Three SEAS Faculty Receive 2014 Chancellor's Awards for Excellence

Excellence in Faculty Service

The Excellence in Faculty Service Award was given to Li Lin, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Industrial and Systems Engineering, for his exemplary record of research in the field of manufacturing systems engineering.

Lin’s principal areas of research and teaching include operational efficiency in health care, modeling and control of manufacturing systems, computer simulation and concurrent engineering. A UB faculty member since 1989, he has authored or co-authored nearly 70 papers in scholarly journals and given numerous invited lectures, seminars, conference presentations and speeches.

He serves on the board of directors of Catholic Health and Catholic Health Home Care, and recently was named chair of the board of directors of Catholic Health Ministry Services. He is the recipient of a UB Exceptional Scholar for Sustained Achievement Award and a National Award of Excellence in Workforce Development from the University Economic Development Association for a project with St. Vincent Health Center in Erie, Pa., conducted with UB’s TCIE.

Excellence in Faculty Scholarship and Creative Activity

Stelios Andreadis, Professor and Chair, Chemical and Biological Engineering, received the Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity award.

A member of the UB faculty since 1998, Stelios Andreadis also serves as co-director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research interests cover the broad areas of tissue engineering, gene therapy and functional genomics. He and members of his research group are pursuing such topics as genetically modified skin equivalents for wound healing, vascular tissue engineering, retrovirus purification and gene transfer to epidermal stem cells. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and an Exceptional Scholar Young Investigator Award from UB. He was recognized as an Innovator of Upstate New York in 2001 by the UB Alliance for Innovation.  

The nomination for this award cites Stelios’ expertise in engineering biomaterials for protein and gene delivery, engineering lentiviral microarrays for real-time monitoring of stem cell behavior, adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells for cardiovascular tissue engineering and intercellular adhesion signaling in epithelial development and stem cell differentiation. The award recognizes faculty who consistently go above and beyond their teaching and professional duties to make extraordinary contributions to their respective fields.

Excellence in Teaching

Gary Dargush, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, which honors those who consistently demonstrate superb teaching at the undergraduate, graduate or professional level.

Dargush, a UB alumnus (PhD ’87 & MS ’77), joined the UB faculty in 1987 as a research assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering. He moved to the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2005 as a full professor. His research interests include computational mechanics, boundary element methods, finite element methods, earthquake engineering, structural dynamics, geomechanics, thermomechanics and computational fluid dynamics. His work has been funded by the NSF. He has co-authored two books and published numerous book chapters and scholarly articles. Dargush has been a dissertation adviser, committee member and outside reader for numerous PhD students, as well as served as an adviser on theses and projects for master’s degree students.

His commitment to the teaching mission of all faculty is exemplified by the creation of a novel "Active Learning" approach, which resulted in a dramatic improvement in learning outcomes. He has been committed to reducing class sizes to facilitate increased student-faculty interaction, and led this effort by teaching an inordinately large number of classes for one who is also the chair of the department.