Three SEAS faculty receive SUNY Chancellor's Awards

Three SEAS faculty members were honored with the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Stella Batalama, professor and chair, Department of Electrical Engineering; Ann Bisantz, professor and chair, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering; and Sriram Neelamegham, professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering,

The award recognizes the work of those who engage actively in scholarly and creative pursuits beyond their teaching responsibilities.  

The awards were among 20 SUNY Chancellor's Awards for Excellence that recognized UB faculty and staff. The 20 recipients match last year’s number of award winners, the most in recent memory.

Stella Batalama joined the UB faculty in 1995. She served as associate dean for research in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from 2009-11, and has been chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering since 2010.

Batalama has worked on various design aspects of wireless communication systems and networks, including CDMA cellular communications, cognitive and collaborative networks, underwater communications, multimedia security and data hiding. She has received more than $9 million in research funding from such agencies as the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense (DoD), as well as private industry. Her research has been published in more than 150 peer-reviewed journals.

Her work in the area of cognitive networking, in collaboration with students and colleagues, recently was recognized by DoD national labs as the technology of choice, based on its flexibility, inherent interference tolerance, throughput and reliability. This pioneering work made her DoD sponsors the de facto leader in policy-based spectrum access and cognitive networking in the U.S. and abroad.

A UB faculty member since 1997, Ann Bisantz specializes in cognitive engineering, including research on human computer interfaces for complex health care systems related to enhanced patient safety. Her work includes developing novel information displays for complex systems, advancing methods in cognitive engineering and modeling human decision-making; she has worked extensively in the domains of health care and defense.

Bisantz is a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and a Young Investigator Award from UB. She has received funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and a number of defense organizations, and has been involved with collaborative research with UB’s Center for Multi-source Information Fusion.

A fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), Bisantz is a member of the advisory board of the National Center for Human Factors Engineering in Healthcare and the executive council of HFES.

Sriram Neelamegham serves as co-director of UB’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, and recently was named co-director of the Stem Cells in Regenerative Medicine program, an interdisciplinary stem cell research training program that brings together scientists from UB and Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

A UB faculty member since 1997, his research interests include molecular and cellular bioengineering, systems glycobiology, pathways in inflammation and thrombosis, and cell biomechanics and adhesion molecules.

In particular, he is interested in applying quantitative experimental and computational techniques to discover new mechanisms that control the cell-adhesion properties of blood leukocytes and platelets during human inflammatory and thrombotic disorders. A long-term goal of his work is to identify new targets for drug development

A fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Neelamegham is a recipient of an NIH Independent Scientist Award, a UB Exceptional Scholar Award for Sustained Achievement and a UB Exceptional Scholar Award for Young Investigators.