Staff Directory
- Title:
- Faculty Athletics Representative
- Email:
- Phone:
- 716-645-1170
Mark G. Frank became the Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) in 2021.Â
Professor Frank was born and raised in Buffalo, graduating from Kenmore East High School in 1979 where he played football and was co-captain of the basketball team (and still holds 1 or 2 records), and was inducted into the Kenmore East Hall of Distinction in 2017.  He graduated UB with a BA in Psychology in 1983, and then Cornell University with a Ph.D. in Social Psychology in 1989. Afterward, he received a National Institute of Mental Health National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellowship to the Psychiatry Department at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School (where some of the work was featured in the TV series Lie to Me). In 1992 he took a position in the School of Psychology in University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. From there he was offered a position in the Communication Department at Rutgers University in 1996, where he was the first faculty member to win all three major awards in teaching, research, and service. In 2005 he was recruited back to UB but this time in the Communication Department, where he founded the Communication Science Center. He served as Department chair from 2015-2021, and has chaired the Intercollegiate Athletics Board since 2016.Â
Dr. Frank has published numerous research papers, book chapters, and edited books on facial expressions, emotion, interpersonal deception, and also violence in extremist groups, and in 2016 won the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. He has had over $10m in research funding from The National Science Foundation, US Department of Homeland Security, and the US Department of Defense to examine these issues.  He is also the co-developer of a patented automated computer system to read facial expressions, for which he won a Visionary Innovator Award from the UB. He has used these findings to lecture, consult with and train virtually all US Federal Law Enforcement/Intelligence Agencies, as well as select local/state and foreign agencies. He is also one of the original Senior Fellows of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit’s Terrorism Research and Analysis Project. He has presented briefings on deception and counter-terrorism to the US Congress as well as the US National Academies of Sciences. He has also given workshops to the US Federal Judiciary as well as some Fortune 500 companies. In 2016 he was selected to present 12 recorded lectures for the Great Courses series called Understanding Nonverbal Communication, and in 2022 was a featured expert on the Curiosity Stream 6-part series Inside the Mind of a Con Artist. Finally, he has appeared in over 100 print, radio, and television appearances to talk about his work, including The New Yorker Magazine, Time Magazine, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, CBS Evening News, CNN, Fox News Channel, CNBC, National Public Radio, The Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Oprah Show, the CBC, BBC, and so on.
