Cyrus Taylor. Photo by Daniel Milner

Whenever I meet with our alumni around the country, I enjoy telling them about the extraordinary development of our campus and its surroundings over the past decade. But it would be better, I sometimes think, if I could just show them the view from my seventh-floor office in Crawford Hall.

Looking westward, they would see both an emerging landmark and a historic one. The new Health Education Campus, a joint project of Case Western Reserve and Cleveland Clinic, is taking shape on Euclid Avenue near E. 96th Street. When this facility, a centerpiece of the university’s strategic plan, opens next summer, the CWRU School of Medicine, the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and the CWRU School of Dental Medicine will inhabit a single building for the first time, with access to the latest medical and educational technology.

Not far from the construction site, our alumni would see the golden dome of the Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at The Temple–Tifereth Israel. Since 2015, when the university completed Phase One of the renovation of this 1924 synagogue, its sanctuary, Silver Hall, has provided a magnificent setting for concerts by student ensembles, public lectures and other community events. Meanwhile, we are continuing to garner support for Phase Two, which will include a proscenium theater, designed for both dance and dramatic productions, and a black box theater.

I would be equally proud to point out the Nord Family Greenway, perhaps the most ambitious urban landscape project in Cleveland’s history. A 430,000-square-foot commons with trees and terraces, a paved walkway, an amphitheater, an event lawn and a bridge overlooking Doan Brook, the greenway, which opens this summer, will connect the Maltz Center to the Tinkham Veale University Center, and thus to the heart of our campus.

Projects like these are integral to the university’s mission and its future. The Health Education Campus and the Maltz Center, for example, jointly symbolize our pursuit of excellence in science, technology and the arts. And I find it exciting that the university is increasingly a place that integrates these domains.

Consider the subject of the cover story in this issue: a new dance work by Professor Gary Galbraith that incorporates images produced with Microsoft HoloLens. Consider, too, the selection of Elizabeth Bolman, the Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts and chair of the Department of Art History and Art, as the recipient of a major digital humanities award. She was honored for the creation of an amazingly detailed, virtual rendering of an architectural and decorative masterpiece: a late-antique monastery church in Egypt’s Nile Valley.

These achievements exemplify what we aspire to when we speak of forging connections across disciplines and specializations. I am deeply grateful to the alumni and friends of the college who support such innovations in research, education and creative endeavors at Case Western Reserve.

Cyrus C. Taylor
Dean and
Albert A. Michelson Professor in Physics