LANDMARK $100 MILLION GIFT NAMES THE LEONARD M. MILLER SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
New Era of Excellence

nnounced amid the backdrop of the Schoninger Research Quadrangle—where lifesaving research is conducted every day—the University of Miami received a $100 million donation for the School of Medicine from the family of the late Leonard M. Miller, founder of Lennar Corporation. The gift, the largest in University history, marks a new name and a new era of excellence at the medical school.

“From this moment forward, the school’s name will be the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine,” said UM President Donna E. Shalala, adding, “This kind of commitment is what makes universities great. It’s what makes communities great.”

In addition to establishing four Miller professorships, the gift will allow the school to recruit the next generation of biomedical scientists, enhance its academic mission, and meet other pressing needs.

Noting that the medical school provides health care to a diverse population of patients, regardless of their ability to pay, University of Miami Board of Trustees Chair Dean C. Colson, J.D. ’77, described the gift as “an inspiration to all of us who believe in the mission of the School of Medicine.”

Miller arrived in Miami in 1954 and invested $10,000 from his own pocket into a small home-building company. By the time of his death in 2002, that small company had become Lennar Corporation, with nearly $9 billion in annual revenues. In 1998 Miller and his wife, Sue, helped establish The Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies, located in the Merrick Building on the Coral Gables campus. Leonard Miller was chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees from 1995 to 1999.

In her moving speech at the announcement ceremony, Sue Miller praised the care her family received from the medical school.

“Leonard’s illness gave us a better understanding of what this arm of the University truly represents,” she said, recalling the doctors who would call from airports returning from seminars with new information related to Leonard’s illness. “I share these stories because there’s no better way to honor each and every one of you.”

“This community has benefited in ways that you’ll never know from the generosity of Leonard and Sue Miller,” said Florida Governor Jeb Bush at the ceremony, “and now the next generation of Millers is doing the exact same thing.”

With this and subsequent gifts, the Momentum fundraising campaign has reached more than $845 million toward its billion-dollar goal.

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FROST SCHOOL OPENS NEW LIBRARY AND TECHNOLOGY CENTER
Noteworthy Addition

tudy space in the Albert Pick Music Library steadily dwindled over the years, but the opening this semester of the Marta and Austin Weeks Music Library and Technology Center at the Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Music has created more than 140 seats and added “a robust offering of cutting-edge technology and playback equipment,” explains William D. Walker, University librarian. The $10 million facility, designed by Armando Rizo, B.Arch. ’80, is named in honor of a lead gift from University Trustee Marta Sutton Weeks and the late L. Austin Weeks, who also helped fund the L. Austin Weeks Center for Recording and Performance at the Frost School.

“Very few music schools have a dedicated, freestanding music library, and even fewer have one of this caliber,” says Frost School of Music Dean William Hipp. “I can just see prospective students and their parents taking a tour through this building with their eyes wide open. Current students and faculty seeing it for the first time are in awe.”

The library portion of the 28,000-square-foot facility places under one roof the scores and sound recordings formerly housed in the Pick building and the books, journals, videos, DVDs, and academic theses formerly housed in the Otto G. Richter Library and in storage at the University’s south campus. Among the holdings is a nationally known musical theatre archive, containing more than 40,000 recordings, scores, and Playbills.

Music librarian Nancy Zavac, M.M. ’79, is adjusting to the added responsibility of managing the entire collection under one roof, but she says it’s well worth the effort. “This is such a huge, huge improvement, and I think our use is going to go way up.”

The adjoining 5,200-square-foot music technology center is a music-making mecca that features five tech-driven labs: multimedia instruction, keyboard/computer, music engineering, electronic music, and media writing and production.

Library visitors are greeted by Fantasy—a sculpture by Mexican artist Leonardo Nierman, donated by Paul Yelin.

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Colson Leads Board of Trustees

n terms of leadership, Dean C. Colson, J.D. ’77, is a natural. Now chair of the University of Miami Board of Trustees, Colson has dedicated his life to serving his community.

After earning an undergraduate degree from Princeton University, where he was captain and most valuable player on the varsity tennis team, Colson returned home to Miami for law school. He then clerked for U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Peter Fay and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist before joining Colson Hicks Eidson, the Coral Gables-based firm where he is a partner. Florida Governor Jeb Bush appointed Colson in 2000 to the State of Florida Commission on Ethics and in 2002 to the Judicial Nominating Commission for the Florida Supreme Court, of which he is now chair.

“I am truly excited about where the University of Miami is going and the speed of our progress,” says Colson, who chairs the University’s billion-dollar Momentum fundraising campaign.

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Dude, the U’s Getting a Dell

lever analysis of the University’s computer purchasing habits has led to an exclusive campus-wide agreement with Dell, Inc., that is expected to save the University $2 million a year. The agreement, which makes Dell the University’s primary computer vendor for central purchasing, is the first of its kind between the computer giant and a major university.

“We have special packages that are available to us at a discounted price, and by buying in quantity, our discount on each computer is increased,” says M. Lewis Temares, vice president for information technology and dean of the College of Engineering.

Information Technology specialists from the medical and Coral Gables campuses teamed up with an outside “spend-analysis expert” and administrators from University Purchasing to determine “how we spend money and on what,” explains Alan Fish, vice president for business services. “The firm we used had industry pricing knowledge, which helped us work out a better deal with Dell after many months.”

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WHO NEEDS CANNES WHEN YOU’VE GOT ’CANES
Preparing for the Reel World

ilmmaking incorporates myriad talents. Aspiring student filmmakers, however, rarely have a forum in which to exhibit their work and have it judged against that of their peers. For University of Miami filmmakers, the annual ’Canes Film Festival provides that unique opportunity.

The three-day event, founded in the early 1990s, showcases the films of University motion picture majors, as well as skills such as scriptwriting, editing, cinematography, directing, and film scoring.

This year’s ’Canes Film Festival will take place May 6 to 8 at the Bill Cosford Cinema on the Coral Gables campus. The festival will feature approximately 80 short films from a variety of genres: comedy, drama, documentary, and animation. Professionals in the motion picture industry prescreen the films to select the winners.

“There are a lot of very good, high-quality films in the festival,” says Nick Scown, M.F.A. ’04, whose film Forgiving John received the best graduate thesis film award last year. “When I won the award I was definitely shocked, but happy. The two years of being at the University of Miami and studying paid off. It was proof that it was well worth the effort.”

His 12-minute film is a “dramedy,” focusing on two disparate families—one “backwoods,” the other more citified—who meet at the funeral of a father who abandoned his family. Scown said the support of the School of Communication’s motion pictures program, which paid for film stock and provided cameras and other equipment, enabled him to produce a more ambitious film than his previous endeavors.

“The festival allows the community of filmmakers at the school to see the work of everybody else,” says Ed Talavera, associate professor of motion pictures and video-film and director of the festival. “It gives students an award that starts them off.”

The festival is free and open to the public. For information, go to www.canesfilmfestival.com.

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$5 MILLION GRANT CREATES GENETICS DIAGNOSTIC LAB
DNA-Driven Care

ike machines, people come equipped with instruction manuals—our DNA. A new laboratory at the Miller School of Medicine, the first of its kind in Florida, is helping to “read” the genetic instructions that make some people more susceptible to diseases, nutritional deficiencies, or drug interactions. An additional $5 million grant from the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation has created the Miami GeneCure Diagnostic Laboratory.

“Genetics will change the attitude of medicine from a catch-up kind of thing after you become sick to let’s predict who is not going to be well and help them maintain optimum health,” explains Louis J. Elsas, M.D., director of the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Center for Medical Genetics at the Miller School of Medicine.

Cancer, neurological conditions, metabolic disorders, early aging, cardiovascular disorders, and diabetes are some of the maladies that can have a genetic root. Miami GeneCure couples the latest screening technologies with follow-up diagnosis. Prevention is then possible through avoidance of environmental toxins, nutritional adjustments, gene replacement therapy, and drug therapy.

Miami GeneCure comprises three labs: a cytogenetics lab, which focuses on chromosome abnormalities, particularly those relating to cancer; a biochemical genetics lab, which addresses inborn errors of metabolism, such as enzyme deficiencies; and a molecular genetics lab, which tests for known gen-etic mutations, such as cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs.

Also through GeneCure, Elsas and other members of the Miami Gene Team are working with State of Florida officials to create a more comprehensive statewide newborn screening program than the one that currently exists. Most states test for four or five diseases, but Florida is expanding that list to more than 30. Still, screening alone is not enough. “Right now there is no infrastructure in the state for diagnosis and management,” Elsas says.

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New Name, New Focus for Nursing

he School of Nursing is broadening its reach with the announcement of a new name—the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies. In addition to B.S.N., M.S.N., and Ph.D. degrees, the school will now offer a B.S. in Health Science.

“Integrating the nursing and health science programs mirrors a growing national trend at nursing schools,” says University President Donna E. Shalala, the nation’s longest-serving Secretary of Health and Human Services. “Students will benefit from interdisciplinary courses rooted in contemporary models of health care.”

The Health Science program, formerly administered by the College of Arts and Sciences, prepares students for many health-related careers, from pharmacy and nutrition to health care administration, health policy, and international health.

“This expansion enables us to enrich the learning experience of all our students and propel our school to the next level of excellence,” says Nilda Peragallo, dean of the School of Nursing and Health Studies.

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PUBLIC SURVEYS TRACK HISPANIC ATTITUDES
Changes in Latin ’Tudes

uch of Florida’s colorful cultural tapestry is the handiwork of its population of Spanish-speakers—the fourth largest in the nation. In the School of Communication, the Oficina de Investigación Social y Communicación is tracking opinions and behaviors among Florida’s growing Hispanic population to learn how society changes as a result of immigration.

“Florida is a good, if not perfect, laboratory for studying the processes taking place when cultures blend,” says Gonzalo Soruco, associate professor of advertising and public relations and director of the Oficina.

In 2004 the Oficina published its first research effort, the Hispanic Optimism survey, named as such because the researchers believe that migration is guided by the promise of reward. The telephone survey obtained responses from 400 Hispanic residents in the five counties that account for 75 percent of Florida’s 2.6 million-plus Hispanics—Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange, and Palm Beach. Soruco was surprised by the uniformly high approval of quality of life in the United States, since “so many of them are working hard and long hours to make ends meet.”

The survey revealed that Hispanics, a term used by the U.S. Census Bureau since 1970 to categorize more than 20 nationalities, differ widely. In South Florida, Soruco explains, the Cuban stronghold maintained for the past 40 years is being supplanted by largely affluent and well-educated people from many regions in South America and the Caribbean. The young, those who are single, and those who come from Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela tend to be more liberal than older, first-generation Cubans; most oppose the war in Iraq and generally supported John Kerry for president. Soruco and graduate students at the Oficina are conducting a second survey to explore how Florida Hispanics voted in the 2004 presidential election and why.

Soruco’s research also addresses assimilation of Hispanics to U.S. culture and language, a process he knows well. As a young man Soruco moved from Bolivia to Oklahoma, where he tried to be “as inconspicuous as possible.” Miami was a much more favorable place for him to nourish his roots.

“Hispanics are becoming our bread and butter,” Soruco says. “The University understands the role that a research office such as ours can play.”

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