UB’s plan to create learning landscape spaces on the North and South campuses continues to forge ahead with the completion of numerous classroom upgrades during the past three summers.

About 11 classrooms have been renovated each year—translating to about 400 seats a year—at an average annual cost of $2.2 million. The renovations include technology upgrades and life-cycle equipment replacement, as well as aesthetic and infrastructure work.

Funding comes from a variety of sources, among them the student technology fee, critical maintenance funds and the Provost’s Office.

“This is a great investment in our students and faculty. It makes their jobs easier,” says Cheryl Bailey, associate director for the Capital Planning Group and a key member of the Instructional Facilities Subcommittee—informally known as the Classroom Committee—that oversees the ongoing project to upgrade the university’s 135 centrally scheduled classrooms on the North and South campuses.

(Tor read more click here)

Click to read more and see schedule

By Brian Peters

Published: August 25, 2011

The university will welcome both new and returning students with open arms and fun events during Opening Weekend, UB’s tradition of offering students an event-packed few days before the start of the fall semester and the busy academic year that lies ahead.

This year’s festivities kick off Friday, Aug. 26 at 3 p.m. on the Student Union Field, where the annual interlocking UB photo will be taken. The photo requires more than 1,200 students wearing UB T-shirts to fill in the border of a massive outline of the UB logo. The photo is then taken from above by helicopter.

To read more click here

Oscar A. Silverman Library, better known as Capen, is UB’s undergraduate library. Open 24 hours, the library is perfect for study sessions at all hours.

The four-story library, accessible by the street level entrance of Capen Hall, has areas devoted to group study or silent studying to suit everyone’s needs. The library is also a printing hub for students and faculty, so computer access becomes scarce in the 10 minutes before and after classes in the early afternoon. Centrally located on campus, Capen is the perfect place to meet for group projects that may require computer or printer access.

(Click here to read more)

UB is implementing a single-stream, “all in one” recycling program that no longer requires that recyclables be sorted according to type.

The new program will make recycling easier, and ideally lead to more materials being diverted from landfills, according Erin Moscati, environmental educator at UB Green.

Employees now may place all accepted recyclables in their blue, desk-side bins, as well as in any container on campus designated for recyclables that has a new, Saturn-style, single-stream lid and appropriate all-in-one recycling sticker, Moscati says. She explains that the conversion of public containers has been gradual, with custodial staff working to replace lids since mid-July. Soon, all blue lids labeled for “paper only” and green lids for “containers/bottle and cans only” will be replaced with the Saturn-style, all-in-one lid, she adds.

(Click here to read more)

The 25th anniversary edition of UB’s Distinguished Speakers Series once more will offer Western New York audiences a varied program of speakers on topics ranging from a decade of warfare to human rights advocacy, medical research and off-beat humor.

The speakers will be former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; actor, author and medical research advocate Michael J. Fox; Judy Shepard, activist, author and mother of Matthew Shepard, the victim of a notorious 1998 gay hate crime; award-winning CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien; Ireland’s former president and international human rights commissioner, Mary Robinson; and Seth McFarlane, voice actor, singer and creator of the animated television hit series “Family Guy” and “American Dad.”

(To read more click here)

As a UB doctoral student, Gabriela Popescu, left, published research in top academic journals. Now, as a UB faculty member, she is giving back by mentoring a new generation of scientists, including biochemistry student Will Borschel, right.

Gabriela Popescu

Cultivating Young Researchers

Watch a video of Dr. Popescu in her lab.

“My lab has been so successful, and I attribute this to the support I had at every step.”

Gabriela Popescu, PhD ’99, Associate Professor of Biochemistry

With a team of students and technicians in the South Campus Biomedical Research Building, Gabriela Popescu is investigating the mysteries of memory formation.

Her sixth-floor lab is an exciting place to be.

Projects under way could have implications for the treatment of neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s.

The department, biochemistry, is tight-knit.

Students and teachers share the work—and the credit.

Popescu, an associate professor, has benefited from the culture of collaboration as both a mentor and a mentee.

(To read more  click here)

On the morning of July 3, 2009, she returned to her home after working the night shift in the Oak Hill (Fla.) Hospital ICU to find that her husband of less than a year had committed suicide. She was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant.

Church’s husband, Paul, originally a reservist—a Navy Seabee who had been called to active duty in Iraq from 2003 to 2004—was not active at the time of his death, making it difficult to prove that his death was service-related. But Church knew differently.

(To read more click here)

A UB-led research team has developed a mathematical framework that could one day form the basis of technologies that turn road vibrations, airport runway noise and other “junk” energy into useful power.

The concept all begins with a granular system comprising a chain of equal-sized particles—spheres, for instance—that touch one another.

In a paper published last month in Physical Review E,  UB theoretical physicist Surajit Sen and colleagues describe how altering the shape of grain-to-grain contact areas between the particles dramatically changes how energy propagates through the system.

Under “normal” circumstances, when the particles are perfect spheres, exerting force on the first sphere in the chain causes energy to travel through the spheres as a compact bundle of energy between 3-to-5-particle-diameters wide at a rate set by Hertz’s Law.

(Click to read more)

BUFFALO, N.Y. — All over the world, patients with chronic pain struggle to express how they feel to the doctors and health-care providers who are trying to understand and treat them.

Now, a University at Buffalo psychiatrist is attempting to help patients suffering from chronic pain and their doctors by drawing on ontology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being or existence.

The research will be discussed during a tutorial he will give at the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (http://icbo.buffalo.edu/), sponsored by UB, that will be held in Buffalo July 26-30.

He describes the goals of his work in a video interview:

http://bit.ly/o7WMld

“Pain research is very difficult because nothing allows the physician to see the patient’s pain directly,” says Werner Ceusters, MD, professor of psychiatry in UB’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and principal investigator on a new National Institutes of Health grant, An Ontology for Pain and Related Disability, Mental Health and Quality of Life.

(To read more click here)