The UB Law School is reinventing the way it prepares students for practicing law. With its new Legal Skills Program that integrates innovative and practical legal skills immediately into the curriculum, graduates will be better equipped immediately after they graduate to file a brief, cross-examine a witness or make a special pleading.

As part of the new program, students are given a framework of courses and experiences that encompass critical skills for the professional field. Highlighted throughout the curriculum are legal research and writing, litigation and non-litigation skills, and professional development.

Charles Patrick Ewing, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the UB Law School, is overseeing the program as vice dean for legal skills.

Dean Makau Mutua says the Legal Skills Program is focusing on skills “critical to the education of a well-trained, analytically sound and thoughtful lawyer,” noting that Ewing is “widely respected by colleagues, peers around the country, judges and the bar. He will bring enormous talents to bear on the organizational and instructional excellence that we expect of the Legal Skills Program.”

Read more here.

“15 Days of Dance: The Making of ‘Ghost Light,’” a film by Emmy-award-winning artist and filmmaker Elliot Caplan that was produced and developed at UB, had its premiere screening recently at Lincoln Center.

Caplan is professor of media study and director of the Center for the Moving Image (CMI), an interdisciplinary initiative of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Media Study.

In 2007, the CMI commissioned “Ghost Light,” a ballet choreographed by Brian Reeder for dancers from the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, as a gift from the City of Buffalo to the people of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

Caplan made an 18-hour film,”15 Days of Dance,” to document the creative evolution of the ballet. Excerpts from the film were presented on Oct. 22 in the Bruno Walter Auditorium in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

Caplan, Reeder and ABT dancers all attended to discuss the excerpts.

It was the first of four programs in which different segments of the film will be screened. Other segments will be presented on Dec. 17, Feb. 11 and March 8, all with the principals in attendance.

Read more here.

2009 marks the 40th Anniversary of the Department of African American Studies. In 1969, Dr. James Arthur Miller, now a professor of English and chair of American Studies at George Washington University, became the first director of the Black Studies Program at UB while a doctoral student in the English Department. Dr. Miller will join UB faculty, staff, students, and local UB alumni to share his experience building the Black Studies Program as a student, with students, as well as demonstrate the continued necessity for Black Studies programs today. Light refreshments will be provided prior to the event and an open question-and-answer session will follow.

More information here.

New funding for an innovative UB program that trains Zimbabwe’s clinician scientists and translational pharmacologists will bring additional health care professionals and researchers to Buffalo to be trained to fight the war on AIDS in Zimbabwe.

UB’s HIV Clinical Pharmacology Research Program in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and its program with the University of Zimbabwe has received a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center grant; last month the program was awarded a supplement as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.

“This is a major advance,” says Gene D. Morse, associate director of the translational pharmacology core in UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, and a professor in UB’s pharmacy school.

He noted that this was the first time the UB-UZ program, which began in 2002, has received a Fogarty grant, NIH’s program for funding international research.

“The ARRA funds will help introduce to Zimbabwe electronic information technology in conducting HIV/AIDS clinical research,” he said.

Read more here.

Dead zones in critical waterways. Accelerated loss of arable land. Massive famines. They’re all caused by the 24 billion tons of soil that are lost every year to erosion, a phenomenon that costs the world as much as $40 billion annually.

But predicting where erosion occurs—and thus how to prevent it—is a serious challenge.

That’s why UB geographer Sean Bennett has constructed various systems to model it, with assistance from the university’s machine shop. His methods range from the deceptively low-tech, like simulating rainstorms over sandboxes, to the high-tech, such as the use of particle image velocimetry (PIV) in large, re-circulating flumes to study how water and grains of sand interact.

The purpose of his work is both exceedingly practical—geared toward helping farmers learn how to best prevent erosion—and fundamental—to better understand how planetary surfaces evolve over time.

“We have feet in two domains,” Bennett explains. “We’re studying processes similar to those that created Niagara Falls; at the same time, we’re studying how these processes degrade soil resources worldwide.”

The UB research is helping scientists better understand some of the key triggers of erosion: the complex formation of channels on the landscape called rills and gullies.

“Rills and gullies are the dominant erosion processes on agricultural landscapes today and the main contributor to soil loss,” says Bennett, professor of geography in the College of Arts and Sciences and an active researcher in the UB 2020 Strategic Strength in Extreme Events.

Read more here.

The latest projects to receive awards from the UB 2020 Interdisciplinary Research Development Fund seek to advance science and make practical improvements in fields ranging from business to medicine and engineering.

The money, distributed by the Office of the Vice President for Research through a competitive process, stimulates and supports research that could later win external awards, such as federal grants. To be eligible for funding, projects must include work by at least two faculty members in different disciplines, in sync with UB 2020’s emphasis on spurring collaborations between departments across the university.

The winning proposals, announced earlier this year, are:

• “Characterization of Vascular Flow”: Corresponding investigator Kenneth Hoffmann, Neurosurgery, with co-investigators Adnan Siddiqui, Neurosurgery; Vipin Chaudhary, Computer Science and Engineering; Jae-Hun Jung, Mathematics; E. Bruce Pitman, Mathematics; Matthew Jones, Center for Computational Research; and Thomas Furlani, Center for Computational Research. This project aims to speed up the calculation of blood-flow patterns in patients, in part by creating a database with information on blood-flow patterns in vessels with different geometries, narrowings, branching and aneurysms.

Read more here.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The appointment of Michael Glick, D.M.D., as dean of the School of Dental Medicine at the University at Buffalo was announced today by David L. Dunn, M.D., Ph.D., UB vice president for health sciences.

Glick is professor of oral medicine and associate dean for oral and medical sciences at the School of Osteopathic Medicine at A. T. Still University (ATSU) in Arizona and editor of the premier peer-reviewed journal on dentistry and dental science, The Journal of the American Dental Association.

Known for his innovative, medicine-oriented approach to dental care, Glick is a proponent of having dental students think of themselves as health care professionals first, and dentists second. His research interests are focused primarily on the care of the medically complex dental patient, and he has published extensively and lectured worldwide on this topic.

His appointment is effective Dec. 1.

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Building on three decades of pioneering collaboration with educational institutions in China, UB was recently given the go-ahead to establish a Confucius Institute on campus. Part of a network of 250 Confucius Institutes worldwide, the Confucius Institute at UB is being created to promote the study of Chinese language and culture throughout Western New York.

The Confucius Institute will be a collaborative initiative involving UB’s Asian Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences; the Confucius Institute Headquarters, which will provide major funding for the program; and Capital Normal University in Beijing, one of UB’s long-time partner institutions in China. The institute will be governed by a board of directors chaired by Stephen Dunnett, vice provost for international education and a dedicated champion of student and faculty exchange with China. In addition to Dunnett, the board will consist of three members from Capital Normal University and three members representing UB.

“We are honored to be invited to host a Confucius Institute at UB,” Dunnett said. “It is fitting that UB host a Confucius Institute, since this initiative of the Chinese government has been developed and overseen by Dr. Zhou Ji, minister of education in China and a distinguished alumnus of UB.”

Read more here.

President John B. Simpson recently traveled to Turkey to visit Bilkent University and Istanbul Technical University, two of UB’s institutional partners, during a trip that included meetings with university alumni in the country and the renewal of an exchange agreement with ITU.

Simpson was accompanied on the trip by his wife, Katherine, and Stephen Dunnett, vice provost for international education.

Turkey is an increasingly important country, not only for the United States but also for SUNY and UB, Dunnett notes. “It is one of our leading source countries for international students outside East and South Asia,” he says. Moreover, SUNY’s collaboration with Turkish higher education through dual-diploma programs “involves a unique and unprecedented level of institutional cooperation.“

“As a cultural crossroads with an extremely rich and varied history, Turkey is a great destination for UB students and offers many excellent institutions of higher education,” Dunnett added. “We are confident that in the years ahead we will be seeing more of our students seeking opportunities for study and research in Turkey.”

Read more here.

GSE Open House

Thursday, November 5, 2009
5 p.m. – 7 p.m.
UB Student Union Lobby, North Campus

All programs within the Graduate School of Education will be represented at this Open House event, including programs offered by:

• Counseling, School and Educational Psychology
• Educational Leadership and Policy
• Learning and Instruction
• Library and Information Studies
• Teacher Education Institute