UB honors Mendola and Chakraborty as top researchers

These awards honor faculty members for outstanding research performance at different stages of their careers. The Sustained Achievement Awards highlight senior scholars; the Young Investigator Awards, untenured scholars who received their terminal degree within the past eight years. Both awards recognize work that has “garnered public and/or professional accolades beyond the norm.”

Pauline Mendola, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health (EEH), is the 2025 recipient of the Sustained Achievement Award. This award honors outstanding professional achievement that has been focused on a particular body of work over a number of years. It was created to recognize an unprecedented accomplishment in a senior scholar's career, distinguishing a body of work of enduring importance that has gone beyond the norm in a particular field of study.

Following completion of her doctorate, Mendola was appointed as a research instructor and then hired as an assistant professor on the tenure track in EEH. She was recruited back to Buffalo in 2020 after working at National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as a senior investigator. From the outset of her career, she has made significant contributions with her research and received recognition including two national awards for her dissertation research. Mendola has also made significant contributions to research, publishing 220 peer-reviewed papers. Her work has been published in the highest impact journals in clinical medicine, environmental health and reproductive health including JAMA, the Lancet, Circulation, Environmental Research, Environmental Health Perspectives, Hypertension, Epidemiology, and the American Journal of Epidemiology. Mendola has also received several awards for her research including two Scientific and Technological Achievement Awards from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Saptarshi Chakraborty, assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics, is the 2025 recipient of the Young Investigator Award, which celebrates recent superior achievement of a scholar in their field of study. This achievement distinguishes the recipient as an up-and-coming scholar.

Chakraborty was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics in 2020. He has 34 peer-reviewed publications, including 19 methodology articles, most as first author in top statistics journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Biometrics. He also has developed seven open-source statistical software packages including BAMBI (CV,1), which has been downloaded over 50,000 times. As further evidence of Chakraborty's reputation and impact, he has given 20 invited talks including to eight international conferences, four regional conferences and eight invited seminar talks. He also has established a track record in grant funding as a co-investigator on seven grants and a consultant on one additional grant since arriving at UB.