By Nicarlyle Hanchard / The Jambar
The Office of Academic Affairs at Youngstown State University recently announced the faculty members who were granted Research Professorship.
Research Professorship is one of the highest awards that can be granted to a university professor. For the 2026-27 academic year, 15 professors were awarded Research Professorship awards.
Severine Van slambrouck, associate provost of Research Services and Graduate Studies, stated that to be considered for the award, faculty must make their intent to apply known by Sept. 8 of each academic year. The formal application must be submitted by Oct. 15.
“The full application goes through an approval process, including the department chair and the dean of the college, before it goes to the Research Professorship committee for review. The committee [then] makes a recommendation to the provost,” Van slambrouck stated.
Kyosung Choo, associate mechanical engineering professor in the Rayen School of Engineering, is one of the 2026-27 Research Professorship awardees. Choo stated that being granted research professorship emphasizes the quality work being produced by professors.
“It is a highly significant form of recognition, reflecting the university’s confidence in a professor’s sustained scholarly productivity, research vision and long-term impact,” Choo stated.
Choo, whose research focuses on thermal management of high-heat-flux electronic systems and advanced cooling technologies for high-power chips and data centers, has applied for and received a research professorship for the past 11 years.
For the coming academic year, his research topic is “AI Chip Liquid Jet Cooling in Data Centers.” In addition to this being an area of expertise for him, Choo stated the increase in demand for AI data centers and the heat produced from their workloads require novel cooling technologies.
“Traditional air-cooling methods are reaching their limits in these high-density, high-heat environments. In response, liquid cooling technologies are gaining attention as an essential solution,” Choo stated. “Ultimately, liquid cooling will play a crucial role in enabling the sustainable growth and energy efficiency of future AI data centers.”
Maria Conti Maravillas, associate professor in the Department of English and World Languages, is another recipient of this year’s Research Professorship awards. Her general area of specialization is composition and rhetoric with a focus on students’ transition into college.
Her research topic is “Student Voices on Growth: A Qualitative Study of Mindset in First-Year Composition,” which is a continuation of a study she did in fall 2024. That study compared sections of first-year composition for students exposed to growth mindset intervention versus those who did not receive the intervention.
“What I found is, when I compared the two groups using surveys, the data revealed that in five out of nine measures, students in the growth mindset group, taught by me, increased their level of growth mindset,” Conti Maravillas said. “But students in the control group, taught by the other professors [who] had no growth mindset interventions, they only increased their growth mindset in one area out of nine measures.”
She said instilling a growth mindset into students is pertinent to their success. Conti Maravillas said, though students’ writing output is important, their beliefs surrounding writing must also be considered.
“There are tools now that can replicate the writing you’re supposed to be doing, to do the learning you’re supposed to be doing and teaching students about growth mindset also invites a conversation to think about, ‘How much am I learning or not learning by overrelying on generative AI tools?’, ‘How can I use them to support my learning than replace it?’” Conti Maravillas said.
Van slambrouck also stated that Research Professorship awards are an investment to support research growth and afford faculty the time to pursue scholarly endeavors as they are factored into faculty workload. “These Research Professorships provide protected time and institutional recognition that allow faculty to pursue ambitious and externally competitive research and scholarly projects,” Van slambrouck stated.