Significant achievements, initiatives and honors

The NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Center, recently completed a successful mid-term review by the DOE, guaranteeing its next two years of funding at more than $6M. The NECCES is directed by Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham.

Sarah Laszlo, assistant professor of psychology, and Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received ~$25K in awards from the National Science Foundation to sponsor full-time undergraduate research assistants for summer 2016. These undergraduates will be exposed to cutting-edge research techniques in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, biometrics and cybersecurity. This is the third year that Laszlo and Jin have received NSF awards for summer undergraduate research.

Binghamton University and Southern Tier Lyme Support, Inc. co-sponsored a Lyme Disease Conference on Saturday, May 7, at the Innovative Technologies Complex that was free and open to the public. The conference featured Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton University, and Binghamton University Lyme disease researchers Ralph M. Garruto and Amanda Roome. The conference will also include presentations by Igenex Laboratories, and regionally and nationally known Lyme disease experts Thomas Moorcroft, MD; and Richard Horowitz, MD, world-renowned LLMD and author of Why Can’t I Get Better? Solving the Mystery of Lyme and Chronic Disease. Both physicians are members of ILADS, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. Lyme disease is the number one vector-borne disease in the United States, infecting over 300,000 people each year and affecting a significant amount of families and communities in the Southern Tier.

Binghamton first-year students Alexander Resnick, Sarah Grosso and Hannah Sheridan took first, second and third place, respectively in the annual New York Undergraduate Spoken Russian Competition, held this year at Vassar College on April 16. The competition among upstate colleges and universities included Binghamton University, the U.S. Military Academy, Hobart-William Smith and Vassar participated. Students competed in poetry recitation, speaking, reading and grammar.

Alexandra Cain ‘16 has accepted a fellowship invitation for the 2016-2017 Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals, a fellowship funded by the German Bundestag and U.S. Congress that annually provides 75 American and 75 German young professionals the opportunity to spend one year in each others’ countries, studying, interning and living with hosts on a cultural immersion program. The CBYX program is sponsored in the U.S. by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, under the authority of the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961. Cain earned her bachelor’s degree in history with honors.

Chloe Blog was awarded the Alfred Bendixen Prize for outstanding honors thesis in English, and Tamar Ashdot took first place for the Andrew Bergman Award in Creative Writing. Also in English, Edmund Reese won the Dunham Award for Fiction.