SUNY Distinguished Professorship
A record of astronomical research accomplishments and providing stellar opportunities for students have earned Shashi Kanbur the rank of Distinguished Professor from SUNY. For decades, the professor of physics has studied the age and size of the universe through measuring pulsating stars –- an endeavor that has created connections with scholars across the globe and propelled many Oswego student researchers to success. Read full story.
SUNY Chancellor’s Awards
Serving as a global expert and dedicated scholar, while advocating for digital human rights, recently earned communication studies professor Ulises Mejias the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Nominators particularly cited the importance of his co-authored book “The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism” and subsequent presentations and publications. Read full story.
School of Education faculty member Carlo Cuccaro earned a 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching through an exceptional ability to teach, connect with students and provide professional expertise. Providing lessons in Oswego classroom since 1995, Cuccaro earned praise for a consistently deep commitment to excellence in working with students across a wide range of courses. Read full story.
Outstanding work in customer service, technological projects and overall support recently earned Michele May the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Classified Service. As administrative assistant to the assistant vice president, academic support, and in previous roles, May continuously contributed to a culture of successful student support and positive outcomes. Read full story.
Dedication to student involvement, engagement and growth has earned Michael Paestella the 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service. Currently interim director of SUNY Oswego's Office of Student Engagement and Leadership, Paestella's work has been crucial for students because membership in student organizations comprises a large component of their out-of-class time and has enormous benefits. Read full story.
Other awards
The New York State Broadcasters Association (NYSBA) presented four awards to SUNY Oswego broadcasting students honoring top-tier work in television, radio and digital storytelling. May 2023 broadcasting graduate and current master of business administration major Zachary Nusimow earned two College TV awards, with a “Rich N’ Pour” package winning Best Use of Local News Video while “Run to Wonzones” was named Best Promotional Announcement or Series. For the second year in a row, Kyle Spisak earned the award for Outstanding Editorial/Commentary in the College Radio category, this time for “The Kyle Spisak Show-Syracuse Blunders.” Kaley Richmond received the Outstanding Classroom Digital Project award for “Roots of Rivalry: Oswego & Plattsburgh Hockey.” Read full story.
EXCEL: Experiential Course and Engaged Learning won the "Excellence in Employer/Community Collaboration Award" at the SUNY Career Development Organization (CDO) Conference in Albany over the summer. The award celebrates community partnerships built for the Focus Forward mentoring program and a service-learning course, “Leadership in Your Field” (GST 303). The Focus Forward program spans five school districts and connects college students with middle and high school students for individualized mentorship experiences. SUNY Oswego’s college mentors provide academic support and social activities to help the school district mentees find confidence and belonging. Also at the SUNY CDO conference, two SUNY Oswego staff, Gary Morris of Career Services and Tina Cooper of EXCEL, were elected to serve on the executive board as president and president-elect, respectively. EXCEL and Career Services also presented four educational sessions about social identity, career readiness integration in the curriculum, multi-generational workplaces and student employment. Read full story.
Publications and presentations
In addition to his Chancellor’s Award, a busy summer for Mejias included publishing the book chapter "Notes on the Historiography of Data Colonialism" in “Algorithms and Society, Vol 6: Decolonizing Data (Routledge).” He delivered the invited lecture Data and the Paradox of Plenty at the Weizenbaum Institute (Berlin), participated in the workshop Critical Data Research in Practice at the University of Cambridge (UK), delivered a keynote during the Sustainable AI Conference at the University of Bonn (Germany), and presented at the workshop Datatopia: The Future of Scientific Discovery Through a Data Lens, University of Michigan. His 2019 co-authored “The Costs of Connection” (Stanford University Press) was translated into Spanish by Ediciones Godot in Argentina and into Turkish by Nota Bene. He was interviewed for SocietyByte (Switzerland), Il Manifesto (Italy), IT For Change (India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Netherlands). Mejias was a featured lecturer in the course "Digital Revolution and Data Economy," offered by the Universidad Abierta de Recoleta (Chile), and his work was mentioned in the #NoTechForApartheid Organizing Toolkit (produced by the Palestinian BDS National Committee) and The New Statesman.
In addition to his Distinguished Professorship, Kanbur co-authored “High-resolution Spectroscopic Metallicities of Milky Way Cepheid Standards and their impact on the Leavitt Law and the Hubble constant” in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. His co-authors included Adam Riess, the 2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics, and lead author Anupam Bharedwaj, a former Ph.D. student Kanbur advised and who has visited the campus and worked with Oswego students on numerous research projects.
Marthinus Koen of the criminal justice faculty co-authored “Painting the Narrative: Police-worn body cameras, report writing and the techno-regulation of police work” in the peer-reviewed First Monday internet journal. The article studied adoption of body cameras by a police agency in the United States, examining how officers’ ideological perspectives on the devices, technological limitations and policy-related concerns influenced their decisions about whether and how to review video as part of their report writing practice.
Astrophysicists using large radio telescopes to observe a collection of cosmic clocks in the Milky Way Galaxy –- including SUNY Oswego faculty member and planetarium director Natalie Lewandowska –- found evidence for gravitational waves that oscillate with periods of years to decades, according to a set of papers published June 28 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The gravitational-wave signal was observed in 15 years of data acquired by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Physics Frontiers Center (PFC), a collaboration of more than 190 scientists from the U.S. and Canada who use pulsars to search for gravitational waves. International collaborations using telescopes in Europe, India, Australia and China have independently reported similar results.
Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics Ampalavanar Nanthakumar had the article "A Copula based investigation of Reliability for the Multivariate Exponential Family of Distributions" accepted for publication in the International Journal of Statistics and Probability. Also, Nanthakumar presented a paper entitled "A Copula based investigation about the effect of the sample size on the Range distribution" in Athens, Greece, at the annual ATINER (Athens Institute for Education and Research) International Conference in Statistics on June 26. On June 20, Nanthakumar was inducted as a member into the SUNY Distinguished Academy.
Kamal Mohamed and Karen Sime of the Biological Sciences Department recently co-authored an article in Plant Science Bulletin, "Travels in Tanzania with North American Undergraduates: A Botanical Wildlife Safari." The paper is an account of their travels in Tanzania starting in 2018, when they first developed BIO 394 Tanzania Biodiversity & Conservation, a faculty-led travel class that is now offered each spring. Working with colleagues at the College of African Wildlife Management near Kilimanjaro, Mohamed and Sime have been bringing groups of Oswego students to Tanzania to explore the national parks and preserves in the northern part of the country and learn first-hand about the peoples of the region and the challenges of wildlife conservation in east Africa. Students study wildlife in their natural habitats and camp among giraffes, zebras and hyenas. Their article focuses on the plants that they encountered in the field, including charismatic species such as baobabs and strangler figs, and many species of medicinal and cultural significance.
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