Three receive Meyerson mentoring awards

UB faculty members Colleen Culleton, Kwang Oh and David Schmid have been named recipients for the 2019 President Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring, UB’s highest honor given for undergraduate mentoring.

The Meyerson award honors faculty members for the crucial guidance and support they provide undergraduate students to help them develop the necessary skills for research, creativity, critical thinking and innovation.

It was established through a generous gift by the late President Emeritus Martin Meyerson, who served as UB’s 10th president, and his wife, Margy Ellen, to recognize exceptional teaching and mentoring at the university.

The recipients will be recognized at the annual Celebration of Faculty and Staff Excellence this fall.

“Each year, the Meyerson Award recognizes the impact quality mentoring has on the student experience and academic achievement,” says Ann M. Bisantz, dean of undergraduate education. “As UB strives to deepen and enrich student involvement across the campus, we look to our faculty to cultivate rich opportunities that will give students an advantage in their chosen fields.”

Culleton, associate professor of Spanish, is a scholar of modern Spanish and Catalan literature and culture, ecocriticism, spatial analysis and theories of narrative. She has served as UB’s Fulbright program administrator and is a member of the Modern Language Association.

She previously was on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and received a doctorate in Hispanic studies at Cornell University, where she also was a Sage Graduate Fellow.

Oh, professor of electrical engineering and biomedical engineering, focuses his research pursuits on bioMEMS, microfluidics and sensors, important areas that continue to impact development of lab-on-chip, point-of-care, high-throughput cell study and unconventional microfluidic applications. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and holds 21 U.S. patents and 49 foreign patents.

He has mentored several doctoral and master’s students, and more than 20 undergraduate research students.

Oh is a recipient of the 2019 Qualcomm Faculty Award for research that “inspires students and sparks new approaches in key technology areas.” He was named an “Emerging Investigator” by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012, and before joining the UB faculty worked at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Samsung Electronics in Korea.

He holds a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Cincinnati.

Schmid, associate professor of English, studies popular culture, as well as 20th century and contemporary British and American fiction. He is well known for his research on Americans’ unusual fascination with murder and murderers, and on the development of the popular culture of true crime in the U.S.

He is the author of the book “Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture” (University of Chicago Press 2005), and has published articles in many major literary and cultural journals in the U.S. and Great Britain.

He is a recipient of the 2017 George N. Dove Award, awarded by the Popular Culture Association for the study of crime fiction; as well as a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Milton Plesur Award for Excellence in Teaching, both in 2007.

He holds a doctorate in modern thought and literature from Stanford University, where he was also a Whiting Dissertation Fellow.