Professional organizations across numerous disciplines have recognized Rochester faculty contributions.
Share your updates
Know of a faculty member receiving an award or honor? Contact us so we can help share the news.
University of Rochester faculty regularly earn regional, national, and international awards and honors for their professional contributions to research, scholarship, education, and community engagement.
As part of an ongoing series, we’re spotlighting their accomplishments.
Colleen Fogarty to lead Association of Departments of Family Medicine
Colleen Fogarty, the William Rocktaschel Chair in Family Medicine, was chosen by the Association of Departments of Family Medicine to serve a three-year term in the sequential roles of president-elect, president, and board chair.
ADFM consists of institutional leaders from larger academic medical centers leading innovations in clinical care delivery, medical student education, resident training, and research.
Gerald Gamm wins award for best paper on state politics
Gerald Gamm, a professor of political science and of history and the associate chair of the Department of Political Science, has won an award for the best paper presented at a professional conference in 2024 on the subject of state politics—together with his coauthor Justin Phillips, the Eaton Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.
The prize, awarded annually by the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association, is for their paper “Party Reform and the Origins of Abortion Politics.”
Gamm’s research focuses on institutional development and historical change in the United States. Current subjects include Congress, state legislatures, party competition, and the relationship between partisan polarization and the rise of social issues, such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, gun rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the teaching of evolution in the 1960s and 1970s.
Jerome Jean-Gilles Jr. named AAPath Leadership Fellow
Jerome Jean-Gilles Jr., an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, has been selected for the fifth cohort of the Association for Academic Pathology (AAPath) Leadership Fellows Program.
The year-long opportunity is designed to help mid-to-senior-level faculty develop skills for future academic administration.
Jiebo Luo inducted into AIMBE College of Fellows
Jiebo Luo, a professor of computer science and the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering, was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s (AIMBE) College of Fellows. College membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering and medicine research, practice, or education, and to the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making significant advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education.
Luo was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for outstanding contributions to artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in medical image computing and predictive modeling of health outcomes.
Luo was formally inducted during a ceremony held during the AIMBE Annual Event on March 31, along with 171 colleagues who make up the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2025.
Hans Malmstrom named Academy of Osseointegration Fellow
Hans Malmstrom, a professor of dentistry and chair of General Dentistry at the Eastman Institute for Oral Health, was inducted as a fellow of the Academy of Osseointegration (AO) at the organization’s annual meeting in March.
Malmstrom joins a select group of 118 AO fellows worldwide, including five from the Eastman Institute for Oral Health.
Myra Mathis receives Courage to Heal Award
Myra Mathis ’09, ’15M (MD), an assistant professor of psychiatry, was honored by Thomas Jefferson University as a pioneer in compassionate and patient-centered care.
Mathis presented the Courage to Heal Medicine Grand Rounds at the university in February as part of the award ceremony.
An addiction psychiatrist, Mathis serves as medical director for Strong Recovery, UR Medicine’s outpatient dual-diagnosis clinic, which offers an opioid treatment program and a full range of addiction and psychiatric services.
Mt. Hope Family Center earns AFP Gold Medal
Mt. Hope Family Center continues to receive national recognition for its important work supporting children and families with evidence-based intervention and prevention services.
Jennie Noll, a professor of psychology and executive director of the Mt. Hope Family Center; Sheree Toth, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and former executive director of the Mt. Hope Family Center; and Dante Cicchetti, founder of the Mt. Hope Family Center and a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, will receive the 2025 American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology. The APF, the philanthropic arm of the American Psychological Association, administers scholarships and research grants to students and early career psychologists.
The award recognizes work that is impactful, innovative, and transformational. According to the APF, the award can be for a body of work in a particular field that has led to change or for one-moment-in-time psychology game changers. Gold medal recipients typically receive a monetary prize and a travel stipend to attend the APA Convention to receive a plaque. The MHFC recipients will donate their prize to the center.
- Learn more about Mt. Hope Family Center’s mission and research.
Andrew Nelson honored with New Investigator Award
Andrew Nelson, an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, was recognized by the International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids & Lipids (ISSFAL) with its New Investigator Award.
The honor celebrates excellence in research and encourages early-career researchers to participate in ISSFAL’s biennial congresses. Nelson’s research focus includes the role of lipids in human health and disease.
Michele Rucci’s study on blinking honored for excellence
A paper by Rochester scientists has been awarded the Cozzarelli Prize by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Eye Blinks as a Visual Processing Stage, authored by Michele Rucci, a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and graduate students Bin Yang and Janis Intoy, was awarded the Biological Sciences honor for the research that found that blinking plays a pivotal role in allowing our brains to process visual information.
The annual Cozarrelli Prize is awarded to six research teams whose PNAS articles have made outstanding contributions to their field. According to the award announcement, papers were chosen from 3,200 research articles that appeared in the journal last year.
Pablo Sierra Silva’s book included on Best Historical Materials list
Pablo Sierra Silva‘s new book, Mexico, Slavery, Freedom: A Bilingual Documentary History, 1520–1829, was selected by the American Library Association for its 2024 Best Historical Materials listing.
The book, featuring an introduction and 118 documents in English and Spanish, was curated after a decade of teaching courses on the history of Latin America and the African diaspora at Rochester. It is the first bilingual source reader to be published on Mexican enslavement and freedom.
RNA biologist Eric Wagner named 2024 AAAS fellow
Eric Wagner ’97, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics and codirector of the Center for RNA Biology, was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.
Wagner was selected for his contributions to the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry, particularly his research uncovering how human cells regulate the production of RNA from genes and how disruptions in this process lead to cancer and intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Wagner, a member of Wilmot Cancer Institute’s Genetics, Epigenetics and Metabolism (GEM) research program, is one of 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators selected for the 2024 fellow class.
Computer science researchers earn best paper award
Researchers from the Department of Computer Science won a best paper award at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2025, a premier venue for computer systems. The paper, selected out of 912 entries, was authored by computer science PhD student Weikai Lin, Yu Feng ’23, and Yuhao Zhu, an associate professor of computer science.
The paper, “MetaSapiens: Real-Time Neural Rendering with Efficiency-Aware Pruning and Accelerated Foveated Rendering,” proposes a new rendering system that leverages characteristics of the human visual system. For the first time, the system achieves real-time photorealistic rendering on untethered virtual reality devices. The team plans to extend the work to augmented reality, which poses an even greater problem than VR.
