Timothy Gage , Professor of Anthropology and Epidemiology, is recognized as one of the leaders of research in the field of mathematical biodemography. He is an influential scholar with a sustained record of contribution throughout the 20 years that he has been on the UAlbany faculty.

He has produced almost 50 published papers in high profile journals in his field. A significant number of his journal papers are published in the leading biological anthropology journal, American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Professor Gage’s work has had a major impact in his field of mathematical biodemography. One of the most obvious and compelling indicator’s of his impact is the statistical methods that he developed, described, and exemplified in his publications are now the standard methods for estimating the effects of different hazards on human and primate mortality; they are referred to informally in the field as “Gage’s method”, and no one working in this field can operate without them.

He has received funding from two of the most prestigious sources of funding, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Professor Gage’s research in issues of Health, Morbidity and Mortality have concerned three types of populations – national populations, anthropological populations, and several non-human species, particularly among primates. He has been influential in guiding research efforts and building infrastructure for research through his service to the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis where he serves as Director of the Statistics and Computing Core.

T.S. Kuan is a Professor of Physics, whose research focuses on how atoms arrange themselves on a microscopic scale, what influences this arrangement, and how properties of a material are influenced by its microscopic structure.

Professor Kuan has published over 100 papers in major scientific journals including Nature, Science,Physical Review Letters and Applied Physics Letters. He has been invited to contribute an article to Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology. Authors for such articles are selected by their international reputation as expert in new areas of science and technology. Professor Kuan is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the major professional society for physicists. He won the IBM Corporation Outstanding Innovation Award for discovery of long-range order in semiconductor alloys.

Professor Kuan has received more than a million dollars of external funding from various external sources such as Semiconductor Research Corporation, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research.

Conly L. Rieder is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. He joined the Wadsworth Center as a Research Scientist in the late 1900s and is currently the Chief of the Laboratory of Cellular Regulation.

He has published 115 full-length, peer-reviewed research papers, plus review papers and chapters in books and series. Fifteen of his papers include images that were featured as journal covers, testifying to the importance of his work. His paper, “The formation, structure and composition of the mammalian kinetochore and kinetochore fiber,” has been cited a remarkable 276 times, as compared to a discipline average of 21 citations.

Professor Rieder began his research with the study of mitosis, the process by which cells divide, and has since, expanded in new directions, although cell division and motility have remained consistent themes. He has made major advances with the so-called “spindle assembly checkpoint”, a quality control mechanism that prevents the cell from dividing too soon. In addition to its importance to basic biology, this work also has significant clinical implications since cancerous cells have been shown to often have defective spindle assembly checkpoint.

Professor Rieder continues to make new and exciting contributions to cell biology, in particular, characterizing in every increasing detail the molecular players involved in mitosis. These advances are not only revealing important insights into the mechanism of mitosis, but also may provide novel targets for cancer drug discovery.

Sophia Lubensky, Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, has achieved national and international recognition for her outstanding research in lexicography, applied linguistics, and language pedagogy.

Professor Lubensky’s most important scholarly achievement is her Random House Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms published by one of the most distinguished names in American publishing. The focus of this work is the idiom, that is, “a non-free combination of two or more words that acts as a semantic whole,” a “readymade unit, functioning as a part of speech or as an independent sentence.” The appearance of the Dictionary of Idioms was hailed in scholarly journals in the United States and abroad. As noted by the reviewer in Voprosy iazykoznaiia, it is grounded in sophisticated semantic theory, principally as developed by noted Russian scholars, and has the distinction of being the first “comprehensive research tool” to be based on this theoretical foundation. She has garnered external funding at an impressively high level from such agencies as the U.S. Department of Defense, U. S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her scholarly achievements have positively influenced the careers of graduate and undergraduate students involved in her projects. Professor Lubensky has played a pivotal role in helping generations of students attain an impressive level of linguistic and cultural proficiency. Many of her former students have developed academic and professional careers involving the Soviet Union, Russia and other post-Soviet states.