TO: University Senate
FROM: Dennis N. Assanis, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
DATE: March 7, 2016
Stony Brook University’s Annual Faculty Achievement Dinner
On April 26, 2016, Stony Brook University is hosting its annual Faculty Achievement Dinner at the Old Field Club. This event, established in 1992, recognizes faculty who received prestigious national and international fellowships, honors and awards during the period from January 1, 2015 through December 31, 2015. The Stony Brook faculty are a remarkable group that, year upon year, brings home remarkable honors. This event is a celebration of the renowned researchers and educators who call Stony Brook their home. These awardees are an embodiment of our great university and of our community of scholars. This year’s honorees will join the already distinguished group of faculty such as Nobel Prize winners, Fields medalists, many winners of United States Presidential medals and awards, MacArthur Foundation “genius” awards, and Members of the National Academies and the Royal Society.
2nd Annual Women's Leadership Symposium - Inspiration & Empowerment: A Conversation For and About Women in the Workplace
On Thursday, March 17, 2016 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the Student Activities Center Ballrooms A & B, Stony Brook University will hold its second annual Women’s Leadership Symposium entitled “Inspiration and Empowerment: A Conversation For and About Women in the Workplace.” The event’s keynote speakers will be Jessica Bacal, Director of the Wurtele Center for Work & Life at Smith College and author of the book, Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting it Wrong; and Tonjanita Johnson, Vice President of Communications and Marketing at the University of Tennessee System. Additionally, our own campus senior leaders, Lynn Johnson, Judith Greiman, Susan Blum and Mary Truhlar will discuss what they've learned in their leadership journey. This event is open to all Stony Brook employees, community members and individuals from surrounding higher education institutions who are seeking inspiration and empowerment in their professional and personal lives, and includes continental breakfast, luncheon, and door prizes. There will also be breakout sessions, networking opportunities, and a book signing. Registration fees are $25 for Stony Brook employees and $50 for community members and alumni. For additional information, or to register, visit http://you.stonybrook.edu/forward/ or call (631) 632-2780.
March 2016 Provost’s Lecture
On Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 9:00 a.m. in the Charles B. Wang Center Theater, Stony
Brook
University will be hosting its 21st Annual Leadership Symposium: Challenges in Higher Education. Shaun R. Harper
will give a talk entitled “Best Practices in Creating an Inclusive Campus Environment.”Shaun R. Harper, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in
Education at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of the forthcoming book
Race Matters in College and President-Elect of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Professor
Harper is a tenured faculty member in the Graduate School of Education, Africana Studies,
and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He maintains an active research
agenda that examines race and gender in educational and social contexts, Black male
college access and achievement, the effects of education policies and campus environments
on student outcomes, and college student engagement. Joining Dr. Harper for the 21st
Annual Leadership Symposium will be Cheryl D. Hamilton, Assistant Provost and Director
of EOP/AIM, and Dr. Timothy Ecklund, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs
and Dean of Students. Ms. Hamilton and Dr. Ecklund will each respond to Dr. Harper's
presentation, after which the presenters will address questions from the symposium
audience. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs and the School of Social Welfare.
20th Annual Swartz Foundation Mind/Brain Lecture with Alan Alda, Eric Kandel and Jim Simons
Please save the date of April 4, 2016 at 4:00 p.m. on the Staller Center Main Stage for a very special event hosted by the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior
in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Swartz Foundation Mind/Brain Lecture Series.
Join us as actor/director and science advocate Alan Alda leads a discussion with Noble
Laureate Eric Kandel and renowned mathematician Jim Simons on the dynamic relationship
between mathematics and neuroscience and why it may be the key to solving the mind’s
most puzzling mysteries. For more information on the speakers, please visit stonybrook.edu/mindbrain.
Outcomes of the LOI Review Process for the 2015-2016 Stony Brook Online Learning Development
(S-BOLD) Initiative
The President and Provost of Stony Brook University, in support of the continuing
evolution of educational excellence for our students and the world, have established
the Stony Brook Online Learning Development Initiative (S-BOLD), funded initially
for four years at a level of $250,000 per year. The goals of the initiative are to:
leverage online channels and technology to enhance and support SBU’s educational mission;
improve the quality, flexibility and accessibility of SBU education to better serve
the needs of residential, commuter and nontraditional students; become a leader in
pedagogical innovation to enhance teaching and learning outcomes; and enhance SBU’s
brand and global reach.
In response to the second call of the S-BOLD Initiative, we received 13 Letters of Intent (LOIs) from various disciplines, including the Humanities, Sciences, Engineering,
and Multidisciplinary programs. Among the submitted LOIs, three were seeking funding in the category involving hands-on/experiential learning,
and ten were from the large enrollment category (at least 200 or more students). Based on the recommendations from the Group for Online and Alternative Learning and
the Online Education Executive Committee, as well as input from deans and chairs,
the following 7 LOIs (listed in alphabetical order according to lead PI) are advancing
to the full proposal round:
- Fodor & McDonnell (Computer Science) - CSE 101: Intro to Computers/CSE 114: Computer Science I
- Hemmick, Dehmelt, Deshpande, & Drees (Physics) - PHY 133/134: Classical Physics Laboratory I/II
- Liu (Economics) - ECO 303: Intermediate Microeconomic Theory
- Nehm, True, & Finch (Ecology & Evolution) - BIO 201: Fundamentals of Biology Organisms to Ecosystems
- Purwar (Mechanical Engineering) - MEC 101: Freshman Design Innovation
- Reuter & Green (Applied Mathematics) - AMS 261: Applied Calculus III
- Tonjes (Technology and Society) - EST 331: Engineering Ethics
BNL Executive MBA Program
Stony Brook University now offers an on-site MBA program at Brookhaven National Laboratory,
exclusively for Lab employees. The program is a 36-48 credit Executive MBA Program
with classes given weeknights on-site at the Lab. In the program, students will interact
with other BNL students from a variety of backgrounds. The program combines classroom
work and real life experience, including industry projects, innovation boot camps,
and other initiatives. Applications are being accepted until March 15, 2016 for summer
2016 program admission. Applications to start in fall 2016 are due by June 15, 2016.
For additional information, contact Amy Milligan at (631) 632-5708 or amy.milligan@stonybrook.edu.
SBU-BNL Joint Appointments
Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory have more than 120 joint
appointments supporting the strategic missions of both institutions. Many of these
are guest appointments (at BNL) or non-salaried faculty appointments (at Stony Brook)
that enable researchers to develop collaborations, access facilities, mentor students
and, in some cases, participate in teaching. Other joint appointments involve formal
arrangements, with effort assigned at Stony Brook and Brookhaven and shared salary
funding. Joint appointees strengthen ties between Stony Brook and Brookhaven, facilitate student
engagement at Brookhaven, and contribute to shared research goals. Some of our notable joint appointees are:
Barbara Chapman - Barbara Chapman’s research focuses on exploring technologies and strategies for
increasing the productivity of application developers, particularly for the creation
of application programs that are deployed on large-scale computers. She performs research
on parallel programming interfaces and the related implementation technology and is
involved in several efforts to develop community standards for parallel programming,
including OpenMP, OpenSHMEM and OpenACC. She is also interested in productivity-enhancing
tools and in supporting the use of parallel computing systems in embedded systems
design. Barbara serves on national and international science advisory committees and
has authored over 200 scholarly works in this field.
Lars Ehm - Lars Ehm is interested in the connection between atomic structure and macroscopic
physical properties in Earth materials at extreme pressure and temperature conditions
of the deep Earth. His goal is to understand the structure, chemistry and properties
as well as the processes in the Earth’s interior. As we can only directly sample Earth
materials from relatively shallow depth, we depend heavily on simulating the conditions
of the Earth’s interior in the laboratory. Synchrotron sources, especially the National
Synchrotron Light Source, have been an excellent tool for measurements, since the
very bright and intense synchrotron light allows us to penetrate the high pressure
vessels and investigate the Earth material directly at the pressure and temperature
conditions of interest. The development of new synchrotron instrumentation and sample
environments that enable the investigation of materials at extreme conditions is his
second focus and goes hand in hand with our research quest of understanding the deep
Earth.
Matthew Eisaman - Matthew Eisaman's research explores technologies for improving the efficiency of
solar cells, including photonic nanostructures for light trapping and improved device
efficiency, and the connection between structural variations and performance at the
nanoscale. Examples of recent and ongoing projects include: (1) novel methods for
the high-resolution spatial mapping of charge collection probability within solar
cells, (2) exploration of nanoscale structure-function relationships in thin-film
solar cells, and (3) the design and understanding of sub-wavelength nanostructures
for improved antireflection coatings.
Robert Harrison - Robert Harrison is a distinguished expert in high-performance computing and the
Director of the Computational Science Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Dr.
Harrison comes to Stony Brook from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, where he was Director of the Joint Institute of Computational Science,
Professor of Chemistry and Corporate Fellow. He has a prolific career in high-performance
computing with over one hundred publications on the subject, as well as extensive
service on national advisory committees.
Jiangyong Jia - Jiangyong Jia is interested in studying the properties of the dense nuclear matter
created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. Under extremely high temperature and
density, such matter exist in the form of quasi-free quarks and gluons (Quark-Gluon
Plasma or QGP), whose interactions are scribed by the Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) theory. We seek to recreate and study QGP in the laboratory and to understand
its underlying QCD theory. Our research is carried out at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL and at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Our group is involved with the PHENIX and ATLAS experiments, respectively, at each of these accelerator facilities.
Peter Khalifah - materials chemistry, solid state chemistry, periodic solids provide the backbone
of the high-tech industry due to their amplification of the interactions between individual
atomic and molecular building blocks assembled within their crystalline lattices.
This group focuses on designing functionality into crystalline solids using elemental
substitution and structural control to fine-tune the energy levels of bulk materials.
Our expertise in materials synthesis, structural characterization, and physical properties
measurements allows us to tackle all aspects of this “internal design” process.
Dmitri Kharzeev - Dmitri Kharzeev is interested in all aspects of the modern theory of strong interactions,
Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), and its applications to the description of experimentally
accessible phenomena. He is closely involved in theoretical research related to the
programs at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL and the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN. In particular, he studies the ways in which the underlying quark-gluon structure
of hadrons and nuclei determines the dynamics of their interactions and the salient
features of the visible Universe.
Huilin Li - Huilin Li’s research is aimed at understanding the function of biological macromolecules
via structural analyses, primarily by cryo-electron microscopy. Cryo-EM is capable
of revealing low to medium resolution structures of large protein complexes that are
proven difficult for X-ray crystallography or NMR methods.
Vladimir Litvinenko - Litvinenko is currently head of the Accelerator Physics Group for Brookhaven's newest
facility for nuclear physics research, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Litvinenko
has made critical contributions to R&D on the high-energy electron cooling of RHIC
and to discoveries in designing high-brightness electron beam injection to an energy
recovery linac machine. He also played a key role in the National Synchrotron Light
Source II team developing the design philosophy for this unique light source. With
colleagues, he also established the Center for Accelerator Science and Education at
Stony Brook University and BNL, where he currently serves as Co-Director.
Emilio Mendez - Emilio Mendez is interested in novel properties of solids with potential for applications
in electronics or photonics. In particular, he studies the transport, magneto-transport,
and optical properties of semiconductor hetero-structures. He has contributed to the
elucidation of phenomena such as resonant tunneling, the quantum Hall effects, and
the Stark effects in quantum wells and super lattices. He is also interested in explaining
the analogies between optical phenomena in semiconductor micro-cavities and atom-cavity
physics and the use of electronic noise to shed light on the mechanisms that govern
electrical conduction in solids.
John Parise - John Parise is interested in the relationships between properties and the underlying
atomic arrangements in condensed matter, especially at the extremes of temperature
and pressure. Under extreme conditions the properties of materials can be quite different,
and potentially useful, compared to those properties at room conditions. Coupling
to theory, preparation of novel states of matter, recovering to room conditions, studying
properties and characterizing the atomic arrangements are vital parts of the research
program. John co-directs the Joint Photon Sciences Institute (JPSI), which was formed
by BNL-SBU.
Roman Samulyak - Roman Samulyak’s research involves mathematical modeling and numerical algorithms
and simulations of complex physics processes in particle accelerators and energy research
applications. He has performed numerical studies of liquids mercury targets for future
particle accelerators, such as the Neutrino Factory/Muon Collider and the Spallation
Neutron Source, collective interactions of particles in accelerators, and fueling
of thermonuclear fusion devices by the injection of cryogenic pellets.
Trevor Sears - Trevor Sear’s research is focused on the study of high resolution spectroscopy
of chemical intermediates and the development of precise and sensitive experimental
methods. Spectroscopic methods are also used to investigate the energetics, dynamics
and kinetics of collisional processes in the gas phase by following the evolution
of a single quantum state of a molecule in time. The goal of this work is a fundamental
understanding of chemical processes related to combustion. We are interested in the
microscopic factors affecting the structure, dynamics and reactivity of short-lived
intermediates such as free radicals in gas-phase reactions.
Esther Takeuchi - Esther Takeuchi’s research focuses on the advancement of battery systems with high
energy and power densities, which remains a lynch pin for new generations of energy
storage. The full utilization of renewable energy sources, such as wind, photovoltaic,
hydroelectric, and geothermal power depends on the ability to store energy, as in
many cases, the renewable energy is generated on an intermittent basis. Additionally,
portable electronics, hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles, biomedical devices, and
aerospace applications demand advanced batteries that can perform safely over many
years. Finally, the way in which communities handle power demands through power grids
may be affected significantly by new developments in energy storage.
Michael White - Michael White’s research is aimed at providing a molecular level understanding
of the energetics, dynamics and morphology-dependence of elementary surface reactions
that play key roles in energy-related catalysis. Specifically, we are interested in
systems involving simple feedstock chemicals (e.g., H2, CO, CO2, O2, CH4), the selective
oxidation of C1 and C2 molecules (e.g., CH3OH, C2H4) and reaction systems that have
environmental impact (e.g., De-NOx, De-SOx). We approach these problems from a chemical
physics perspective in which experiments are designed to probe the adsorbate-metal
potential surface and the dynamical paths that lead to reaction.
Stanislaus Wong - Working on the nanometer scale, one billionth of a meter, requires the ability
to synthesize, manipulate, and organize matter in a controllable manner as well as
to predict and understand the properties of the resulting structure. Fundamentally,
the focus of the nanoscience research in this group is to study discrete, molecular-scale
intermolecular interactions. These are critical to understanding problems such as
(a) friction, adhesion, and lubrication, important for physics applications; (b) binding
energies on surfaces, essential for the design of effective chemical and biological
catalysts; and (c) phenomena such as chemical and biological self-assembly.