Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering

Ian Bradley, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering and a core faculty member of UB’s RENEW Institute. His research examines sustainable biological processes and develops techniques for employing those processes to address issues in wastewater and water management as well as natural resource recovery. He received a $2 million grant from the Department of Energy in 2023 to make harvesting biofuel more efficient and affordable by employing polycultures and mitigating the impact of bacterial pests on algae crops. In 2025, Bradley received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to investigate how wastewater treatment and agricultural discharge interact with harmful algal blooms.

Department of Learning and Instruction

Virginia J. Flood, PhD, is an assistant professor of learning sciences in the Department of Learning and Instruction and member of the University at Buffalo Institute for Learning Sciences. Her research focuses on embodied communication (particularly gesture) in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) teaching and learning. Flood will use her National Science Foundation CAREER Award to investigate the use of responsive teaching in an active, collaborative introductory undergraduate physics course. Responsive teaching describes instructors’ efforts to elicit, attend and respond to the substance of students’ ideas and to connect those ideas with the discipline. Flood seeks to understand how instructors are responsive to the ways students share their ideas through embodied communicational resources like gesture and how this impacts students’ learning. 

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Kaiyi Ji, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and an affiliated faculty member with UB’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Ji’s research lies at the intersection of optimization, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs), spanning both theoretical foundations and practical applications. His interests include bilevel optimization, multi-objective and multi-task learning, and continual learning, with applications in deep learning, communication, and recommendation systems. In 2025, Ji received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support his work focused on advancing the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of multi-objective optimization (MOO) and enhancing the efficiency and impact of real-world AI and big data systems that use MOO.

Department of Earth Sciences

Kristin Poinar, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and a core faculty member of UB’s RENEW Institute. Her research focuses on the ongoing changes to the Greenland Ice Sheet, one of the biggest drivers of global sea-level rise today. She studies ice melt, how the ice flows into the ocean, and the interactions between those processes. She collects field data, writes and applies process-scale ice-sheet models, and validates these against remote sensing data. Poinar will use her National Science Foundation CAREER Award to explore the use of mathematica deep learning techniques to more efficiently incorporate her specialized models into making predictions of ice sheet loss. This is critical for predicting sea level rise and its associated consequences.