UB Distinguished Professor
The Office of the Provost created the rank of UB Distinguished Professor to honor full professors who have achieved national or international recognition as experts in their fields of study. UB Distinguished Professors are members of the faculty who have been full professors for a minimum of five years with a demonstrated record of excellence in artistic or scholarly contributions.
2023-24 Honorees
Hanfeng Li
Department of Mathematics
Hanfeng Li, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Mathematics. His primary research interest is noncommutative geometry and dynamical systems, particularly connections between operator algebras and dynamical systems. His recent work concentrates on actions of countable sofic groups and algebraic actions of general countable groups. In 2020, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society for his contributions to algebraic dynamics and operator algebras. He is the co-author of the 2017 book “Ergodic Theory: Independence and Dichotomies,” which introduces the ergodic theory and topological dynamics of actions of countable groups.
A-Z
Erik R. Seeman
Department of History
Erik Seeman, PhD, is a professor in the Department of History. The former director of UB’s Humanities Institute, he is a noted historian of colonial North America and the early modern Atlantic world. His research focuses on religion, social and cultural history, Indigenous history and death. He is the author of four books and numerous articles. His most recent book, “Speaking with the Dead in Early America,” won the 2020 Organization of American Historians’ Lawrence W. Levine Award for the best book of American cultural history. His work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and he has received two Fulbright Research and Teaching fellowships, most recently in 2023.
Sarah Xin Zhang
Department of Ophthalmology
Sarah Xin Zhang, MD, is a professor in the Department of Ophthalmology. She has distinguished herself in ophthalmic research, conducting impactful translational studies on retinal diseases related to diabetes and aging. Her seminal work has potential clinical applications, particularly in targeting endoplasmic reticulum stress to prevent and treat neurovascular damage in the retina. Recently, her research identified novel neuroprotective factors for retinal neurons. Her studies explored the detrimental effects of smoking on retinal cells, and the intrinsic factors that attenuate smoke-extract-induced stress and cell damage. This work has opened the door to understanding the mechanisms of retinal cell survival in disease conditions and developing new treatment for diabetic and age-related retinal degeneration. Since 2010, her work has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health.