Faculty News

The Department is sad to announce the passing away of Professor Emeritus Piyare Lal Jain on Oct 28, 2019 in Buffalo, NY. The cremation was carried out on Nov 2nd. He is survived by his sons Navin and Atul and their families. Prof. Jain was born in India in 1921 and received his PhD from Michigan State University in 1954. Prof. Jain joined the Department in 1954 when UB was a private school and retired after nearly 50 years in service. Prof. Jain was a Senior Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in 1966. His research activities can be found in: 

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Personally, I did not overlap too much with Prof. Jain before his retirement, but interacted with him much more since then, at the UB swimming pool.  He was an optimistic person throughout his life and stayed active all the way to his early 90's before his health eventually deteriorated. I also had the pleasure of having his son, Atul, in my introductory College Physics class. Atul clearly inherited the same level of optimism and dedication, and is having a successful career as a medical doctor. Prof. Jain's long association with the Department and UB will be missed. 

Assistant Professor Priya Banerjee received a grant titled “Mechanism of liquid phase homeostasis of prion-like RNA binding proteins” from the National Institute on Aging, a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This grant started in 2019 and results of this project are expected to provide a unified view of the molecular mechanism of liquid-to-solid phase transition of prion-like RBPs and how RNA/polyphosphate binding regulates this devastating transformation. They are expected to be generally applicable to other disease-linked protein systems, such as tau phase separation in Alzheimer’s disease.

Associate Professor Salvatore Rappoccio has been selected as a recipient of the 2020 President Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring. Each year, the Meyerson Award recognizes the impact quality mentoring has on the student experience and academic achievement.  Recently, Prof. Rappoccio has been appointed to be a Level 1 Manager on the CMS Collaboration in the area of Physics and Primary Datasets, which is responsible for computing resource deployment, calibration, and quality assurance of data and simulations to achieve the physics goals of the Collaboration. This position is immediately below the Spokesperson’s office of the CMS Collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and works extensively with them. The position runs from September 2020 to August 2022, when he will have an extended presence at CERN.

Professor Surajit Sen has been named a 2020-2021 Jefferson Science Fellow by the US National Academy of Sciences. The last JSF from UB was in 2007. The President's Office at UB has granted him a Title IX leave from August 2020 to August 2021 when he will be working full time as a science advisor at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington, D.C. His work will focus on Local Sustainability in developing nations with a focus on scientific awareness, science literacy and education and development. On January 1, 2020, Professor Sen has assumed responsibilities as an editor of the Springer journal "Granular Matter". Granular Matter is the flagship international journal that carries articles in all areas of research on granular systems. The engineering, applied mathematics and physics communities are represented by this journal.

Professor Wenjun Zheng received a grant (as co-I) with PI Gabriela K. Popescu, PhD, professor of biochemistry, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) titled ”Gating mechanism of NMDA receptors” to study the gating mechanisms of fast neurotransmitter brain receptors. His research group developed new algorithms to manipulate in silico receptor structures and to simulate the movements that may happen during activation. These methodological innovations will uncover unprecedented molecular details of NMDA receptor gating mechanism, along with new predictions to guide the experimental studies by Dr. Popescu. Read more about the project here.

Professor Igor Zutic (second from left) was awarded SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities (with UB President Satish Tripathi (far left) and Provost Scott Weber (far right) and co-honorees at the award ceremony). This award recognizes the work of those who engage actively in scholarly and creative pursuits beyond their teaching responsibilities.  Professor Zutic’s research focuses on spintronics and superconductivity, including elusive Majorana fermions, which are their own antiparticles and could be used for fault-tolerant quantum computing. He is an APS fellow and received numerous grants including an NSF CAREER Award, one of the most prestigious honors for junior faculty.