Noteworthy: Research grants, awards and publications

A man in a suit and tie and wearing glasses stands next to a table topped with books below a sign that reads "The Department of Africana Studies Faculty Publications"
Leonard A. Slade Jr., professor emeritus of Africana Studies and former adjunct professor of English, has been named Poet Laureate of The Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc.

ALBANY, N.Y. (Feb. 23, 2023) — The latest developments on University at Albany faculty and staff who are receiving research grants, awards and other noteworthy attention.

  • CTG UAlbany Director J. Ramon Gil-Garcia recently provided two keynote addresses, "Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector," for the First Innovation and Smart Conference in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and the Conferencias Magistrales INFOTEC 2022 in Mexico City. He also conducted a virtual seminar on multidimensional smart cities for the University of Lille, France, and a virtual seminar on cross-boundary information sharing in emergency management for the Center for E-Governance in Krems, Austria. Gil-Garcia will conduct a virtual presentation on smart cities and the role of public libraries for the Urban Information Lab at the University of Texas (Austin) on March 7.
  • An all-UAlbany research team composed of scientists from the RNA Institute and the Department of Chemistry, led by Postdoctoral Associate Jibin Abraham Punnoose from Ken Halvorsen’s lab, published a paper in Nature Communications earlier this month. The study, “High-throughput single-molecule quantification of individual base stacking energies in nucleic acids,” provides novel insights into fundamental DNA interactions that are critical in biology and can inform biotechnology applications such as nanostructure construction, molecular cloning and improving the accuracy of molecular simulations.
  • Leonard A. Slade Jr., professor emeritus of Africana Studies and former adjunct professor of English, has been named Poet Laureate of The Southern Conference on African American Studies, an organization that works to interpret and preserve African American history and culture. Slade is also a UAlbany Citizen Academic Laureate, Collins Fellow and Lifetime Poet Fellow of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
  • Fangqun Yu, senior researcher at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, was awarded $58,709 by General Electric Global Research to support experiments on contrail ice particle formation that will be carried out in the altitude simulation chamber at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.