Three named UB Distinguished Professors

Three faculty members have been named UB Distinguished Professors.

The UB Distinguished Professor designation — not to be confused with the SUNY Distinguished Professor designation, a rank above that of full professor awarded by the SUNY trustees — was created by the Office of the Provost to recognize full professors who have achieved national or international recognition as experts in their fields of study.

UB Distinguished Professors are members of the faculty who have been full professors for a minimum of five years with a demonstrated record of excellence in artistic or scholarly contributions.

This year’s honorees are Hanfeng Li, Erik Seeman and Sarah Xin Zhang.

Hanfeng Li is a professor in the Department of Mathematics, College of Arts and Sciences.

His primary research interest is noncommutative geometry and dynamical systems, particularly connections between operator algebras and dynamical systems. His recent work concentrates on actions of countable sofic groups and algebraic actions of general countable (amenable) groups.

In 2020, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for his contributions to algebraic dynamics and operator algebras. He is the co-author of the 2017 book “Ergodic Theory: Independence and Dichotomies,” which introduces the ergodic theory and topological dynamics of actions of countable groups.

He has also received the UB Exceptional Scholar Sustained Achievement Award for outstanding research in 2014.

Erik Seeman is a professor in the Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences. The former director of UB’s Humanities Institute, he is a noted historian of early America and the Atlantic world.

His research focuses on colonial North America, religion, social and cultural history, Indigenous history, and death. He is the author of four books and numerous articles. His most recent book, “Speaking with the Dead in Early America,” won the 2020 Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best book of American cultural history.

His work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a 2005 Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellowship. In 2022, he received a Fulbright Scholar Award to teach and conduct research in Germany.

Sarah Xin Zhang is a professor in the Department of Ophthalmology, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. She is an international leader in ophthalmic research, conducting innovative and impactful translational studies on the retina and retinal disease in diabetes.

Her seminal work has potential clinical applications, particularly in targeting endoplasmic reticulum stress to prevent and treat neuronal degeneration in the retina. Recently, her research identified novel neuroprotective factors for retinal neurons.

Her current research studies the detrimental effects of smoking on retinal cells and the cell mediators that attenuate smoke-extract-induced stress and cell damage — research that has opened the door to mechanisms of protecting retinal cell survival and activity.

Zhang received a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2023.