People in Action Aug. 31, 2022

Several faculty and staff members earned SUNY Distinguished ranks and Chancellor’s Awards over the summer, as announced via Oswego Today. Honorees include:

• Ashraf Attia (pictured above), professor and chair of marketing and management, Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities
• Mary Craw, office assistant in Residence Life and Housing, Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Classified Service
• Lisa Evaneski, Title IX coordinator; Joshua McKeown, associate provost for international education and programs; and Sean Moriarty, chief technology officer, all earned the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service
• Sarfraz Mian, management and marketing, Distinguished Professor rank
• Ampalavanar Nanthakumar, mathematics, Distinguished Teaching Professor rank
• Mary Tone Rodgers, Marcia Belmar Willock Endowed Professor of Finance, Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching 

In addition, Attia delivered the keynote speech on “Social Media Marketing and the Black Lives Matter Movement” for the International Conference on Management Studies in Turkey in June. 

Biological sciences faculty member Poongodi Geetha-Loganathan completed a research collection titled “Cellular Mechanisms during Normal and Abnormal Craniofacial Development” for the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology. Collaborators included John Abramyan, University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Dr. Marcela Buchtova, Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno. The collaboration took the form of a collection of articles and published ebook. The topic has been a success with more than 50,000 views and 22 published papers, Geetha-Loganathan said. She also published a review article entitled “Role of Cell Death in Cellular Processes During Odontogenesis” and an editorial article on the topic.

Shashi Kanbur of the physics faculty co-authored “Period-Colour and Amplitude-Colour relations for OGLE-Delta Scuti stars in the Galactic Bulge and Large Magellanic Cloud” for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Main Journal. The paper applies previous understanding of other types of pulsating stars to explain certain observations of a fifth class of variable stars. Pulsating stars help Kanbur and other astrophysics researchers try to answer questions about how the universe formed and how large it is.

Gwen Kay, director of the college’s Honors Program and a history faculty member, chaired a national shared governance meeting of the National Council of Faculty Senates, featuring more than 20 faculty senate leaders from around the country. The August gathering at the University of Houston was the first face-to-face meeting for the National Council of Faculty Senates –- for which Kay is president –- in three years. 

Physics faculty member Natalia Lewandowska recently co-authored “Single Pulse Dispersion Measure of the Crab Pulsar” in the Astrophysical Journal. The research investigated the use of bright single pulses from the Crab pulsar to determine separately the dispersion measure for the Main Pulse and Interpulse components of this star.

Joshua McKeown, associate provost for international education and programs, was invited to represent SUNY Oswego at the European Union “KA 107 Erasmus+” international conference at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) in Madrid, July 4 to 8. He presented along with 80 other university delegates from around the world. Erasmus+ is the European Union’s mechanism for facilitating student and staff mobility. Congratulating McKeown in this photo is Pablo Salvadores, URJC’s director of international projects and relations; URJC is an exchange partner of SUNY Oswego. At right is …

Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics Ampalavanar Nanthakumar had an article titled “A Comparison of Vine and Hierarchical Copulas as Discriminants” published in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Statistics and Probability. Also, Nanthakumar presented a paper “Copula Models for Trivariate Exponential Distribution” at the annual Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) Statistics conference in Greece. 

Sofia Luz Pérez, a December 2021 graduate, won one of only three Best of SUNY awards at the 2021-2022 Best of SUNY Student Art exhibition for her painting, “Know Thyself, Heal Thyself.” As an award-winning piece, it will remain on display at SUNY Plaza in Albany through November. Read full story.

Jaclyn Schildkraut of the criminal justice faculty appeared on CNN with research partner Amanda Nickerson of the University at Buffalo to discuss their research on lockdown drills on Aug. 14. They explained how, when done correctly, lockdown drills can prevent loss of life by better preparing students, teachers and administrators. The appearance followed the publication of their opinion piece, “The critics are wrong. School lockdown drills can help save lives.” in the Washington Post on Aug. 9. In addition to her faculty position, Schildkraut is interim director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, while Nickerson directs the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at UB.

Communication studies faculty member Jason Zenor published “A Trigger Warning? Engagement, Reception and Appreciation of Pop Music with Dark Lyrics” in the Northwest Journal of Communication. The study used a mixed-methods approach to assess how listeners read the song “Pump-Up Kicks” by Foster the People, which was a pop song about a school shooter. The study suggests that how audiences engage music will dictate how they read the lyrics and that nostalgia may play a bigger role when it comes to reading lyrical messages compared to messages in visual media.