The vice president for research and a nonprofit started by students to assist refugees will receive awards tonight from the International Center of Syracuse. The group's annual awards dinner is tonight, Friday, Nov. 8 at Onondaga Community College, featuring cuisine from Africa, Asia and Latin America and  African dance and drums for entertainment.

The International Humanitarian Award goes to HopePrint, the nonprofit group that works with  refugees resettling in the Syracuse area. It was started by Upstate Medical University student Sean Haley and Erica Nicole of Syracuse.

The award for International Citizen of the Year goes to Rosemary Rochford, PhD, the vice president for research at Upstate who previously served as chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. She has extensively studied lymphomas, malaria and the Epstein-Barr virus. Her research in Kenya led her to establish the Equatorial Africa Children's Cancer Fund, which helps children being treated at the Nyanza Provincial Hospital. Rochford joined Upstate in 2003 as an associate professor.

The dinner's keynote address, on "Border Conflict and Refugees," is by Paula Banerjee, PhD, associate professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Calcutta. She is also the president of the International Association for Study of Forced Migration.

Banerjee received a Fulbright grant from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board to spend the fall semester teaching at SUNY Oswego and the spring 2014 semester at Onondaga Community College.