Read the in the latest edition of , along with other stories that illustrate UofL’s impact.��  

• : Engineering professors are disrupting life as we know it
• : Nico Thom is on a mission to teach young girls they can be whatever they want to be
• : Madison Kommor changed the way the medical students prep for disasters
• : Professor Hilaria Cruz created an alphabet so parents in one indigenous community could read books to their children

It is a vision echoed across society but UofL sophomore Nico Thom is turning that vision into reality.

Along with attending school full time, majoring in public health and participating in student government and other organizations, Thom is the founder of She Became, a nonprofit focused on mentoring young girls.

“I had great parents that always told me that I could be whatever I want to be, but I knew that not everyone had that,” Thom said. “I wanted to tackle this issue that affects all young women, not just the underprivileged or underserved. I think that it’s prevalent everywhere.”

At age 16, Thom established the first She Became site in her Fort Thomas hometown.

What started as a passion project quickly spread like wildfire through the Fort Thomas school system as a successful after-school program. When she graduated from high school, Thom brought She Became with her to Louisville and UofL. The program has since grown to include more than 80 volunteers from the university and the community. During the 2018-19 school year, She Became became an official after-school program in two Jefferson County schools: Coleridge-Taylor Montessori and Fern Creek Elementary.

She Became works with third- through fifth-graders by engaging them directly with female professionals across a wide variety of careers. From doctors, lawyers and software engineers to chefs, cosmetologists and zookeepers, the girls are brought face-to-face with all of their potential in the form of women who achieve.

Christie Kremer, a UofL freshman with a double major in Spanish and studio arts, has been with Thom since She Became’s beginning in Fort Thomas. She saw the potential in Thom’s idea and decided to throw her support and skills behind it. Kremer is currently the director of marketing, responsible for designing the She Became logo and keeping the website up to date, as well as serving as a mentor at Fern Creek Elementary.

“I was a big fan of the idea. I thought it was a good way to get involved with different schools and it just seemed like something really important,” Kremer said.

“I like Christie because she’s really nice and pretty,” said Kremer’s mentee, Teionna, 10. “But my favorite part is all of the strong, beautiful women that come in and teach us about different things.”

At the final event for the school year, UofL law student Meryem Khaloon spoke to the girls about life as an attorney. She outlined to them the steps to becoming a lawyer and the responsibilities of the job. During a mock trial, the girls were divided into groups to defend their clients. The discussion was lively and engaged as the young women delved into the attorney role-playing.

Arienna, 11, loved interacting with UofL students but she specifically enjoyed Khaloon’s lesson in law. “I really liked the law week. We got to be creative and make up a defense for some crazy story, and we won,” she said.

Thom has accomplished much in writing her own kind of fairy tale for herself —  starting a nonprofit, becoming Student Government Association chief of staff and working as RaiseRED programming director — but her college dreams are nowhere near the final chapter.

Following a successful first year in Louisville, Thom hopes to expand She Became’s reach to more Kentucky schools and three additional states next school year.

And in the process of achieving her goals, she became — and encouraged young women to become — exactly what society needs: more.

For more information, visit .��

Anna Petrova praised her new student Behnam, a teenager from Afghanistan, as he pinpointed C sharp on the keyboard.

Their lesson was halfway around the world from her UofL School of Music job as assistant professor of piano. The classroom was in Denmark at a Red Cross school for refugees, to which Behnam traveled an hour each day. The youth had taught himself English by watching YouTube videos.

A quick study, Behnam also learned the basics of piano and viola within two days of lessons last November with Petrova and her musical partner, violist Molly Carr.

“His passion is to study piano and learn to play music,” Petrova said. “We encouraged him to continue pursuing his dream and talked to his teachers to help find a local piano teacher who would volunteer to teach him. This path could be completely life-changing for him. We hold him dear and hope that we will see him play again one day.”

Behnam is one of many refugees Petrova and Carr encountered this past year with their multifaceted project Novel Voices, which seeks to aid refugees through music. With a financial award from the Music Academy of the West, Petrova and Carr conducted music workshops and concerts for refugee communities in Bulgaria, Denmark, the West Bank and the U.S.

The two wanted to use art to reach those living on the margins of local and global communities.

“We hoped to not only provide the momentary solace and empowerment that music and storytelling provide, but create spaces in which their unique stories are heard, connections are made and support is galvanized,” Carr said.

They traveled with Fernando Arroyo Lascurain, a film music composer from Los Angeles who collected cultural expressions that refugees shared, such as folk songs, dances and poetry. Lascurain used them as inspiration for a three-part musical composition the Carr-Petrova Duo will premiere at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 28 in New York City. The concert is dedicated to refugees.

Victoria Stevens and Skyler Knutzen, New York-based photographers and videographers, captured the team’s work and plan to use the footage for a documentary about refugees that will likely air at a refugee film festival, among other places.

“Through film and media nowadays we can make a much bigger impact,” Petrova said.

The project ultimately is meant to humanize refugees and draw attention to the real people caught in the complicated geopolitical issues of migration, which recently reached crisis levels largely due to the Syrian War, Petrova said. Globally, more people have been forced to flee their homes from conflict and crisis lately than at any time since World War II.

Novel Voices has already attracted international attention. The United Nations invited Petrova and Carr to speak about the project and perform a concert in October as part of the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

“The project’s mission was to center the spotlight onto refugees as people, just like you and I,” she said.

In the Beginning

Carr and Petrova met as students at the Manhattan School of Music, where Petrova earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree. Carr transferred to the Juilliard School, where she teaches now, and the two drifted apart. They ran into each other several years ago in a New York City park and decided to play together. Since then, they’ve performed around the world as the Carr-Petrova Duo, earning awards and critical acclaim.

Carr has worked with underserved populations as director of her own nonprofit Project: Music Heals Us and wanted to extend support to refugees. She reached out to Petrova to collaborate.

Petrova, whose native Bulgaria has struggled with increasing refugee populations, holds deep empathy for people escaping conflict in search of a better life. Her participation was a natural fit.

The two kicked off Novel Voices about the same time Petrova was hired to teach at UofL. Christopher Doane, then dean of the School of Music, said Novel Voices exemplifies Petrova’s collaborative abilities, which, along with her performance skills, made her an attractive candidate for the job.

The School of Music has a strong legacy of piano education throughout its 75-year history, harkening back to its first dean, concert pianist Dwight Anderson. The school needed someone who could carry that legacy forward.

“She is a fantastic player, great collaborator and an inspirational teacher,” Doane said. “Anna’s presence allows us to both connect with the past of the school and establish a new future based on her artistry and vision for what a solo pianist can learn here at UofL.”

Her busy international performance schedule, along with the Novel Voices project, gives her a worldwide platform to serve as an ambassador for UofL.

The Project

Petrova and Carr worked with refugee organizations to reach eight communities.

This presented its own challenges, Petrova said, as groups were enthusiastically receptive but had no precedent for working with musicians. That meant all the logistics fell to their team.

At each site, they performed works from artists who overcame adversity to become composers and musicians.

“We wanted to inspire them with their stories,” Petrova said.

They also gave group workshops, teaching basic components of music such as rhythm and melody; then the group created new compositions together. The duo offered private lessons to interested individuals.

The team met many memorable participants, such as Morteza, a teenage Afghan refugee living in Denmark. He rapped in his own language to music he’d made on his phone. He dreams of touring internationally as a rapper named Danger.

And, there were two boys, both named Mohammad, also living in Denmark, who were particularly eager. “Throughout the whole experience with teaching them piano, I was astonished by their innocence, naiveté and pureness — the child in them was not changed regardless of the harrowing situation they were in. It was hard for me to not think about that as they were completely immersed in the fun of learning the piano and music-making,” Petrova said.

There were challenges along the way too, Petrova said, like translating their lessons through various languages and filming in the Bulgarian camps, where Muslim participants didn’t want to appear on camera.

Wrapping Up

Carr and Petrova have completed the outreach portion of their project but foresee working with refugees in other ways.

“It never stops. It’s very hard to say this will be the end,” Petrova said. “We always see opportunity to do more.”

Next, they’ll release the duo’s debut album, “Novel Voices,” in September on the Melos label featuring compositions they played for the refugees and Lascurain’s original composition. They’re planning album release events in New York and in Louisville on Sept. 5 at the jazz club Jimmy Can’t Dance.

While Carr is in Louisville, they’ll do concerts and workshops for Kentucky Refugee Ministries, and Petrova’s UofL students will participate. She’ll talk to them about how they put the project together and how music can be used as a vehicle for social justice and outreach.

Looking back, it’s hard to say what the lasting impact of the project will ultimately be, Petrova said. But she feels they were able to reach people in a personal way, help fan their creative flames and foster hope for a better tomorrow.

“Without sounding too ambitious, I do believe we have inspired children and refugee audiences to be more open and use their creative talents,” Petrova said. “We haven’t alleviated the refugee problem, obviously, and that was not the goal of the project. I haven’t been naive enough to think that through concerts we can change the reasons there are refugees … But for the human impact, one-on-one, I believe we’ve made a small impact on some people’s lives.”

Photos by Victoria Stevens. Illustration by Paul Blow.��

They have the power to create and upset whole industries and change how we live and work. Think shopping before the internet, travel before planes and cars or even cooking before fire.

According to the DaVinci Institute’s Thomas Frey, one of Google’s top-rated futurists, more of these disruptive technologies may be on the rapidly approaching horizon. When he spoke in Louisville earlier this year, he outlined eight of them: sensors, flying drones, driverless cars, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, internet of things, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies/blockchain.

Here’s how trailblazing researchers, inventors and innovators at UofL are working to advance these technologies.

Sensors
Sensors can efficiently and automatically collect information, such as location, temperature and pressure. Cindy Harnett is using them to build better athletes. She’s invented stretchable, thin sensor technology that can be woven into fabric. The idea is to create smart-technology clothes or wraps you can wear as you bike, run or lift.

“We can track things that have always been happening but we didn’t have the data on,” said Harnett, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “And we can do it without invading people’s privacy.”

Harnett’s technology, patented through UofL’s Commercialization EPI-Center, can measure the strain on muscles during athletic activities — the “player load” — which can tell us about physical limits, form and technique. That’s information we don’t necessarily get from current athletic performance measures.

Outside of athletics, Harnett said sensors have the potential to impact or completely disrupt many industries including manufacturing, public health, logistics and distribution.

Flying Drones
Flying drones can navigate and gather information where humans can’t, such as over large territories or in dangerous, potentially life-threatening circumstances. That ability makes drones perfect for surveillance and monitoring, according to Adrian Lauf, assistant professor of computer engineering and computer science and director of UofL’s Aerial Robotics Lab.

“I’ve always thought ‘what could we do if we take multiple aircraft, attach sensors to them and allow them to be part of the picture?’ ” Lauf said.

Lauf believes drones could inventory what structures are still standing after a natural disaster and look for survivors. In agriculture, they could gauge the health of crops. For major public events, such as concerts or the Kentucky Derby, drones could map traffic patterns.

But for drones to be effective at surveillance, Lauf predicts we would need many, inexpensive bots working together. His lab is studying wireless sensor networks, which would allow groups of drones to work as a team, coordinating navigation and group decision-making, and reporting the information they gather back to a central location.

Driverless Cars
Autonomous vehicle technology is already being explored by everyone from BMW to Uber. Doctoral student Parag Siddique is trying to figure out where and how all of those self-driving cars would park.

He’s especially interested in urban areas, where there are lots of people and space is scarce. Self-driving cars might be an opportunity to use that space more efficiently through automation.

“This doesn’t require new parking lots. It’s a better use of existing ones,” said Siddique, whose work is with the Logistics and Distribution Institute at the J.B. Speed School of Engineering. “All you need is an algorithm.”

Siddique proposes an “automated valet” in smart parking lots that packs cars densely together. His idea was inspired by current warehousing research and a game called “Rush Hour,” where a player tries to remove one car piece from a board of them packed tightly together.

With the automated valet, drivers — er, passengers — would open an app and surrender control of their self-driving car to the lot. The lot would then automatically move the cars into available spots, packing them densely together to maximize space.

3D Printing
Your desktop printer can print words or pictures onto a sheet of paper. But 3D printers can print tangible things, like prototypes, machine parts and even jewelry.

Sundar Atre hopes to build that technology into Louisville’s economy through his newly launched Louisville Additive Manufacturing Business Alliance, or LAMBDA.

“I see the pathway to a multibillion 3D printing economy in Louisville,” said Atre, a professor of mechanical engineering and endowed chair of manufacturing and materials. “It’s not unrealistic.”

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, can help businesses quickly innovate and lower costs for prototyping and manufacturing. The technology has applications across many industries, including dentistry, automotive manufacturing, defense, health care and construction.

With LAMBDA, launched last year with a U.S. Department of Commerce grant, Atre hopes to make this technology accessible to everyone. The alliance is working to open a business incubator and workforce training center in West Louisville, with the goal of helping minority-owned small businesses innovate and grow.

“The goal is to create a pathway for inclusive innovation,” Atre said. “It’s not where we are now — it’s how far can we go? And how fast are we hurtling toward that potential?”

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

Virtual reality (VR) technology creates immersive simulations that allow you to explore new worlds or try new things. Augmented reality (AR) overlays those simulations on our real world — similar to Snapchat filters or “Pokémon Go. ”

Hui Zhang is using this technology to untangle virtual knots on a touchscreen computer. It’s a method of teaching mathematics in which computer-generated knots are dynamic, difficult math problems.

“VR allows them to interact with the concept virtually, while learning the mathematical properties,” said Zhang, an assistant professor of computer engineering and computer science.

He’s also using this technology to study human behavior. By pairing a person with a virtual conversational partner, his team monitors eye movements to see when both are paying attention.

“We use this virtual twin to study how we interact with a conversational partner,” Zhang said. “We want to understand the statistical, reliable pattern of
how we reach joint attention.”

Zhang predicts this work could have applications for children with autism, who often have a delay in their ability to reach joint attention. It also could be useful for training in negotiation or customer service.

Internet of Things (IoT)
You may already be familiar with the internet of things (IoT) concept through smart assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home. When connected with smart devices, they allow users to control other electronics with a simple voice command.

“We want to make everything smart,” said Huacheng Zeng, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

But to unlock IoT’s full potential, there are still challenges to overcome. For example, there’s only so much radio spectrum available — not enough for all the things we want to connect to the world wide web.

“How can we provide internet access to those devices?” Zeng asks.

Zeng has a career grant from the National Science Foundation to find solutions to that problem. He’s also invented a technology — patent-pending through the Commercialization EPI-Center — that makes the existing spectrum more efficient by allowing devices to share. His invention also tackles security issues by jamming signals that would allow hackers to steal information.

Artifical Intelligence (AI)
Most jobs require a certain degree of intelligence. Whether that intelligence is human or artificial — well, that’s a question for Dan Popa.

Popa is developing artificially intelligent robots that could work in manufacturing or nursing. The latter would serve as a nursing assistant, collecting information and retrieving cups of water so human nurses can focus on more important things.

“The robot that observes the person can document and log data,” said Popa, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. ”But it will not replace human care.”

The nursing assistant robot is patent-pending through the Commercialization EPI-Center. It’s currently being tested at the School of Nursing.

Popa understands people have concerns about artificial intelligence. If this has you worried that robots will come for jobs, don’t. Most robots aren’t reliable enough yet and still need “chaperones” to show them where to go, what to do and keep them out of trouble. And even if robots take over some jobs, Popa thinks they’ll create new ones.

“I don’t believe the predictions that robots will replace everyone,” Popa said.

Cryptocurrencies/Blockchain
You’ve probably heard of bitcoin, one of many currently available cryptocurrencies. These cyber monies are increasingly popular in today’s digital economy as an alternative to tangible money, and they come in all different flavors.

“Some come with interest, some invest for you,” said Roman Yampolskiy, an associate professor of computer science and computer engineering and director of the Cybersecurity Lab. “Each comes with its own perk.”

Cryptocurrencies are built on blockchain technology, which is best described as a ledger spread across the thousands of systems all over the world. It’s an open, distributed and unchangeable log of transactions that encrypts and timestamps when the currency changes hands. That “unchangeable” nature gives the technologies potential uses across industries including banking, health care, media, retail and government.

Yampolskiy is looking at how we can use these transactions to send text and media messages.

“The decentralized nature of the blockchain allows power to be taken from the governments and corporations and returned to the people,” Yampolskiy said. “It is a powerful tool for fighting censorship, privacy violations and asset seizers.”

Preparing for a Social Hurricane
UofL’s own futurist, Nat Irvin, assistant dean for thought leadership and civic engagement in the College of Business, thinks technology will disrupt more than the economy alone. Here, he shares the double-sided storm he sees coming society’s way.

Two powerful forces of the future — an ever-expanding surge in technology and a dramatically different human population — are converging right before our eyes.

In the summer of 2016, I joined a couple of my baby-boomer friends to travel to a small town in Ohio ostensibly to view the remnants of a 2,000-year-old American Indian mound.

It was nearing dusk when we arrived and thus we were quite surprised to see so many young people who had also gathered to observe this part of our American history. But as we began our tour, we quickly discovered the young crowds were not there to see the ancient burial grounds. They were “Pokémon Go” seekers, searching for futuristic augmented reality creatures like Pikachus, Squirtles and Rattatas. While we boomers were looking for the past, this next-gen crowd was searching for invisible creatures of the future that had nested themselves right where we stood.

We could not see the Pikachus, but the teens could. Using the lenses of their smartphone cameras, embedded with smart sensors and GPS coordinates, the mobile game players literally transformed the ancient American Indian burial grounds into a physical-world mirror image filled with virtual creatures. The fervor around “Pokémon Go,” which swept the globe in 2016, has somewhat faded but the underlying convergence of the real world colliding with the virtual world was only the beginning.

As artifical intelligence (AI) becomes cheaper, we can expect our existing physical structures will be impacted by some aspect of augmented reality. Our computers will start to disappear, replaced by smart sensors embedded not only in our physical structures such as buildings, roads, cars, homes or centers of faith, but also in the clothing we wear, our shoes, the food we consume, diapers for our newborns, latrines that collect our waste, trees that we plant, pets that keep us company. Even our physical bodies will be transformed with some variations of smart sensors.

But that’s not all. The crowd of teens we witnessed that summer of 2016 also reflects a change in the human faces who might seek the Pikachus of the future, virtual or real. By 2020, the entire population of those under the age of 18 will be majority non-white, the entire age 30 and under population will also be majority non-white. Within 10 years, all of our existing structures — and their supporting institutions led by humans — will undergo dramatic changes, both virtual and real. We will experience a social hurricane.

But what if that woman could not do so in her native language? What if the language of her childhood had no written form, no alphabet? This situation was a reality for Hilaria Cruz. “I was kind of sad,” she recalled wistfully.

Cruz, as a child, spoke the tonal language Chatino in her southwestern Mexican hamlet. When her family moved to the district capital for education, the preteen girl had to learn Spanish by total immersion. Years later, in 1991, she was learning a third language through English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in the United States.

Now a field linguist, Cruz is an assistant professor of comparative humanities, where she will add to her fall class schedule a new course on endangered languages such as her childhood Chatino, and a variation called San Juan Quiahije.

This summer, she will be teaching the language to Mexican families using children’s books that she and former students published. By videotaping the parents reading,

Cruz intends to broaden the impact of the lessons via social media. Cruz and her sister, Emiliana, a linguistic anthropologist, will give away some books in Oaxaca City, Mexico City and San Juan Quiahij.

To accomplish this, and at last to be able to read to her now-adult daughter in Chatino, Cruz faced the intimidating task of creating an alphabet.

“An ideal alphabet should be able to explain with symbols all the thoughts a person has in their mind,” Cruz said.

An estimated 70% of the world’s spoken languages are tonal with the best known being Mandarin Chinese. Roughly one billion people speak Mandarin. Chatino speakers number about 40,000 to 50,000.

In tonal languages, the words’ meaning changes with the melody, so to speak, with a complex system of high, low and mid tones, and rises and falls in pitch distinguishing the differences. So the same general spelling could mean various things, depending on the speaker’s pitch; Cruz shared the example of a word (kla) that can mean fish, dream, stream or the expression “you will arrive” — all intoned with slight differences.

For her alphabet, Cruz assigned different capital letters to the pitches and used those letters in her notations next to each word. So kla^{������}means fish while kla^F means dream.

Cruz never had the chance to study Chatino grammar before her family relocated. Although Mexico has various languages, indigenous children were forced to learn Spanish, the country’s dominant language, when they pursued formal education. The result, in Mexico as in other countries, meant lost fluency and the endangerment of native languages as students integrated themselves into a more homogenous culture.

Just as her family wanted its daughters to gain that more advanced schooling, Cruz’s father encouraged her to go to college.

Cruz moved to the U.S. in 1991 and enrolled in English classes in Washington. Learning about the linguistics field, she thought maybe it could help her develop a written Chatino language, so she wrote to various linguists seeking guidance.

Her academic trek led her to the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her doctorate.�� Graduate field work drew her back to where Chatino was spoken. After recording political speeches and spoken prayers, she laboriously typed all the sounds, yielding more than 100 hours of archived speech that she analyzed for her dissertation.

While a Dartmouth University postdoctoral fellow in 2018, Cruz taught an undergraduate language revitalization course, helping students develop children’s books in indigenous North American languages with no English translations.

To start the project, she turned to her mother, a seamstress who stitched blank cloth books. A student drew the images, which they transferred on paper and ironed onto the pages. Their books featured the North American languages Chatino, Ojibwe and Hupa.

Later the picture books were published on more durable stock, like common early childhood books. Those are the books the Cruz sisters are distributing this summer when they travel back to Mexico and plan to share more broadly via videos on social media.

Cruz’s work attracted attention lately when she was interviewed for podcasts including “Lingthusiam.” She also attended a conference last summer that united people from various backgrounds — computer science, linguists, native speakers — looking for ways to preserve “small” native languages before their remaining speakers die out in cultures taken over by “big” languages spoken more widely.

“Many people will say, ‘Why do I have to know that?’ ” Cruz said. “If we lose one of their languages, we are losing a knowledge that a group of people developed.”

As part of a preservation effort, Cruz hopes someday that schools would be able to use indigenous languages for instruction and that automatic speech recognition devices such as Alexa and Siri could respond in minority languages such as Chatino.

She has allies. Noting the cultural loss of disappearing languages, the United Nations has declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages to encourage action to preserve, revitalize and promote them.

“It’s part of the creative capacities that we humans have and that is why we as humans should value it,” Cruz said.

While Louisville’s 23rd head football coach may not be an expert at the track, he is certainly familiar with elite athletes thundering down the turf, racing toward a win. The determination Thoroughbreds show in a few minutes at Churchill Downs is the same level of fight he expects to see for 60 minutes on the football field.

“When we play during the season, we want other teams to say ‘Man, that team really plays hard,’” Satterfield said. “That’s what we want to get out of our players and hopefully that will be our trademark.”

Since Satterfield is new to the city and its whole horse racing thing, UofL Magazine took him back to Churchill Downs so the North Carolina transplant could experience the track like a true Louisvillian, without the pomp and circumstance of the Derby. We also wanted to know more about him and gain some insight into the upcoming season.

We asked Satterfield to try his hand at playing the ponies again, this time by choosing names that reminded him of the football program or gave us a little peek into his personality.

He was game.

Race #1 Coach’s Picks: Try Try Again and Trust Me Now

Why: “I like Try Try Again because that’s what we’re going to have to do for the season. We’re going to face adversity. We’ve got to have that attitude that we’re going to keep going. And Trust Me Now, you’ve got to trust in the process. That’s what it’s all about.”

Program Notes: Satterfield knows his team is following a team that struggled and he acknowledged his coaching staff and players have a lot of work to do.

“The one thing we wanted to develop when we got here was trust and we were able to do that this spring,” he said. “That’s something that’s ongoing; you do it every single day. But the players really have bought into what we’re trying to do and be more of a team. We need them to play for each other and that obviously starts with the coaching staff. We’ve got to care for these guys and get them to care for each other, and that’s what’s happening.”

Race #2 Coach’s Pick: StayOnTheGrind

Why: “I’m going with StayOnTheGrind because you’ve got to work hard and your attitude has to be in grind mode all the time.”

Program Notes: Satterfield expects his team to put in effort, whether it’s in spring practice, summer workouts or fall camp.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do in the weight room and on the field and all those things to get stronger and bigger and faster, so we’re doing that,” he said. “But the great thing about this process has been their willingness and eagerness to get better, and that’s where we are.”

And what other group Satterfield hopes sticks with it this season? The fans.

“We need the fans to be behind us during this transition to really support these players because they’re going to give it everything they have. We’re going to give it everything we have as coaches to be something they can be proud of throughout the season and hopefully we’ll finish strong this year,” he said.

Race #3 Coach’s Pick: Arrival

Why: “I’m thinking Arrival because we’re arriving on the scene. Hopefully we arrive in a victory.”

Program Notes: The 2019 season kicks off in a big way with a home game against Notre Dame. Satterfield hopes it will be another “moment” for the team and the program.

“It’s a new era for UofL football now, so hopefully everyone’s excited about  it,” he said. “To bring Notre Dame here to Louisville to play on a Monday night, with a national television audience, it’s exciting. We hope we’re going to sell it out so we’ll have a full house to come out and support our team and to watch us play for the first time this season.”

While Satterfield believes this is a new day for Louisville’s program, he also thinks Arrival is a good fit for his family. After decades at Appalachian State, Satterfield and his family — wife Beth and children Bryce, Isaac and Ali — are adjusting to their new hometown. “It’s been awesome so far,” he said. “We’re really enjoying the people and the community and getting to be out and see different things, like the Derby.”

Race #4 Coach’s Pick: Rock N’ Candy

Why: “I like candy. I like rock ‘n’ roll. It sounds like this horse is fun but has a little edge.”

Program Notes: With a field that was woefully low on football-related names, Satterfield chose this horse to show off some of his personality.

So here are some Satterfield fun facts:

His music choices are fairly eclectic, but Guns N’ Roses is one of his favorites. He recently saw Metallica in concert at the KFC Yum! Center. He’s a sucker for Snickers. One of his first stops in Louisville was the Muhammad Ali Center. His favorite Louisville restaurant so far is Le Moo, but said the sheer number of great restaurants in the city “is blowing my mind.”

Race #5 Coach’s Pick: All Around

Why: “We want to be an all-around team.”

Program Notes: Fans may notice that Satterfield’s team looks a little different
 than previous teams that have taken the field for Louisville. He’s not worried about what happened in the past but is focused on his players adopting new schemes and styles of play.

“We want to be a complete team. We’re really focusing on all three phases with the offense, defense and kicking game,” he said. “All around, we want to be a very efficient team. We don’t want to be a heavily penalized team. We want to take care of the ball. All the little things that enable you to win championships, that’s what we want to do.”

“We have some great skill sets at wide receiver and running back, so we’ve got to be able to get those guys the ball and let them run fast and score touchdowns,” he said. “Defensively, we’re keeping everything in front, rallying to the football, playing hard.”

Editor’s note: It turns out that it was fairly easy for Satterfield to relate horse racing to
football. But while the coach’s picks gave great insight, they wouldn’t have done too well if he’d actually placed the bets. His highest finisher for the day was fifth. That’s OK. He — and we — would rather save his wins for the football field.

But most importantly, he saw UofL medical students putting their training to work.

The drill took a full year of planning for Kommor, who completed it as the capstone project required for his medical school program. It was also the culmination of a two-year certificate series he started to train medical students for mass casualty disasters. That series, created in tandem with associate professor of pediatrics Bethany Hodge, director of the Global ����ֱ�� Office, is the first such published certificate series for medical students in the country and perhaps the world.

“No one is learning this and everybody wants to learn this,” Kommor said. “It is not in any standardized curriculum — or very, very few. And a majority of people going into med school today feel like this is supposed to be part of the job.”

Disaster medicine, a specialization that teaches care for injured patients and medically related disaster preparedness, is often taught when physicians reach their residency. But as mass shootings and natural disasters, such as the 2017 hurricanes in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, became more prevalent, Kommor and Hodge decided they could fill an educational gap for medical students.

“We wanted our students to become familiar with this world that’s out there,” Hodge said. “To feel more comfortable as a physician and to know this is our role and how we can help.”

“It was kind of a tragic coincidence that a lot of mass shootings occurred right when we were starting this,” Kommor said. “The Vegas shootings, the Parkland shooting. A lot of medical students were sick of sitting in the library, getting another text about a mass shooting and realizing ‘I have no idea what I would do if that happened here.'”

More than 130 students took part in the certificate series, which is now the medical school’s largest supplemental program. To earn the certificate, students attend training sessions and lectures from community agencies including Louisville Metro Police, Louisville SWAT, first responders and fire departments, specifically centered on how medical personnel fit into disaster response. Kommor also trained a group a medical students to lead the series with Hodge after his own graduation.

For the drill, Kommor developed a mass shooting scenario and adapted a plan from a Federal Emergency Management Agency training that he and Hodge attended. Forty UofL students portrayed victims, complete with movie-quality wound makeup, while more than 20 students acted as medical personnel. Eleven agencies, including first responders from LMPD and EMS, also participated, making it one of the largest scale drills that the city has seen.

“It definitely changed some perspectives,” Hodge said. “To be able to see what would we as a community do if something like this happened at Derby? Or what if it’s something like Hurricane Katrina where there are fires and floods city-wide? We all feel this innate responsibility to learn our skill sets.”

For Kommor, the training was more than just technical, it was personal. Like many physicians, Kommor got into medicine because he wanted to make a difference. He also wanted to ease the unrest he felt when he would hear in the media about yet another a tragedy, and he knew he wasn’t alone among his peers in those feelings. As Hodge pointed out, doctors don’t like to feel powerless.

“Even as far back as Sandy Hook, it was like the whole country was feeling an overwhelming sense of restlessness,” Kommor said. “It all comes from fear. What I wanted to do with this certificate was to say if you come to this, you’ll be one little bit better, one little bit farther away from that feeling of hopelessness you had before, and you’ll at least have an avenue to be a little more prepared.”

Some chose to honor family members or beloved pets; some quoted their favorite song lyrics or TV show. Some just wanted to look pretty. Caps were sassy, silly, sweet and sincere.

But what exactly did our graduates want their last word on college to be? And how did they decide on the decoration? Here’s what a few had to say:

Julie Mattingly Gadd, organizational leadership and learning:
“My 21-year-old daughter, who is graduating in December, decorated my hat. I started at UofL a very long time ago and I have gone back to UofL on and off for 30 years. After 30 years, I’m finally graduating.”

Michelle Blevins, elementary education:
“All the little fish on there are from the kids I student taught with. They all colored and signed them for me.”

Michael Jester, communication:
“My hat was a nod to my fellow older graduates, so they’d feel seen in the lineup and during the ceremony.”

Charles Smiley, social work:
“It represents what it means to be an African-American male going through hardships. I chose the background to show that it can be hard going through and coming out of that jungle. And the quote symbolizes my college career.”

Jasmine Bridges, nursing:
“My mom passed away when I was three; she had been a nurse for six months. I always looked up to her and now I’ve made it all this way. So the ’98 is her and the ’19 is me.”

Jonathan Yann, applied geography:
“I love my cat, Zoey. She was always there for me for my really long nights of studying. She helped keep me company.”

Emma Crump and Josh Tierney, music:
“It was between Harry Potter and Hamilton, and we went with Harry Potter. And it was good because we all bonded over Harry Potter our freshman year.”

Brynnan Underhill, accountancy:
“I’m graduating a year early and I’ve been taking 18 credits every semester since I’ve been here. I’m a finance major so I have worked my assets.”

Sherea Malone, communication:
“I like artistic things, so I wanted it to look good. And I wanted my daughters Aaliyah and Ava on there because they motivated me to finish my degree.”

Heather Griffith, biology:
“It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do. Then I remembered I used to say I wanted to be a nature teacher just like Steve the Crocodile Hunter. I was in kindergarten when I wrote this.”

Brooke Sanders, psychology:
“I was trying to think of something quirky and I thought, I’m going to be a speech pathologist so I’m actually going to teach kids to talk back.”