Ten Stony Brook University faculty members were appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor — a prestigious honor bestowed upon professionals of the highest caliber — by the State University of New York (SUNY) Board of Trustees for 2021-2022.
The honored faculty members include Distinguished Teaching Professor Jadranka Skorin-Kapov (management, affiliated with philosophy, mathematics and statistics) and Distinguished Professors Carol Carter (microbiology and immunology), Leonie Huddy (political science), Richard Larson (linguistics), Robert Shrock (physics), Katy Siegel (art), Vincent Yang (medicine), Abhay Deshpande (physics), Mary Jo Bona (women’s, gender and sexuality studies) and Christopher Bishop (mathematics).
“The teaching, research, dedication to service, and other scholarly pursuits of these distinguished faculty members are part of what makes Stony Brook a top-tier public research university,” said Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis. “We are proud of all they have accomplished, and our community is lucky to have them as role models in their respective fields.”
“I would like to sincerely congratulate these outstanding faculty members on achieving the highest status of recognition by SUNY,” said Interim Provost Mónica Bugallo. “Their achievements in research, scholarship, and teaching are laudable, and we are extremely proud and thankful to have these distinguished individuals among the Stony Brook University faculty.”
SUNY’s Distinguished Faculty Rank programs encourage ongoing commitment to excellence, kindle intellectual vibrancy, elevate the standards of instruction and enrich contributions to public service. They demonstrate SUNY’s pride and gratitude “for the consummate professionalism, the groundbreaking scholarship, the exceptional instruction and the breadth and significance of service contributions of its faculty.”
The Distinguished Professorship is conferred upon faculty who have achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within the individual’s chosen field through significant contributions to the research and scholarship, or through artistic performance or achievement in the fine and performing arts.
The Distinguished Teaching Professorship is conferred upon instructional faculty for outstanding teaching competence at the graduate, undergraduate or professional levels. Teaching mastery is to be consistently demonstrated over multiple years at the institution where the Distinguished Teaching Professorship is bestowed.
About the Faculty
Jadranka Skorin-Kapov is the head of the management area in the College of Business, and has affiliated faculty positions in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She founded the Center for Integration of Business Education and Humanities in an effort to enhance business education with ideas framed by philosophy and art.
Skorin-Kapov has published scholarly books in continental philosophy and film art and criticism. Her research in philosophy is in the area of continental philosophy, especially aesthetics and the phenomenology of surprise. Her research in art history concerns the filmic art. She integrated her research in business, philosophy, and art history in the book on business ethics through film, considering ethical issues arising in professional and business settings and the role of individuals making decisions and coping with moral dilemmas. Skorin-Kapov is a recipient of five National Science Foundation grants and a Fulbright Award, won the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2016, and the Ideas Worth Teaching Award from the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program in 2017. In 2020, Skorin-Kapov was elected as the corresponding member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Social Sciences.
Carol Carter is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Renaissance School of Medicine and an adjunct professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. Carter earned her PhD at Yale University in 1972 and has been a faculty member at Stony Brook since 1975.
A veteran educator and researcher at Stony Brook University, Carter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology for its Class of 2022. More than 20 years ago, Carter authored a research paper that suggested a new strategy to fight HIV. Her scientific approach with colleagues in this study ended up opening a new field of investigation into how pathogens escape from infected cells by exploiting cellular machinery, and thus led to a new approach to antiviral drug development.
Leonie Huddy is a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. She studies political behavior in the United States and elsewhere through the lens of intergroup relations, with a special focus on gender, race and ethnic relations. Her recent work extends that focus to the study of partisan identities in the United States and Western Europe.
Huddy is the co-editor (with David O. Sears and Jack Levy) of the second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, served as co-editor of the journal Political Psychology from 2005 to 2010, is past president of the International Society of Political Psychology, serves on the American National Election Studies Board of Overseers, appears regularly on CSB radio as an exit poll analyst, and serves on numerous editorial boards in political science. She is the co-author (with Stanley Feldman and George Marcus) of Going to War in Iraq: When Citizens and the Press Matter, published by the University of Chicago Press, which examines news coverage and public opinion in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Richard Larson is a professor in the Department of Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences and is president of the University Senate. He held previous appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT and has been at Stony Brook University since 1989. He is also a guest professor at Beijing Language and Culture University.
Larson’s research has spanned a wide range of topics in natural language syntax and semantics. Languages of investigation include Warlpiri, Japanese, Turkish, Haitian, Russian, Mandarin, Iranian Persian, Gilaki, Zazaki and Tati. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. In addition to linguistics research, Larson has worked in undergraduate science education in connection with the NSF-sponsored Grammar as Science Project. He is also chair of the Linguistic Society of America’s AP Linguistics Committee, which is working in partnership with the College Board and with students, teachers and faculty across the nation to create an AP linguistics course and examination.
Robert Shrock is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, working in particle physics and statistical mechanics. He carried out some of the earliest studies of lepton number violation in electroweak gauge theories, and has worked extensively on neutrino physics. In 1980, he suggested a new class of tests for massive neutrinos emitted via mixing in nuclear and particle decays and used this observation to set stringent bounds on such emission. That suggestion led to a number of experiments further pursuing this search.
Shrock co-authored two early papers proposing and studying the capabilities of an atmospheric neutrino experiment to search for neutrino oscillations. Such experiments later found evidence for neutrino masses and mixing. He has also worked on quark mixing, models of fermion mass matrices, grand unified theories, lattice field theory and statistical mechanics. Shrock has advised many departmental thesis students and is an American Physical Society Fellow.
Katy Siegel is the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art in the Department of Art in the College of Arts and Sciences. Siegel is also senior curator for research and programming at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). Siegel’s scholarly and curatorial interests are focused on the intersection of material and social being/making.
Her most recent book is the exhibition catalog Joan Mitchell (Yale University Press & SFMOMA, November 2021); the exhibition, co-curated with Sarah Roberts, opens Fall 2021 at SFMOMA and is traveling to the BMA and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2022. Other exhibitions (with accompanying catalogs) include Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, co-curated with Kelly Baum, at the BMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Houston MFA; Tomorrow Is Another Day, Mark Bradford’s presentation in the American Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, co-curated with Christopher Bedford; and Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965, co-curated with Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes at the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Vincent Yang, MD, PhD, is the Simons Chair of Medicine and professor in the Departments of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics, and Physiology and Biophysics in the Renaissance School of Medicine. An internationally renowned physician scientist, Yang’s research focus has been on identifying the causes and treatment of gastrointestinal malignancies. He is also a pioneer in the cloning and characterization of Krüppel-like factors (KLFs), a group of proteins with important physiologic functions. One of the KLFs that Yang’s group identified, KLF4, has gained significant attention due to its ability to convert somatic cells to induced pleuripotent stem cells with remarkable therapeutic potential. A faculty at Stony Brook since 2011, Yang is a member of the prestigious American Society for Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians. He was also named a 2018 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for distinguished contributions to the field of gastrointestinal physiology and pathophysiology, particularly in the areas of intestinal stem cell biology, inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer.”
Yang received his clinical training in internal medicine followed by gastroenterology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was a faculty member in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins between 1989 and 2001. He was appointed R. Bruce Logue professor of medicine and director of the Division of Digestive Diseases in 2001 at Emory University School of Medicine, where he also held the positions of professor of the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology and director of the Emory Epithelial Pathobiology Research Development Center, which was supported by a Digestive Diseases Center Grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Abhay Deshpande is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and is a nuclear physics expert who also holds a joint appointment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory as director of Electron-Collider Ion Science. His current research includes various exploratory and precision studies in QCD using polarized proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus beams of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Lab; and high intensity polarized electron beams of the recently upgraded Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory. He has been involved deeply in the development of the science and promotion of the future Electron Ion Collider.
A professor at Stony Brook since 2004, he was named a 2021 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for key contributions to the determination of the spin composition of the nucleon, and for leadership in the development of the science program of the Electron Ion Collider.”
Mary Jo Bona is a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her expertise in feminist literary studies examines the nexus between gender and ethnicity, with transnational migratory identities and Italian diaspora studies as primary intersections. Bona also serves as the college’s associate dean for faculty affairs, focusing on faculty recruitment, mentoring, development, and promotion, working with departments to build the strongest possible support networks for faculty at all levels. In 2020, Bona was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service.
Bona is past president of the Italian American Studies Association and received the Distinguished MELUS (Multiethnic Literature of the United States Association) Award for Contributions to Ethnic Studies. Bona was invited to a convening of international experts on Italian diaspora studies at the Rockefeller Foundation site in Bellagio, Italy. The group developed a postdoctoral summer program on the Italian diaspora at the Universities of Calabria and Roma–Tre. Bona’s authored books include Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary; By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America; Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers, and a book of poetry, I Stop Waiting For You. Bona has completed a book on motherhood studies in American narratives through the lens of diasporic time and gendered space. Bona is also editor of The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women’s Fiction and co-editor with Irma Maini of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates. In addition to being series editor of Multiethnic Literatures for State University of New York Press, Bona serves on the SUNY editorial board.
Christopher Bishop, a professor in the Department of Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences since 1991, received his PhD from the University of Chicago. His research interests include complex analysis, applied mathematics, computational geometry, Riemann surfaces and hyperbolic manifolds, dynamical systems, fractal geometry, probability and geometric analysis. Bishop was a 1987 National Science Foundation postdoc and the list of his awards includes: 1982 Churchill Scholar; 1992 A. P. Sloan Foundation Fellow; 2018 ICM Invited Lecturer; and 2019 Simons Fellow in Mathematics. He was also an invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.
In 2019, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) named Bishop an AMS Fellow, recognized for contributions to the theory of harmonic measures, quasiconformal maps, and transcendental dynamics. The Fellows of the AMS designation recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.
More information about SUNY’s faculty award program is available online.
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