SUNY Distinguished Professors

Due to the influential accomplishments of four UB professors, the State University of New York Board of Trustees have named them SUNY Distinguished Professors.

Colin G. Drury of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, George C. Lee from the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, David M. Mark from the Department of Geography, and Makau W. Mutua from UB Law School were awarded the title.

Colin G. Drury directs UB's Research Institute for Safety and Security in Transportation (RISST). The RISST studies the human factors in errors and inefficiencies in security systems and inspection failures in aircraft maintenance.

He is a member of the Transportation Security Administration's Scientific Advisory Panel and serves on the National Research Council's Panel on Assessment of Technologies Deployed to Improve Aviation Security. As a member of these panels he has to review security systems in airports around the world.

George C. Lee has made significant contributions to the field of engineering at the University at Buffalo. He has served as the chair of the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering and as the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

He has published 250 papers on structural engineering and mechanics, steel structures, and earthquake engineering.

"I am very pleased in being given this accolade. However, it has not been my goal in educational careers to be considered a distinguished professor," he said.

David M. Mark serves as the director of the UB site for the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. Mark is the project director of UB's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) projects in geographic information service.

Mark served as the president of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) in 1998. His research interests include the ontology of the geospatial domain, geographic cognition, cultural differences in geographic concepts, geographic information systems, human-computer interaction, and digital elevation models.

Makau W. Mutua directs the Human Rights Center in UB Law School. He is also the co-director of the Program on International and Comparative Legal Studies in the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. He has conducted numerous human rights, diplomatic and rule-of-law missions to countries in Africa, Latin America and Europe, and has spoken at public forums in many parts of the world including, Japan, Brazil, France, and Ethiopia.

He has written numerous scholarly articles on topics that include international law, human rights, and religion. He also has written human rights reports for the United Nations and leading nongovernmental organizations, as well as dozens of articles for New York Times.