13 Stony Brook Students Earn 2026 SUNY GREAT Awards for Research Excellence

The 2026 State University of New York (SUNY) Graduate Research Empowering and Accelerating Talent (GREAT) Awards has recognized 13 graduate students from Stony Brook University for their outstanding contributions in their respective fields, including psychology, geosciences, physics, and mathematics.

The Seawolves were among 41 students across the SUNY system honored for their cutting-edge research and national fellowship achievements.

Now in its fifth year, the SUNY GREAT Award provides $7,500 in flexible funding from the SUNY Office of Research and Economic Development. All recipients of the award have received national recognition from the National Science Foundation, Graduate Research Fellowship Program or the National Institutes of Health's National Research Service Awards.

"The GREAT Award recipients are the embodiment of research and scholarship, which is a cornerstone upon which SUNY's progress and impact are built," said SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. "SUNY researchers and students are at the forefront of cutting-edge innovation, and I am proud to celebrate their excellence and drive to serve the public good. I am proud to congratulate this year's GREAT Award winners and recognize their incredible achievements."

"Graduate students power research at Stony Brook, and when they receive competitive national fellowships, it's a demonstration that they rise to the very top of their respective fields," said Celia Marshik, dean of The Graduate School. "With award winners from a range of programs, Stony Brook is proud of this evidence of our excellent graduate training. We appreciate SUNY's investment in and recognition of these talented students."

"Writing a competitive fellowship application is an investment and being recognized on the national and international stage is difficult and worthy of recognition. The SUNY GREAT awards acknowledge the great work these students are doing and encourage them to keep their momentum toward achieving their goals," added Ashley Staples, director of External Fellowships and Scholarly Development.

The GREAT Awards build on SUNY's commitment to advance research projects and excellence throughout New York State, and to expand research opportunities for students.

Stony Brook's 2026 SUNY GREAT Award winners:

Roheyatou Ceesay
Geosciences - Geochronology
My research focuses on understanding how landscapes change over time and how those changes shape human history. I use geological dating methods and remote sensing tools to build timelines for archaeological sites, particularly in West and East Africa. I am especially interested in dating both very young and very old sediments with the goal of extending the limits and reliability of luminescence dating methods. Through this work, I aim to better connect environmental change with patterns of human activity and preservation in the archaeological record, and to provide tools that can be applied to archaeological sites worldwide.

Noah Chavez
Physics
My research aims to uncover how gluons, the particles that bind quarks together, shape the internal structure of the proton and other nucleons. Using large scale lattice QCD simulations, advanced statistical methods, and machine learning, my work will develop new tools to study how gluons contribute to the mass, spin, and three-dimensional structure of matter. This research directly supports the science goals of the future Electron Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory by providing first principles theoretical predictions for the gluonic structure of nuclei. In addition to advancing nuclear physics, the project will create computational methods and training opportunities that prepare students for data intensive research in physics and beyond.

Derek Fucich
Life Sciences - Ecology
I am interested in the pathways through which wildlife is susceptible to and buffers against the costs of urbanization. My dissertation work focuses on two common NY gull species and how both genetic and epigenetic variation interact with prey choice to result in disparate physiological outcomes. After my dissertation, I look forward to expanding the scope of my work to encompass additional species and physiological feedbacks. The knowledge that I hope to find hidden among the species ubiquitous in our urban settings can reveal which species are most susceptible to extinction as urban centers continue to expand. Furthermore, the strategies that the most resilient species are using may have the potential to be replicated by humanity so that we too can more effectively fend off urbanization's costs.

Julianna Gerold
Psychology - Social Psychology
My research examines cognitive and neural vulnerability to financial exploitation in older adults. Using experimentally controlled, task-based simulations that model real-world scam scenarios, I assess how cognitive, emotional, and social decision-making processes influence risk or resilience in later life. By integrating behavioral performance with neuroimaging, this work establishes a comprehensive framework for identifying behavioral and neural risk and protective factors for financial exploitation in aging populations. Ultimately, the findings will inform early identification and targeted interventions to help older adults maintain financial autonomy, reduce economic harm, and promote well-being in an aging society.

Brian Gulick
Geosciences - Geophysics
I am in the Mineral Physics Institute where we research the high pressure elastic properties of Earth's mantle minerals as well as metals relevant to the National Nuclear Security Agency's stockpile stewardship program. We seek to understand how deformation under extreme pressures and temperatures changes a material's properties, whether that is to determine how fast earthquakes propagate through Earth's deep interior or how metals deform under extreme conditions relevant to the nuclear stockpile. Recently, we have been focusing on so-called 'critical minerals' to discover potentially new useful properties for advanced materials. I hope to discover useful material properties to develop new technologies as well as maintain the safety and reliability of stockpile materials.

Michael A. Kim
Marine Atmospheric Sustainability
My research aims to determine the effects of anthropogenic noise pollution on the behavior of large marine predators. Alongside my monitoring of sound produced by marine vessel traffic and coastal construction (such as the planned offshore wind projects on the North Atlantic coast), I will be investigating the acoustic ecology of Atlantic sharks and any changes in their feeding and migration patterns. The behavior of top predators like these often has a profound effect on the marine ecosystems they play out in, and behavioral shifts in response to human activity is relatively understudied. I hope my work can inform more sustainable interactions between human infrastructure and marine life, especially as we move toward a more connected global economy and alternative energy solutions.

Aniruddha Madhava
Mathematics
The existence and formation of black holes is one of the hallmark predictions of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity (GR), which now stands as the presumptive fundamental theory of gravitation. While the astrophysical study of gravitational collapse, singularities, and black holes in GR is not new, the topic teems with many exciting unanswered mathematical questions about the products of collapse and their stability - questions that could fundamentally overhaul our understanding of the universe. These questions are particularly well-defined through the lens of partial differential equations (PDEs) and differential geometry, and primarily revolve around the study of Einstein's Field Equations. Through my research, I will be investigating related problems in the theory of hyperbolic PDEs and mathematical analysis, and develop the tools needed to study the WCC for the spherically symmetric Einstein-Maxwell-Klein-Gordon matter model.

Erica Nebet
NMDA Receptors in Neurodevelopment and Seizure Pathogenesis
Neurodevelopmental disorders, including epilepsy and seizure disorders, are one of the most common di-agnoses in pediatric patients. Often, genes implicated in these disorders encode proteins that play a role in both neurodevelopment and synaptic transmission. However, whether disease pathologies arise due to a neurodevelopmental change, a change in synaptic signaling, or both is generally unknown. NMDA recep-tors (NMDARs) are glutamate-gated ion channels that contribute to neurodevelopment in addition to their classical role in excitatory neurotransmission. My central hypothesis is that the loss-of-function of GRIN1 or GRIN2A alters neurotypical brain activity, leading to a pro-excitatory state, due to a putative delay in neuronal maturation. This work will provide new insights into NMDAR-associated seizure activity and potential therapeutic targets for the treatment of seizures in pediatric patients.

Thomas O'Neill
Mathematical Sciences - Applied Mathematics
My research focuses on developing methods for optimizing risk-sensitive decision-making. Specifically, I study finite-horizon Markov decision processes under the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) criterion, which captures the behavior of worst-case outcomes rather than average performance. The expected impact of this research is to enable safer and more reliable decision-making in high-stakes applications where rare but catastrophic outcomes dominate risk, such as autonomous systems, supply chain management, healthcare planning, and financial regulation. Incorporating CVaR into sequential decision models allows planners to control downside risk while maintaining long-term performance. Additionally, this work contributes to risk-aware artificial intelligence, helping ensure that automated decision systems align with societal priorities of safety and responsible deployment.

Ana Reif
Anthropological Sciences - Social Sciences - Biological Anthropology
I study primate functional morphology, which involves looking at the skeletal anatomy of extant and extinct primates to infer many aspects of their habitual movement. My current research concerns the relationship between knee anatomy and hindlimb loading in the locomotor repertoire of extant primates, including our closest relatives, the great apes. This work will help illuminate the conditions which led to the evolution of bipedalism (walking on two legs), which is unique to humans among living primates.

David Sieg
Mathematics
Much difficulty in studying physical systems involves wrangling their chaotic behavior. A common treatment for such difficulties is finding so-called "invariant" quantities of a chaotic system: small fragments of regularity within disorder. Entropy, the maximal expansion of a dynamical system, is a classical example of this. We study a complementary invariant: minimal expansion rates within topological dynamical systems. While similar to Lyapunov exponents in smooth dynamics, this quantity makes no reference to smooth structure and yet encodes important smooth notions such as core entropy for polynomials in the Mandelbrot set. Understanding these invariants provides a more complete theory of dynamical systems, which allows for more effective treatment and understanding of chaotic systems, physical and otherwise.

Bradyn Weaver
Chemistry
Discovering new materials for better batteries and cleaner energy often comes down to one hard problem: understanding - and ultimately controlling - how atoms rearrange during a solid-state reaction to form a material that has never existed before. When scientists only compare the 'before' and 'after,' the most important part is missing: the pathway in between. These reactions often pass through short-lived intermediate steps, and a single wrong turn can completely change the final product. After months of trial-and-error trying to perfect synthesis reactions in my undergraduate research, this challenge is exactly what drew me to the Chapman Group at Stony Brook. In our work, we use the bright X-rays produced at Brookhaven's NSLS-II, along with custom reactors our group designs in-house, to watch reactions happen in real time. Ultimately, this work helps make solid-state synthesis more predictable and more efficient, accelerating the development of next-generation energy technologies.

Colista West
Neuroscience
Selective and progressive loss of dopaminergic (DA) neurons in the midbrain leads to the characteristic movement symptoms of Parkinson's disease. However, the reasons for this specific vulnerability of DA neurons remain unclear. My research investigates the regulatory role of the genetic master regulator myocyte-enhancer factor 2A (MEF2A) and how it contributes to the vulnerability, function, and protection of DA neurons. This work is relevant to public health because it provides mechanistic insight into the factors that make DA neurons vulnerable, which is critical for understanding Parkinson's disease and age-related neurodegeneration. Ultimately, this research may help guide the development of improved treatments for these conditions.