Two Queens College Faculty Members Named City University of New York Distinguished Professors
—Michael Mirkin explores chemical and biological processes at the nanoscale and Yoko Nomura investigates how exposure to climate change-driven disasters affects prenatal development—
Flushing, NY, August 4, 2025 — Queens College professors Michael Mirkin and Yoko Nomura have been elevated to the rank of distinguished professor. Both appointments were approved by the City University of New York (CUNY) Board of Trustees in May, bringing the college’s total number of distinguished professors to 14.
The title of distinguished professor is the highest academic honor that CUNY can offer its faculty, conferring it in recognition of exceptional scholarly achievement. It is reserved for faculty with records of exceptional performance by national and international standards of excellence in their field.
“Professors Mirkin and Nomura are representative of the caliber of our faculty, utilizing research results to address real-world problems,” says Queens College President Frank H. Wu. “Professor Mirkin’s work creates the possibility for optimizing the design of drug delivery systems and insights into cell communication and disease mechanisms, while Professor Nomura’s findings on the effects of climate-driven disasters on children in utero provides an opportunity for early intervention to address any resulting behavioral issues. It is deeply rewarding to see our faculty recognized for their transformative contributions to society.”
Mirkin’s research focuses on nano-electrochemistry, specifically using nanometer-sized electrochemical probes in conjunction with scanning probe microscopy techniques to explore various systems and processes at the nanoscale. These nano-electrochemical probes are highly versatile, allowing his team to investigate a wide range of phenomena. For example, researchers can position the tip near the substrate surface to study charge transfer reactions—the movement of electrons—occurring at a nanostructured solid/liquid interface. Alternatively, a tip can be inserted into a biological cell to probe intracellular processes with high spatial resolution. The flexibility and adaptability of these probes make them suitable for studying diverse samples, from nanoparticles to biological systems, providing unique insights into nanoscale behaviors.
Mirkin, who came to the United States in 1989 as a refugee from the former USSR, received his doctorate in electrochemistry from Kazakh State University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin and participated in the early development of scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM), joining the college’s chemistry and biochemistry department in 1993. Mirkin has published approximately 200 journal articles and chapters (Google Scholar h-index 71), co-edited the first monograph on SECM (3rd edition, 2022) and a monograph on nanoelectrochemistry (2015). He has also been a visiting professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.
Nomura, a professor in the college’s psychology department, a faculty research fellow at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and a professorial lecturer at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, investigates how prenatal and early childhood adversity affects central nervous system development. Specifically, her research examines the impact of genetic susceptibility and fetal programming on neurobehavioral development. (Fetal programming is the concept that conditions experienced in utero can adversely affect an individual’s health for the rest of their life.) Nomura recently expanded her work to explore environmental disasters’ effects on long-term neurodevelopment and psychopathology. She collaborates with the Queens College Psychological Center, a community mental health clinic, to educate communities and reduce early life stress impacts.
Nomura earned her doctorate from Columbia University and trained at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. As a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. She received her first NIMH grant and NARSAD Young Investigator Award. At Mount Sinai School of Medicine, she secured a prestigious career development award and, with the support of President Barack Obama’s scientific stimulus grant, launched a longitudinal study of mother-child dyads. Since joining Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in 2009, she has continued following this community-based epigenetic cohort.
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