Chris Badurek
Chris Badurek, Geography Department, gave an invited keynote address at the Regional STEM Summit of the Greater Southern Tier STEM Learning Network held Aug. 13 at the Corning Corporation in Corning, N.Y. His presentation, The Power of Creative Thinking: Harnessing GIS and Machine Learning for Career Preparation, highlighted approaches to generate student interest in STEM using machine learning for applied problem solving and facilitate IT career readiness in students without computer science degrees.
Kevin Dames
Kevin Dames, Kinesiology Department, and Sutton Richmond from Malcom Randall VA Medical Center presented their project “Are Your Balance Data Telling Tall Tales? Impact of Height on Stability Assessments” at the 48th annual meeting of the American Society of Biomechanics held Aug. 5 to 8 in Madison, Wis. This work demonstrates the limitations of height as a normalization factor in position-based center-of-pressure outcomes across eyes open and closed static upright standing balance trials. In contrast, time to boundary effectively eliminates the body size concern by scaling center-of-pressure motion to an individual's base of support area. Clinicians or researchers reporting differences in position-based center-of-pressures measures between cohorts may be detecting effects of body size inequality rather than indicators of disease progression, aging or imposed interventions. In contrast, TtB is not related to height and may be used to discern the effects of clinical conditions and fall risk without concern for anthropometric inequalities.
Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo
Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo, Geography Department, had her promotion to SUNY Distinguished Professor confirmed in June. Johnston-Anumonwo has a long tenure at SUNY Cortland and a distinguished record of scholarship at the nexus of race, gender and urban geography. Also, she has a distinguished record of academic and professional service, making significant contributions to SUNY Cortland as well as the geography discipline. Her promotion is a significant accomplishment at SUNY Cortland and across SUNY as she is the first woman to be named a SUNY Distinguished Professor from a Geography Department. With her promotion, SUNY Cortland leads SUNY in Distinguished Professorships in the field of geography (three) along with the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Johnston-Anumonwo joins the ranks of Cortland Geography Department’s two Distinguished Teaching Professors David Miller and John Willmer.
Ann Blanton and Amanda Olson
Ann Blanton and Amanda Olson, Communication Disorders and Sciences Department, attended the Cortland Pride Festival held on July 13 to promote the Center for Speech, Language and Hearing Center's gender affirming voice care services.
Gender affirming voice services are dedicated to individuals who want to develop communication styles that are aligned with their gender identity and expression across all settings. These services are designed to educate and train clients to modify their voice through vocal pitch, intonation, resonance, articulation and voice quality as well as nonverbal communication. Gender affirming voice therapy can guide individuals to communicate in a way that feels authentic to them.
Peter McGinnis
Peter McGinnis, Distinguished Service Professor of Kinesiology, had a Greek translation of the 4th edition of his textbook, Biomechanics of Sport and Exercise, published by Konstadaras in Greece. Counting this translation and those of this and previous editions, the book has now been translated into seven different languages: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and now Greek.
Rhiannon Maton
Rhiannon Maton, Foundations and Social Advocacy Department, will serve as Visiting Scholar at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), for the 2024-2025 school year. She will examine the recent upsurge in U.S. higher education organizing efforts broadly, with a particular focus on community college organizing and bargaining.
Officer Melissa Keelhar
Officer Melissa Keelhar M '10, University Police Department (UPD), was sworn in by President Erik J. Bitterbaum as an investigator on July 30. Keelhar’s partner, K-9 Meekah, was awarded a badge and also sworn in as UPD’s therapy K-9. Keelhar joined SUNY Cortland UPD in 2018. Meekah joined the UPD in 2023 when she was 15 weeks old as the force’s first therapy dog.
Nance Wilson
Nance Wilson, Literacy Department, co-authored an article titled “Investigating students during-reading practices through social annotation” that was selected by the Association of College and Research Libraries Distance and Online Learning Section’s Research & Publications Committee for the Summer Top 5 post about Digital Reading and Annotation.
Theresa Curtis
Theresa Curtis, Biological Sciences Department, was awarded a new National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research grant to develop and commercialize a new instrument to assist researchers in characterizing cells.
In this collaborative grant, Curtis will be working with the company Applied BioPhysics Inc., Troy, N.Y., and statisticians from Cornell and Mount Holyoke College. The device is based on Electric Cell-substrate Impedance Sensing (ECIS), a well-established technology using impedance measurements to quantify cell morphology and behavior. The research group proposes to take advantage of the multivariant nature of the ECIS measurement to ultimately select features that, when plotted in a 2 or 3-dimensional coordinate system, will allow the user to visually confirm the identity of their cells as well as detect subtle unwanted anomalies in culture that could jeopardize experimental results. Animal cell culture plays an indispensable role in biological and biomedical research and the production of biopharmaceuticals, but misidentification of cell lines, subtle forms of contamination, as well as epigenetic changes often affect the outcomes of experiments. With the grant money ($154,772) coming to SUNY Cortland, Curtis will be able to pay students during the semester and over the summer for two years to work on this project.
Jerome O'Callaghan
Jerome O'Callaghan, arts and sciences, has published a review of Timothy Zick's new volume, Speech Out of Doors, in the Law and Politics Book Review (LPBR). The LPBR is an electronic publication of the American Political Science Association, distributed to 1,300 subscribers in 39 countries.