Faculty kudos
College of Community and Public Affairs
Dean Laura Bronstein received the Esther W. Couper Memorial Award from the Family & Children’s Society for “outstanding service and dedication to the children and families of our community.”
Associate professor and chair of the Department of Public Administration, Nadia Rubaii, was recognized by the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) and the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE) with the Outstanding Article Award for her article titled “Beyond the Case Method in Public Affairs Education: Unexpected Benefits of Student-Written Cases” written with two Colombian colleagues.
Susan Appe, assistant professor of public administration, and a colleague from Indiana University received the prestigious RGK-ARNOVA President’s Award at the ARNOVA nonprofit research conference. The $10,000 award encourages innovative, foundational research in the field of nonprofit and philanthropic studies. The award will help her to further her work on non-governmental organizations involved in international development.
S.G. Grant, professor of social studies education, has published a novel under the pseudonym Geoffrey Scott. Stealing Homer: A Rascal Harbor Mystery is the first in a series of art-flavored literary mysteries set in a fictional town on the coast of Maine. The main character, John McTavish, is recently widowed and recently returned to his home state. The theft of a newly-discovered Winslow Homer watercolor, a gay boy’s awakening identity and McTavish’s fledgling art career all appear as random events with no surface-level connections. Woven in and around these actions, however, are the compelling, tragic and even funny lives of the fictional Maine townsfolk of Rascal Harbor. Stealing Homer is a mystery, but it also speaks to the idea we all live lives defined by the positive and negative spaces around us.
Harpur College of Arts and Sciences
Binghamton University is the 2017 Best Geography and Cartography School for Veterans in New York. The geography and cartography program is ranked 24 our of 81 for veteran friendliness of all colleges and universities reviewed by College Factual, putting Binghamton’s Department of Geography in the top 25 when it comes to offering a quality education to veterans in geography and cartography.
Qiusheng Wu, assistant professor of geography, received am AI for Earth Microsoft Azure and Esri grant of $10,000 for his project titled “Wetland Mapping and Monitoring Using Geospatial Big Data and Deep Learning.”
A five-year, $7 million Department of Defense Multi-University Research Initiative award between Associate Professor Louis Piper and Assistant Professor Wei-Cheng Lee of the Physics Department, and Georgia Institute of Technology, is underway. The project, “Cross-disciplinary Electronic-ionic Research Enabling Biologically Realistic Autonomous Learning (CEREBRAL), will develop devices that combine data processing and storage using biological systems as their inspiration. Their efforts will focus on understanding the origin of the unique switching properties of niobium oxides, important for developing man-made neurons or neuristors.
David Jenkins, professor of geological sciences, received the Hawley Medal in 2017 from the Mineralogical Association of Canada for the best paper published in their flagship journal, The Canadian Mineralogist in a given year. Jenkins co-authored the paper with Albert Chan and M. Darby Dyar. The lead author, Albert Chan, worked under Jenkins’ supervision on the project while an undergraduate at Binghamton University. The paper, “Partitioning of Chlorine Between Nacl Brines and Ferro-Pargasite: Implications for the Formation of Chlorine-Rich Amphiboles in Mafic Rocks,” was just published in the latest issue of The Canadian Mineralogist.
Assistant Professor Ayse Baltacioglu-Brammer’s dissertation, “Safavid Conversion Propoganda in Ottoman Anatolia and the Ottoman Reaction, 1440s-1630s,” has been selected to receive the Ohio Academy of History’s award for Best Dissertation. She received the award at the annual meeting of the organization in March 2018, on the campus of the University of Dayton.
Nancy Appelbaum, associate professor of history, has published a book, Dibujar la nación: La Comisión Corográfica en el siglo XIX, that has been listed among the 10 best academic books of 2017 related to Colombia by the Colombian daily newspaper El Especatador. The book is a translation of her 2016 book, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia.