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Football, Catholics, and Prejudice

2025-03-28T17:46:00-04:00

The year 1924, when Grantland Rice penned his famous lede—“Outlined against a blue, gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again”—wasn’t the birth of Notre Dame football, but it was the moment when the University learned to leverage its gridiron fame for a greater purpose.

A Hesburgh Libraries multimedia exhibit, Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice, employs archival materials to explore how University leaders harnessed the unprecedented popularity of the 1924 football team to combat bigotry and promote a more inclusive America.

The University Archives’ senior archivist for graphic materials, Elizabeth Hogan, and Greg Bond, sports archivist and curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection, teamed up to curate the exhibit.

Prisons of our own perceptions

2025-03-11T09:52:00-04:00

Zip! Zap! Zoom!

About a dozen students at Westville Correctional Facility stand in a circle and trade finger points while saying these words in a competitive game that doubles as a warm-up for an acting class.

Zip! The mood is jovial. Zap! Aaron takes the energy from Shakka and turns to send it to Antwan. Zoom! Anyone who hesitates accepts their loss and steps out of the circle without complaint.

A prison is a setting where any vulnerability can lead to physical attack. Yet the students in Scott Jackson’s Acting Shakespeare class—part of Holy Cross College's program at Westville—are willing to follow along with his funky warm-ups and dramatic breathing exercises.

“We’re going to be vulnerable, take the hard focus out of our eyes and be trusting,” says Jackson, the Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Artistic Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame. “We’re breathing out from our core, the seat of impulse and instinct.”

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Using Artificial Intelligence to change minds

2024-12-02T10:36:00-05:00

To help those experiencing homelessness, Notre Dame researchers fight stigma with data

In 2020, Jack Vest was sitting on the side of the road across from a gas station in downtown South Bend, not far from where he spent each night sleeping hidden behind a fence, when a social services worker asked if he wanted a place to live.

He appreciated the choice, remembering when he was at LaSalle High 91��Ƶ and the military showed up one day and also asked for him by name. That time, he was drafted into the US Marines and served several years in Saigon. The person asking for him this time was offering safety and privacy through a temporary housing program called Motels4Now.

Vest had spent about two decades living on the streets, and the 69-year-old veteran knew he couldn’t last much longer. He said people in South Bend either treated him poorly or acted as if he was invisible.

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A reason to live: Moreau College Initiative lets Indiana prisoners earn a college degree

2024-08-20T11:45:00-04:00

Editor’s note: To protect the privacy of the Westville Correctional Facility men quoted in this story, only their first names are used.

At the Westville Correctional Facility in northwest Indiana, seven men in similar prison-blue pants and sweatshirts sit in a bare-bones classroom in April to discuss Irish literature with Notre Dame professor Brian Ó Conchubhair.

The men relish the opportunity. One after another offers testimony as if he is at a religious revival meeting about the value of the Moreau College Initiative classes that allow them to earn a degree while behind bars.

“I get treated like a person here—a student,” Chris says. “And if employers see you took the initiative to change yourself, they are looking for that.”

David agrees. “A lot of doors are closed to us, but this opens some up,” he says. “With all that goes down here, if you get a degree, you’ve done something.”

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Second chance: LEO boosts Excel Center mission of high school diplomas for adults

2024-06-10T14:23:00-04:00

Rizan Hajji Mohamed bundled his pregnant wife into a car and drove from Los Angeles to Indianapolis because an online search identified only one program that grants high school diplomas to adults. The Syrian refugee arrived in a snowstorm, the first he’d ever seen.

But Mohamed, now 42, was no stranger to desperate treks across the miles. He fled Aleppo, Syria, because the Bashar al-Assad regime was persecuting Kurds like him who advocated for political freedom. He landed in Lebanon in 2007 and lived at a refugee camp, eking out a living in the industry he’d formerly owned a business in—embroidery design.

Warned that the intelligence agencies of Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria were trying to kill him for his human rights advocacy in Lebanon, he fled again. The United States granted him political asylum and flew Mohamed and his wife to Los Angeles in 2012.

Once they arrived in Indianapolis, he enrolled in a tuition-free Excel Center to get the high school degree he’d been denied in Syria. At the same time, he applied for dozens of jobs with no luck until he found a furniture company willing to hire him.

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Testing emotional resiliency

2024-05-01T16:06:47-04:00

Katie Edler, a graduate student in psychology, conducts an experiment in emotional regulation where she asks children between 6 and 8 years old to complete a simple puzzle with 20 large pieces and then leaves the room.

The trick is that the puzzle is under a box with a sheet over it, and it’s actually “pretty much impossible” to fit the pieces together without seeing them. A video camera records the scene.

“We put them in a challenging or frustrating situation—nothing too intense, but we want to see how they react,” Edler said. “It’s not a bad thing if a kid is struggling in the moment, but this is one way we can assess: Do they keep trying? How much of the five minutes did they try to put it together? We also look at their expressions of positive and negative emotion.”

Some kids actually lift up the sheet to cheat by seeing the pieces. That’s OK, Edler said. It might be a sign of persistence or determination, reminiscent of one of the more famous studies in psychology history.

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Family buffers

2024-04-08T13:04:10-04:00

Notre Dame senior Cassandra Bustillos, a psychology major, is speaking with Enrique Arista Salgado, a factory worker, about the kinds of stress he faces as a Mexican immigrant working in the United States.

Salgado is very positive at first, telling her how the Goshen community about 45 minutes from campus has embraced his family of four and provided so much support over the last 20 years as they have pursued the American dream. When their first baby was stillborn, the community “welcomed them with open arms” and made it possible to eventually have two healthy boys, now 15 and 13.

While Salgado says he hasn’t faced discrimination, he finally acknowledges considerable stress over a 2013 arrest for driving without a license, which led to a long legal battle. He was nearly deported, which would have separated his family, and he spoke emotionally about his last-minute release to his lawyer and wife.

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Accessibility Awareness

2023-10-25T14:56:00-04:00

ND architecture students sample disabilities to learn equitable design

Architecture student Ginika Kalu quickly discovered the perils of using a wheelchair: elevator doors that close as you enter, bathroom doors that are hard to open while sitting, and finally, a pile of bricks partly blocking the basement hallway in the Walsh Family Hall of Architecture.

With room for only her wheels, she built up some hallway speed, folded her arms in to avoid hitting the wall or the bricks—and sailed through the opening with an inch to spare on each side.

Fellow student Angela Li complimented Kalu’s ingenuity before trying on blindfolds for about a minute, deciding the world was too dangerous for that. Classmate Hayden Strong tried a set of crutches for about the length of a football field before also giving up from exhaustion.

The students were participating in late September in an annual event called Accessibility Awareness Day, where budding architects in their fourth year divide into groups for the morning and try to navigate campus using a wheelchair, crutches, or blindfolds. The purpose is to experience firsthand the challenges or ease of accessibility in the kinds of buildings they could soon be designing.

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Remarkable recovery: Junior Andrew Daigneau bounces back from traumatic motorcycle accident

2023-05-17T16:22:00-04:00

Notre Dame junior Andrew Daigneau has always loved speed — fast cars and motorcycles. He loves to tinker with both and has bought and fixed about a dozen, selling some.

But he’s positive he wasn’t speeding on his motorcycle after perusing the hot rods at a car show with family and friends. It was a warm June night last summer in his hometown of South Bend. Leaving the show, he gave his father a fist bump before heading the other direction.

It’s the last thing Andrew can remember.

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Properties of the Faith: ND experts help Church leaders consider real estate options

2022-12-06T15:46:00-05:00

In the mid-2010s, Church and parish leaders from St. Austin Parish in Austin, Texas, realized their 50-year-old school, ministry and rectory maintenance costs would soon overwhelm their financial resources.

Updates or reconstruction of the old buildings would cost more than the urban parish could afford, said Patricia Dolese, a graduate of Notre Dame and Texas and a volunteer project manager for the parish.

What they had was prime real estate right next to the expanding University of Texas. But they didn’t want to sell their land and move away from their beloved neighborhood and parish church, so they needed to get creative.

Did they ever. The parish landed a 99-year land-lease deal where developers are building a tall residential building for Texas students on parish land. The 29-story tower will include a new parish rectory and gym, plus proceeds to construct new school and ministry buildings, and ongoing funds to maintain all of it. The tower will also include 200 affordable housing beds that will help low-income college students save a total of about $2 million per year.

This kind of forward-thinking focus on property and mission is exactly why Notre Dame’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (FIRE) started the Church Properties Initiative (CPI) last year. One of CPI’s early research efforts was a case study of the Austin project.

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The ties that bind: Notre Dame official represents U.S. at Ugandan universities

2022-11-16T15:34:00-05:00

Michael Pippenger was pleasantly surprised by the opportunity in September to represent the United States as a citizen diplomat building ties to universities in Uganda, where Notre Dame has a long history.

The State Department's U.S. Speaker Program recruited Pippenger, Notre Dame's vice president and associate provost for internationalization, to speak about a topic close to his heart: the importance of global partnerships in higher education.

“I got an email completely out of the blue in the middle of August,” Pippenger said. “In particular, they wanted me to deliver a keynote lecture, celebrating the centenary of Makerere University.”

Makerere University in the capital city of Kampala is one of the oldest universities in sub-Saharan Africa, predating even the independence of the nation of Uganda. Pippenger also spoke at Uganda Martyrs University, a Catholic institution in Nkozi, and the new Lira University in the north, where the Lord’s Resistance Army had terrorized the region.

Notre Dame Stories: Inside the takedown of a drug kingpin

2022-10-14T11:31:00-04:00

Notre Dame Stories · Inside the takedown of a drug kingpin

The arrest this summer of Mexican drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero caught the attention of Notre Dame Law 91��Ƶ professor Jimmy Gurulé. Caro Quintero was wanted for the 1985 torture and murder of a DEA agent, a story so infamous it was recently featured in the Netflix show "Narcos: Mexico." Gurulé was the prosecutor in Los Angeles who first indicted Caro Quintero, and he tells the story from an insider's perspective.

The future of cancer research

2022-10-10T12:53:00-04:00

Harper Institute collecting Native American samples to address health disparities

Dr. Gerald Morris, the medical director for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians that live in northern Indiana and southwest Michigan, isn’t certain that the Native American patients he sees show higher rates of cancer than the rest of the population — though he suspects it.

“The one thing that stands out to me is, oftentimes, they’re more advanced when we find them,” said Morris, who is a Pokagon citizen. “I think they have the same issues as other patients in terms of the types of cancers. It’s just that they tend to be more advanced when I do see them.”

Morris said the reason the cancers are more advanced could trace back to historical access to health care, which leads to lower rates of cancer screening. He hopes that a partnership being developed between the Pokagon Band and the University of Notre Dame's Harper Cancer Research Institute (HCRI) will help raise awareness of the importance of screening and early detection to address measurable disparities in cancer treatment outcomes involving Native Americans.

The Pokagon Band’s tribal leadership plans to invest $25,000 to help fund the project. Scott Brewer, a senior vice president at the tribe’s Four Winds Casino Resorts, oversees the company’s philanthropic activities and proposed the HCRI project to his tribal council. He said the research disparities Harper presented speak for themselves — of about 90,000 cancer tissue samples in the Cancer Genome Atlas at the National Cancer Institute, only 114 came from Native Americans.

That’s .001 percent of the total, even though people identifying as at least partially American Indian or Alaska Native constitute about 3 percent of U.S. population.

“We’ve partnered with the University on several things, but this is the first health initiative,” Brewer said. “It was the easiest sell for me because it’s research to try to get a cure, and the research is specific to Native Americans.”

The project aims to double the number of cancer tissue samples that come from Native Americans through several outreach efforts. While Harper is in the early stages of relationship building with the Pokagon Band, it has been working for a few years with other minority groups: the Kalispel tribe in eastern Washington state, and medical groups in Puebla, Mexico.

Andy Bullock, associate director of HCRI, explained why it’s so important to diversify the cancer tissue samples available for research. His rationale starts with the direction the future of cancer research is taking.

“Cancer is not one disease, it’s thousands,” Bullock said. “It used to be cancer of the breast, colon, kidney, etc. With more personalized medicine, it’s now more about the type of mutation.”

Cancer comes from a mutation in a person’s DNA, leading cells to grow uncontrollably in different ways. Targeted cancer drugs and chemotherapy attempt to block different pathways that are turned on by these mutations in the body. But people of different race or ethnicity with the same cancer might have different mutations that activate the cancer-driving pathway.

“It might be different between a Caucasian person and Native American person and African American person,” said M. Sharon Stack, the Anne F. Dunne and Elizabeth Riley Director of HCRI. “We don't know for most cancers in minority populations because nobody’s really looked.”

Most cancer tissue is collected at elite cancer centers, where there is an over-representation of white patients that can afford treatment there. Minority cancer patients are more likely to seek treatment at local, often less-costly cancer centers. These trends drive the disparity that leads to such low numbers of Native Americans in the Cancer Genome Atlas.

“The current model is — we come up with a drug that helps white people, then hope it helps other people too,” Bullock said. “We are trying to invert that model. We want to research Native Americans and see how well those pathway blockers help them and other people.”

Stack said the project fits the University’s mission of serving populations often marginalized in the past, but it’s also a “really compelling scientific question.”

A 2022 American Cancer Society report on American Indian and Native Alaskan populations found that cancer incidence in these indigenous communities is higher nationally than among whites, especially for lung, colorectal and kidney cancers. The report notes that lower levels of health insurance and chronic underfunding of the U.S. Indian Health Services exacerbates the problem.

Within the national numbers are wide variations, partly because there are 574 federally recognized tribes and more than 200 that remain unrecognized. Even when factors like health care and poor housing are equalized, wide disparities in cancer cases remain. For instance, Northern Plains Indians are four times more likely to have kidney cancer than whites. Survivability charts also show disparities, likely due to later detection.

Bullock said HCRI has been working for several years with partners in eastern Washington because an alumnus there donated money for cancer research. Ryan Gee, who graduated in 1998, is CEO of Gee Automotive companies with 35 car dealerships across several western states.

Gee, whose wife survived cancer, said the fight against the disease is his side passion. He co-founded the Community Cancer Fund with a friend who survived cancer against great odds. The organization raises money for cancer research and to help families in the Northwest cope with the severe economic impact of cancer treatment.

The Kalispel Indian tribe is a large donor to the fund, so Gee asked Harper about cancer research among Native Americans and learned it was lacking. “What if we set a goal to double the amount of Native American research samples in the database through Harper at Notre Dame,” Gee said.

Gee’s nonprofit works with the MultiCare hospital system in Washington state, which has helped Harper collect about 20 cancer tissue samples from Native Americans so far.

“Native American populations experience much higher cancer rates than non-Hispanic white people in the U.S and are historically under-represented and critically under researched,” said Annie Reedy, MultiCare’s chief research and education officer. “Through this collaboration with Notre Dame we are moving toward a greater understanding of cancers in Native Americans and building a foundation for future clinical trials and treatment advances for this population.”

Fundraising is an important part of this research because the cancer tissues are expensive to analyze. When a lump or tumor is removed from a patient, the doctors will perform a biopsy on a small slice to determine if it’s cancerous. The rest is considered medical waste.

Stack said it can be difficult to convince people to share the leftover portions with tissue banks, especially if the target population is mistrustful of the medical community. Relationship building can take years. A tissue bank must strip out identifying information that could lead back to the donor, leaving only basic demographic information.

Harper contracts with a Chicago company that extracts DNA from samples and looks for about 600 mutations linked to cancer. The $2,500 process also analyzes the RNA sequence, which is a blueprint of the DNA’s genetic code that gets made into the proteins that form hair and skin and bones – the different parts of the body. Men’s basketball coach Mike Brey raised money for the project through his Coaches vs. Cancer work.

Another branch of this ongoing project works with partners in Puebla, Mexico. There is a huge disparity in childhood leukemia survival between people in America and Mexico. In America, more than 90 percent of leukemia patients live to the 10-year marker that signals successful treatment. In Mexico, only about 60 percent live for four years.

HCRI has been collecting samples from pediatric patients in South Bend to compare them with samples from Mexican patients.

“Ideally we would have Caucasian kids and also kids of Latin American origin that happened to be raised in South Bend to see if any differences are genetic, or if it could be an environmental effect,” Stack said.

Maria Cristina Miranda Vergara earned a doctoral degree in biochemistry from Notre Dame in May. As a student, she studied biomarkers that could improve early cancer detection, working with partners at the Catholic Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla. Now working in biochemical research in Puebla, Miranda Vergara helps process Mexican samples using the same protocols so that the data can be compared to Notre Dame’s research.

“My dream is to develop some sort of microfluidic device that would allow us to detect cancer biomarkers in the field, so we could do early diagnosis of children in their communities,” she said. “It’s difficult to determine the symptoms of cancer, but we need to improve early detection to get the right treatment and improve outcomes.”

The common thread between the Harper projects in Mexican and Native American communities is to improve cancer survival by analyzing distinct populations that have not been studied as thoroughly in the past.

Priscilla Gatties, director of Health Services for the Pokagon Band, said Harper’s research can help address disadvantages that Native American communities have developed due to a lack of historical health data. She said her mother-in-law, a Pokagon citizen, is fighting against kidney cancer using medication that didn’t exist a decade ago.

“From my perspective, I’m very excited about what Harper is doing,” Gatties said. “There’s a lot of new research and information, and we can be a part of that. I think that’s going to help patients and save lives, even if it’s later on down the road.”

Mobile Assist: ROAM engineering lab developing powered prosthesis to aid natural movement

2022-07-01T10:54:52-04:00

Grasping the railing of a stopped treadmill in the basement of Fitzpatrick Hall of Engineering, Laura Light broke into an electric smile as she used an experimental foot-and-ankle prosthesis to stand on her tiptoes.

Patrick Wensing, an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering who specializes in robots and motorized prosthetics, gave a thumbs-up to his two doctoral degree students. David Kelly focused on Light’s balance and safety, while Ryan Posh watched the data his computer received from several electric sensors attached to the muscles of Light’s residual left calf.

The sensors read electrical twitch signals from Light’s muscles, allowing her to fully control for the first time the forward roll of a motorized ankle device — and to ultimately stand on her toes.

“I feel like a little kid,” said Light, 28. “That was amazing, because I have not been able to do that ever — since my foot was amputated as a little child. That was a really cool experience, something I always wanted to do as a kid.”

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Origin Story: The Peace Corps began in part on the campus of Notre Dame

2022-06-29T08:51:22-04:00

In a speech to college summer interns in 1962, President John F. Kennedy stumped for the Peace Corps international volunteer organization he created by telling a motivational story about Tom Scanlon.

The president didn’t mention that Scanlon was a 1960 Notre Dame graduate or that the “friend” who told him the tale was Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C. Nor does the history timeline on the Peace Corps website mention the 45 young people who trained at Notre Dame and landed in Chile about a month after another cohort (Ghana) is celebrated as the first group to serve.

Ditto for a recent documentary celebrating the Peace Corps’ history, which didn’t mention the role Father Hesburgh played in helping Sargent Shriver make Kennedy’s vision possible. Even Father Hesburgh hints at some secrecy in his 1999 memoir.

“Everybody knows about the Peace Corps, but relatively few people know that Notre Dame played a pivotal role in the earliest beginning of the program,” he wrote.

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A Walk Through the Valley of Death: Notre Dame geologists study rocks and Earth tectonics in southwest desert

2022-04-22T08:00:00-04:00

Sydney Higgins was trying to make sense of the readings from her Brunton compass at Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas.

Geologist Tony Simonetti had taught his Planet Earth students how to take strike and dip measurements in the classroom, but now a theory had turned into reality. He poured water on the angled rock mountainside to identify the exact direction of the dip angle, which reveals the strike plane in a perpendicular direction.

“Doing it in the field is so much more …,” said Higgins, searching for the right word. “I’m a very hands-on learner, so it just made me understand.”

Taking strike and dip readings, Simonetti said, helps a geologist understand a region’s tectonic history — the massive underground forces that thrust up the mountains and stretched out the valleys over millions of years. Seeing firsthand the results of these tectonic plate collisions is exactly why the associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences (CEEES) took 16 undergraduates and two graduate students to Death Valley National Park and Red Rock Canyon for a one-credit field trip over spring break.

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Ulysses Goes Global: Notre Dame celebrates 100 years of James Joyce’s masterpiece

2022-03-10T15:45:00-05:00

Kevin Whelan is standing on a street corner of Merrion Square, just across the park from Notre Dame’s Dublin Global Gateway where he is the director, spinning a story about how James Joyce haunts every part of Dublin, if you know where to look.

Joyce stood on this spot for about four hours on June 16, 1904, waiting for his first date with Nora Barnacle, his future wife and the primary model for Molly Bloom, the female protagonist of “Ulysses.” Joyce set this date as the novel’s single day, which is now celebrated as Bloomsday every year in Dublin. Whelan said the Galway-born Barnacle represented for Joyce the earthy values of the authentic Irish countryside in contrast to his British-derivative city.

But Barnacle was cleaning a nearby hotel and couldn’t get out of extra work that day, so they postponed until the next day. The waiting must have stuck with Joyce.

“The kick-start of the novel is that date, but I find it highly Irish that he set the novel on the 16th of June, not the 17th, because nothing happened on the 16th except the rain,” Whelan says. “He was probably under this tree, thinking about this raven-haired Irish beauty.”

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Space Bubbles: Experiment on International Space Station aims to improve cancer detection

2021-08-30T15:00:00-04:00

Tengfei Luo had certain hypotheses about what would happen during his scientific experiment, conducted in June aboard the International Space Station, to form water vapor bubbles in an environment without gravity.

His goal was to engineer material surfaces to make bigger bubbles that adhere to the surface rather than grow buoyant and detach like they do on Earth. He ended up getting both less and more than he expected in his first beyond-this-world experience.

“What I found interesting is that the bubbles did detach,” Luo said of the near real-time videos beamed back from space. “They did grow bigger than what we saw on Earth. There’s no gravity there, which means we’re probably seeing the physics we would like to see. There is a competition between other factors that led them to detach.”

Against expectations, Luo said, the bubbles grew slowly but suddenly detached at once while still at different sizes.

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Language and Learning: Celebrating 10 years of a unique educational collaboration

2021-07-26T12:00:00-04:00

A dynamic partnership between the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Center for Social Concerns and local Latino community organizations has flourished since it began with a single class in 2010.

Faculty member Marisel Moreno first brought her Spanish majors to work with Latino children at La Casa de Amistad, a youth and community center in South Bend. That same year, Rachel Parroquin was hired to nourish the seed of what’s known as community-based learning (CBL).

CBL classes focus on community engagement, prompting Notre Dame students to interact and learn their subject by doing hands-on projects in the community. The Center for Social Concerns has deep ties to a wide range of community organizations and has promoted community-engaged classes across different departments, growing its list to more than 200 through relationship building and training workshops.

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The Musical Mansours: Siblings blazed own creative paths at Notre Dame

2021-07-12T13:00:00-04:00

Ronnie Mansour was 2 and a half years old when she followed her older brother Alex to a piano lesson. After he finished playing a Mozart piece, she jumped on the bench and started to play the song by ear.

The piano teacher told the precocious child she wasn’t playing Mozart correctly.

“I said I don’t want to play the Mozart way, I want to play the Ronnie way,” she recalled. “The piano teacher looked at my mom and said, ‘You’re gonna have a big problem on your hands’ — because I was acting like a little bit of a diva.”

Ronnie and Alex Mansour chose Notre Dame over a traditional music conservatory because the University’s music program allowed them the flexibility to do it, as Sinatra would say, their way. They were able to study a wide liberal arts curriculum and go abroad. Both majored in cello performance, but they also found the freedom to create musical paths that included writing original compositions performed by their classmates.

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