Two Jacobs School faculty are members of the SUNY Distinguished Academy Board

Two faculty members in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB are serving on the SUNY Distinguished Academy Board.

John E. Tomaszewski, SUNY Distinguished Professor and the Peter A. Nickerson, PhD, Professor and Chair of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences at UB, was recently named to the board; his term runs through 2024. He joins Steven J. Fliesler, SUNY Distinguished Professor and the Meyer H. Riwchun Endowed Chair Professor of Ophthalmology at UB, who joined the board in 2020; his term runs through 2023. Fliesler was recently elected vice chair of the board, joining the ranks of the three elected officers of the board.

Tomaszewski is internationally renowned for his research in pathology and prognostic factors in cancer and kidney disease, and development of quantitative image-analysis tools used in computational pathology. He is a global leader in digital pathology and computational modeling in histopathology and the informatics revolution in pathology, making critical contributions to international diagnostic guidelines. Tomaszewski is president of UBMD Pathology.

Fliesler is a world renowned vision scientist and among the world’s top experts on cholesterol metabolism in the retina. He has been funded for more than 30 years by the National Institutes of Health to conduct pioneering studies into retinal dysfunction and degeneration associated with defects in cholesterol synthesis.

The members of the SUNY Distinguished Academy include all active distinguished faculty appointed by the SUNY Board of Trustees. The purpose of the academy is to serve as a formal organization to leverage the collective contributions of its members to build and support academic excellence within the state university.

The SUNY Distinguished Academy Board is responsible for:

• Developing appropriate ways for distinguished faculty to help raise or ensure academic excellence within SUNY, to honor the accomplishments of distinguished faculty and to increase opportunities for engagement, collaboration, communication and networking for distinguished academy members.
• Striving to enhance the visibility of the Distinguished Academy within SUNY and in the community at large.
• Reporting Distinguished Academy actions and activities to the SUNY chancellor.
• Forming Distinguished Academy working groups and/or committees to pursue issues of interest to the Distinguished Academy and/or to the SUNY chancellor.
• Creating agendas and organizing the annual Distinguished Academy meeting and any special meetings/webinars deemed necessary.