Four SUNY Oswego students earned the 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Awards for Student Excellence, the highest such recognition in the state system. These awards recognize outstanding accomplishments inside and outside the classroom (from left) childhood education-English major Kaitlin Flint, psychology major Adriana Militello, zoology major Brooke Goodman and meteorology major Kaitlyn Jesmonth. They were among 193 students recognized in a ceremony with SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. on April 24 in Albany. Read full story.

Lynn Braun, the university’s director of counseling services, co-authored a position paper titled “Navigating a Path Forward for Mental Health Services in Higher Education" for the national Association of University and College Counseling Center Directors. The report aims to provide a blueprint for institutions and the industry to navigate rising needs for mental health support, changes in the higher education experience and increased staff turnover, among other challenges. Braun and the other authors offer nine suggestions for creating a more sustainable model across campuses.

Political science professor Helen Knowles presented at Touro Law Review’s symposium “The Life, Work & Legacy of Felix Frankfurter,” recognizing one of the most influential lawyers in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. At the invitation of the organizers, Knowles presented about three cases in the 1940s in which Frankfurter, then a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, cited the landmark women's minimum wages decision West Coast Hotel v. Parrish from 1937. Knowles is an expert in that influential case, including writing a book on it titled “Making Minimum Wage: Elsie Parrish versus the West Coast Hotel Company.”

Damian Schofield, director of the human-computer interaction master’s program and Ian Cummins (then a student and now an alum) co-authored “Studying the Effects of Being Einstein: An Experiment in Social Virtual Reality, Computer and Information Science.” This study utilized a novel methodology to conduct remote testing in virtual reality, leveraging a popular social virtual reality platform to test whether participants using Einstein as their virtual body performed better at a cognitive task than participants using other virtual bodies, and did not find any effect or correlation of the virtual body with any of the factors measured.

Roger Guy, professor and chair of criminal justice, published a pair of journal articles recently. “Police violence, corrupt cops and the repudiation of stigma among underclass residents in Mexico City” appeared in the journal Current Sociology. “Beyond money, power, and masculinity: Toward an analytical perspective on recruitment to Mexican drug trafficking organizations” was published in the International Sociology journal.

John F. Lalande II, emeritus professor and chair of modern languages and literatures, recently published two book translations: “Festschrift: 50 Years of AIMS (American Institute of Musical Studies) in Graz,” a translation of Clemens Anton Klug’s “50 Jahre AIMS in Graz,” and “​​In Our Poverty, God Has Blessed Us,” translation of Sr. Marianna Rosenberger’s “In unserer Armut hat Gott uns gesegnet,” Vol. II of “Mother M. Anselma Bopp and the Growth of the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of Thuine, 1869-1887.” 

Physics student Hugh Randall presented on April 15 at the Rochester Symposium for Physics Students at the University of Rochester. He shared “Instability Strips of 3 Types of Classical Variable Stars,” which had co-authors including Oswego students Selim Kalici and Michele Manno and physics professor Shashi Kanbur; SUNY Oswego alumnus Earl Bellinger (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics); Anthony Chalmers (Binghamton University); Nick Proietti (Rice University);  Mami Deka (Cotton University, Guwahati, India); Susmita Das (Konkoly Observatory, Hungary); and Anupam Bhardwaj (Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy). The project tests four different theories of convection to model pulsating stars, which are used to measure the age and size of the universe. The models determine instability strips which are the compared to observational data from the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment ) IV mission to constrain current theories of stellar pulsation.

Karen Sime of the Biological Sciences Department gave a talk at the seventh International Entomophagous Insects Conference, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in April. Her presentation, "Tales from the bog: the natural history of an endangered moth and its egg parasitoid," discussed her many years of research on the bog buckmoth, a moth native to Oswego County that was recently placed on the U.S. Endangered Species list. 

SUNY Oswego students Bradley Wiggins, Joshua Fahey, Marie Park and Aidan Trusz recently excelled in the university's first-ever appearance at the SUNY Model European Union gathering.

Four Oswego students had an excellent showing in their first-ever appearance at the SUNY Model European Union gathering recently, winning an award for Outstanding Agenda Item with sophomore journalism major Aidan Trusz honored as Most Effective Finance Minister. From left are participants Bradley Wiggins, Joshua Fahey, Marie Park and Trusz. Read full story.

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