13 named UB Distinguished Professor

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

Thirteen faculty members from across the university have been named the first UB Distinguished Professors.

The UB Distinguished Professor designation—not to be confused with the SUNY Distinguished Professor designation, a rank above that of full professor awarded by the SUNY trustees—was created by the Office of the Provost "to recognize those full professors who have achieved true distinction and who are leaders in their fields," says Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi.

It is open to faculty members who have been a full professor for at least five years and who have achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within their field through significant contributions to the research/scholarly literature or through artistic performance or achievement in the fine arts.

While attainment of the UB Distinguished Professor designation may pave the way for a faculty member to be nominated for SUNY Distinguished Professor, nominations also can come from the professorate in general, Capaldi said, noting "it is not a necessary step."

The first class of UB Distinguished Professors includes:

• Athol Abrahams, Department of Geography. A UB faculty member since 1977, Abrahams served as chair of the department from 1988-91. An expert on the hydraulics and erosion mechanics of overland flow, he has conducted field experiments on desert hill slopes in southern Arizona and southern New Mexico, flume experiments in the Geomorphology Laboratory at UB and computer modeling in the university's Geographic Information and Analysis Laboratory. He is the co-editor of "Geomorphology of Desert Environments" and "Overland Flow: Hydraulics and Erosion Mechanics" and the recipient of the G. K. Gilbert Award from the Association of American Geographers, the Gladys W. Cole Research Award from the Geological Society of America and Association of American Geographers Honors
• Guyora Binder, Law School. Binder, who has been a member of the UB law faculty since 1982, specializes in constitutional law, criminal law, international human rights and international law. He was the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School in 1991-92. Co-author of textbooks and teacher's manuals on criminal law, Binder serves on the editorial advisory boards for Buffalo Criminal Law Review, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, Buffalo Law Review and Law, Language and Literature. In the fall, he will teach a graduate course on "Law as Literature" offered by Department of Comparative Literature.
• Frank Bright, Department of Chemistry. A UB faculty member since 1987, Bright's research interests are in the areas of biomolecule dynamics at and in surfaces, developing new-generation biosensors, supercritical fluid science and technology, and advanced laser-based chemical instrumentation. The author of more than 150 scientific publications, Bright last year received the Buck-Whitney Award of the Eastern New York section of the American Chemical Society for "outstanding contributions to chemistry." Bright, who also serves as associate chair of the Department of Chemistry, received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998 and a SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000.
• Jonathan S. Dewald, Department of History. A former two-time department chair (1982-85 and 1990-97), Dewald is a specialist in early modern Europe, particularly France. He is the author of four books and numerous scholarly papers, and is editor-in-chief of "The Dictionary of Early Modern Europe," a project that includes six volumes and about 1,200 entries on European history and culture from 1450 to 1800. Dewald is the recipient of the 1994 Leo Gershoy Award from the American Historical Association for "the most outstanding work in English on any aspect of the field of 17th- and 18th-century European history." He is the immediate past-president of the New York State Association of European Historians and the current chair of the President's Review Board at UB.
• Colin Drury, Department of Industrial Engineering. Drury's work is concentrated on the application of human-factors techniques to manufacturing and maintenance processes. He has more than 200 publications on topics in industrial process control, quality control, aviation maintenance and safety. He was the founding executive director of The Center for Industrial Effectiveness, which works with regional industries to improve competitiveness and has been credited with creating and saving thousands of jobs in the region. Drury currently heads the FAA Research Group at UB, which works to apply current theory in the area of human factors and ergonomics to improve the task structure, environment and training facilities used in aviation maintenance. He is a fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, the Ergonomics Society and the Human Factors Ergonomics Society, and received the Bartlett Medal of the Ergonomics Society and the Fitts Award of the Human Factors Ergonomics Society.
• Stephen Dyson, Department of Classics. Dyson's research interests include the Romanization of Sardinia, urban development and the social history of ancient Rome and the history of classical archaeology. The last is the focus of his most recent book, "Ancient Marbles to American Shores (1998)." He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He served as president of the Archaeological Institute of America, and held the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectureship of that organization in 1993-94. He twice has been Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome and was director of the classical summer school of the American Academy in Rome from 1998-2000.
• Isaac Ehrlich, Department of Economics. Executive office (chair) of the Department of Economics, Ehrlich also holds positions as Leading Professor of Economics and Melvin H. Baker Professor of American Enterprise. His research interests include general applications of economic theory to law and economics, human capital and health economics, uncertainty and insurance, advertising and information, and economic growth and development. He is the author of more than 50 articles in major journals and collections, and his widely cited work has been supported by numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, including a major USAID grant to study economic development and the role of free enterprise.
• Peyman Givi, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. A UB faculty member since 1988, Givi's research interests include thermal-fluid science, turbulence, combustion, multiphase transport and computational methods and numerical algorithms. He is director of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Laboratory. His most recent work, published in March in Physics of Fluids, resulted in the development of a novel method of computing and modeling turbulent reacting flows that produces results equivalent to those generated by expensive supercomputers and is anywhere from 30 to 100 times less expensive to use. It is expected to have a major impact on how engineers, particularly those in industry, conduct computational simulations of chemically reacting turbulent flows, such as those involved in hydrocarbon combustion and propulsion.
• Alfred Konefsky, Law School. Konefsky joined the law faculty in 1977 after serving as the Charles Warren Fellow in American Legal History at the Harvard Law School and as editor of the "Legal Papers of Daniel Webster" at Dartmouth College. He teaches contracts and a variety of courses in American legal history, including the subject areas of the 19th century—from the Revolution to the Civil War—the colonial period, law and American labor history, American constitutional history, and Melville and the law. Konefsky's research interests focus primarily on issues in 19th century American legal history, including the ideology and role of legal professional elites and groups in a democratic culture, the relationship between legal doctrine and its social context, and the borderline between legal history and literary history. He is at work on a biography of Simon Greenleaf, a mid-19th-century law professor at the Harvard Law School. His research has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Bar Foundation.
• Howard Kuramitsu, School of Dental Medicine. A faculty member in the Department of Oral Biology with a joint appointment in the Department of Microbiology, Kuramitsu investigates the molecular basis for the pathogenicity of microorganisms involved in human dental caries and periodontal diseases. In his lab, he utilizes both biochemical and molecular genetic approaches to identify virulence factors expressed by Streptococcus mutans, the principal etiological agent of human dental caries, as well as by Porphyromonas gingivalis and Treponema denticola, two organisms implicated in periodontal diseases. A member of the Center for Advanced Molecular Biology and Immunology (CAMBI), Kuramitsu and colleagues have found that oral bacteria can exchange genes, raising the possibility that organisms in the oral cavity can be transformed from harmless to destructive, and from antibiotic-susceptible to antibiotic-resistant.
• Russ Miller, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Director of the Center for Computational Research—one of the leading academic supercomputing sites in the United States—Miller also is a senior research scientist at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI) and an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at UB. His research currently focuses on the "shake-and-bake" method of molecular structure determination, which was mentioned on the poster "The Top Ten Algorithms of the Century," published in Computing Science & Engineering. In general, his research interests include parallel algorithms, image processing and computational crystallography. He is the author of two books on parallel algorithms, and is a member of the editorial board of Parallel Processing Letters.
• Frederick Sachs, Department of Physiology and Biophysics. An authority on cell mechanics, Sachs is director of the Center for Single Molecule Biophysics and a member of CAMBI and the Center for Neurobiology and Vision. His research attempts to understand the electrical processes in cells. Of particular interest are the mechanisms of mechanoreception and the role of ion channels. He conducts quantitative light and electron microscopy, and mathematical modeling to understand the mechanics of cells, as well as develop unique instrumentation and software relevant to that analysis of images and electrophysiological data.
• Stanley Zionts, Department of Management Science and Systems. Alumni Professor of Decision Support Systems, Zionts' interests include mathematical programming, multiple criteria decision making, decision support systems, entrepreneurship, and management strategy. He founded and served as the first president of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), and received the Gold Medal Award and the Presidential Service Award from that organization. A book honoring his work was published in conjunction with the MCDM, and presented to Zionts on at the 13th meeting of the society.