Princeton Magazine Family Edition

february 2015

family

Brooke Shields On Motherhood and H e r L at e s t B o o k Stem Scholars: pairing New Jersey’s best and brightest Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s new outpatient care center in Plainsboro Princeton Public Library’s world language story hour

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family

Photograph courtesy of Brooke Shields.

february 2015

Brooke Shields honestly examines her

remarkable and often difficult relationship with her mother in her latest memoir There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me.

Contents:

PUBLISHER

J. Robert Hillier, FAIA EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Lynn Adams Smith CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Jorge Naranjo

6 Brooke Shields: on motherhood and her latest book Interview by Kam Williams

10 Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s new outpatient care center in Plainsboro

By Greta Cuyler

14 Stem Scholars: pairing New Jersey’s best and brightest

by Anne Levin

16 P rinceton Public Library’s world language story hour

by Ilene Dube

20 Shopping! A Boy’s Life

By Taylor Smith

art director

Jeffrey Edward Tryon GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Matthew DiFalco

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

kam williams anne levin ilene dube greta cuyler taylor smith

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Robin Broomer ACCOUNT MANAGERS Jennifer Covill Kendra russell cybill tascarella Erin Toto OPERATIONS MANAGER Melissa Bilyeu

PRINCETON Magazine princeton family Witherspoon Media Group 305 Witherspoon Street Princeton, NJ 08542 P: 609.924.5400 F: 609.924.8818 www.princetonmagazine.com Advertising opportunities 609.924.5400 Media Kit available on www.princetonmagazine.com Subscription information 609.924.5400 ext. 30 subscriptions @witherspoonmediagroup.com Editorial suggestions editor@witherspoonmedia group.com Princeton Magazine is published 7 times a year with a circulation of 35,000. All rights reserved. Nothing herein may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher. To purchase PDF files or reprints, please call 609.924.5400 or e-mail melissa.bilyeu@witherspoon mediagroup.com. ©2015 Witherspoon Media Group

On the cover: Photograph courtesy of Brooke Shields.

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Brooke Shields On Motherhood and Her Latest Book

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INTERVIEW BY KAM WILLIAMS

ctress and author Brooke Shields is a familiar face within the entertainment industry. Starting her career at just 11 months, Shields went on to star in Pretty Baby (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Endless Love (1981). She also caused a sensation with her advertising campaign for Calvin Klein. Shields attended Princeton University in 1983, graduating in 1988. Following college, Shields played the title role in Suddenly Susan and appeared on Seinfeld.

She has just published her latest memoir There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, written after the death of her mother, Teri Shields, in 2012. In it, Shields honestly examines her remarkable and often difficult relationship with her mother. Her previous memoir, Down Came the Rain, was a New York Times Bestseller.

Childhood photos from There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me.

PM: How important to you and your career has been the education you received at Princeton University?

It’s been the thing that’s helped me stay standing.

PM: Did classmates ask you out on dates while you were a student at Princeton?

After a while. Not much my freshman year. But by my sophomore year, I had asked enough people out that they started to ask me back.

PM: Princeton has eating clubs instead of fraternities.

Had they begun admitting women when you arrived?

Yes, although I went there in 1983, the Ivy Club was all-male when I arrived and it was still all-male when I graduated. I joined Cap & Gown.

PM: Would you ever be interested in acting in a French language film given that you majored in French Literature?

I would absolutely say “yes” in a second, if given the opportunity. I would take on that challenge enthusiastically and work really hard.

PM: If you hadn’t entered the entertainment industry, what do you think you’d be doing today?

I’ve been in the entertainment industry for so long, before I even knew that I wanted to be in it. So, it would be hard to know what else I might be doing. I probably would have still made my way into it somehow because, to me, making people laugh, and entertaining, and watching people experience storytelling is one of the most rewarding things I can imagine. So I think I would have found a way to entertain people in some capacity.

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Brooke and Teri Shields.

PM: What was the turning point in your life? To me, it seems that you have had more than one.

Most people assume there’s only supposed to be one turning point, which dictates the rest of our lives. But I think we have to be open to additional turning points when they arrive. Things happen in our lives.

Classmates graduate, careers change, babies are born, friends are lost, loved ones die…There are so many milestones that I believe are important to acknowledge as being significant.

PM: Who is your intended audience for this book?

Is there a particular demographic you believe will gain from it?

I think there’s a difference between who will be interested in reading it and those who might be able to gain perspective. I’ve been around for so long that those people who have actually grown up with me might read it just for the trivia. However, I’m hoping that younger audiences will sort of tap into the part that simply deals with getting to know your parents and asking them to try and understand who you are.

That’s a dialogue that needs to happen.

PM: If you could talk to your mother today, what would you say to her?

I hope you knew how much I loved you.

PM: When I see the tremendous wealth of work you have done in the industry, I can’t help but wonder when you will try your hand as a director?

I directed Chicago at the Hollywood Bowl the summer before last, and I got a bit of the bug for it.

So I’m sure that within the next few years, there will be some sort of foray into it.

PM: Given that you’ve been a legend since childhood, “What becomes a legend most?” is an interesting question to pose to you.

Well, there’s a certain sense of longevity that’s associated with legends, as well as a sense of endurance. I think what becomes a legend most is not only that which lasts the test of time but an ability to keep adapting. I’ve been around for decades and I’ve tried to stay afloat by seizing upon opportunity when presented to me. And the opportunities presented to me now look very different from the ones in PM: I believe that your book will help many heal the 1980s. But instead of waiting for everything to from the pain of being raised in an unhealthy or happen the way you think it should, it’s a matter of Brooke Shields with daughters Rowan and Grier, photograph courtesy of Brooke Shields. challenging environment. being able to see what the real lay of the land is, and figuring out how you can play a part in it.

I think we can all look at our situations and find reasons to make them healthier. Nobody really has it all figured out. I believe there’s healthy and PM: Thanks again for the time, Brooke, and best of luck with the book. unhealthy in each of us. It’s when you operate with a sense of love in your heart that you maintain the integrity that enables you to keep going forward.

Thank you so much, Kam.

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CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA’S NEW OUTPATIENT CARE CENTER IN PLAINSBORO

By Greta Cuyler

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Images courtesy of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

C

hildren’s Hospital of Philadelphia will open a new outpatient pediatric specialty care center in Plainsboro in late January. The first pediatric hospital in the nation, CHOP was ranked No. 1 on the U.S. News & World’s Report 2014-15 Honor Roll of the nation’s Best Children’s Hospitals. CHOP’s new building, located on the campus of the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, will replace one that CHOP has leased at 707 Alexander Road for nearly the last decade. At 25,000 square feet, CHOP’s one-story facility be significantly larger than its current location and has the potential to expand to 100,000 square feet.

“Currently, when we open in January, 2015, we’ll offer a few expanded services, including diagnostic x-ray, speech therapy for children and occupational therapy,” says Amy Lambert, Senior Vice President of the CHOP Care Network. “And we will enhance our other 14 or so subspecialties. Our hope is that this location will be successful and we will grow staff over time.”

CHOP physicians, neonatologists and pediatric hospitalists will rotate between CHOP and the Plainsboro campus and be available to patients at UMCPP 24/7, while providing an invaluable resource for children in crisis, according to Barry Rabner, CEO of Princeton HealthCare System.

Children may be transferred to CHOP in Philadelphia if they have a rare or unique syndrome or diagnosis or one that requires a multidisciplinary team, Lambert says.

UMCPP’s affiliation with CHOP began about five years ago when Rabner was meeting with the hospital’s approximately 50 pediatricians. “They felt they could do a better job servicing the kids in the region if we had an affiliation with a children’s hospital,” he says. “It was an idea I found very compelling.”

When UMCPP sent out request for proposals to several children’s hospitals, CHOP quickly rose to the top of the pile. “The original intent was to enhance the quality of pediatric care that we were providing within the acute care hospital,” Rabner says. “CHOP came on board with their physicians and systems and in short order, materially improvised the quality of the care we were providing for our kids. It was a marriage made in heaven.”

Rabner recalls a case several years ago when a young girl arrived at the hospital’s Emergency Department with symptoms that were not immediately clear to staff doctors. “They called their CHOP colleagues and they were

immediately talking with pediatric specialists and sharing electronic information.

They determined that she was having a stroke, which is very rare for a young person. While they were discussing the case, they also sent a specially equipped ambulance to us. The team agreed on how to proceed, the patient was transferred downtown to CHOP and had a terrific outcome. It was a beautiful thing. We had all of the expertise necessary to take care of a potentially serious problem. Not only are the systems there, the technology for sharing the information is there.”

CHOP broke ground on the Plainsboro facility in late 2013. According to Rabner, "They can increase their building here to 100,000 square feet, they have the approvals in hand. My predictions, based on the positive reactions from the community to CHOP being here, is that the only thing that’s going to keep them from going to 100,000 square feet is the ability to recruit the staff quickly enough.”

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STEM Scholars: Pairing New Jersey’s Best and Brightest

By Anne Levin

espite its diminutive size, New Jersey is home to the highest concentration of scientific professionals in the nation. Some even call the Garden State the “medicine chest of the world.” With 17 of the top 20 biopharmaceutical companies operating within its borders, little New Jersey is the epicenter of invention when it comes to science, technology, engineering and mathematics – the four words that form the popular acronym STEM. But there’s a problem. When New Jersey kids graduate high school, they tend to leave instead of looking for more local centers of higher education, especially those that specialize in STEM. This means that the powerhouse companies can have a hard time finding the next generation of experts for research and development.

“New Jersey exports more college students than any other state in the country,” says David Hodges, who directs the Governor’s STEM Scholars Program, started last year. “And that’s not good. We need to create something like 269,999 jobs in STEM by 2018. The problem is compounded by the fact that we have a lot of baby boomers here on the verge of retirement. New Jersey is heavily STEM-dependent, so we’re going to take that loss a lot harder than other states.”

Galvanized by the dramatic statistics, The Research & Development Council of New Jersey announced the STEM Scholars Program in February 2013 in partnership with the Governor’s Office, New Jersey Department of Education, and Secretary of Higher Education. The idea is to bring together 50 STEMsavvy high school and college students each year to tackle important research.

Projects are designed by the college students and implemented by their younger colleagues. Efforts in this inaugural year range from building a mini-drone to doing an olfactory experiment to try and measure the sense of smell.

By the time the school year ends, these teams of youthful researchers will have attended four conferences together. At the final event, they will present the results of their projects.The group judged to have completed the most impressive research project will be invited to the 36th Annual Edison Patent Awards, which celebrate the year in innovation.

The first group of STEM Scholars was culled from a pool of some 225 applicants. Information was sent to every superintendent and county in the

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state. The Research & Development Council also contacted all of New Jersey’s universities. An advisory board of professionals in industry, academia, and government made the final selections.

“We were looking for students who showed not only an aptitude for STEM but also leadership in their communities,” says Hodges. That includes students like Iris Rukshin, a senior at High Technology High School in Lincroft. While working on math and computer science projects, she finds time to teach English and translate at a local day care center.

The 17-year-old has been entranced by math and science as long as she can remember. Her father is a cardiologist, and her mother is a former engineer who now works as a registered nurse. “The thing that got me hooked on research is that moment when you see something that finally makes sense – when you understand something,” Rukshin says. “It’s that ‘aha’ moment that is kind of the drug of research.”

Working with a team under the mentorship of College of New Jersey junior Susan Knox, who is an alumnus of Stuart Country Day School, Rukshin is, as she says, “identifying the lateralization threshold of the trigeminal nerve.” Asked to translate that into layman’s terms, she immediately makes the leap. “When you’re smelling,” she explains, “there are two types of olfactory senses. One is smelling, and the other is almost tactile. Like when you inhale mint, it feels cool, right?”

The team is trying to stimulate that tactile sense without activating the actual sense of smell. “Lateralization refers to which side it is coming from,” Rukshin continues. “If we know the threshold, we can identify how the nerve functions and contribute to our knowledge of anosmia, which is the term for not being able to smell. And this is important for people with anosmia, because they are actually prone to depression. There are so many things anosmics can’t do. They can’t tell when food is rotten so they often get sick more often. Most people can’t relate to that because we don’t often think of what it would be like to lose our sense of smell.”

Princeton University freshman Jeffrey Register is fascinated by chemical engineering, which is not surprising since his parents are both chemical engineers. While a student at West Windsor Plainsboro High School, he loved science and math.

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Acting Governor Kim Guadagno holds a press conference at the State House announcing the Governor’s STEM Scholars Program. (NJ Office of Information Technology)

“I never had a program quite like this one,” he says of the STEM Scholars.

“I took all the science and math courses I could in high school. And I interned at a chemical engineering lab one summer. That was good, but nothing quite as organized or as broad as the STEM Scholars program.”

Register is mentoring five high school STEM scholars on a project to make wet chemistry solar cells. The team is testing the cells’ output voltage and current to determine which is best. “And then we’ll change a factor of the cell to see how that changes the output,” Register says.

Other college mentors in the program come from Rutgers University, Rowan University, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Stevens Institute of Technology. Their high school colleagues are from all over the state. A browse through the group’s biographies on the STEM Scholars website yields an eclectic list of topics of expertise -- humanoid robotics, astronautical engineering, and biomedical engineering, to name just a few. Extra-curricular activities range from volunteering with a local first aid squad to playing clarinet in the New Jersey Senior Youth Orchestra.

Like Register, some of the students have already interned with local STEM companies. This gives them a head start on one of the aims of the program.

“We want to connect all of the students to an employer or an internship,” says Hodges. “One of the institutions that has been very helpful is Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. They’re taking on four interns, two at the college level and two at the high school level. This is a very important part of the program.”

While some large companies such as Exxon, Chevron, and Lockheed Martin have their own STEM programs, others rely on state-run initiatives to develop talent. “STEM is a unique program that has been around for over half a century,” says Hodges. “But there wasn’t any kind of statewide program that really addressed the programs New Jersey has, as a STEM state. Now, that has changed. We’re pairing industry leaders with the best and brightest STEM scholars, and this means a lot for our future.” (top-left) Dr. Narayan Ganesan of Stevens Institute of Technology talks about his career journey. From left to right, the panelists are: Dr. Dave Rotella of Montclair State University; Dr. Ganesan; Dr. Wilma Olson of Rutgers; Dr. Fuat Celik of Rutgers. (top-right) Dr. Kathleen Scotto of Rutgers talks about her work as an oncologist. (bottom-left) One of the nine groups of STEM scholars working on their year-long research project. (bottomright) A group of STEM Scholars poses at the Pharmaceutical Labs at Rutgers University.

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Images courtesy of NJLA: New Jersey Library Association

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Sing Along in World Languages Story Hour

F

By Ilene Dube

rench, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian and Chinese are among the languages in which you’ll hear the phrase “Good morning, children, it’s story time” spoken at the Princeton Public Library. The library offers its World Language Stories program to connect with the languages and cultures of the greater Princeton region.

It began eight years ago. “We started with Spanish to address the needs of Princeton’s large Hispanic population,” says Allison Santos, Youth Services Librarian. “We would average 40 attendees, made up of children, their parents and caregivers. We were then approached by other native speakers who were interested in story times for their communities.” After Chinese language story time attracted a crowd, it was followed by a French program. Veronica Olivares, an advocate for early literacy initiatives, leads the Spanish language story time.

“Some libraries offer Urdu or Gujarati language story times, but it’s rare for a library to offer as many languages as we do,” says Santos.

All the storytellers are native speakers who volunteer their time. “They put a lot of work in planning and promoting the programs and help make decisions about books to include in the World Language Collection,” Santos says. Ages of attendees begin at 2, and children up to 10 enjoy attending. “Ages 3 to 5 is the most receptive,” says Santos. “We want them to participate and sing along.”

Story times range from half an hour to a full hour and a half, in the case of the Hungarian story time, which includes music, dance and acting out scenes from the book. “If you go to that one, you’ll be singing and dancing before you leave,” says Santos. Most attendees speak the language of the group they attend, but “you don’t have to be Chinese to come to Chinese story hour. Parents can expose their children to different cultures and language.”

Japanese story time incorporates kamishibai, a centuries-old form of

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storytelling considered a precursor to manga and anime that incorporates picture scrolls in conveying stories. Sometimes called paper drama, kamishibai has even been used by Toyota as a management tool and by others to promote world peace. “With ‘kamishibai,’ even if you don’t speak the language you can understand the story and get the flow,” says Santos.

The library’s World Languages literature collection includes picture books, chapter books, nonfiction, music and movies in 16 languages from A to Z. “Everything from Arabic to Zulu,” says Lucia Acosta, the youth services librarian who manages the collection. When she arrived 14 years ago the collection included books from Norway and Sweden, reflecting a population no longer reading those books. She took it upon herself to rebuild the collection, which now includes Tagalog, Hindi, Czech, Korean, Hebrew and Italian.

While bestsellers such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are available in most languages of the collection – books that have been translated from English – the primary focus is on books written in the language of the author.

“It is through French books by French authors that we can understand French culture,” says Acosta, a native of Colombia who is fluent in English, Spanish and French, and speaks some German and Italian.

The Spanish collection is the largest, but the French collection is significant, to meet the needs of families who came to the Princeton area with such French businesses as L’Oreal and Schlumberger. Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study also bring international library patrons. Siemen’s and Munich Re bring German speakers who don’t necessarily live in Princeton but purchase Princeton Public Library cards so they can borrow the books, says Santos. “During our summer reading program, the German children completed their 50 hours of summer reading in German.”

The library offers a summer reading program, One World, Many Stories, in which children tell where their parents were born. When the library opened its Sands building in 2004, a video was made of children saying “library” in the 81 languages spoken in Princeton.

“With the World Languages Collection and story times, we’re making available what other libraries don’t offer,” says Santos. “We also have English conversation groups, where native speakers can come and practice English. It’s like a little U.N. Princeton really is a melting pot.”

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Image courtesy of Princeton Public Library

Allison Santos, Princeton Public Library Youth Services Librarian, leads the Preschool Pirate and Princess Parade. The library offers stories and books in languages from Arabic to Zulu.

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