Five Early Career Faculty Win Stony Brook Trustees Faculty Awards

Five promising early-career assistant professors were awarded the Stony Brook Trustees Faculty Award, worth up to $20,000 each to support and advance research, scholarship and art-making.

• Rafael D'Andrea, Department of Ecology and Evolution, College of Arts and Sciences
• Wenbo Li, Department of Communication, School of Communication and Journalism
• Fernando Loffredo, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, College of Arts and Sciences
• Jack McSweeney, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences
• Vivian Miranda, C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics; Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences

"Early career awards like these are essential to empowering our faculty as they grow their careers and pursue bold, innovative research," said Mónica Bugallo, vice provost for faculty and academic staff development and professor of electrical and computer engineering. "We are grateful to the Stony Brook Foundation for its continued investment in research excellence through this program, and proudly celebrate this year's outstanding awardees."

The awards are intended for full-time second-term assistant professors who have completed a review after at least three years at Stony Brook, recognizing those who have established a strong foundation of research and academic excellence in their early years.

Rafael D'Andrea
Synthesizing Ecological Theory for Science-Based Risk Assessment in Assisted Colonization
To minimize risks of extinction, conservationists have begun to introduce at-risk species to new, potentially favorable ecosystems. The process, known as assisted colonization, can create unintended disruptions to the original ecosystem and its native species. Because of the complex interactions in ecosystems, conservationists find it extremely difficult to predict the likelihood of success or failure of assisted colonization efforts, and theoretical models of these interactions have found limited use in conservation. This project will support collaborative work to evaluate existing models against real-world case studies and develop a more practical framework to guide conservation efforts.

Wenbo Li
Bidirectional Influences Between Social Media Use and Youth Mental Health
Social media is not helping the youth mental health crisis, and no one knows what the impact of artificial intelligence in social platforms will be. Li aims to begin to discover that impact and, eventually, his findings may help inform policies and practices related to the ethical application of AI in social media. This project will build on his prior research in social media use, digital interventions, AI literacy, and mental health to better understand how emerging technologies shape individual well-being and how targeted strategies can foster more informed and responsible digital engagement.

Fernando Loffredo
Additional support for ongoing "Empires, Environments, Objects" project
Loffredo is leading a long-term international research project to examine how art and artifacts moved across territories and had an impact on cultures and environments in Latin America and the Pacific Rim under Spanish and Portuguese rule, and the role power hierarchies played in those interactions. This project will include a week-long, on-site collaborative seminar at Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia as well as a series of campus events to engage the university community and foster broader dialogue around these global themes.

Jack McSweeney
Disentangling Complex Ocean Processes Modulating Coastal Water Properties
Ocean dynamics have significant impacts on coastal environments, but the specific influences of individual processes are extremely challenging to untangle. Internal waves, invisible from the coast or the surface, are one of the processes for which there is very little data. Internal waves have direct interdisciplinary effects, such as on water temperature variability, nutrient distribution, fisheries, and hurricane forecasting, as well as potential impacts on offshore wind development. However, scientists have limited data by which to separate their impacts from those driven by other ocean processes. This project will build on pioneering work of measuring internal waves off Long Island's south shore, aiming to establish the first multi-year dataset of its kind in the region in over four decades.

Vivian Miranda
Braving the Dark Sector of our Universe with the Roman Space Telescope
On a human scale, sources of gravity pull things toward them. Apples and other objects fall to the ground because of the force of Earth's gravity. On a cosmic scale, gravity pushes things away, causing the universe to expand. Physicists and astronomers for years have theorized this repulsive force is caused by a particle called dark energy. The study of dark energy and its fundamental nature pose the most significant questions to modern physics. This project will advance three interconnected efforts using data from the upcoming NASA Roman Telescope: exploring the physics of cosmic expansion, examining how dark energy interacts with other particles, and developing AI tools to accelerate data analysis.