock’s class, and then convinced them to make it the focus of their careers. Gradually, Havrelock, Blackburn and their Freshwater Lab collaborators are building a body of work that they hope will change the way people think about the Great Lakes watershed—either by getting them to pay attention for the first time, or by considering the merits of a narrative that runs counter to the tales of a city and region whose vitality owes to the ways it has brought nature to heel.

“One of the really important characteristics of the Freshwater Lab is how it sits right at that intersection of the humanities and the sciences, and how that perspective helps us think about this resource, and helps us think about ourselves in relation to the resource, how that plays out in terms of informing policy perspectives,” says Teresa Córdova, director of the Great Cities Institute at UIC.

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Clockwise from top left: Freshwater Lab students pose for a photo during a Toxic Tour led by the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization in September 2019; detail of Freshwater Lab students cleaning up Chicago’s beaches; students pose for a photo during a field trip to clean up Chicago’s lakefront beaches.

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Freshwater Future

H

avrelock has a plan for the Chicago River: to break the connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River by closing the passageway whose creation 172 years ago sparked Chicago’s growth. She calls it “decommissioning the pipeline,” in keeping with her characterization of the river. Indeed, one of the major obstacles standing in her way is oil-related—barge traffic continues to make use of the passage. Her approach there is straightforward: she considers the barge industry to be so dependent on federal subsidies that, if the subsidies were removed, the barges would vanish of their own accord and the oil companies would turn to alternate means of transport.

The other issue—what to do with Chicago’s sanitary waste—is more of a challenge. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to stop invasive carp species from reaching Lake Michigan by building additional fortifications, including an electric barrier along the Des Plaines River in Joliet, at a cost of $778 million. Havrelock has another ambitious solution that costs far less: to recycle the city’s wastewater and make it available for agricultural and industrial use and for cooling data centers.

One ancillary benefit would be to prevent invasive species of carp from migrating from the river system to the Great Lakes.

Havrelock wants to get her idea on the public agenda before it’s too late to stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan.

“We’re at a crossroads,” says Havrelock.

“We’re looking at spending so much money to keep the canal running and to keep building out the Deep Tunnel, but these things are sputtering, out-of-date pieces of infrastructure. We’ve spent 120 years marveling at this reversed river, but it’s not looking like such a marvel right now, and we’ve got to rebuild and rethink this system.”

So her goal with the Freshwater Lab’s Backward River project is to raise the issue—to show people that our regional water infrastructure is flawed, and that spending more money to fix aging solutions might not solve their problems—the carp might make the jump despite the protections, and flooding might prove too much for even an expanded Deep Tunnel to handle. And besides, shipping our treated wastewater to a toxic pool in the Gulf of Mexico can’t possibly be the most elegant or efficient solution.

Peering into a future roiled by climate change, Havrelock sees immense potential for the Great Lakes watershed to be a model and a refuge, eschewing both oil pipelines and the man-made waterways that serve them, and instead becoming the centerpiece of a freshwater-based economy.

“That’s why I get up in the morning, the hope that we could get off our dependence on oil and rebuild everything with water at the center,” she says. “We shouldn’t stop dreaming about what our water could be and could do.”

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Waves crash on the concrete at Calumet Park on Chicago’s South Side in March 2020 during high water levels on Lake Michigan.

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PHOTO: MATTHEW KAPLAN

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UIC’s Heritage Garden envisions a diverse, sustainable and just society.

By Bridget Esangga

Seeds of Change

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY: UIC HERITAGE GARDEN

The Heritage Garden at UIC is a project by the university’s seven Centers for Cultural Understanding and Social Change, with infrastructure provided by the Latino Cultural Center. Prior to the pandemic, students in the internship program planted and cultivated eight satellite gardens on UIC’s campus, collected seeds, connected with Chicago communities through field trips and garden tours and shared the fruits of their labor with surrounding communities.

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CULTIVATE

In 2019, Heritage Garden interns visited the Global Garden Refugee Training Farm in Albany Park (top), Semillas de Justicia Garden in Little Village (middle) and the First Nations Community Garden in Albany Park (bottom). Community members also came to campus for tours that tell the tales of the three sisters (corn, beans and squash) who help each other grow and the monarch butterfly migration that begins with an egg on a milkweed plant in Chicago and ends in southern Mexico each year.

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Interns collected seeds from the gardens for the mobile seed library and annual seed swap. The library is a toolkit of educational resources about sustainable gardening practices and seeds to trade with garden lovers in the greater Chicago community.

Each spring the Heritage Garden hosts a seed swap event on UIC’s campus, offering students, community organizations and friends a chance to exchange knowledge about cultural diversity, environmental sustainability and social justice through gardening. ●

UNSTOPPABLE UIC students forge a brighter future with some of academia’s most prestigious awards.

By Julie B. Sevig Illustrations by Ethan G. Brown

E

ven during a global pandemic, UIC students and alumni are pursuing groundbreaking research and rigorous study domestically and globally, fueled by internationally competitive fellowships, scholarships and grants.

Bearing names such as Fulbright, Gates and Goldwater, the competition is fierce, and the application process is long and intensive. “Our students’ pursuits of and success with these awards are a testament to their intellect, dedication and research skills, as well as their ability to think big. It is also evidence of UIC’s strengths in providing research opportunities and mentors,” says Kim Germain, director of UIC’s Office of External Fellowships.

These generous monetary gifts, coupled with membership in a new and supportive community of scholars, enable students to pursue academic work that contributes to their fields of study, advances their careers and may even change the world. We spoke to some of the recipients of these prestigious awards. Get to know them here.

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ANIS BARMADA

BS ‘20 Biological Sciences and Chemistry

Gates Cambridge Scholarship

A

nis Barmada, whose family emigrated from Syria in 2015, was only 6 years old when his father died, leaving his mother to parent alone. He says her “immense strength and altruism” and sacrifices for a better life for her children inspired him.

“It was planted in me from an early age to always do my absolute best and make the most of opportunities to have a positive impact in the world,” says the UIC senior majoring in biological sciences and chemistry.

Barmada is one of 77 scholars from 30 countries to win the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, England. With this scholarship, Bill and Melinda Gates intend to create a network of future leaders committed to improving lives, and Barmada is well on his way to doing just that.

Since his first year at UIC, Barmada has been conducting research on diabetic eye disease in the laboratory of Scott Shippy, UIC associate professor of chemistry and bioengineering. Shippy calls Barmada “nothing short of remarkable” and, as an example, noted his key role in the lab’s project to collect tears from mice to look for markers of disease that resulted in three first-author publications.

“I hope to solve some of the most persisting scientific and clinical challenges of currently incurable diseases.”

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Barmada, a 2016 graduate of Wheeling High School, earned the prestigious Goldwater scholarship in 2019 and was a Rhodes scholar finalist.

When he completes his master’s in genomic medicine, he’ll begin his MD/PhD training at Yale, advancing biochemical and computational technologies to address incurable diseases and contributing to a new era of health care without disparities.

“I hope to solve some of the most persisting scientific and clinical challenges of currently incurable diseases, while still being active in my community and contributing to policy and social change,” he says.

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LOPA BHATT

BS in Physics and Mathematics Student

Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship

“I have come to love teaching, and this feeling has grown even stronger due to some of the professors at UIC.”

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hen Lopa Bhatt checked her e-mail on the day the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship was to be announced, she couldn’t believe she was seeing “Congratulations” in a subject line.

“I read the e-mail twice thinking it was probably a mistake,” she says. Only 400 of 5,000 applicants receive the most prestigious STEM award nationwide for university sophomores and juniors involved in research. Bhatt is now a UIC senior majoring in physics and mathematics. An Honors College member, she’s studied in the lab of Robert Klie, UIC professor of physics, where her work has focused on improving techniques related to the fabrication of graphene-based liquid cells, or GLCs. Klie says Bhatt’s ability to operate a state-ofthe-art electron microscope and perform atomicresolution imaging and spectroscopy using electron probes that don’t damage the delicate graphene liquid cells is “an extraordinary achievement.” He also calls her research presentations at conferences unusual exposure for an undergraduate student and proof of her outstanding research and presentation skills.

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In addition to her work on projects in Klie’s lab, Bhatt is revising a paper on the culmination of her research at UIC. Some of her work on GLCs has allowed for additional collaboration in the College of Dentistry. She credits UIC professors—Klie; Andrew Shulman, senior lecturer in mathematics, statistics and computer science; and Mark Schlossman, professor of physics—with impacting her educational career. “It is because of them that I have gotten this far,” she says.

Bhatt was born in India and moved to the U.S. in 2015, graduating from Metea Valley High School in 2017 and receiving the President’s Award Program Scholarship, UIC’s most prestigious award, which covers four-year tuition for exemplary incoming firstyear students.

Recently, she says she was excited and anxious while applying to and hoping to hear back from graduate schools so she can start a PhD program next year.

Bhatt says one of her goals in the next few years is to become a professor at a research-oriented university. “I have come to love teaching, and this feeling has grown even stronger due to some of the professors at UIC who have had a big impact on my life. I feel both privileged and obligated to do the same for the future generation.”

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NANYOMBI LUBIMBI PhD Nursing Candidate

Fulbright U.S. Student Program

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anyombi Lubimbi describes the application process for the Fulbright Scholarship as “grueling” and learning that she’d received it as “an exhilarating experience.”

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and designed to increase mutual understanding between the United States and other countries.

Lubimbi will return to Rwanda, where she spent four years developing a nursing program for the country’s Human Resources for Health (HRH) program through the UIC College of Nursing.

Working with the University of Rwanda, she will study the factors that affect and sustain global health nursing, a field made even more urgent and visible by this global pandemic.

“I’m going to help those without a voice,” she says. “The nurses who work so hard every day, who give their all with the most limited resources you can think of. And they don’t complain; despite the challenges, they come back to work every day to save lives to the best of their abilities.”

Originally from Uganda, she’s no stranger to the challenges of health care systems in developing countries. Similarities in language between the two African countries is a plus, she says, as is her determination to experience and feel what the Rwandan nurses do: “If there’s no buy-in and mutual respect and understanding from both partners, it’s not going to work.”

“I’m going to help those without a voice.”

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She was a clinical educator the first year in Rwanda, went on to do administration, and stayed on because she loved the work.

“I needed to stay,” she says. She had access to leadership stakeholders and decision makers. In three years, they made moves to ensure students were taught effectively and that there was strong leadership among nurses and managers. “We trained Rwandans on how to take ownership of the initiated programs and activities.”

Eventually, her research findings will be in scientific journals and shared at conferences.

Most importantly, it is an opportunity to strengthen relationships in low- and middle-income countries where she sees a lifetime of collaboration.

“I am grateful that I received this scholarship,” she says. “I’m going to use it to benefit others.”

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Larissa Mukundwa PhD in Anthropology Candidate

Fulbright U.S. Student Program

“She will be a wonderful ambassador between the U.S. and Rwanda.”

W

hen a congresswoman spoke to Larissa Mukundwa’s Grayslake Central High School Advanced Placement U.S. History class, the senior was inspired to an activism which launched her future—and led her back home to Rwanda.

Now a UIC PhD student in anthropology, she studies the politics of genocide. A Fulbright Scholarship is enabling her to spend the 2021-22 academic year in her native Rwanda where she’ll conduct an oral history project about political party mobilization in the years leading up to the Rwandan Genocide (1990-94). This means interviewing survivors and relatives of political activists who fought against the government but were assassinated early in the genocide. She’ll make the interviews available to the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (her sponsoring institution).

Mukundwa says she was “ecstatic” to win the Fulbright, which allows her to spend the most time she has spent in her birth country since her family fled in 1993 when she was four. She comes from a large Rwandan family, some members of which she reconnected with in recent years via social media.

She also visited Rwanda in 2018 for a month of preliminary research.

38 WINTER 2021

“Larissa is soft-spoken but firm and determined, with the ability to collect, organize and synthesize information to reach considered conclusions,” says Anna C. Roosevelt, UIC professor of anthropology and chair of her dissertation committee, pointing out that Mukundwa did all this under a cloud of sorrow. Her family had left Rwanda in haste, sensing danger for Tutsi families. “They escaped being killed but left behind relatives, many of whom were killed in subsequent violence. She will be a wonderful ambassador between the U.S. and Rwanda.”

Mukundwa credits Roosevelt and Dan Harper, a project director in the Special Collections and University Archives at UIC, for encouraging her as she earned her master’s degree in comparative politics.

Serving as graduate research assistant in the Political Oral History Archives at the library gave her the academic background and experience which brought her to this next step. Harper praised her work ethic, intellectual ability, quality of work and dedication.

Mukundwa hopes to be an archivist curator or a political anthropology professor teaching about African politics, kingdoms and conflicts, or possibly a United Nations researcher/international diplomat.

“I’m excited and appreciate how units at UIC led me to my defined path of study,” she says. “I hope my work will be received in a positive light. It is only my intention to tell the story, and that they [Rwandans] be open to me researching and getting information.” ●

ADVANCE.UIC.EDU

UIC Connected This virtual networking platform, exclusive to UIC, is a place for alumni and students to connect and grow.

• Create connections, build networks.

• Mentor students.

• Seek advice or expertise.

• Customize involvement to meet your needs.

Visit go.uic.edu/connected to learn more.

LAUNCHING SPRING 2021

PHOTO COURTESY: RAJA TALATI MS' 14

UNIQUELY UIC 40 WINTER 2021

Data Doctor Raja Talati uses his UIC education to adopt telemedicine and track COVID-19 patients over time.

BY ED FINKEL

ADVANCE.UIC.EDU

R

aja Talati MS ’14, focuses closely on the impact technology has on society in his role as chief medical information officer at Midway Specialty Care in Florida.

Among Talati’s major initiatives at Midway have been the construction of a telemedicine system that went online last October—before anyone knew COVID-19 was coming—that’s proved to be invaluable during the pandemic.

It’s also popular among HIV patients, who still face a stigma and prefer not to physically come into the office.

“I didn’t predict COVID was coming,” he says. “But that made it really easy to transition. In a heartbeat, we were doing telemedicine, starting in the middle of March—we closed everything down and did telemedicine exclusively.”

Talati leverages technology to bolster patient care in more indirect ways as well.

For example, he’s led an initiative to access a Microsoft-hosted health care research database called Redcap, offered for free to nonprofit providers by Vanderbilt University, which allows the entire care team secure access, Talati says. “My UIC education gave me the fundamental knowledge base to realize that it was the tool we needed to conduct studies,” he says.

Talati did not originally seek a career in health care informatics; in fact, one might say it sought him. He was serving as a staff physician in family medicine at the multispecialty Heart and Family Health Institute in Port St. Lucie, Florida, when the group adopted a new electronic medical records system called NextGen—and he was tapped to be the “physician-IT champion” who would train everyone on how to use it.

Not long thereafter, and energized by that experience, Talati enrolled at UIC to earn a master’s degree in health informatics from the College of Applied Health Sciences, which he says has laid the groundwork for everything he’s done for the past six years.

“It helped me build my own toolbox and helped me understand that IT has not done what it was supposed to have done for health care—that there is room to grow,” he says.

Upon completing the program, Talati took on his current tripartite role at Midway.

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A constant backdrop to his work, and another one of his passions, has been his role as chief of aerospace medicine at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

There, he has been part of the Air Force Reserve since finishing his residency in 1998.

He hopes to get promoted from lieutenant colonel to colonel.

“It’s been 22 years now, and I’m still in,” he says. “I have to make judgments on whether somebody is safe to fly, due to medical conditions. We have to keep them safe and make sure we don’t interrupt the mission, if they’re ill.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken Talati away from his typical day-to-day mission for parts of this year. On April 5, he found himself starting a two-month deployment as attending physician at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, caring for coronavirus patients alongside others from his Air Force team.

“I had 20 to 25 COVID patients on the floor, on a ventilator or high-flow oxygen, and we still had no treatment for it. But we did the best we could to understand the disease.” His informatics background made it easier to get up to speed on the electronic medical records system the hospital used, he adds.

Then in July, Talati received privileges at a hospital in Ft. Pierce, Florida, not far from Midway, to help handle the midsummer surge of COVID-19 cases among Hispanic farmworkers and others in the area. “The Latin and Hispanic population has a much higher incidence of COVID. Specifically, in this group, about 37 percent tested positive out of 300 people,” Talati says.

Leveraging his informatics background, he’s trying to create a database to follow those patients over time to better understand the long-term implications of the disease. “By no means am I a COVID expert, but this experience gave me a leg up,” he says. And once complete, the database should give patients and the population overall a leg up, while furthering Talati’s career mission to bring technology to bear on behalf of people.

●

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OBITUARIES View and submit to go.uic.edu/alumniobituaries

WINTER 2021 41

COU

RTESY: MICHEL LE

KA YS E

N

BS

'03

M

ichelle Kaysen BS ’03, environmental scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and recent Alumni Exchange presenter, is passionate about civil service.

For nearly 20 years, she has remediated hazardous waste sites, and she has received the EPA’s National Notable Achievement Award in 2019 and 2008 and its 2010 Bronze Medal for Commendable Service.

UNIQUELY UIC

WHAT MADE YOU INTERESTED IN ENVIRONMENTAL WORK? It started from an early attraction to the natural world. I grew up with a creek and a large open space behind my house, and I spent every minute I could exploring the creek, critters, plants and rocks. I was 9 years old when the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened, and I was riveted by that and watching the emergency responders.

HOW DID UIC IMPACT YOUR CAREER? The biggest gift UIC gave me was teaching me how to think. My ecology professor, Dr. Joel Brown, put a finer point on my desire to go into environmental work. And as a student worker in a molecular genetics lab, I observed the process of science and how to apply it to different situations.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF? My projects have included cleaning up residential properties and directly impacting people's lives, their homes and their sense of security for their kids and dogs to play in their backyards. Those are by far the most rewarding experiences that I have had the pleasure of doing on behalf of the EPA.

42 WINTER 2021

PHOTO: TOM MADAY

CIVIL SCIENTIST

Futurist Physician

D

r. Lyle Berkowitz MD ’92 combines innovation science with technology to humanize health care for doctors and patients. In his career, he served patients as a primary care physician while addressing health-care quality and physician burnout as an informatician, health system executive and technology entrepreneur. See his presentation on the future of health care at go.uic.edu/alumniexchange, and read on for an excerpt of our recent conversation with him.

HOW DID UIC IMPACT YOUR CAREER? UIC medical school gave me a great combination of clinical, technical and research confidence due to three things: mentorship from great informatics and research experts Arthur Elstein and Leonard Bernstein; the breadth and depth of exposure in my clinical rotations; and colleagues who mixed fun, purpose and intellectual curiosity in a healthy way.

BIGGEST ACCOMPLISHMENTS? At Northwestern Medicine, I oversaw and optimized a large electronic medical record rollout and helped create one of the nation’s first health care innovation programs. Externally, I served on the boards of several national healthcare organizations; wrote the first book on the intersection of healthcare IT and innovation; and started healthfinch, a workflow automation company that saves doctors more than one million minutes a week.

WHAT INNOVATIONS ARE NEXT? I’m most excited about the combination of artificial intelligence, sensors and telehealth to help further automate routine clinical care to enable more accessible and affordable care to all, while allowing physicians to focus on the more serious and complex cases where they are most needed.

ADVANCE.UIC.EDU

ADVANCE.UIC.EDU

We are grateful to the 45 alumni who serve on our UIC Alumni Board for their time and talent. You can read more about the UIC Alumni Board and find out how to get involved at go.uic.edu/alumniboard.

As the world continues to change and our priorities shift again, one thing will remain constant—we will continue providing meaningful resources for our graduates.

In fact, in the next few months you will hear about UIC Connected, a new virtual networking and mentoring platform we are launching. This incredible tool will be a resource for all alumni to easily connect with their peers to network or build skills and students seeking mentorship, advice or guidance.

We look forward to engaging with you in 2021 and beyond.

— CARYN SCHULTZ KORMAN EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, UIC ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

uicalumni@uic.edu facebook.com/UICAlumni twitter.com/UIC_Alumni @UICAlumni go.uic.edu.linkedin go.uic.edu/alumni

LETTER TO ALUMNI

M

any of us have changed our routines over the last year, and thereby, our priorities. For some of us, these changes have dramatically shifted how we live our daily lives. While I am encouraged by the advancements of COVID-19 vaccines, and especially the trial at UIC, I can’t help wondering, once the pandemic is under control, how will our priorities shift again?

In order to provide meaningful resources to alumni over the last year, and in consideration of our shifts in routines and priorities, the UIC Alumni Association moved all of our programming online. In fact, one of the positive trends we’ve seen is alumni turning to UIC, demonstrating stronger commitment and engagement. Over the last few months, we have seen two prevalent examples. The first is through our UIC Alumni Exchange programming, which brings alumni together (virtually) to engage in interactive discussions with UIC alumni, faculty or staff experts. As of the time I am writing this, more than 4,000 alumni and friends have registered to attend one of our weekly programs, and I am excited for the incredible lineup we have assembled for 2021. Check it out at go.uic.edu/alumniexchange.

Additionally, volunteer commitments are up. Taking on alumni volunteer leadership roles has been easier for people, since they can participate online and, presumably, not fight Chicago traffic! I am overwhelmed by their dedication and am proud to share that in November 2020 we officially launched the UIC Alumni Board. The UIC Alumni Board is charged with advancing alumni relationships with the university to support student success, encourage connections among alumni and promote advocacy that drives UIC’s mission.

COURTESY: CARYN SCHULTZ KORMAN

Silver Linings

WINTER 2021 43

Determined

A

dit Bhagat, a rising senior double majoring in finance and information and decision sciences, keeps his eyes on the big picture. His focus on the future has helped him juggle seven classes on average, allowing him to graduate early, work on campus and at internships, serve on student organizations and be selected for UIC Business Scholars. An international student from New Delhi, Bhagat returned home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, switching to a night-time schedule to accommodate for the 10-and-a-half-hour time difference. Bhagat, though, enjoys a challenge and thrives while pushing himself to achieve.

CLOSING NOTE

WHAT HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE BEEN LEARNING AND WORKING REMOTELY? Everyone has been very accommodating, considering the time difference, both at my internship and for classes. I usually sleep during the day and work at night, and I’ve been able to manage both well, although I miss my friends a lot.

44 WINTER 2021

WHAT LED YOU TO FINANCE? In high school I was part of an investment competition, and as a math and business enthusiast, finance appealed to me. I wanted to understand the financial markets, but I also became interested in data science during my sophomore year at UIC, so I decided to double major.

WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS AFTER GRADUATION? I’m planning to work for three to five years likely in private equity and then go to grad school to get my MBA in finance.

COURTESY: ADIT BHAGAT

WHY UIC? As an international student, one of my biggest worries was being able to adapt to Western culture. UIC has a very diverse student body, and that was a positive in terms of my social experience, to be around people who were experiencing the same cultural adaptation issues.

NAME ONE OF YOUR BIGGEST SUCCESSES? Maintaining discipline. At one point, I was taking eight classes, working on campus and at an internship, participating in Flames Consulting Group and Business Student Advisory Board while keeping my focus on the big picture.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE UIC COMMUNITY? I think the best of everyone comes out when times are tough, and it’s been great to receive support and understanding from my professors, friends, colleagues and employers throughout this time.

—Ana Sekler, MA '08

ADVANCE.UIC.EDU

The new W. Ann and Rachel Reynolds Dissertation Fellowship in the Graduate College fuels UIC’s IGNITE campaign goal to clear financial obstacles for talented students by supporting English graduate students working to complete their dissertations.

“The mentoring I received as a young assistant professor of anatomy enabled my career as a teacher and scientist,” said W. Ann Reynolds, a former UIC College of Medicine administrator and faculty member. “UIC’s English department works with large numbers of non-traditional students who go on to extraordinary influence, and we wanted to contribute to keeping this legacy strong,” added Rachel Reynolds MA ’07, PhD ’02.

Learn more at ignite.uic.edu.

Office of the Vice Chancellor for Advancement University of Illinois at Chicago Student Center East 750 S. Halsted (MC 100) Chicago, IL 60607

Thank You, Essential Alumni

You work on the front lines of today’s pressing challenges and embody UIC's mission to make the world a healthier, safer and more peaceful place to live.

Thank you for all you do. #UICProud