President Jennifer J. Raab is pleased to announce the appointment of Hunter faculty members Steven Greenbaum and Nari Ward as Distinguished Professors, the highest rank a City University of New York professor can achieve. They were appointed to this prestigious post by the CUNY Board of Trustees on October 29, 2018.
Professor Greenbaum, a member of Hunter’s Physics faculty and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, is an internationally recognized leader in the development of new materials for electrical energy storage. Also acclaimed for his pioneering work in the field of solid state nuclear magnetic resonance, he is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring; the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science; and the Richard Nicholson Science Teaching Award from the Quality Education for Minorities/Mathematics, Science and Engineering Network. In 2014-2015, he served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. Department of State, and he has spent sabbatical years as both a Fulbright Scholar at the Weizmann Institute of Science and a NASA/NRC Senior Research Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A graduate of Clark University with a PhD in solid state physics from Brown University, he joined the Hunter faculty in 1983. From 2008 to 2014, he served as the Executive Officer of the PhD Program in Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and he has held Visiting Professorships at Rutgers and Stony Brook Universities, Tel Aviv University, Université de Paris and the University of Rome.
Professor Ward, a member of Hunter’s Studio Art faculty, is a globally renowned sculptor. He is also a Hunter graduate, Class of 1989. Born in Jamaica, he is known for work that reflects his immigrant background, often exploring the differences between his Jamaican heritage and his American experience. His dramatic sculptural installations have been exhibited by major cultural institutions around the world, and between 1993 and 2017, he had 27 solo exhibitions and 80 group exhibitions at leading museums and galleries. His work is in the collections of numerous museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum. In 2017, he won the highly prestigious Vilcek Prize, which honors immigrants who have made lasting contributions to American society through extraordinary achievement in biomedical research, the arts or the humanities. He has also received the 2015 Joyce Foundation Award for a major commission in Detroit, the 2012 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Rome and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. He joined Hunter’s Department of Art and Art History in 1993, shortly after earning his MFA from Brooklyn College.
