Eight Stony Brook Professors Are Honored as SUNY Distinguished Faculty for 2025

Eight Stony Brook University faculty members were appointed to the rank of State University of New York (SUNY) Distinguished Faculty by the SUNY Board of Trustees for 2025.

Stony Brook's Distinguished Faculty members were honored at a ceremony on October 9 at the Sunwood Estate.

The honored faculty members include:

Distinguished Professor: Ramana Davuluri, Biomedical Informatics; Victoriano Roncero-López, Hispanic Languages and Literatures; Christopher Sellers, History; Kenneth Shroyer, Pathology; Wei Zhao, Radiology

The Distinguished Professorship is conferred upon faculty who have achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within the individual's chosen field through significant contributions to the research and scholarship, or through artistic performance or achievement in the fine and performing arts.

The Distinguished Service Professorship is conferred upon instructional faculty having achieved a distinguished reputation for service not only to the campus and the university, but also to the community, the State of New York or even the nation, by sustained effort in the application of intellectual skills drawing from the candidate's scholarly research interests to issues of public concern.

The Distinguished Teaching Professorship is conferred upon instructional faculty for outstanding teaching competence at the graduate, undergraduate or professional levels. Teaching mastery is to be consistently demonstrated over multiple years at the institution where the Distinguished Teaching Professorship is bestowed.

About the Distinguished Faculty

Patricia Coyle
Patricia Coyle is a recognized expert in nervous system immune-mediated and infectious disorders. She has been involved since medical school with patient care and research focused on Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Her particular areas of expertise include Lyme disease, cerebrospinal fluid, therapeutics, neuroimmunology, and gender issues. She is currently involved in a number of therapeutic trials testing new immunotherapies for MS, as well as studies addressing neurologic aspects of Lyme disease. She has been named as one of Castle Connolly Top Doctors since 1999, most recently being named to Top Doctors on New York Magazine's 2021 list. She has held multiple leadership positions at the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, the American Academy of Neurology, the American Neurological Association, and the National MS Society. She has served as an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Coyle has received research funding from the NIH and the National MS Society, and is actively engaged in studies to understand and treat these diseases.

Ramana Davuluri
Ramana Davuluri is a world leader in Molecular Data Science, with research focus on computational analysis of non-coding genomic regions and isoform-level gene regulation. Davuluri is well-known for his pioneering efforts to use machine learning in biomedical applications - for example, development of gene promoter prediction algorithms, molecular subtyping assays for glioblastoma and ovarian cancers, deep learning algorithm for integrative learning from multi-omics datasets, and informatics pipelines for the analysis of cancer drug target interactions affected by alternative splicing. Working at the interface of artificial intelligence and genomics, Davuluri is one of the first to develop a genomic large language model, called "DNABERT," released in 2021. The DNABERT model can predict allele-specific activity based only on local nucleotide sequence context, and prioritize candidate transcription-factor-binding sites, core-promoters and splice sites that are sensitive to variants at genome-scale. Building on DNABERT's success, his group is developing informatics methods to calculate genome-wide mutational scores, based on whole genome sequence data, and integrate other biomedical data, such as histology and RNA expression to improve prognosis and cancer outcome prediction.

Lori Repetti
Lori Repetti completed her PhD in Romance Linguistics at UCLA in 1989, and has held academic positions at Cambridge University and Stony Brook University, where she was Chair of the Linguistics Department from 2018-2023. She has published and lectured on the history and phonology of the Romance languages, in particular Italian and endangered Romance languages. Recent projects include collaborative work on ablaut reduplicative structures (Linguistic Typology 2024), phonotactic restrictions on Mandarin consonant clusters (NACCL 2021, WECOL 2020), and an innovative asynchronous general education course in Linguistics (Language 2023). She has conducted field research throughout Europe, which has been funded in part by both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Faculty Service. She is a member of the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals (Probus, Forum Italicum, Isogloss), and is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Global Council on Anthropological Linguistics.

Victoriano Roncero-López
Victoriano Roncero-López is a graduate of Spanish and American universities. He was assistant professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) and at High Point, North Carolina.He is Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature and has taught at Stony Brook for over two decades. His research and published papers focus on humanist issues, historiography, the Picaresque novel, Petrarchist poetry, Bufoonesque literature, and Autos Sacramentales. He has edited works from medieval Cancionero poetry, Fernando de Herrera, Quevedo, Carlos García, and Calderón. His study of Quevedo's historiography was the first critical approach to the subject and received excellent international reviews. His recent study on humanism examines humanist trends in 16th- and 17th-century Europe through the eyes of Quevedo with a philological approach. He belongs to GRISO, a prestigious Golden Age research team, and is General Editor and Founder of La Perinola: Revista de Investigación Quevediana. He frequently teaches summer courses in European universities.

Christopher Sellers
Christopher Sellers is a historian with a long-standing interest in the environmental, cultural, and health history of the 20th-century United States, and the ways this history has compared with that of other parts of the world. His research concentrates on the history of occupational and environmental health, of cities and suburbs, of industrial development and its hazards, and of the environmental movement. Chris is co-editor of Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing Worldand is author of Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in 20th-Century America, as well as a forthcoming history of the lead and petrochemical industries in Texas and Mexico. Among his numerous grants, fellowships, and awards are those from the National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Library of Medicine. He is also a trained physician.

Kenneth Shroyer
Kenneth Shroyer is board certified in anatomic and clinical pathology with subspecialty certification in cytopathology, and a general surgical pathologist with a subspecialty expertise in gynecologic oncology. He also has extensive experience in gynecologic and non-gynecologic cytopathology, including fine needle aspiration cytopathology. Shroyer pioneered novel methods to improve the accuracy of the cytologic and histologic classification of tumors. He completed his graduate training in Experimental Pathology under the supervision of Dr. Paul K. Nakane, the inventor of the immunoperoxidase method, invented the method of DNP labeling of nucleic acid probes, and was a pioneer in the development of methods for in situ hybridization of mRNAS in the early 1980s. He subsequently authored the first report on the analysis of x-chromosome inactivation in archival tissues as a marker of clonality. Shroyer contributed to the early validation of tyramide-based signal amplification technology for in situ hybridization and high sensitivity immunohistochemistry and he has been engaged in the development of novel approaches for antibody labeling using nanoparticles for both in vivo imaging and for immunohistochemical applications in collaboration with scientists in biomedical engineering for over 10 years. Ongoing areas of investigation in Dr. Shroyer's laboratory are focusing on the discovery of the mechanistic basis of nuclear keratin 17 as a prognostic biomarker in carcinomas of the female genital tract, pancreas, and other anatomic sites.

Thomas Weinacht
Thomas Weinacht is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan, for which he received the outstanding thesis award from the division of atomic, molecular and optical physics of the American Physical Society. He joined the department in 2002, and was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012. Weinacht's research is centered on quantum control and time resolved spectroscopy. He develops new approaches to follow and control the dynamics of small molecules on ultrafast timescales (10^-15 seconds) using tailored light fields. His group develops light sources, constructs new instruments, carries out measurements and collaborates closely with theory in order to interpret the dynamics and develop new models.

Wei Zhao
Wei Zhao has done research work in the past that has focused on the investigation of amorphous selenium flat-panel detectors for radiography and fluoroscopy. She has also worked on the development of cesium iodide based flat-panel detectors for medical imaging. Her current research interest focuses on the investigation of imaging performance and design optimization for amorphous selenium flat-panel detectors for digital mammography and digital tomosynthesis. Her research work also involves developing advanced detector concepts for improved imaging performance at low dose and high frame rates.