Swihart receives Marshall mentoring award from NAGS

Mark T. Swihart, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, is the recipient of the 2026 Geoffrey Marshall Mentoring Award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS).

The Marshall award, one of three given annually by NAGS to recognize the contributions of faculty members to graduate education, recognizes the comprehensive and sustained mentorship of graduate students from course completion through research and placement.

Swihart received the award at NAGS’ annual meeting on April 17.  

A longstanding member of the UB engineering faculty, Swihart has devoted himself to mentoring graduate students. “Dr. Swihart’s mentoring philosophy is grounded in meeting students where they are, nurturing independence and combining intellectual rigor with empathy, patience and an unwavering belief in the potential of every student,” says Graham Hammill, senior vice provost for faculty affairs and dean of the Graduate School.

“Over the course of his career, he has mentored more than 30 PhD students and dozens of master’s students, nearly all of whom have co-authored publications with him,” Hammill says. “His former trainees now hold faculty positions at leading universities, research appointments at premier laboratories and leadership roles in industry and entrepreneurship.

“These outcomes reflect not only scholarly excellence, but also Dr. Swihart’s investment in his students’ long-term success.”

Jeffrey Errington, professor and chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, notes that Swihart’s mentorship transcends beyond the students he directly advises. “Mark’s mentoring extends far beyond his own laboratory. As department chair and long-serving director of graduate studies, he has frequently intervened to help students across the department resolve conflicts or recover from challenging situations,” Errington says.

“He views such involvement not as an administrative burden but as an ethical responsibility — to ensure that every UB graduate student has the opportunity to succeed.”

Swihart earned a BS in chemical engineering from Rice University and a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow. He conducted postdoctoral research in the Particle Technology Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota before joining the UB faculty in 1998.

Swihart has co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed journal manuscripts and three book chapters, co-edited three proceedings volumes and is a co-inventor on five issued U.S. patents. He co-authored the eighth edition of “Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics” (Smith, van Ness, Abbott, and Swihart, 2017), which, through the first seven editions, was the best-selling chemical engineering textbook of all time. Swihart is a recipient of the Kenneth Whitby Award from the American Association for Aerosol Research and the J.B. Wagner Young Investigator Award from the Electrochemical Society, as well as several UB awards for research excellence.

Swihart was named “Professor of the Year” five times by UB chemical engineering undergraduates and has received mentoring awards from UB’s Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and the McNair Scholars program. In 2015 he received the President Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring, the university’s highest award for undergraduate mentoring, and was recognized by UB’s Graduate School this year with the Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award. He was UB’s nominee for this year’s Marshall award.

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Swihart serves as an editor for Aerosol Science and Technology, and a member of the Board of Consulting Editors of AIChE Journal. He has advised more than 50 graduate students and more than 100 undergraduate researchers at UB. Swihart served as chair in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering from 2018-25.

Swihart’s research interests include synthesis, processing and applications of nanoparticles and nanomaterials. His research group has been the first in the world to demonstrate several applications of silicon nanocrystals in bioimaging. The group is also widely known for its work in solution-phase synthesis of anisotropic and multi-component nanomaterials, and for computational studies of gas-phase nanoparticle synthesis.

More recently, they’ve developed a new process for gas-phase production of multi-component metal nanoparticles, and have advanced the solution-phase synthesis of copper chalcogenide-based plasmonic semiconductor nanostructures.