Two Hunter College researchers have won a CUNY award recognizing younger faculty members for outstanding research.
Computer scientist Sarah Ita Levitan and special-education expert Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides have received the Gross-Wasser Award, which honors academically impressive assistant professors from CUNY campuses.
The award is named after two founding members of the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser. Each awardee presents their research in a talk as part of the Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser lecture series. Levitan and Voulgarides also hold appointments at the CUNY Graduate School.
The awards underscore Hunter’s commitment to its role as an anchor institution providing opportunities for high-impact research benefiting the broader community.
Levitan was one of nine CUNY faculty members receiving funding from Google as part of a three-year, $3 million grant from the company. She won the award for her research project “News or Opinion: Fine-Grained Analysis of Text Data to Inform Online Readers.” The project aims to develop computational models that help users determine the trustworthiness of online content by distinguishing between opinions and facts in text.
Levitan joined Hunter in 2020. She earned a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University. Her research is in natural-language processing, which aims to teach computers to understand and generate language. Her focus is on building computational models to detect information about speakers and authors from spoken and written language. She is working on building models to understand and model trustworthiness in spoken language, written language, and combinations of images and speech — in both human and machine-generated language.
“I am truly honored to receive this award, and I am grateful to the selection committee for the recognition,” Levitan said. “I look forward to continuing my research in natural-language processing together with my fantastic students and collaborators.”
Voulgarides, who came to Hunter in 2019, last year won a $1.7 million, four-year federal grant for a four-state study of racial disproportionality in special education. Her research examines legal mandates and policy compliance for students receiving specialized educational support and the structures and procedures that contribute to disparities.
She earlier worked as a special education teacher in New York City public schools. She earned a PhD in the sociology of education from New York University.
“I am truly honored to receive this award recognizing my scholarship,” Voulgarides said. “It affirms the importance of examining how systems-level education policies shape the experiences and outcomes of students who receive specialized support. I remain committed to producing research that bridges policy and practice to promote more responsive, inclusive, and accountable educational systems.”
