Three named SUNY Distinguished Professors

UB faculty members Jonathan Dewald, Chunming Qiao and John E. Tomaszewski have been named SUNY Distinguished Professors, the highest faculty rank in the SUNY system.

They were among 21 SUNY faculty members appointed to the distinguished professor ranks by the SUNY Board of Trustees at its meeting on May 3.

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.

Dewald, Qiao and Tomaszewski were all 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.”

“We are tremendously proud of our faculty who have recently been appointed to the highest rank in SUNY,” said Charles F. Zukoski, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “This distinction recognizes that UB faculty are among the best in the world and have a transformative impact through their research and scholarship.”

Dewald, UB Distinguished Professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of History, is internationally recognized for his innovative scholarship in early modern French history. His research has garnered many of the most prestigious national and international fellowships and honors during an academic career spanning more than 40 years, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Humanities Center.

He has twice been designated as Directeur d'Etudes Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. A pre-eminent and prolific scholar and former chair of the UB history department, his research contributions have advanced the historical methods, theory, analysis, and interpretation among historians with a serious interest in social, cultural, economic, material and gender history. The author of six major books and numerous articles in the top journals of his field, he is acclaimed by colleagues as someone who is “widely cited and respected, and unquestionably one of the best historians of France of his generation” and “one of the very few scholars who have…reshaped his field” by changing how scholars look and think about early modern French history.

Qiao, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is one of the world’s leading authorities on network protocols and architectures, and the inventor of optical burst switching. He also has been at the forefront of pioneering research on integrated wireless systems that have revolutionized the smartphone industry and profoundly impacted the communication infrastructure of the internet, as well as that of video, multimedia and high-end digital services.

A fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Qiao has published more than 350 peer-reviewed articles, approximately 140 journal papers, eight book chapters and more than 210 symposium and conference papers. His research that has been cited more than 20,000 times, including 2,700 citations to date of his groundbreaking, 1999 article on optical burst switching.

He holds eight U.S. patents and has received almost 50 grants and more than $8 million in total research funding. During the past decade, he also has established himself as a leader in the design and evaluation of Transportation Cyber Physical Systems with connected and autonomous vehicles.

Tomaszewski, professor and chair in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is internationally renowned for his research in pathology and prognostic factors in cancer, and development of quantitative image analysis tools used in digital pathology and automated cancer diagnostics.

He is a global leader in digital pathology and computational modeling in histopathology and the informatics revolution in pathology, where he contributes to international diagnostic guidelines. A pioneer of high throughput detection of prostate cancer in histologic sections using probabilistic models and computer-aided diagnosis, he is a leader in the development of multidimensional molecular data pairings with pathological findings.

He is the author or co-author of more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, 35 book chapters and 10 chapters dealing with his special interests in renal pathology, renal transplant and immunopathology. He holds four U.S. patents.