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(University of Rochester illustration / Julia Joshpe)

International, national, and statewide organizations have recently honored Rochester faculty for their contributions.

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University of Rochester faculty regularly earn regional, national, and international awards and honors for their professional contributions to research, scholarship, education, and community engagement.

As part of an ongoing series, we’re spotlighting their accomplishments.


Daniela DiMarco, Erica Bostick honored for STI, LGBTQ+ health care

Daniela DiMarco and Erica Bostick were recently honored during the New York State Department of Health’s World AIDS Day and Ending the Epidemic Summit.

DiMarco, an assistant professor of infectious diseases, received the Commissioners Special Recognition Award for Sexually Transmitted Infections, which recognizes outstanding achievements in the field, highlighting her commitment and contributions to improving care, treatment, and prevention of STIs in New York State and nationally.

DiMarco, a dedicated clinician, educator, and public health advocate, participates in STI clinical research as part of the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium and serves on STI expert working groups at the local, regional, and national levels.

Bostick, an associate professor of pediatrics and medicine, received the Commissioners Special Recognition Award for LGBTQ+ Health for her demonstrated allyship and dedication to improving health and wellness of the LGBTQ+ community.

Bostick, who is passionate about empowering patients with the knowledge and skills they need to make healthy decisions, specializes in caring for adolescents and young adults, specifically in the fields of transgender medicine, sexual and reproductive healthcare, as well as eating disorders.


Thomas Brown awarded SPIE G.G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization

Thomas Brown, the director of the Institute of Optics and the Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professor, has received the G.G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. The award is presented for exceptional contributions to the field of optical polarization.

Brown was recognized for “foundational work on structured polarization and the effects of stress-induced birefringence on beam polarization and intensity, waveguide modes, and point-spread functions.” His research at Rochester includes polarization in microscopy and photonic integrated circuits optical metrology, and stress-engineered optics.


Peter Christensen’s book named outstanding academic title

portrait of peter christensen.
Peter Christensen. (University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)

Peter Christensen’s book, Prior Art: Patents and the Nature of Invention in Architecture (MIT Press, 2024), has been selected as a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.  Associate Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, Christensen is also the Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Art and Art History, and the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center.

In Prior Art, Christensen traces the emerging 19th century practice of patenting architecture that ensured architects’ exclusive intellectual property rights, and the complex relationship between art and architectural invention. A scholar of architectural and urban design, Christensen specializes in modern architectural and environmental history of Germany, Central Europe, and the Middle East.


Michele Cotrufo receives Franco Strazzabosco Award

Michele Cotrufo, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics, received the 2024 Franco Strazzabosco Award from the Italian Scientists & Scholars in North America Foundation ISSNAF. The award was established in 2013 by the Strazzabosco family in memory of Dott. Ing. Franco Strazzabosco, and is a tribute to the entrepreneurial courage of Italian engineers who strive to apply scientific discoveries to the public advantage.

The ISSNAF says it presented Cotrufo with the young investigator award “for his research on light-based analog image processing and computing. His research holds the promise for a more sustainable future in terms of energy-efficient data processing, with implications for a wide range of technologies, from self-driving cars to neuromorphic computing and efficient data centers.”


David Figlio named to list of US education scholars with highest public impact

David Figlio. (University of Rochester photo/ J. Adam Fenster)

David Figlio, the Gordon Fyfe Professor of Economics and a professor of education at the University’s Warner School of Education and Human Development, has been named to the top 200 list of university-based scholars in the United States who did the most in the past year to shape educational practice and policy. Assembled by Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an Education Week blogger, the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings measure scholars’ influences on their field, both within and outside academia. Figlio, who ranks 122nd for public impact, garnered the highest possible score for scholarly impact.

Having made the list every year since its inception in 2015, Figlio focuses in his research on a wide range of education and health policy issues—from school accountability and standards to welfare policy and policy design, as well as the interrelationship between education and health.

In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Education. An economist by training, Figlio currently serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn and a member of the CESifo Network on the Economics of Education in Munich—both in Germany. He is currently also a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.


portrait of April Haberyan.
April Haberyan

April Haberyan named Fellow of National Academies of Practice

April Haberyan, an associate professor of clinical nursing, has been named a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academies of Practice.

The fellowship honors individuals who have made significant, enduring contributions to health care practice, research, education, and public policy. Distinguished fellows are elected by their peers from multiple different health professions to join the interprofessional group. Class of 2025 fellows will be celebrated at the NAP’s Annual Meeting and Forum in Washington, D.C., in March 2025.

Part of the School of Nursing faculty since 2022, Haberyan is a longtime psychiatric nurse who has dedicated her career to advancing behavioral and mental health, wellness, and disaster response.


Allison Lopatkin stands with her hands crossed in front of some lab equipment.
Allison Lopatkin (University of Rochester photo / Matt Wittmeyer)

Allison Lopatkin receives NSF CAREER Award

Allison Lopatkin ’13, an assistant professor of chemical engineeringbiomedical engineering, and microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester, has received a 2024 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). CAREER awards are the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

The award will provide Lopatkin’s lab funding to study the principles that enable microbial populations to self-regulate and remain stable, drawing inspiration from the processes by which bacteria naturally exchange genetic information. Through modeling and experiments, these principles will be applied to develop and demonstrate a practical approach for controlling microbial communities. The results could have broad implications for agriculture, healthcare, and environmental science, providing tools to manipulate microbiomes in ways that are reliable and predictable.

Lopatkin’s unique approach leverages horizontal gene transfer to self-regulate and stabilize microbial communities. Specifically, the project will use plasmid conjugation to dynamically balance growth rates and community composition, creating programmable microbial populations capable of maintaining stability across diverse conditions.

In addition to the research, Lopatkin’s lab will create hands-on learning kits that help teach the otherwise abstract and difficult concept of mathematical modeling, which is a key method used for synthetic biology.


Jiebo Luo awarded IEEE Computer Society’s Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award

portrait of Jiebo Luo.
Jiebo Luo

Jiebo Luo, a professor of computer science and the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering, has received the 2025 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society.

The award, which includes a certificate and $2,000 honorarium, is presented for outstanding and innovative contributions to the fields of computer and information science and engineering or computer technology, usually within the past 10 and 15 years. Luo was recognized “for sustained contributions to computer vision and multimedia computing technologies.”

Luo’s research interests include computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, computational social science, and digital health. He has authored more than 600 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and holds more than 90 granted US patents.


Jannick Rolland receives SPIE A.E. Conrady Award in Optical Engineering

portrait of Jannick Rolland
Jannick Rolland

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has presented Jannick Rolland, the director of the Center for Freeform Optics and the Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering, with the A.E. Conrady Award in Optical Engineering. The award is presented in recognition of exceptional contributions to the design, construction, testing, and theory of optical and illumination systems and instrumentation. Rolland is being recognized “for pioneering contributions to the development and application of freeform optics.”

Over her career, Rolland has developed numerous novel optical-engineering solutions across a range of fields from microscopy to space optics. Besides her extensive contributions in freeform optics from the mathematical descriptions and design methods, to metrology and assembly of optical systems, SPIE also highlights her earlier work designing the optics for SPOT4, an Earth-monitoring satellite in orbit from 2008–2013, and her development of mathematics to describe the “lumpy background” noise that plagues medical images, as it is background noise that may hide lesions of interest. The “lumpy background” mathematics developed as part of her PhD thesis in the 1990s led to a widely adopted method to assess image quality in diagnostic instruments. The lumpy backgrounds can be thought today as her earlier work on the mathematics of freeform surfaces, as similar mathematics also revealed to be useful in freeform optics mathematical descriptions.

The SPIE website also notes that “in the last 10 years, she has addressed a key challenge in AR/VR with a novel type of optical component, the metaform, and has inspired the broad adoption of freeform optics in imaging systems.”

Previous award recipients include Rolland’s late husband and former Institute of Optics faculty member Kevin Thompson as well as founding figures of the Institute of Optics Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake.


Nicole Sampson featured in piece honoring women authors

Nicole Sampson, a professor of chemistry, is among the authors featured in an editorial in ACS Infectious Diseases.

Sampson, who is serving as Rochester’s interim provost, is a distinguished chemical biologist whose research focuses on the molecular intricacies of mammalian fertilization, methods for precision synthesis of polymers, and finding new treatments for tuberculosis and cholera.

In the ACS Infections Diseases piece, “Infectious Diseases Chemical ‘Cookbooks’: Celebrating Women’s Authorship in ACS Infectious Diseases,” Sampson discusses what sparked her research interests, the future of infectious disease research, and advice for young women scientists.


Elizabeth Weber receives NEA literature translation fellowship

Elizabeth Weber, an assistant professor of instruction in Chinese and a research assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Culture, is one of 22 translators selected by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as a recipient of the 2025 Literature Translation Fellowship.

The fellowship will support her ongoing work translating the late Qing exposé novel Flower in a Sea of Retribution (Niehai hua) by Jin Congcen (1874–1947) and Zeng Pu (1872–1935) from Chinese into English. Canonized as one of the four great works of social critique from that period, Flower in a Sea of Retribution is a work of great literary significance. While the novel has previously been translated into English in excerpted form, this award from the NEA will support Weber’s efforts to make it available in English in its entirety for the first time.