蜜桃传媒

Eight UB faculty members have been named SUNY Distinguished Professors, the highest faculty rank in the SUNY system.

Irus Braverman, Michael Cain, Jian Feng, Siwei Lyu, Samina Raja, Jennifer Read, Despina Stratigakos and Nallan Suresh were appointed to the distinguished professor ranks by the SUNY Board of Trustees at its meeting on April 29.

The rank of distinguished professor is an order above full professorship and has three co-equal designations: Distinguished Professor, Distinguished Service Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Cain was named a Distinguished Service Professor in recognition of his “distinguished reputation for service not only to the campus and the 蜜桃传媒, but also to the community, the State of New York or even the nation, by sustained effort in the application of intellectual skills drawing from the candidate’s scholarly research interests to issues of public concern.”

All the other faculty members were named Distinguished Professors in recognition of their international prominence and distinguished reputations within their chosen fields. According to SUNY, “this distinction is attained through significant contributions to the research literature or through artistic performance or achievement in the case of the arts. The candidate’s work must be of such character that the individual’s presence will tend to elevate the standards of scholarship of colleagues both within and beyond these persons’ academic fields.”

UB’s newest SUNY Distinguished Professors:

Irus Braverman, professor and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar in the School of Law, is a founder of the fields of legal geography and non-human legalities. She is internationally recognized for her uniquely interdisciplinary research on ecological regimes and ocean governance, her groundbreaking ethnographic accounts of scientific practices in nature conservation and her documentation of settler ecologies in Israel/Palestine and the nexus of One Health and climate justice.

Since 2006 she has produced seven monographs, six edited books, and approximately 100 articles and chapters addressing legal, political and ethical issues arising from human efforts to govern nature, most recently in the face of climate change.

Her book “Zooland” received the Bronze Medal for outstanding book in current events from Independent Publisher as part of the online magazine’s annual IPPY competition in 2013. Her book “Settling Nature” won the 2023 Clay Morgan Award for Best Book on Environmental Political Theory.

Among her numerous honors are fellowships from Cornell 蜜桃传媒’s Society for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Munich 蜜桃传媒’s Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the National Humanities Center and South Africa’s Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, as well as a UB Exceptional Scholars: Sustained Achievement Award.

Braverman’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Research Council of Norway. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the French National Research Agency’s Grande Fonds Marins 2030 and the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Committee of the Earth BioGenome Project, and a frequent collaborator with the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea (NCLOS) in the Arctic.

Michael E. Cain, professor of medicine and biomedical engineering in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is an internationally recognized cardiovascular physician-scientist who specializes in the area of abnormal heart rhythms. He has been recognized for his long-term leadership role in his field with numerous awards, including the Distinguished Service Award from the Heart Rhythm Society, the Stanley J. Sarnoff Spirit Award from the Scientific Board of the Sarnoff Endowment for Cardiovascular Science and the Arthur E. Strauss Award from the American Heart Association.

He is also the recipient of the UB President’s Medal for exemplary leadership, and the Legacy Award from the National Federation for Just Communities of Western New York.

Cain has been involved on multiple levels in virtually every aspect of academic medicine — he served as dean of the Jacobs School for 15 years and as UB’s vice president for health sciences for a decade — and has focused his efforts on continuously enhancing the UB’s educational, research and clinical care learning environments.

In the broader community, he has been an advocate for broad health system transformation to improve health outcomes, control costs and improve health equity in Western New York.

Jian Feng, professor of physiology and biophysics in the Jacobs School, is a world leader in the molecular and cell biology of Parkinson’s disease. His research has centered on proteins and neurotransmitters in the brain that are pathophysiological elements in Parkinson’s. He has identified the critical roles of the parkin gene in Parkinson’s disease. Feng developed the use of human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to generate patient-specific human dopaminergic neurons in vitro to study the role of parkin in the disease.

He has published 89 papers — many appearing in high-impact journals and with total citations of more than 22,220 — and two book chapters. Among his numerous honors are designation as a UB Distinguished Professor, the Visionary Inventor Award, the Bridge Award for Translational Research, UB Exceptional Scholars: Sustained Achievement Award, the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and the Stockton Kimball Award, the Jacobs School’s highest honor.

Feng’s research has been consistently funded over the past 24 years to a total of $22.3 million. An excellent mentor, he has guided numerous PhD and postdoctoral students throughout their academic journeys.

Siwei Lyu, Empire Innovation Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is known for his extraordinary research and scholarship in the area of multimedia forensics and, in particular, AI-generated deepfakes. He frequently provides his expertise to the news media, including USA Today, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Newsweek, National Geographic and NPR.

Lyu holds four U.S. patents, has authored 230 peer-reviewed papers and has received more than $11.5 million in research support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA and U.S. Space Force, among others.

Director of UB’s Media Forensics Lab and founding co-director of the university’s Center for Information Integrity, Lyu’s work has contributed to UB’s national reputation as a source for detecting and mitigating disinformation and misinformation online. He chairs the Scientific & Technical Review Panel on Forensic Science for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and has worked with both New York State and U.S. policymakers, as well as industry, on socially significant issues related to deepfakes.

He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2018, and is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the International Association of Pattern Recognition and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. He was also named one of four Thought Leaders of 2024 by the American Association of Forensic Science.

Samina Raja, professor of urban and regional planning and founder/director of the UB Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (Food Lab), is a world-renowned expert in food systems planning, policy and practice. Her scholarship, teaching and civic engagement focuses on the role of community-led local government planning and policy in building equitable and sustainable food systems and healthy communities.

Raja works with a team of faculty, postdocs, doctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students, as well as many community collaborators, including the Massachusetts Avenue Project, Buffalo Food Equity Network and Juneteenth Agricultural Pavilion, to strengthen food systems policy and planning, and promote healthy eating and active living.

Her research, funded by more than $20 million in grants from the Foundation of Food and Agriculture Research, National Institutes for Health, National Institute for Food and Agriculture and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, impacts policy change and practice locally, nationally and globally. Moreover, she has led training sessions on food systems and planning for United Nations agencies.

Her work has received multiple awards, among them, the UB Exceptional Scholars: Sustained Achievement Award, the Champion of Community Change Award and the 40 Under 40 Award from Business First of Buffalo.

Raja’s teaching complements her scholarly research, training students of all academic ranks — and across many disciplines — and preparing dozens of award-winning trainees to become Fulbright scholars, Truman fellows, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health fellows and AAU Women fellows.

Jennifer Read, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, is an internationally known authority on the causes and consequences of problematic substance use. Read’s work, focused on the intersection of trauma and substance use, has been continuously funded during her more than two decades at UB, including as PI and co-PI on 10 federal grants totaling more than $17 million.

She has published more than 160 peer-reviewed articles, one book and eight book chapters, and has given numerous invited talks and conference presentations. With an h-index of 62 — over 18,600 citations — her publications have appeared in the most prestigious journals of psychology.

Read is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Association for the Advancement of Behavior and Cognitive Therapy (ABCT), and a recipient of a 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities and the 2017 Outstanding Individual Contributions to Research Award from ABCT. She has chaired a NIH review panel, served on the board of directors for the Research Society on Alcohol, and is the current editor-in-chief of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Despina Stratigakos, professor in the Department of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, is a widely respected historian whose interdisciplinary research explores how power and ideology function in architecture and the built environment, with a focus on women’s history as well as the landscapes of Nazism.

Her work on women architects reveals — and works to rectify —profound inequities in the architecture profession. A prolific scholar, she has authored five — soon to be six — books with prestigious presses (Princeton 蜜桃传媒, Yale 蜜桃传媒, 蜜桃传媒 of Minnesota) and her publications have won national awards such as the Society of Architectural Historians’ Spiro Kostof Book Award and the DAAD/German Studies Association Book Prize.

Stratigakos’ research has been supported by notable funding agencies in her field, including four Graham Foundation grants. She has held research fellowships nationally and internationally at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 蜜桃传媒 of Michigan, 蜜桃传媒 of Copenhagen, and Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, among others; she served as co-PI for two landmark Mellon Foundation grants awarded to UB in 2019 and 2021.

She has served on the board of directors of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, Society of Architectural Historians, International Archive of Women in Architecture, and Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. 

Nallan Suresh, UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Operations Management and Strategy, School of Management, is known for his seminal works in cellular manufacturing and flexible manufacturing systems. His research in later years has focused on supply chain agility, logistics and sustainable operations.

Over a long-standing research career, Suresh has authored numerous papers in leading publications and has held senior editorial positions in operations management (OM) journals, guest-edited key volumes and refereed articles for top-tier journals.  

Among his numerous awards are the Alfred V. Bodine Award for studies in machine tool economics, Outstanding Senior Editor Award from Decision Sciences Journal and the UB Exceptional Scholars: Sustained Achievement Award.

In addition, Suresh is an accomplished teacher, earning praise from both graduate and undergraduate students. He has chaired 24 PhD dissertation committees and developed master’s programs in manufacturing and supply chain management at UB and at partner institutions like Singapore Institute of Management. He is co-director of UB’s Stephen Still Institute for Sustainable Transportation and Logistics and has been a visiting professor in universities in the Netherlands and China.     

As associate dean for faculty and research, he has contributed significantly to building the management school's faculty strengths in research and teaching.