OFFICE OF THE PROVOST AND
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR ACADEMIC AFFAIRS
TO: University Senate
FROM: Dennis N. Assanis, Provost
DATE: October 3, 2011
REPORT TO THE UNIVERSITY SENATE
FACULTY ACHIEVEMENT DINNER
On November 3, 2011, we are hosting a Faculty Achievement Dinner at the Watermill Inn. This event, established in 1992, recognizes faculty who received prestigious national and international fellowships, honors and awards during the period from July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2011.
ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT BANQUET
On November 3, 2011, we will host an Academic Achievement Banquet to honor students who have demonstrated extraordinary competence, and have excelled in their academic and extracurricular pursuits here at Stony Brook; students who achieved a 4.0 GPA in the Spring 2011 semester and who hold at least a 3.85 cumulative GPA. Many of the students who will be recognized at this event, in addition to academic demands, have jobs or familial responsibilities, and are involved in innovative research, creative activities and service.
UNIVERSITY AWARDS DINNER
On October 11, 2011, we will be hosting a University Awards Dinner to recognize members of our Stony Brook community who are this year’s recipients of the Chancellor's Excellence Awards, and the Presidential Mini-Grants for Departmental Diversity Initiatives.
CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR CHANCELLOR’S EXCELLENCE AWARDS
The Chancellor's Awards for Excellence are system-level honors conferred to acknowledge and provide system-wide recognition for consistently superior professional achievement and to encourage the ongoing pursuit of excellence. These programs underscore SUNY’s commitment to sustaining intellectual vibrancy, advancing the boundaries of knowledge, providing the highest quality of instruction, and serving the public good. Through these awards, SUNY publicly proclaims its pride in the accomplishment and personal dedication of its instructional faculty, librarians, and professional and classified staff across its campuses. The awards provide SUNY-wide recognition in six categories: Classified Service, Faculty Service, Librarianship, Professional Service, Scholarship and Creative Activities, and Teaching. Nomination files must be received by the Provost's Office by November 4, 2011.
OCTOBER 2011 PROVOST’S LECTURE SERIES
On October 10, 2011 at 4:00 p.m. in the Charles B. Wang Center Theater, we will be hosting a lecture by Dr. Luis H. Zayas, entitled “Understanding Why Latinas Attempt Suicide.” Luis H. Zayas is the inaugural holder of the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor of Social Work Award at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work of Washington University in St. Louis. He is the Founder and Director of the School’s Center for Latino Family Research, the only center in a U.S. school of social work that conducts research on Latino social, health, mental health, and family and community development issues in the United States and Latin America. Zayas’ current research explores the sociocultural and developmental processes that influence suicidal behavior among adolescent Latinas, who have consistently outpaced other youth in their rates of suicide attempts. Drawing from his 30 years of clinical practice and research on this serious public health issue, Zayas will discuss the history of this phenomenon and present findings from his latest book, Latinas Attempting Suicide: When Cultures, Families, and Daughters Collide.
On October 24, 2011 at 4:30 p.m. in Wang Lecture Hall 2, we are honored to have Dr. Fred Bookstein, winner of the 2011 Rohlf Medal, present a lecture entitled “Biology and Mathematical Imagination: the Meaning of Morphometrics.” The Rohlf Medal was established in 2006 to mark the 70th birthday of F. James Rohlf, Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolution and longtime Stony Brook University faculty member. Recipients of the Rohlf Medal are recognized for excellence in their body of work on the development of new multivariate morphometric methods or for their applications in the biomedical sciences, including evolutionary biology, population biology, physical anthropology, and medicine. Dr. Bookstein is Scientific Director of the Fetal Alcohol and Drug Unit at the University of Washington. He uses his expertise in morphometrics (the measurement of biological shape and shape change) to study brain damage in persons diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). Currently, his research focuses on correlations between brain shape and behavioral deficits and psychiatric problems in persons diagnosed with FASD. Dr. Bookstein is exploring new ways to detect this brain damage at birth, so that alcohol-affected children can be diagnosed and begin receiving appropriate interventions at the earliest possible age.
On October 27, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. in the Charles B. Wang Center Theater, in a co-sponsored lecture with the School of Medicine, Dr. Marie-Claire King will give a talk on “Anna Karenina and the Genetics of Complex Disease.” Mary-Claire King is an American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was the first to prove that breast cancer is inherited in some families as the result of mutations in the gene that she named BRCA1. Her research interests include inherited breast and ovarian cancers, genetics of hearing loss, the genetic bases of schizophrenia, and human genetic diversity and evolution. Dr. King is President-Elect of the American Society of Human Genetics. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and is a foreign member of the French Academy of Sciences. Dr. King has received 13 honorary doctoral degrees, including those from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton Universities.
On October 27, 2011 at 4.00 p.m. in the Humanities Institute, Room 1006, Dr. Isobel Coleman will speak on “Women, Islam and Reform in the Middle East.”Isobel Coleman is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she directs the Council’s Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy initiative and the Women and Foreign Policy program. Her areas of expertise include democratization, civil society, economic development, regional gender issues, educational reform, and microfinance. She is the author and co-author of numerous publications, including Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East, Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President, and Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security. Dr. Coleman’s writings have also appeared in publications such as Financial Times, Forbes, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and USA Today.