The Warner School graduate built a career advocating for shoppers—then turned her attention to helping future educators thrive.

Mary Ellen Burris ’68W (EdM) likes to say that her graduate degree from the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and Human Development is her secret ingredient. “What I learned at Warner I put to work at Wegmans,” she says.

Equipped with a master’s in educational psychology (now human development), Burris joined Wegmans in 1971. She quickly became the company’s “voice of the customer,” pioneering a consumer affairs department at a time when few retailers even considered such a role. As she puts it, “If there was one word that would capture what I did, it was to listen—and then to share that information where it would be heard.”

Her listening led to change. Burris launched consumer columns, spearheaded food safety programs, and introduced the Strive for Five campaign encouraging shoppers to eat more fruits and vegetables. Over nearly five decades, she became a trusted voice for thousands of customers and a key architect of Wegmans’ reputation for care and quality.

At the same time, she never lost sight of her roots as an educator. For more than 20 years, Burris has been a dedicated advisor and supporter of the Warner School, helping to shape programs, mentor leaders, and invest in the next generation of educators. She credits the school as the place where her values, and the importance of education, came into focus: “Warner helped me to bring all of that together,” she says.

In 2023, she deepened her commitment to the Warner School with an extraordinary gift: an endowed deanship, professorship, and scholarship—the largest in the school’s history. Yet Burris is quick to center the impact, not the milestone. She views it as a way to ensure that others, like her, can turn education into action.

More recently, Burris established a newly endowed professorship at Warner to provide vital, ongoing support for early-career faculty. Burris says the decision to give now was intentional. “I believe in giving while living,” she says. “Supporting Warner like this is my way of giving back to a place that gave so much to me.”

From her start as a Warner graduate to her legacy as a champion of both customers and students, Burris has built a career—and a life—on listening, learning, and giving back.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on September 3, 2025. It was updated on October 31 to reflect Burris’s recent gift to the Warner School as part of For Ever Better: The Campaign for the University of Rochester.

Professor Benjamín Castañeda ’09 (PhD) leads a global effort to meet critical needs for medical technology.

The situation in Peru was grim during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The South American country produces very few of its own medical supplies and without adequate equipment to treat patients, it soon had the world’s highest COVID-19 death rate per capita.

“One of the most critical needs was mechanical ventilators,” says Fabiola León-Velarde, then-president of Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (CONCYTEC), Peru’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation. “The virus severely damaged the lungs, and many patients required mechanical ventilation to survive while their lungs recovered.”

But the nation of 33 million people had fewer than 250 mechanical ventilators available to treat patients. When CONCYTEC launched a call for proposals for help creating ventilators and other essential medical services to fight the pandemic, Professor Benjamín Castañeda ’09 (PhD) from the University of Rochester’s Department of Biomedical Engineering answered. Then a professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), one of Peru’s most prestigious universities, Castañeda devised a plan to rapidly design and manufacture hundreds of ventilators to support critically ill patients.

“We built them from scratch, not knowing anything about mechanical ventilators,” says Castañeda. “We turned PUCP’s gym into a factory and produced 350 for use in 23 hospitals across the country. Peru didn’t have a medical device industry, so this was the first mechanical medical device designed, tested, approved for use, and fabricated in Peru.”

The project is emblematic of Castañeda’s career: bringing medical technology to people who would otherwise not have access. León-Velarde credits Castañeda’s leadership in navigating the complex regulatory landscape and bringing together a multidisciplinary team of engineers, medical professionals, and policymakers to make the project happen.

“These ventilators were deployed to public hospitals at a critical time when every additional device meant a chance to save more lives,” she says. “Their impact went beyond the immediate crisis—they also demonstrated the potential of local scientific and technological innovation in responding to national emergencies.”

Castañeda attended PUCP as an undergraduate, staying active as chair of the university’s student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). By organizing the chapter’s events, he made important contacts with faculty across the globe, including at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he would pursue a master’s in computer engineering.

While at RIT, Castañeda found an idol and mentor downriver in Kevin Parker, the William F. May Professor of Engineering at Rochester’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. Soon Castañeda enrolled at Rochester to pursue a PhD in electrical and computer engineering.

Castañeda developed deep expertise in biomedical ultrasound during his time studying under Parker’s guidance. While completing his dissertation on extracting information from sonoelastography, a novel hybrid imaging technique developed by Parker’s lab, Castañeda weighed opportunities in the United States and back home.

“I’ve always wanted to make an impact on society,” he says. “Even though I would have many opportunities in the US as a PhD, I felt that going back to Peru would allow me to make a bigger impact, even if I had access to fewer resources.”

He discussed establishing a medical-imaging laboratory with PUCP and began teaching summer courses there in 2008. A grant from a Peruvian network of universities allowed Castañeda to travel the country, learning about its health care needs and identifying ways to apply his expertise.

That is when he first saw rural areas as a potential niche for his research. In Peru’s mountains and jungles, there is limited access to the internet and medical professionals. Indeed, it can take hours of difficult travel to reach the nearest hospitals.

“Designing technology for rural areas is much different than designing for state-of-the-art university medical centers,” says Castañeda. “You have to take into account the resources that are available and what is not.”

When he joined the PUCP faculty in 2009, he focused his lab on creating point-of-care medical devices that work in rural settings. By augmenting biomedical ultrasound technology with photogrammetry and artificial intelligence techniques, they were able to help diagnose and treat chronic ailments prevalent in such places in Peru, including diabetic feet, tuberculosis, and wounds caused by parasitic diseases.

Castañeda climbed the ranks to full professor at PUCP, served as director of academic affairs for the School of Science and Engineering, and launched an undergraduate program in biomedical engineering. All the while, he maintained research collaborations with Parker and partners at the University of Rochester Medical Center, including Thomas Marini, an assistant professor in the Department of Imaging Sciences.

The COVID-19 pandemic grew interest in tele-ultrasound research, so Castañeda expanded an ambitious project with hopes of bringing prenatal and breast-cancer imaging to millions of women in rural Peru. The lack of ultrasound access leads to high maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality as well as delayed diagnosis of breast cancer.

Castañeda formed a team that included collaborators from the Medical Center and Johns Hopkins Medicine. Kathryn Drennan, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, joined three years ago, intrigued by the parallel challenges in her home state of Alaska, where many rural towns are only accessible by bush plane or boat.

Rather than having patients travel long distances to receive care or deploying specialists to sparsely populated areas where needs are infrequent, the project leverages generally trained community health workers.

“They can do a broad variety of tasks, so the idea is that through augmented reality–assisted training plus an AI boost, they can get the images that allow qualified physicians to remotely triage while the patients stay local,” says Drennan.

Already the project has impacted thousands of lives, deploying the technology in 24 Peruvian clinics through partnerships with the Peruvian government, perinatal and cancer institutes, and local universities. The team is pursuing further funding to refine the technology and expand its implementation throughout the country via public policy.

“Ben is so smart in the way he can imagine an idea, bring a team together, and make everybody feel good about accomplishing that goal,” says Drennan. “It’s inspiring.”

Castañeda joined the Rochester faculty in fall 2024, establishing the Global Health and Medical Devices Lab. “In Peru, I was at a stage in which I had reached a ceiling,” he says. “Coming back to Rochester gives me the opportunity to still focus on low-resource settings and global health but with more means at my disposal.”

Already, he has established a new three-year collaborative research agreement between Rochester and PUCP to advance the ultrasound project and promote exchanges of faculty as well as undergraduate and graduate students. Stefano Romero, one of Castañeda’s first students at PUCP and now a professor and head of the Digital Signal Processing Lab there, was the first to come to Rochester through the agreement in February.

For three months at Rochester, Romero will conduct ultrasound and elastography experiments to refine the AI techniques that identify potential lesions. He believes Castañeda’s leadership is a boon to both universities.“We want to preserve these connections between the universities for generations of students,” Romero says. “We’re building exciting opportunities for students from both Rochester and Peru to see different perspectives on health outcomes that we believe will be transformative.”

A version of this story appears in the spring 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the University of Rochester. This story, originally published online on April 4, 2025, has been updated with the video and republished.

How Rochester’s Vice President for Research built a career on curiosity, collaboration, and access.

In a second-floor office in the Del Monte Research Building at the University of Rochester Medical Center is an unassuming door that wasn’t always there. Nothing extraordinary. Simply an extra entrance cut into the wall when Stephen Dewhurst, the vice president for research at the University of Rochester, first moved into the space. Dewhurst asked for the extra door in 2009 when he became chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology because he wanted to offer direct access, without people’s having to go first through his administrator in the adjacent room.

“Making yourself available is super important,” Dewhurst says. “People are more likely to come talk to you if they find you approachable.”

That small architectural adjustment is in many ways indicative of his approach to leadership: accessible and acutely aware of the human relationships that frequently underpin the successful work of scientists.

With no fewer than 49 patents or co-patents to his name, Dewhurst has become a respected scientific and academic leader. An accomplished virologist and HIV researcher, he’s served as the vice president for research since 2023 (having held the role on an interim basis for the preceding two years) and as the vice dean for research at Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry since 2013.

He came, saw, and stayed

English-born Dewhurst, who earned a bachelor’s degree in cellular pathology from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and a PhD in pathology and microbiology from the University of Nebraska, first arrived on the Rochester campus in 1990. He never left.

“I stayed because I really liked the people I met in my interview,” he says. “That relationship to faculty, staff, and students here has never changed.”

Though trained as a virologist during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Dewhurst’s career was never confined to a single field. His research has crossed disciplines—from a long-term collaboration with a pediatrician to studies of viral peptides with chemists. At one point, he worked with faculty from the departments of chemistry, obstetrics and gynecology, and infectious diseases to study how self-assembling peptides can influence the sexual transmission of HIV. These weren’t just scientific intersections—they were human ones, too.

The best collaborations, says Dewhurst, are those when “you get to work with people who know stuff you don’t, and who think of things you’d never think of.”

One of his most enduring collaborations was with the late Caroline Breese Hall, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the Medical Center. An expert in pediatric infectious diseases, Hall had begun to study a newly described virus known as human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6), which had been recently linked to roseola infantum (also known as sixth disease)—a very common childhood illness that her father, Burtis Breese, had studied back in the 1930s and 40s. Hall had access to clinical samples; Dewhurst brought molecular virology expertise to the table.

Together, and with the help of other collaborators, they explored questions neither could have answered alone—such as the clinical consequences of viral infections in young kids. In fact, in infants and young children, the team showed, HHV-6 infection is a major cause of visits to the emergency department, febrile seizures, and hospitalizations.

According to Dewhurst, it’s this spirit of cross-pollination that makes up the essence of Rochester.

“The culture is extremely collaborative,” he says, pointing out the geographic proximity of the Medical Center and River Campus, which are across the street from one another.

“There’s something different here,” he adds. Large labs with more than 20 people are quite rare at Rochester, “so you likely need to collaborate to succeed. Most people cannot be an island unto themselves.”

A mentor’s gift

Dewhurst’s leadership style was forged not just in labs but also through various mentors in his early career. He recalls a pivotal moment during his time as a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, when he was part of a research team preparing a paper for a top scientific journal—the type of opportunity that can catapult a young scientist’s career.

The work involved scientists from two institutions, and the senior leaders of both groups felt that their contributions merited recognition. As a result, Dewhurst’s position as first author on the paper was suddenly in jeopardy. A postdoctoral trainee at the time, Dewhurst knew the loss of first-author credit would greatly diminishing his future job prospects.

That’s when his mentor, James Mullins, made a quiet but powerful decision. “Jim was kind enough to remove himself from the senior authorship, in order to create space for me to be first author,” Dewhurst says. “That made a huge difference. I wouldn’t be sitting here if that hadn’t happened.”

It’s a lesson that stuck with him and one that he’s been trying to pay forward to his own mentees.

An accidental leader

Truth be told, Dewhurst’s career was less of a well-laid plan than a slow accumulation of yeses to unexpected opportunities. At Rochester, he first led a summer research program for undergraduates at the School of Medicine and Dentistry and then won a National Institutes of Health grant to support those historically excluded from biomedical science. Later came an associate deanship, a period as a department chair, followed by a vice deanship.

Dewhurst insists he never set out to become an administrator. Instead, each step was something of a surprise. “People have asked me to step into roles that I might not have thought of for myself,” he says.

But he figured that if others believed he could do it, he’d give it his best shot.

Now, as the University’s head of research, Dewhurst is a steward of programs and initiatives far beyond his own training and expertise.

“I’m grateful that I get to be a voice for the research community,” he says, explaining that he often speaks about the University’s research with the media, legislators, members of the board of trustees, donors, and other supporters of the institution.

As that voice he helps champion and oversee projects in areas as diverse as astrophysics, biomedical research, education, extended reality, humanistic inquiry, music, quantum science, and resilience. As an example, he describes Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics: the facility not only supports national security and world-class research on nuclear fusion and plasma physics; it’s also the site of training for scientists, including those who helped achieve nuclear fusion, or “ignition,” in 2022.

“The majority of the people who did that experiment trained at Rochester,” Dewhurst says, adding that “researchers get paid to explore. In doing that, we create enormous societal benefit.”

Putting the art in science

An avid collector of contemporary art, Dewhurst’s office boasts a dozen framed drawings and paintings—all original art—and two large canvases with strong colors and bold brushstrokes.

He was instrumental in bringing artist Charmaine Wheatley to the University, originally to create portraits of people affected by HIV and mental health diagnoses—groups that are often stigmatized.

“The ability to humanize people and make their stories understandable, relatable, and important,” Dewhurst says, “is something unique that art can do—that science can’t.” Which is why, in part, Wheatley has more recently created a gallery of Rochester neuroscientists that seeks both to humanize the researchers and to explain how their work improves lives.

Those dual commitments—to discovery and humanity—shape how he sees the future of the University’s research enterprise. Despite budget pressures and political headwinds, Dewhurst remains hopeful, noting the University’s recent decision to invest $8.5 million in four new transdisciplinary research centers.

“We’re all concerned about federal support for scholarship and research,” he says, “but research will continue. And it’ll continue to advance knowledge, to save lives, to improve the world—because those ideals and goals are something we can all agree on.”

The former Students’ Association president offers advice on how Rochester students can ‘make their hive a home.’

Jamal Holtz ’20 didn’t know a soul when he arrived at the University of Rochester in 2016. By the time he graduated, he was arguably the most recognized face among the student body.

Holtz grew up in an impoverished neighborhood in the District of Columbia, one of five children to a single mother (in October 2024, he lost his brother Joseph to gun violence). He earned a full-tuition merit scholarship to Rochester as a Posse Scholar—the first in his family to attend college—and served as Students’ Association president his senior year, a key player at the University during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Holtz entered Rochester planning to major in political science, but his keen interest in civil issues such as affordable housing and economic disparity led him to create his own major: social justice and policymaking. That decision was made possible, in part, because of Rochester’s signature flexible curriculum.

These days, Holtz is chief of staff at LINK Strategic Partners, a social impact consulting firm in Washington, DC, where he helps lead the firm’s executive functions, business development, strategy, and performance development portfolio.

He returned to Rochester in January to speak at the inaugural Career Exploration Summit, presenting a keynote address focused on helping students assimilate on campus.

Holtz offers advice to current and prospective students on making the most of their experiences at the University of Rochester.

Embrace the good and the bad—and try new things!

When Holtz joined student government as a senator his first year, he adopted the phrase “Make our hive a home” as his motto. He urges students to be curious and experimental as they tread the unfamiliar path of college.

“You’re going to be here for four years,” he says. “You’ll meet new people. You’ll like some and not like others. You’ll try food you like and food you don’t like. You’ll have classes you like, and ones you don’t like. Find out what works and what doesn’t. In the grand scheme, it’s about making this place your home.”

Get involved in activities to ‘put yourself out there.’

Holtz says Rochester students should take advantage of the flexible curriculum and be creative in their choices inside and outside the classroom.

“Politics was my passion, so joining student government was an easy decision,” he says. “But there are so many activities offered on campus—student organizations and special events. Participate in them, even if they might seem boring. Meet new people and embrace diverse perspectives. Put yourself out there. You never know what will develop.”

He urges students to volunteer at events, both on campus and in the Rochester community. “Hand out T-shirts. Volunteer at food drives. Do things that you may not traditionally do on a college campus. Think about what community service really is beyond being some graduation requirement in high school.”

Building relationships with Rochester faculty and staff can serve you in the long run.

Holtz says “collaboration is a true superpower on campus,” one that extends beyond bonding with fellow students.

“Collaborate with administrators, staff, and faculty,” he says. “Partner with campus organizations and build connections. Have a conversation with someone you’ve never spoken to before and build relationships. You never know: The commonalities you have may outweigh your differences.”

Such relationships could open doors down the line—to internships opportunities, formative experiences, career prospects, personal connections, and more.

Holtz formed a strong bond with Anne-Marie Algier, Rochester’s dean of students and associate vice president for student life, and says she was “a huge part” of his success on campus.

“Anne-Marie was more than just an administrator and adviser,” he says. “She was a mentor and a mother. There were times when I wanted to give up on college, and she reminded me that I was someone special who made meaningful contributions on campus. And she made that campus feel like a home for me, cooking meals and desserts at home and bringing them to campus. She got me involved socially and exposed me to the Greater Rochester area.”

Holtz also says people tend to bond in times of crisis, so forming relationships early will make it easier to manage when challenging times inevitably occur.

“In the end, everyone’s committed to making this place a home for each other,” he says.

Take advantage of mental health resources offered on campus.

The University has resources available to students who are struggling with anxiety, loneliness, or depression. The CARE Network helps identify students in need of help, while University Counseling Center provides confidential one-on-one healthcare services for students and other members of the University community.

“I didn’t think a therapist could help me at all when I came here,” he says. “But I did need help, and I went to them frequently. And they were super helpful.”

He remembers leaving a frustrating conversation about safety on campus one day “filled with anxiety and anger.” A counselor who was at the meeting followed Holtz out of the room. “He told me he saw that I wanted to break down, and he was there for me,” Holtz recalls. “I didn’t even know this guy, but he cared about me. It was that moment that I realized the University was committed to creating a community that was like home for me. I felt valued knowing there was someone I could voice my feelings to.”

Be yourself—and own your identity.

It’s great to take advice or learn from a mentor. Yet Holtz says students should always “own your identity” and use it as a strength.

“We all have unique stories and perspectives,” he says. “We come from different places. Own that. Brag about yourself whenever you can, but always leave open the space to learn and hear from others.”

And, mostly, have fun.

“College is a place where it’s OK to make certain mistakes and learn from those mistakes,” he says. “Engage, communicate, and listen. And then analyze and see what fits. But always remember: This campus community is better because of your unique experiences and contributions. Know that—and own it.”