Class of 2021

Dr. Abi-Dargham, Professor of Psychiatry/Radiology and Lourie Endowed Chair of Psychiatry at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine. An outstanding biomedical scientist, Dr. Abi-Dargham studies the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, schizophrenia-related spectrum disorders and addiction, utilizing molecular, multi-modal imaging techniques and computational approaches. She has shown that striatal dopamine dysregulation presents as excess dopamine synthesis and release, contributing to hallucinations and psychosis. Director of Multi-Modal Translational Imaging Lab, Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Psychiatry, and Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Science, Dr. Abi-Dargham received the American College of Psychiatrists’ Stanley R. Dean Award in 2015, and the Brain and Behavior Foundation’s Lieber Award for Schizophrenia Research in 2018.

Ms. Carson, Professor of Art and Art History at the University at Albany, is an internationally renowned sculptor and painter. With 20 solo and 63 group exhibitions, Ms. Carson has been interviewed, profiled, and examined in 84 publications. Her work has appeared in galleries and museums across the United States, including the National Academy Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Frederick Weisman Collection in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, in addition to others. Among her many awards, Professor Carson received the prestigious Prix de Rome Fellowship in Painting from the American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts, and in recognition of her skill as a sculptor, the Purchase Prize in Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, Professor Carson was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence for Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Dr. Cochran, Professor of Marine Geochemistry at Stony Brook University, is a Fellow of both the Geochemistry Society and the European Association of Geochemistry. He is the preeminent world leader in the application of radionuclides as tracers for the ocean carbon cycle in the water column and sediments and has consistently pioneered new methods and instruments to understand those geochemical processes. His 2008 co-edited collection—U-Th Series Nuclides in Aquatic Systems—is required reading in graduate seminars nationwide. Dr. Cochran has made foundational contributions to our knowledge of rates and processes in the open ocean, coastal bay and lagoon sediments, groundwater, and biogeography. Since 1983, he has engaged in large-scale multidisciplinary international research programs on sea and land, most recently studying the Upper Cretaceous of North America and Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary sections. A research associate of the American Museum of Natural History since 1986, he served as co-editor in chief of the 2019 Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences.

Dr. Davis, Professor of Music and long-time Chair of the Music History Area at SUNY Fredonia, is an internationally renowned musicologist. His research, particularly in the 2019 Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War, the 2014 Music along the Rapidan: Civil War Soldiers, Music and Community during Winter Quarters in Virginia, 1863-64, and the 2012 Bully for the Band: Civil War Letters and Diary of Four Brothers in the Nineteenth Vermont Infantry Band, has been credited with single-handedly constructing the world’s most nuanced and complete account of Civil War music’s signal importance for American society. Through his influence, the American Musicological Society has included the scholarship of teaching and learning in its mission. He has held two Mellon Research Fellowships at the Virginia Historical Society. He serves as the Series Editor for Routledge’s Modern Musicology in the College Classroom, and is a member of the steering committee for the Pedagogy Student Group of the International Musicological Society.

Dr. Del Poeta, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stony Brook University, was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2007 and the Association of American Physicians in 2016. He is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in lipid-mediated infectious diseases, particularly opportunistic fungal infections, a critical and growing problem among immunocompromised individuals. He has pioneered the study of unique metabolic pathways in fungal infections and successfully identified several new enzymes involved in fungal pathogenesis, especially enzymes of lipid metabolism. He has shown that the lipid glucosylceramide is critical for the virulence of Cryptococcus neoformas and that drugs specifically targeting the fungal enzyme responsible for its synthesis can be effective in preventing disease. The undisputed leader of the fungal-lipid field, Dr. Del Poeta has also served extensively on National Review Boards, an indication of his status in the field; he is the Associate editor of five major journals in the field and Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Mycology.

Dr. Drees, Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, has profoundly contributed to experimental nuclear physics, particularly in his leadership of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His groundbreaking research has led to the discovery of the “perfect fluid” behavior of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of high density and temperature. Dr. Drees is best known for his leadership in the study of dilepton production from quark-gluon matter within the PHENIX Collaboration and his work behind the discovery of dilepton spectrum modification in nuclear collisions at the CERN laboratory (known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics). Dr. Drees devised original methods for extracting the information about the properties of strongly interacting matter from the spectra of the produced dileptons and photons that are currently used across the world. A sought-after international speaker, Dr. Drees is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a 2019 recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Dr. Feldman, Professor of Psychology at the University at Albany, is a global leader in the cognitive science of language. She incorporates psycholinguistic methodologies to examine how multilingual individuals concurrently develop and manage multiple linguistic codes. Editor of Morphological Aspects of Language Processing (1995), she has authored or co-authored 108 articles that have shaped the field and influenced the way educators deliver language instruction. Her work in psychology contributes to many related fields, such as linguistics, multilinguism, language development, and language education. She has made significant contributions to understanding what is universal in language processing and what is not. Dr, Feldman has been awarded two Fulbright Specialist Scholarships, two visiting research appointments with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and a continuous appointment as a Senior Research Scientist with the Yale University-affiliated Haskins Laboratories. A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, Dr. Feldman is recipient of the University at Albany’s 2009 Excellence in Research Award and Radboud’s University’s 2017 Netherlands Excellence Initiative Award.

Dr. Foley, Professor of Physical Education and Rehabilitation at SUNY Cortland, is a Research Consortium Fellow of the American Association of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance. The influence of his pioneering use of secondary data analysis and use of large data sets to analyze the health benefits of physical activity has reached beyond his own field to public health, health education, obesity, exercise science, and disability studies. As Director of the Activity and Movement Pedagogy Laboratory, he has collaborated with U.S. Games to house the Online Physical Education Network, a partnership which generates free standards-based physical education content for teachers worldwide. He has served as President of the American Federation of Adapted Physical Education. Selected six times to receive Cortland’s Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Outreach Award as well as the 2012 Outstanding Achievement in Research Award, Dr. Foley received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2013.

Dr. Goeckel, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at SUNY Geneseo, is an internationally renowned scholar on religious policy in the communist world. Author of Soviet Religious Policy in Estonia and Latvia, Die Evangelische Kirche und die DDR, The Lutheran Church and the East German State as well as dozens of articles, Dr. Goeckel works comfortably across languages, engaging in archival work in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), and validating and expanding that research with first-hand interviews of leading church and governmental officials. One recommender calls his work “astounding in its range.” A major figure in his field, Dr. Goeckel has been frequently invited to speak in Cracow, Budapest, Moscow, and Berlin. He has received two Fulbright Research Fellowships (to Berlin and Moscow), a Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Hoover Institute, and several International Research and Exchanges Board fellowships for research in the GDR and Russia.

Dr. LeBrun, Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University, is one of the foremost differential geometers in the world today. His original and profoundly influential research over the past forty years has consistently changed the landscape of the field. Co-editor of Essays on Einstein Manifolds, Dr. LeBrun has published over 90 articles, including publications in top mathematical journals such as Inventiones Mathematicae and Mathematische Annalen. Using ideas from physics, such as Penrose’s twistor theory, the Gibbons-Hawking Ansatz, and Seiberg-Witten invariants, Dr. LeBrun has established results that no one expected, while disproving long-standing conjectures. As one recommender writes, “his proofs are both technically formidable and extremely beautiful.” A “clear, crisp and thorough” speaker and author of papers considered “gems,” Dr. LeBrun has made transformative contributions to a wide range of subjects, while directing the work of over 30 Ph.D. students. Elected a Fellow of American Mathematical Society in 2012, Dr. LeBrun was awarded a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics (2018).

Dr. Meredith, a former Professor of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Binghamton University, is an internationally recognized neuroscientist who has made foundational contributions to the study of Parkinson’s Disease and our understanding of psychostimulants on neural circuits. Her pioneering application of neurochemical, anatomical and behavioral analysis to the study of basal ganglia places her at the forefront of such multidisciplinary approaches. She has examined how psychostimulants, such as amphetamine, precipitate synaptic changes during emotional learning for drug reward. Founding Dean of two separate schools of Pharmacy, Dr. Meredith has shaped generations of scientists, and her research—cited over 7,500 times—has shaped her field. Her discovery that a calcium-channel blocker developed to control hypertension can reduce the death of dopamine-producing neurons is in stage three clinical trials, suggesting it might become the first drug to slow the development of Parkinsons. In 2013, she received the Morris L. Parker Award for meritorious scientific research.

Dr. Ontaneda, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Binghamton University, is one of the foremost geometers in the world with a reputation for answering well-known open problems that have “stumped” mathematicians for decades and centuries. His notable early-career discoveries concerning harmonic maps and dynamical systems led to his most recent and most profound discovery: the existence of vast numbers of previously unknown spaces, or "manifolds," of negative curvature. Until Dr. Ontaneda's finding, few examples of this phenomenon were known to exist, and some pure mathematicians even doubted more such spaces could be found. The question itself extended back to the Ancient Greeks and had implications for analytic geometry, number theory and the study of space-times. As a result, Dr. Ontaneda’s landmark achievement has changed the landscape of his field and earned him a place in its history. Dr. Ontaneda has enjoyed continuous support from the National Science Foundation since 2006, a remarkable achievement since the NSF rarely offers ongoing support for senior mathematicians.

Dr. Poliks, Professor of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering at Binghamton University, has made sustained contributions to the fields of electronics packaging, flexible and hybrid electronics. Holder of 48 patents, Dr. Poliks has created new additive and semi-additive manufacturing approaches for the fabrication of sensors, thin-film transistors and RF devices and antennas on flexible plastic or glass. With more than 3,800 citations, Dr. Poliks is the second most cited author in the field of flexible hybrid electronics and the third most cited in electronics manufacturing. Director of the Center for Microelectronics Manufacturing since 2006, he has investigated interconnect strategies for thinned integrated circuits in flexible hybrid wearable healthcare devices such as ECG and temperature sensing patches, flexible capacitive ECG electrodes, sweat/hydration sensors or industrial monitoring systems, and he has established methods to print fine meshed circuits and components onto flexible and complex surfaces. He was awarded a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2017.

Dr. Puccio, Professor and Chair of Creativity and Change Leadership at Buffalo State College, is an internationally recognized creativity expert. Author of eight books and forty-five articles, Dr. Puccio revolutionized the field when he developed FourSight, a psychological measure of creative-thinking preferences, translated into seven languages and used by more than 125,000 people worldwide. Dr. Puccio received the Tudor Rickards Best Paper Award in 2005 for an article in Creativity and Innovation Management; the President’s Medal for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Creativity in 2007; and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Exemplary Contributions in Research and Scholarship in 2007. In 2012, he was invited by Teaching Company to deliver their first Great Course on creativity: his Creative Thinkers Toolbox has been viewed over 200,000 times. His 2012 TEDx keynote--Creativity as a Life Skill--has been viewed over 100,000 times. In 2017, he was one of 100 North American leaders to receive the John C. Maxwell Transformational Leadership Award.

Dr. Qin, Professor and Chair of Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook University, is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. Dr. Qin is one of the world’s leading bone biomechanists, and his foundational work in bone biomechanics and mechanobiology may ultimately have a transformative impact on diagnosis and treatment of musculo-skeletal disorders including osteoporosis and delayed fracture healing. He holds patents for ultrasound diagnostic imaging and therapeutics and mechanical stimulation technologies for musculoskeletal diseases like osteopena. Director of the Orthopaedic Bioengineering Research Laboratory since 1999, he has organized the International Osteoporosis and Bone Research conference for the last sixteen years, and he was the Founding Associate Editor of the Journal of Orthopedic Surgery and Research.

Dr. Reifowitz, Professor of History Studies at Empire State College, has established an international reputation for his research on the impact of nationalist, ethnic, and racial identities and biases on U.S. national politics. As a public intellectual, he has provided a measured historical perspective to current public policy debates for a variety of political news sites, including work as a contributing editor to Daily Kos since 2013; he also frequently serves as an expert speaker on France 24 news. He has authored three timely books, including in 2019 The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump, and in 2012 Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity Politics—works which one external reviewer called “exemplary” works of scholarship: “novel and insightful, rhetorically sophisticated, and rhetorically dexterous.” He has received Empire State’s Susan H. Turben Award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2009 and the Scholar across the College Award in 2019. In addition, Dr. Reifowitz is a 2014 recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Dr. Russo, Professor of Medicine and Division Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is a Fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America. An international expert on the diagnosis, nature, and treatment of bacterial infectious diseases, he has produced foundational research focusing on Gramnegative bacteria, including Escherichia coli, Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella pneumonia that cause infection and are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. With over 9,300 citations, Dr. Russo’s research has paved the way for development of vaccines that will prevent infection and antibodies that can be used to treat infection. His discovery of genomic differences between bacteria has increased our understanding of pathogenesis and antibiotic resistance. He discovered virulence factors in bacteria causing urinary tract infections and pathogenic pneumonia, and the causes of antibiotic resistance. He serves as an expert on infectious disease to local, national, and international media, a vital service during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Scannapieco, Professor and Chair of Oral Biology in the School of Dental Medicine at the University at Buffalo, is a Fellow of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR). Dr. Scannapieco was one of the first scientists to study the effect of oral pathogens on nosocomial bacterial pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. His work in the area of salivary proteins and, particularly, his work on the relationship between oral health and respiratory disease have provided new insights into the impact of oral health on overall health. These studies have major implications for the management of respiratory diseases, of particular importance during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most highly cited scientists in his field, he received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2008; the American Dental Association’s William J. Gies Award for Achievement in 2009; the International Association of Dental Research’s Distinguished Scientist Award in Oral Biology in 2019; and the AADR’s Irwin Mandel Distinguished Mentoring Award in 2020.

Dr. Shepson, Dean and Professor of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union. He is an internationally known atmospheric chemist whose research has focused on understanding air-surface interactions in the Arctic, in forest, and in urban environments and, ultimately, their relationship to climate change. He has developed novel instrumentation to study the mechanisms and surface processes that lead to ozone depletion. He has received the Walter Orr Roberts Lecturer Award from the American Meteorological Society, and the American Chemical Society Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology. Dr. Shepson has served as the Director of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Division at the National Science Foundation, as a member of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Space Weather Operations, Research and Mitigation Task Force, and currently serves as a member of the NYS Climate Action Council.

Dr. Stephens, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University since 1980, is one of the world’s leading experts in synchrotron-based X-ray diffraction. In his work with powder diffraction, Dr. Stephens found a way to treat the broadening of the diffraction peaks due to internal stresses in the crystals, a phenomena that now bears his name –“Stephens line shape”– and is part of the standard analysis packages used worldwide to interpret X-ray diffraction patterns. For this work, in 2019, the International Center for Diffraction Data named Dr. Stephens the eighteenth recipient of the biennial Barrett Award. His research influenced systems ranging from magnetic materials to semiconductors to pharmaceuticals: for example, the computer code he created has become part of standard software packages used worldwide. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, Dr. Stephens received the 2015 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Dr. Tsirka, Professor of Pharmacology at Stony Brook University, is internationally recognized for her studies of neuroimmune interactions in physiological and pathological settings such as glioma, stroke, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis. Her research, starting with a 1994 report in Nature, brought microglia, the innate immune cells of the central nervous system, to the forefront in the context of these diseases. She has authored 120 articles, many in top journals and served as a mentor to 27 Ph.D. students. At Stony Brook, Dr. Tsirka served as Director of the Pharmacology Ph.D. T32 NIH-funded training program and she founded and directs the T32 NIH-funded Scholars in BioMedical Science Graduate Certificate Program. Awarded Scholar Awards from both the Klingenstein and the Wadsworth Foundations and an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, Dr. Tsirka has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Parkinson’s Foundation. Named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019, Dr. Tsirka received the 2016 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service.

Dr. Weinstock-Guttman, Professor of Neurology at the University at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is an internationally recognized neuroscientist, whose research productivity puts her in the top 1 percent of clinical neuroscientists in the world. Director of the Jacobs Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Center for Treatment and Research and the Executive Director of The New York State MS Consortium, Dr. Weinstock-Guttman  has made foundational contributions to understanding MS as related to diet, age, gender, and race. Her studies of MS in the African-American population led to a paradigm shift in patient care, and her research has led to groundbreaking correlations of serum lipid proinflammatory activities and body weight with disability and brain imaging outcomes in MS and identified a proinflammatory diet in adolescents as an important risk factor for MS onset. Her work first identified serum biomarkers for MS. She has received two awards from the National MS Society: the Stephen H. Kelly Award in 2011 and Impact Award for Research in 2018. 

Ms. Wriston Colbert, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University, is a leading voice in eco-fiction and a master of the novel-in-stories format. Writing poignant narratives that unfold within precarious landscapes of deterioration, Professor Wriston Colbert has published seven novels, with her third—the 1998 Climbing the God Tree—winning the Willa Cather Fiction Prize. Her fourth novel, Dream Lives of Butterflies won the gold medal (first place) in the Twelfth Annual Independent Publisher Book Awards, while her 2009 Shark Girls was a finalist for both the USA Book News Best Books of 2010 and ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year. Her 2016 Wild Things won the CNY 2017 Book Award for Fiction and the 2018 International Book Award in Fiction: Short Stories; her story “Things Blow Up” won the Ian MacMillan Fiction prize. Her 2018 Vanishing Acts won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Best Family Saga and finaled for another five awards. A book reviewer for the New York Journal of Books, Professor Wriston Colbert also serves on editorial boards in Indonesia, Turkey and India.

Dr. Hamm, a Professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, researches and teaches the interaction of law and society in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. He is a true scholar-teacher: for more than 30 years, he has used his enthusiasm for his field– as evidenced in his books Murder, Honor, and Law (2003) and Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture and the Polity, 1880-1920 (1995) – to enliven and enrich his classroom teaching, and his research is of the highest quality, awarded the Society for History in the Federal Government’s Henry Adams Prize. His “selfless dedication” continues well after graduation, as he mentors former students through graduate programs, law school, and careers. As a teacher of teachers, he has shaped the classrooms of those he has taught, extending his gift for teaching to those he has never met. He is known as a committed and engaged dissertation director, guiding the work of 23 Ph.D. students, five of whom earned the college dissertation award. Dr. Hamm received the 2013 “Most Influential Person” award from the University at Albany’s Honors College, the 2012 Outstanding Achievement Award from the University at Albany’s Disability Resource Center, the 1998 SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the 1997 University at Albany Excellence in Teaching award. Externally, Dr. Hamm received a 2004 Fulbright Senior Scholar Teaching award, and in 2012 he was named a Distinguished Member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.

Dr. Handley, Professor in Literature and Writing at Empire State College (ESC), received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014, ESC’s Scholar Across the College award in 2017-18 and Outstanding Mentoring Award in 2002. Recipient of the Arthur Imperatore Fellowship for 2019-2020, she produced an art installation on the rewards and challenges of caregiving, which featured more than 120 works of art and writing from veterans, teenagers, professional and family caregivers. She served as a faculty member of the NYS Young Writers Institute from 2006 to 2019. She co-created one of the first online writing centers in the country, which served as a model for those at other universities worldwide. She was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant in 2006 and is a three-time winner of the Adirondack Center for Writing Best Poetry Awards.

Dr. Lee, Professor in Accounting at SUNY Plattsburgh, brings to his classroom robust professional experience as a Certified Public Accountant, Certified Management Accountant, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Financial Manager. An Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador for 2018, he received the 2011 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. As author of McGraw-Hill's instructor’s manual for managerial accounting in 2011 and twenty-three articles in his field, Dr. Lee shares pedagogical expertise with instructors across the country. Most recently, he led an initiative to launch the Online Accounting Completion Program for SUNY Plattsburgh undergraduates. The only one of its kind in SUNY, the program helps underserved New York State residents complete their Accounting bachelor’s degrees via an AACSB-accredited business education.

Dr. Searles, Professor in English at Mohawk Valley Community College, has served SUNY and his students for more than 40 years. He was honored with the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1985. In 2002, the Carnegie Foundation recognized him with the New York State Teacher of the Year Award, an honor echoed in 2003 by NYSUT’s Higher Education Member of the Year. His textbook, Workplace Communications: The Basics, now in its 8^th edition, is used in over 200 colleges in the United States and abroad, including Canada, Saudi Arabia, and in translation to Mandarin in China. A true teacher-scholar, Dr. Searles has published three books, an additional textbook, and more than 250 articles, reviews and poems in peer-reviewed journals. He received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2003.

Dr. Storch, Professor and Chair of History at SUNY Cortland, received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006, Cortland’s Outstanding Achievement in Research Award in 2013, and its Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Outreach in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017. The Central New York Education Consortium honored her with the Philip Martin Educator of Excellence Award in 2006. She co-authored National Endowment for the Humanities Landmark Grants in 2013, 2015, and 2016, designed to enhance and strengthen the teaching of humanities in K-12, and she wrote and led a 2018 Summer Institute for Teachers. She is author of two books on labor and working-class history. Her co-developed Forever Wild project provided immersive experience on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at Cortland’s Outdoor Education Center at Raquette Lake.

Dr. Yang, Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at SUNY Oswego, received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2009 and has been recognized internationally for his expertise in teaching and learning with the Chinese Ministry of Education’s National Higher Education Teaching Achievement Grand Award in 2018. Co-editor of fifteen essay collections on educational innovation and e-learning and co-author of another seventy-five articles on cognitive learning, information literacy, and online education, Dr. Yang has promoted the application of educational technologies as well as measured their impact on student learning. Dr. Yang has been an important catalyst in building international partnerships during the global pandemic, and he has shared his expertise to support teachers and students in the move to virtual learning.

Dr. Bendinskas, Professor of Chemistry at SUNY Oswego, is one of only 51 Distinguished Members of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. In 2015, he founded the Oswego chapter, which received the Chapter Program of Excellence award for 2017-18. Dr. Bendinskas developed Oswego’s American Chemical Society-accredited Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry. Since 2000, he has served as graduate and undergraduate research mentor for the Oswego Chemistry department, supervising four undergraduates and one graduate student each semester. He has been elected five times to serve as director of the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Center. As three-time chair of the Scholarly and Creative Activities Committee, he created a successful Early Stage Grant program for junior faculty. Since 2014, Dr. Bendinskas has served as executive editor for the American Journal for Undergraduate Research, following eight years as disciplinary editor for biochemistry. In 2017, he received Oswego’s President’s award for Scholarly and Creative Activity.

Dr. Duggan, Professor of Medicine and a Board-certified hematologist/oncologist at SUNY Upstate Medical University, holds a Mastership with the American College of Physicians, an organization he has served as regional governor and state president. During his 15-year tenure as Department of Medicine Chair, the residency program achieved a 100 percent pass rate, placing it at the top of all programs in the country. As a founding member of the Board of the Health Advancement Collaborative of Central NY, he guided development of a regional health information organization which now serves 26 counties. In collaboration with the NYS Department of Education, Dr. Duggan developed protocols for site visits and has served as Team Chair for visits to medical schools in the U.S., Caribbean, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. An ISO-certified auditor, Dr. Duggan has served on review teams for the Liaison Committee for Medical Education as well as designed national clinical trials, particularly for the Cancer and Leukemia Group B research base, then the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology.

Dr. Fitz-Gibbon, Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Cortland, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. Known for his work on nonviolent conflict resolution, particularly in the context of foster care communities, and peace education, Dr. Fitz-Gibbon has served as the Director of the Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice, housed within the Cortland Philosophy department, which he has also chaired. Past President of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, Dr. Fitz-Gibbon has been instrumental in developing a pilot program in campus mediation services to informally address issues of conflict among faculty and staff. Through a collaboration with state and local social services agencies, he offers training for foster parents, adopters, and case workers in nonviolent childcare. Author or co-author of fifteen books, Dr. Fitz-Gibbon is book series editor for Brill Academic Publisher's Social Philosophy series. In 2018, he received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Dr. Floriano, Professor in the Department of Music at SUNY Geneseo, leverages his international reputation in service to Geneseo’s performance programs and the region overall. Internationally, he is known as creator and artistic leader of the Finger Lakes Opera (FLO), a summer professional opera company awarded Professional Company member status at Opera America in 2020. Dedicated to inspiring future musicians, Dr. Floriano expanded the FLO’s Young Artist Program to become an endowed international operatic training program, with notable principal artists from La Scala, the Metropolitan and LA Operas, and the Madrid Teatro Real, among others. Dr. Floriano has also served as musical director for the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra (12 years) and as resident conductor for the Brevard Summer Music Festival (9 years). Locally, Professor Floriano has reinvigorated the Geneseo Festival Singers, a college/community ensemble, and brought together his Geneseo Chamber Singers (a group he has led on six international tours) with talented high school choral musicians through his Greater Rochester High School Honors Choir Festival. Dr. Floriano has served as guest conductor to New York’s All-State choirs and orchestras; guest lectured at the American Symphony Orchestra League’s Conducting Workshop; led national organizations such as the American Choral Directors Association, Collegiate Repertoire and Standards Committee; and advocated for the arts by fundraising through the Geneseo Office of Development. Dr. Floriano has received the Livingston County Arts Leadership Award in 2014 and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2008.

Dr. Millán, Professor of Psychology at SUNY Old Westbury, is a Fellow of both the American Board of Professional Psychology and the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards, serving the latter as a member of the Board of Directors and as President. As Chair of the Psychology department and later as Founding Director of the M.S. in Mental Health Counseling degree, Dr. Millán has prepared diverse, ethical and culturally competent professionals. He has served the Association of Hispanic Mental Health Professionals as Secretary and the National Latinx Psychological Association as Treasurer, President, and member of the Council of Past Presidents. A board member for the New York State Board for Licensure/ Discipline, he has helped develop binational guidelines for telepsychology between Canada and the U.S., and he led the development of the Interjurisctional Compact, a national agreement allowing Psychology regulatory bodies to monitor telepsychological practice across jurisdictional lines. Coeditor of a well-regarded case book on telepsychology, Dr. Millán received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002.

Dr. Santos, Professor of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering at Binghamton University, has served as Director of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies, advisor to the freshman engineering program, and faculty advisor for the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society for Black Engineers. A thrust leader for the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM), he played a key role in Binghamton’s research initiative in roll-to-roll flexible electronics research and production. His leadership helped position CAMM to become the New York node of NextFlex, a $75 million federal initiative to advance flexible hybrid electronics manufacturing. He has forged international partnerships with universities in Mexico and South Korea; served as an assistant director of the Watson Institute for Systems Excellence; and assumed key leadership roles in the Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006 and the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2011.

Dr. Wagner, Professor of Educational Policy and Leadership at the University at Albany, has built a local and national reputation as an advocate for university-K12 partnerships and for advancing the professional development of local school leaders. He has served multiple terms on the boards of the Greater Capital Region Principals’ Center and the Capital Area School Development Association. An internationally recognized expert on international education, he has led various organizations including the Comparative and International Education Society and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. He has served on advisory committees to the World Bank (on Lifelong Learning Policies in Latin America), the UNESCO European Centre for Higher Education, and the U.S. Department of Education. Honored with National School Development Council’s Leadership Award in 2008 and the University at Albany’s Disability Resource Center’s Outstanding Service Award in 2009, Dr. Wagner received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service in 2011.

Dr. Wulfert, Professor of Psychology and Collins Fellow at the University at Albany, is an internationally respected scholar of behavioral therapy and addiction as well as public policy related to gambling. The treatment she developed for persons with gambling disorder—Cognitive-Motivational Behavior Therapy—became a fundamental part of the training offered by the New York Council on Problem Gambling. Dr. Wulfert has provided expert testimony to the New York State Gaming Commission. As co-Chair of the President’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion for nine years, she established initiatives to support women scholars, particularly in STEM fields. Dr. Wulfert is known for her significant contributions to the Capital Region’s Arts community, particularly her board service to Albany Pro Musica. She is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998; the President’s Excellence Award in Academic Service in 2001; President’s Award for Exemplary Public Engagement in 2014; and the 2020 Citizen of the University Award, given by the Alumni Association.