SUNY Board of Trustees Appoints Six Faculty to Distinguished Ranks

New York City – The State University of New York Board of Trustees today approved the appointments of six faculty to distinguished ranks – the highest system honors conferred upon SUNY instructional faculty.

Appointed as distinguished professors were UAlbany Professor John Monfasani, University at Buffalo Professor Richard Salvi, Stony Brook University Professor Sanjay Sampath, and Upstate Medical University Professor Christopher Turner. In addition, Westchester Community College Professor Louis M. Rotando was appointed as a distinguished service professor, and SUNY Maritime’s Constantia Constantinou was appointed as a distinguished librarian, only the fourth such appointment in SUNY history.

“In bestowing our highest faculty honor, we proudly recognize the extraordinary achievements of these faculty members and thank them for their continued commitment to excellence," said SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher.

“The Board is pleased to present these individuals with SUNY’s distinguished ranking,” said Board Chairman H. Carl McCall. “Their commitment to the students, faculty, and staff at their respective campuses and their vast achievements within their respective professions is astounding and much appreciated.”

Since the program’s inception in 1963, SUNY has appointed 889 faculty to distinguished ranks, as follows, including these most recent appointments: 295 Distinguished Professorships; 267 Distinguished Service Professorships; 323 Distinguished Teaching Professorships; and 4 Distinguished Librarian Professorships. For more information about SUNY’s faculty award program, please click here.

In extending its distinguished ranks to the library faculty, SUNY recognizes the accomplishments of its entire faculty, and also assumes national leadership within the academy by becoming the first university system to so encourage and foster the full potential of the faculty status of librarians. 

The Distinguished Librarian is a prestigious tenured University rank that is awarded to librarians whose contributions have been transformational in creating a new information environment by providing access to information, sharing or networking information resources, and fostering information literacy. The Distinguished Librarian rank honors and promotes the achievement of personal excellence, groundbreaking professional progress, and wide-ranging benefit to the academic community.  Receiving this rank today is:

·         Constantia Constantinou has been the Director of the Stephen B. Luce Library at the Maritime College since 2001. She has served on the SUNY Council of Library Directors (SCLD) and represented SCLD on the CUNY Council of Chief Librarians and to the New York State Higher Education Initiative. As a Fulbright Scholar (2011) and as a Fulbright Senior Specialist (2005), in the country of Cyprus, she has accomplished what no other scholar or librarian has been able to do since 1974 by bringing the Greek‐Cypriot and Turkish‐Cypriot academic communities closer through overcoming ethnic and political conflicts. To achieve this, Ms. Constantinou established collaborations among institutions, lectured and trained librarians in information literacy, enabled the membership of the University of Cyprus into OCLC global bibliographic network, and promoted the establishment of the Cyprus National Library Consortium. Ms. Constantinou’s scholarly work and presentations in Croatia, Greece, Turkey, China, Korea, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States have enhanced the principles of information literacy by setting exemplary standards within worldwide maritime universities.

The Distinguished Professorship is conferred upon individuals who have achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within the individual’s chosen field. This distinction is attained through significant contributions to the research literature or through artistic performance or achievement in the fine and performing arts. The candidates’ work must be of such character that the individuals’ presence will elevate the standards of scholarship of colleagues both within and beyond the individual’s academic field. It must also be of such quality that students and scholars on other SUNY campuses could and do benefit by lectures and seminars, or other appropriate presentations the faculty members might bring to them. Appointed to this rank today are:

• Professor John Monfasani joined the University at Albany Faculty in 1971, and is currently a Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences.  Dr. Monfasani is a world leading authority on Renaissance Studies, known internationally for his seminal and ongoing scholarship on the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance. His first book, George of Trebizond:  A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic, is an enduring classic in the field.  He is widely and highly admired for his prodigious output in the years since, and for his professional leadership as a champion for Renaissance Studies in national and international professional societies.  He has received fellowship support from major funding sources, including the National Endowment for Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  He serves frequently as a reviewer for scholarly presses and journals, and as a consultant for funding agencies. 

• Professor Richard Salvi joined the University at Buffalo in 1987.  He immediately established a state-of-the-art laboratory with an interdisciplinary team, mentored many students and contributed an enormous amount of service to the profession, the department and the University.  In 1995, he co-founded the now world-recognized Center for Hearing and Deafness at UB.  His main area of research is the auditory physiology associated with acquired hearing loss.  He has investigated:  noise and ototoxic drug – induced hearing loss, tinnitus, inner ear physiology, central auditory plasticity and reorganization, hair cell regeneration, and most recently, stem cells and genes that might be used to treat hearing loss.  Dr. Salvi has published more than 300 articles in top-tier journals and is on 12 Editorial boards of national and international organizations. Dr. Salvi is known internationally, in part due to the large number of invited talks given, including in England, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, China, South Korea, India, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia.

·         Dr. Sampath is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Stony Brook University and Director of the Center for Thermal Spray Research (CTSR), a unique interdisciplinary industry-university cooperative research center focusing on thermal spray materials processing and surface engineering. The National Science Foundation named CTSR one of its prestigious Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. Dr. Sampath received his doctorate from Stony Brook in Materials Science in 1989. After graduating, he spent four years at GTE Sylvania in advanced research, development, and processing of refractory metal compounds, intermetallics, and composites.  Upon joining the faculty at Stony Brook University in 1993, Professor Sampath has directed research efforts on a large number of federal and industrially funded programs. Under the auspices of the NSF Center, he directed an interdisciplinary group of some 12 faculty members towards a fundamental understanding of thermal spray processes, materials and applications. Through Dr. Sampath's remarkable leadership, the Center is now self-sustaining and is home to the Industrial Consortium for Thermal Spray Technology, comprised of 35 leading U.S. and foreign companies aimed at knowledge transfer from fundamental research to application engineering. As Principal Investor on major DARPA and DoD contracts, he led a group in developing new processing tools for direct writing of mesoscale electronics and sensors.  Dr. Sampath has over 200 publications and 13 patents. He received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in its inaugural year, was elected Fellow of ASM International, and in 2007 won an R&D 100 Award for developing the novel direct write technology. His research interests lie in thermostructural coatings, thick film materials and multi-functional materials. Due to his pioneering research Dr. Sampath was inducted as a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society in 2010.

• Professor Christopher Turner, a member of the Upstate Medical University faculty since 1991, is recognized nationally and internationally for his research on paxillin – which he discovered – in focal adhesions.  He has contributed to the understanding of cell adhesion molecules and how they signal the cell’s internal structure to regulate cell movement and growth.  They are critical for development and contribute to the enhanced motility seen in cancer cells.  With 12 national grants, he has had continual NIH support of his research activities since he started.  His post-doctoral fellows and pre-doctoral fellows have also obtained national funding for work in his laboratory.  He has published almost 100 original papers and reviews since 1991.  He has served on many review panels for grants both in the USA and abroad, and continues to lecture throughout the USA and abroad, including in France, Austria, Canada, United Kingdom, and Italy.

The Distinguished Service Professorship honors and recognizes extraordinary service by those who have demonstrated substantial distinguished service not only at the campus and SUNY, but also within the immediate community, region, and State. Many of those appointed have also rendered influential service contributing at the national and international levels. To be considered for this rank, service must exceed the work generally considered to be a part of a candidate’s basic professional work and should include service that exceeds that for which professors are normally compensated.  It must also extend over multiple years and, very importantly, must involve the application of intellectual skills drawing from the candidate’s scholarly and research interests to issues of public concern. Receiving this rank today is:

·         Professor Louis M. Rotando has been teaching full-time at Westchester Community College (WCC) for more than 45 years and has been the Chair of the Mathematics Department for more than 30 years. He is known for his innovation in the teaching of mathematics, his enlightened leadership of his more than 100 faculty members, and his unflagging support for students. His promotion of student excellence is reflected in the success of students in International Mathematics Modeling competitions, where WCC has continually placed among colleges considered to be Ivy League schools. He is the author of a textbook, “Finite Mathematics in Business, Social Science and the Liberal Arts.” He has been awarded a full-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation and is the recipient of several VEA grants and two Title VI grants.  He holds the Joseph and Sophia Abeles Endowed Chair in Mathematics and two Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence, as well as the WCC Foundation Award for Excellence in Scholarship. 

About the State University of New York

The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive university system in the United States, educating more than 467,000 students in more than 7,500 degree and certificate programs on 64 campuses with nearly 3 million alumni around the globe. To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunity, visit www.suny.edu 

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