SUNY Board of Trustees names Paras Prasad, Sargur Srihari Distinguished Professors

The rank, an order above full professorship, was conferred upon Paras N. Prasad, Photonics Science Professor of Chemistry and director of the Photonics Research Laboratory, and Sargur N. Srihari, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR).

The designation is awarded to individuals who have achieved national or international prominence in their fields.

Paras N. Prasad, a UB faculty member since 1974, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of optics and spectroscopy. He is founder and director of the UB Photonics Research Laboratory, which has a unique position among the world's photonics laboratories, focusing on the fundamental science behind photonic materials, as well as on industrial applications.

Last year, Prasad announced the development of new photonic materials that could revolutionize information storage because they are able to store thousands of times more data than conventional compact disks.

The new storage media are ideal for archiving very large quantities of pictures, photographs and other visual information that cannot efficiently be stored on today's CDs.

Applications for these materials are currently being explored by Prasad with the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He also conducts research on nonlinear optical effects in organic polymers and is developing new generations of multifunctional, nanostructured organic hybrids that could lead to the synthesis of "smart" materials.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Optical Society of America. Author of more than 300 technical papers, Prasad has co-edited or written seven books. A native of India, Prasad attended Bihar University. He received his doctoral degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.

Sargur N. Srihari, a UB faculty member since 1978, is the founder and director of CEDAR, where he supervises and conducts research on developing methodologies, algorithms, software and hardware designed to enable machines to read. Recognized internationally for its work, the team Srihari leads at CEDAR conducts research on one of the most difficult problems in artificial intelligence-getting a computer to "read" handwriting and poor-quality machine printing.

Last winter, the U.S. Postal Service installed the handwriting-interpretation system Srihari and his team developed into its main postal-distribution centers in order to automate the processing of handwritten addresses on envelopes.

Other projects Srihari has supervised and which now are in use include a system that is helping the Internal Revenue Service automate the reading of addresses on tax forms.

Srihari, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, has authored more than 150 papers and co-authored several U.S. patents, as well as a book on computer-text recognition.

He earned bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from Bangalore University and a bachelor's degree in electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He earned master's and doctoral degrees in computer information science from Ohio State University.