Three professors at Oswego State have been awarded with Provost Faculty research and Creative Activities Fellowships.

The goal of this study is to give professors extra time to work on their independent research. They will get to take off one class in the 2016-2017 academic year while continuing to get paid.

Isabelle Bichindaritz from the computer science department, Donna Steiner from the English and creative writing departments and Ulises Mejias from the communication studies department all received the fellowship.

Bichindaritz will be using her time to research intelligent learning systems in biology and medicine. One of the major things she will be working on is precision cancer. This will help propose personalized and precise recommendations to health care professionals. She is also going to apply for grants to get funding for her research. She is also going to try and involve students in the process.

“Cancer is a very important and growing challenge in our society,” Bichindaritz said. “I am enthusiastic about designing machine learning systems capable of improving cancer care”

Steiner began writing decades ago and received an MFA from the University of Arizona. This is where she began to write non-fiction, which is primarily what she’s teaching now, even though she writes a lot of poetry.

Steiner will be working on her recent manuscript of poems. These poems reference three very important events that have taken place in the last few years of her life. These events include when the ship her 21-year-old nephew was on struck a reef near Japan, and when her mother had a stroke and her dad fell fatally ill, causing them both to die within weeks of each other. She hopes that her research of ship wrecks, ischemic strokes and other related topics might begin to “organically coalesce” in her manuscript.

Mejias will be looking at the Internet in different ways and deciding how it differs in the United States and India. He recently went to the University of Calcutta in India where he participated in a conference about this. They are seeing how the Internet impacts a societies structure, how the information is used and how it creates new opportunities, even if it comes at a price.

Mejias is also looking to involve students in his project. If they can get the funding they would like to have six to eight students travel abroad to India while having students travel here too to conduct research on this project.

This fellowship has provided a lot of opportunities for some of our professors here at Oswego State.