A Message from Rosemarie D. Wesson

Interim Associate Provost for Research

by Roxanne Lee

In this issue of the RICC, we are proud to place the spotlight on a few highly accomplished City College junior faculty members who have recently earned prestigious awards to pursue their research.

This April 2022 issue highlights:

Dr. Daniel Keedy, assistant professor of Chemistry in the Division of Science, was named a 2022 Cottrell Scholar Award for his project “Illuminating Structural Motions that Underlie Allostery in Dynamic Phosphatase Enzymes.”

Dr. Elizabeth Biddinger, associate professor of Chemical Engineering in the Grove School of Engineering earned the 2018 U.S. Department of Energy Early CAREER Award and is assisting companies to accelerate the use of biomass fuels.

Dr. Sriram Ganeshan, assistant professor of Physics in the Division of Science, the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) in July 2020. Dr. Ganeshan’s award was titled “Quantum hydrodynamics and the collective behavior of quantum systems.” The National Science Foundation’s CAREER Program offers awards that support early-career faculty, who are at forefront of research in departments or originations.

Dr. Zihao Zhang, assistant professor of Architecture at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, received the CUNY Interdisciplinary Research Grant for a project titled “Cultivating Urban Wild for Urban Food.”

Dr. Mohammed Bolhassani, assistant professor of Architecture in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, investigated the viability of a bridge originally designed by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Dr. Robert Messinger, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Grove School of Engineering, won the NSF CAREER award in 2019 for his proposal, entitled “Design and Understanding up from the Atomic Scale of Multivalent Intercalation Electrodes for High-Energy-Density Rechargeable Batteries”.

Together, Drs. Yana Kucheva and Norma Fuentes-Mayorga, both assistant professors in the CCNY Department of Sociology, received a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on undocumented Latino populations in New York City.

We are also excited to congratulate other recent CCNY National Science Foundation CAREER awardees.

Jing Fan, assistant professor in the Grove School of Engineering, is the sixth CCNY faculty to receive an NSF CAREER Award since 2018 for her proposal entitled: “Microfluidic development of dual-gel culture matrices for studying effects of interstitial flow on cellular behaviors.”

Dorthe M. Eisele, assistant professor in the Division of Science and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, won the NSF CAREER Award in 2018 for her research proposal “Unraveling Excitation-Energy Transfer Process in Excitonic Light-harvesting Systems.”

Ahmed Mohamed, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Grove School of Engineering, won the CAREER award in 2019 for his proposal entitled “A Hybrid Physics-Based/Data-Driven Modeling and Mitigation Approach for Interdependencies Between the Electric Power, ICT, and Transportation Critical Infrastructures”.

Notably, the first U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award recipient at City College and within CUNY was Dr. Naresh Devineni, associate professor of Civil Engineering in the Grove School of Engineering and NOAA CESSRST. Dr. Devineni received the DOE Early Career award in 2017 for his proposal, “Multi-scale Modeling of Extreme Events and Impact Information”.

Read more about these incredibly hard-working and accomplished members of our CCNY community in the April issue of the RICC.

Rosemarie D. Wesson, Ph.D., P.E.
Associate Provost for Research

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