The first-ever CUNY Research and Sponsored Projects Awards Celebration was held on April 23rd to showcase researchers across the University’s 26 campuses.
CUNY Central’s Associate Vice Chancellor and University Vice Provost for Research, Dr. Rosemarie D. Wesson hosted the event at CUNY’s Graduate Center, where around 350 people gathered for the awards presentation and to learn more about the awardees. Ten awards were presented to faculty across multiple disciplines, including the sciences, engineering, social sciences, and the arts and humanities.
“The CUNY Research and Sponsored Projects Awards Celebration was created to recognize the innovative and transformative work undertaken by CUNY faculty, as reflected in the significant number of externally funded research awards secured in FY25,” said Dr. Wesson.
“It was important to highlight these achievements at a time of significant contraction in federal research funding. Even amid uncertainty, CUNY researchers continue to advance transformative discoveries and expand opportunity for generations to come.”
In the 2025 fiscal year, CUNY secured 428 new research grants. This number does not include grants that were extended or renewed.
City College faculty members received nominations across multiple categories– Climate, Environment, and the STEM Discovery & Fundamental Science Award.
Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost Dr. Alicia M. Alvero presents CCNY’s Iona Voiculescu as an award winner
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Ioana Voiculescu, won the Engineering, Computing & Advanced Technologies Award for a National Science Foundation grant titled Collaborative Research: STEM Cell Maturity Evaluation and Promotion with An Intelligent Lab-on-Chip framework.
Awards were presented by Dr. Wesson and Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost Dr. Alicia M. Alvero.
The event concluded with a reception and faculty and students presenting their research at a poster presentation.
Zoya Shafique, a fourth-year PhD student of Electrical Engineering Professor Dr. YingLi Tian presented their research on using LiDAR images to detect landslides. Tian was also a nominee for the Engineering, Computing & Advanced Technologies Award for her NSF grant titled CAIG: Unifying Landscape Domain Knowledge and AI to Understand Landslide Causality.
“What is special about LiDAR images is that they let us see through trees onto the floor. So if you’re in a forest, the LiDAR can actually penetrate through the trees and show you what the ground of that forest looks like,” said Shafique.
Zoya Shafique
Using multiple LiDAR derivatives, Tian and her team were able to combine different types of LiDAR data to get a more comprehensive landslide detection and will eventually be able to build a landslide inventory, showing where landslides have occurred.
CUNY will continue to recognize research with the Celebration of Undergraduate Research that will take place on May 26th at John Jay College.
Malina Seenarine is a recent graduate of Baruch College, where she studied journalism and minored in theater. In addition to writing for The RICC, she has contributed to Baruch’s award-winning Dollars & Sense Magazine and has written for the arts and news section of Baruch’s student-run newspaper, The Ticker. She’s also written for FSR magazine.