Education ecosystem

Our talented and caring faculty and wide selection of course offerings, research opportunities, and applied learning options add up to a rich educational experience for Oswego’s students. Our professors and support programs earned signal distinctions in 2014-15, and faculty added to our portfolio of academic programs.

Faculty achievers

Oswego is a competitive destination for talented faculty members who are engaged internationally in their disciplines and who actively involve students in their research and creative projects. Outstanding examples in 2014-15 included professors in biology, theater and computer science.

Evolutionary biologist Christopher Chandler received a top National Science Foundation award for junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars. The grant of more than $640,000 supports his genomic research and teaching, including an opportunity for a group of students to explore the subject at the University of Poitiers in France.

The State University of New York system tapped Henry Shikongo of Oswego’s theater department for its highly competitive Faculty Diversity Program, a salary-assistance and research award. He led a group of students to Russia for training at the Moscow Art Theater School, where he earlier trained in his specialty — physical theater.

The prestigious Fulbright educational exchange program awarded computer science professor Christopher Harris a year abroad for teaching and research. In 2015, he began teaching in Finland and continuing his research there and in Kenya, particularly as it relates to how users adapt to new technologies differently across cultures.

Other faculty members continued to infuse their courses with applied learning experiences set as near as the living laboratory of our Rice Creek Field Station and as distant as Benin and France for cross-cultural teacher education.

New fields of study

With an eye to preparing students for emerging career opportunities, the college’s faculty is always developing new courses and programs of study. Newly approved in 2014-15 was an online health and wellness certificate, designed for busy professionals in health care.

It joins our two nationally recognized online MBA programs as programs available through Open SUNY+, the system’s initiative to extend degree-earning opportunities to those who cannot take time from career or personal obligations to enroll on a campus. In 2015, Princeton Review ranked Oswego’s online MBA No. 22 in the nation following its first comprehensive survey of colleges and universities offering such programs.

We also added two new minor programs of study: one in illustration and an interdisciplinary minor in nutrition that gathers courses in chemistry, health promotion and counseling.

Oswego’s new Advanced Wireless Systems Research Center began hosting new courses in a new research and training lab in the college’s Shineman Center for Science, Engineering and Innovation in 2015.

Established as part of a NY/SUNY 2020 grant of $15 million, the wireless center aims to propel students into careers in next-generation wireless technology in collaboration with partners in industry and the SUNY system, including Upstate Medical University. In health care alone, the center’s research interests include mobile health care diagnostics, implantable devices, non-invasive smart sensor systems and computational methods for new drug design.