Qiaoqiang Gan and Kimberly Kriz receive SUNY Chancellor's Awards

The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities recognizes outstanding academic and creative achievements across a broad spectrum of scholarly and artistic fields. Professor Qiaoqiang Gan, honored previously with the 2017 Senior Researcher of the Year, School of Engineering and Applied Scienced; 2016 University at Buffalo Exceptional Scholar Award - Young Investigator; and 2015 Early Career Research Achievement Award of School of Engineering and Applied Scienced, received the Chancellor's Award.

Qiaoqiang Gan is a pioneering researcher whose expertise in fundamental light-matter interactions has led to development of low-cost manufacturing processes for optical materials and commercialization of groundbreaking technologies. He is internationally recognized for applying photonics to nanoscale and nanostructured materials to solve critical problems in engineering. He has published more than 100 papers in peer‐reviewed journals, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, Advanced Materials and ACS Nano. He has received a dozen federal grants totaling more than $3.9 million, and his work has been continuously funded by the NSF since 2011. He has three patents, with an additional patent pending.

The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service honors professional staff performance excellence “both within and beyond the position.” Kimberly Kriz, a previous winner of the Dean's Award for Professional Service, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, received the Chancellor's award.

As executive officer of the Department of Electrical Engineering since 2012, Kimberly Kriz is responsible for the overall management of her department’s financial, research, academic, communications, space and personnel resources. She is credited with single-handedly redesigning department workflow and continuously scaling it to accommodate an ever-growing population of students and faculty. Colleagues note that her deep knowledge of the higher education landscape has significantly improved marketing efforts to recruit both students and faculty to the department, as well as to increase UB’s reputation among peer institutions.