CLUSTER COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Mark Aronoff is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Stony Brook, where he has taught since receiving his Ph. D. many years ago from MIT.  The central focus of Prof. Aronoff’s research has always been on morphology, the internal structure of words.  For the last decade, he has also worked on sign languages, with special interest in the emergence of structure in new sign languages.  For most of the same period, he has been deeply involved in improving undergraduate education, especially within research universities.  Besides his research, he has served as Editor of the journal Language, President of the Linguistic Society of America, and Chair of the section on Linguistics and the Language Sciences of AAAS.  He is a Fellow of both AAAS and the Linguistic Society of America.   In Fall 2012, he is a Christensen Fellow at the University of Oxford.  In 2013, he and the members of his sign language research team will be in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.  

Benjamin Chu is a Distinguished Professor past chair of the Chemistry Department serving in that role from 1968-1988. His areas of interest are Deformation-Induced Polymer Chrystallization, Polymer Nanocomposites, Nanofibers for Biomedical and Environmental Applications, Gene and Drug Delivery, Water Purification and Tissue Engineering.   He is a member of several editorial boards and has received several honors and fellowships. He has over 650 publications with 40 patents and patent applications. 

Eugene A. Feinberg received his Ph.D. in Probability and Statistics from Vilnius University, Lithuania, in 1979. Between 1976 and 1988 he held research and faculty positions in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Moscow University of Transportation. After holding a one-year visiting faculty position at Yale University in 1988-89, he joined Stony Brook University, where he is currently Distinguished Professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His research interests include stochastic models of operations research, Markov Decision Processes, and industrial applications of Operations Research and Statistics. Since 1999, he has been working on electric energy applications. He has published more than 130 papers and edited the Handbook on Markov Decision Processes. His research is partially supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, New York Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research, and industry. He is a member of several editorial boards including Mathematics of Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, and Applied Mathematics Letters. He has been awarded Honorary Doctorate from the Institute of Applied System Analysis, National Technical University of Ukraine. Dr. Feinberg is a Fellow of INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences) and he is a recipient of 2012 IEEE Charles Hirsh Award, IEEE “For developing and implementing on Long Island, electric load forecasting methods and smart grid technologies.” He is also a recipient of 2012 IBM Faculty Award. 

Paul Grannis received his undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1961 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965. He served as spokesman of the DØ experiment from its inception in 1983 until 1993, and from 1993 to 1996 as co-spokesman. With his students and postdocs he has contributed to DØ measurements of the top quark and W boson masses, anomalous couplings of gauge bosons, Z boson plus heavy flavor production, and searches for the Higgs boson. He was on the faculty at Stony Brook University from 1966 to 2006 and is currently Distinguished Research Professor. He was awarded the American Physical Society W.K.H. Panofsky Prize, a J.S. Guggenheim Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from Ohio University. He served as chair of the APS Division of Particles and Fields in 1998 and is currently chair of the Linear Collider Steering Group of the Americas. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  

Yusuf Hannun is the new Director of Stony Brook Cancer Center, Dr. Hannun has one overarching goal: To develop a cancer center that makes a difference in the study and practice of cancer medicine — both at Stony Brook and around the world. Here in Suffolk County, with Stony Brook already delivering some of the most advanced and comprehensive cancer care in the region, Dr. Hannun plans to build on existing strengths to create a world-class cancer program. By expanding clinical programs, more fully integrating research with clinical care, spearheading facility expansion, transforming the Center into a basic and translational research hub, and recruiting new physicians and investigators, Dr. Hannun is equipped to take Stony Brook Cancer Center to the next level. As these elements become integrated into the Cancer Center, the next step is to attain National Cancer Institute (NCI) designation, something Dr. Hannun achieved in his former position as Deputy Director of the Hollings Cancer Center in South Carolina. This would make Stony Brook one of 66 NCI-designated cancer centers in the country and the only one in Suffolk County. Dr. Hannun is committed to continuing research in the area of cancer cell signaling as well as staying involved in clinical education as a Professor of Medicine — not only because of his commitment to the field but also because as a leader, he believes hands-on involvement translates into more effective outcomes. 

E. Ann Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English and Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University, where she also founded and directs The Humanities Institute. She is Past President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Kaplan has written many books and articles on topics in cultural studies, media, and women's studies, from diverse theoretical perspectives including psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism, and post-colonialism. She has given lectures all over the world and her work has been translated into six languages. Kaplan’s pioneering research on women in film (see her Women in Film: Both Sides of the Camera, Women in Film Noir and Motherhood and Representation) continues to be in print and influential in the United States and abroad. Her Feminism and Film (2000) brings together major feminist film theories from 1980 to 2000. Kaplan’s more recent research focuses on trauma as evident in her books Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (co-edited with Ban Wang in 2004), and her 2005 monograph, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005). She is working on two further book projects, Trauma Future-Tense: Futurist Dystopian Discourses in Media and Culture; and The Unconscious of Age: Screening Older Women. Essays anticipating both books were published in 2010, 2011, and 2012, or are presently in press.  

Serge Luryi received his Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics in 1978 from the University of Toronto, Canada. In 1980 he joined Bell Laboratories doing research in physics of semiconductor devices. He worked at Bell Labs until 1994 as a Group Supervisor and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. In 1994 Dr Luryi joined the University at Stony Brook, where he chairs the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He is also the founding director of the NY State Center for Advanced Sensor Technology. Dr Luryi has published over 240 scientific papers (Hirsch number h = 38) and holds 51 US Patents.Between 1986 and 1990 Dr. Luryi served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. In 1995 he organized the first international advanced research workshop on the "Future Trends in Microelectronics", which has since grown into a celebrated series of triennial conferences.Dr. Luryi was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1989 "for contributions in the field of heterojunction devices," Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1993 "for contributions to the theory of electron transport in low-dimensional systems and invention of novel electron devices," and Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2008 "for outstanding and pioneering contributions to semiconductor optoelectronics, especially to the physics and photonic applications of low-dimensional semiconductor structures". In 2003 Dr Luryi was appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor by the Board of Trustees of SUNY. In 2006 he received the IEEE Papoulis Award for Excellence in Engineering and Technology Education with the citation: "For pioneering contributions to include entrepreneurial skills in engineering education on Long Island."

Emilio Mendez Emilio Méndez is Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University and Director of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His research is on nanoscience and nanotechnology, namely, on the physics and materials science of nanodevices for electronics and energy-related applications, a field in which he has received six patents and authored more than one hundred and sixty technical articles. He got a Bachelor’s Degree at Universidad Complutense of Madrid and a Ph.D. in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For fifteen years, he worked as a scientist at IBMT.J.WatsonResearchCenter in New York, where he also held management positions, as a member of the Center’s planning staff and as a leader of the quantum electronics group. Since 1995 is Professor of Physics at State University of New York in Stony Brook, where has been Director of the Undergraduate Program. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at NTT Research Laboratory in Japan, the Paul Drude Institut in Berlin, and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He is scientific advisor to a number of international institutions devoted to advanced materials science and applications. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the board of trustees of several non-profit organizations, including the US-Spain Council. Among other recognitions he has received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Research and the Fujitsu Prize for Quantum Devices.

John Morgan became the founding Director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. He has responsibility for and oversight of all the intellectual activities at the Center.  Dr. Morgan earned his B.A. and Ph.D.
in Mathematics from Rice University and has held positions at Princeton, MIT, Stanford, the Institutes for Advance Study, and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques.  Dr. Morgan well known for his work in topology and geometry, particularly on the Poincaré Conjecture.  He is a member of the National Academies of Science and was most recently Chair of Mathematics at Columbia University. 

Nancy Tomes is Professor of History at Stony Brook University.   A native of Louisville, Kentucky, she holds a BA from the University of Kentucky and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked with Charles E. Rosenberg.   She is the author of three books: A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum Keeping (Cambridge, 1984) Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914, co-authored with Lynn Gamwell (Cornell, 1995), and The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Harvard, 1998). The Gospel of Germs won both the History of Science Society’s Davis Prize and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Welch Medal and has been named one of the best books on the history of medicine by both the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. While a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Tomes developed “Medicine and Madison Avenue,” a digital collection on the history of health related advertising available on the Duke University Library’s website.   More recently she has edited two books: Medicine’s Moving Pictures with Leslie Reagan and Paula Treichler (Rochester University Press, 2007), and Patients as Policy Actors with Beatrix Hoffman, Rachel Grob, and Mark Schlesinger (Rutgers University Press, 2011). She is now finishing a book titled Shopping for Health, on the concept of the patient as a “health consumer,” work that has been generously supported by both the National Humanities Center and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is currently President of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Frederick M Walter was born in Boston MA during the Eisenhower administration. He was raised, along with 6 siblings, in Waltham MA, where he attended parochial schools and graduated Waltham High (class of 72).
After graduating MIT in 1976 with an SB in physics (course VIII), he bought a 1976 AMC Gremlin with cash earned as a caddy, and drove cross-country to UC Berkeley for graduate school. After obtaining a PhD in Astronomy (1982) he headed east to Boulder Colorado. At the University of Colorado he was a postdoc at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) for 3 years, spent a year at the Laboratory for Astronomy and Space Physics (LASP), and then became a founding Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA). In 1989 he packed up the 1976 Gremlin for the trip to Stony Brook, where he has been ever since (he sold the Gemlin to a grad student in 1993). He is professor of Astronomy at Stony Brook University. An observational astrophysicist, he studies the birth and death of stars at many wavelengths, using ground-based and space-based telescopes, including The Hubble, Chandra, and XMM-Newton observatories, the NOAO facilities atop Kitt Peak Arizona and Cerro Tololo Chile, and the Palomar 5m. He is heavily involved with the SMARTS observatory at Cerro Tololo, and has just published an atlas of 64 southern novae discovered between 2003 and 2012. He has over 225 publications, with 88 as first author. He has chaired the Einstein Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope User's Committees.  He is vice chair of the AURA Observatory Council. At Stony Brook, he has chaired the Intercollegiate Athletics Board, served a term as President of the
Arts & Sciences Senate, and has been President of the University Senate since 2011. 

Eckard Wimmer was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1936, Eckard Wimmer received the doctor rerum naturalium in organic chemistry from Göttingen University, Germany, in 1962. Being intrigued by the chemistry of living cells, he shifted his research interests first to biochemistry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1964, then to virology at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1966. Wimmer started his independent academic career as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at St. Louis University, St. Louis, in 1968, where he began to study poliovirus, a system that became the scientific pursuit and challenge of his life. In 1974, he joined the Department of Microbiology at Stony Brook University where he served as Chairperson from 1984 to 1999. In 2002 he was promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor. Wimmer has published more than 300 papers, amongst them the first genome sequence and genetic organization of a eukaryotic RNA virus (poliovirus), the discovery of the internal ribosomal entry site (IRES), the mechanism of viral polyprotein processing, and the cell-free synthesis of a virus in a naive cell extract seeded with poliovirus RNA. Wimmer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and of the American Academy for Microbiology. In 2010 he received the Beijerinck Price in Virology from the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2012 he will receive the Kobert-Koch-Medal in Gold from the Robert-Koch-Stiftung in Berlin, Germany. Wimmer has always looked at viruses, on the one hand, as biological entities that replicate and can cause disease and, on the other, as aggregates of organic compounds. His research, therefore, focuses on mechanisms of pathogenesis and the (bio)chemistry of poliovirus. The latter has led his research group in 2002 to the cell free chemical-biochemical synthesis of poliovirus in the absence of a natural template. The work was praised as well broadly misunderstood, even ridiculed; to others it deemed dangerous lacking any benefits. In fact, it heralded the beginning of a new era in virology: the study of viruses by whole genome synthesis that offers a powerful new tool for investigating viral gene function and pathogenic potential, as well as developing new means of preventing viral disease.