Joel H. Saltz, MD, PhD, and Alexander B. Zamolodchikov, PhD, have been elevated to the rank of Distinguished Professor — a prestigious honor bestowed upon professionals of the highest caliber — by the State University of New York Board of Trustees.
Dr. Saltz is Cherith Foundation Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Vice President for Clinical Informatics at Stony Brook Medicine, and Associate Director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center. Dr. Saltz also co-directs the Institute for Engineering-Driven Medicine in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Dr. Saltz is a leader in research on advanced information technologies for large-scale data science and biomedical/scientific research. He came to Stony Brook in 2013 as founding chair of the University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, having already built two successful biomedical informatics departments at Emory University and the Ohio State University. At Stony Brook, he has created a world-renowned, NCI-funded digital pathology program that brings in researchers from the Schools of Medicine and Engineering at Stony Brook and encompasses leadership of several national NCI-funded consortia. He has collaborated with former colleagues at Emory and researchers at the University of Arkansas to earn an $8 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to coordinate radiology and pathology information for cancer treatment. He is also developing digital solutions for pathology slide specimens, allowing doctors to more fully access the information contained on a glass slide, only a fraction of which may be currently used in medical care.
Dr. Zamolodchikov is Yang Chen Ning – Deng Wei Chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University.
A pioneer in modern theoretical physics, he is known internationally for his contributions to the study of condensed matter physics, conformal field theory, and string theory, and his research is supported continuously by the U.S. Department of Energy. Before arriving at Stony Brook, he was a senior researcher at the Landau Institute in Russia and a Board of Governors Professor of Physics at Rutgers University. The impact of Dr. Zamolodchikov’s work is reflected in the number of times it has been cited — more than 18,000 as reported by the Stanford-based website, Inspire. Dr. Zamolodchikov is expanding his work on integrable quantum field theories, working on applications of conformal and integrable field theories to low dimensional systems in condensed matter theory, collaborating in his work on integrability with other members of the C.N. Yang Institute, and continuing his work with mathematical physicists at Stony Brook’s Simons Center, and with scientists at Rutgers, the Landau Institute, and Weizmann Institute.
“Please accept my personal congratulations, and those of Chairman Merryl H. Tisch and the members of the Board of Trustees, on this well-deserved recognition,” said SUNY Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson. “Your dedication to the highest principles of your profession and your continuing contributions to SUNY are a source of pride and inspiration to us all.”
About the SUNY Distinguished Professorship
The Distinguished Professorship is conferred upon individuals who have achieved national and/or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within their chosen field. This distinction is attained through extraordinary contributions to, and impact on, the candidate’s field of study, often evidenced by significant research and/or creative activity. Moreover, the candidate should be a role model for students and other faculty and their work must be of such character that it has the potential to elevate the standards of scholarship or creative activity of colleagues both within and beyond their academic fields. Their work must be of such quality that students and scholars on other SUNY campuses would benefit from lectures and seminars, or other appropriate presentations the faculty members might provide. Further, to be eligible for nomination, a faculty member must have attained and held the rank of full professor for five years, and must have at least one year of full-time service at the nominating institution.
More information about SUNY’s faculty award program is available online.
When will Professor Jiang in Finance/Business be upgraded to “Distinguished Professor” status. She is most certainly worthy.