Russell Bessette, associate vice president for health sciences and director of health information technology in UB’s Academic Health Center, speaks during a news conference held in the Center of Excellence to announce the award. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI

UBMD, UB’s 450-member physician practice plan, has received a $7 million grant from the New York State Department of Health HEAL NY initiative to implement a novel electronic records system to track and manage treatment of chronic kidney disease in real time, with the goal of reducing the number of patients in Western New York who develop end stage kidney disease (ESRD).

The project will be supported by additional major investments from CTG, the Buffalo-based global information-technology company, and UBMD. The total $28.9 million investment will create a software system that enables uniform sharing of electronic patient records across the UBMD practice, and which will identify in patients the health markers symptomatic of kidney disease and diabetes.

The project is expected to create approximately 115 new high-paying jobs in computer programming and data analysis in Buffalo at CTG and UBMD.

The principal investigator on the project is David L. Dunn, vice president for health sciences. Russell W. Bessette, associate vice president for health sciences and director of health information technology in the UB Academic Health Center, serves as co-investigator. Both are working in close collaboration with Bruce A. Holm, senior vice provost and executive director of UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.

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he Office of the Provost has established a new Faculty Internationalization Fund to encourage faculty members to become more “international” in their teaching, scholarship and service.

The fund, to be administered by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Education, will provide limited travel funding—up to $5,000 per grant—to support new faculty initiatives with UB’s existing institutional partners in other countries. The fund does not support international conference travel.

The funding can be used for a variety of activities, among them new faculty-led study abroad programs for UB students, new collaborative international research projects and the development of new courses or programs—or the enhancement of existing ones—that have substantial international content and perspectives.

The impetus for establishing the fund came from the final report of UB’s International Strategy Task Group, which called for “creating incentives and eliminating barriers” to encourage and facilitate faculty participation in UB’s numerous international partnerships. The task group, part of the UB 2020 planning process, specifically urged that travel grants and grants to internationalize curricula be awarded to faculty.

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Blair’s talk, the second in this year’s Distinguished Speakers Series, touched on some of the same themes—the importance of globalization and the need to give emerging countries a voice in international organizations—that former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented in his September lecture that kicked off the series.

Many of today’s most pressing problems—and their solutions—are global in nature, Blair said. Fighting climate change requires cooperation between the world’s wealthiest and poorest nations. The meltdown of the U.S. economy and the ensuing financial crisis that reached west to Asia and east to Europe demonstrated how closely economies across oceans are linked. Rich countries that want assistance in fighting terrorism must be ready to extend aid to coalition partners who face different threats.

In this age, Blair said, peace and progress will be rooted in people’s willingness to listen to and respect alternative opinions. An end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with an independent and viable state for Palestinians, will only come on the basis of justice for all parties involved, said Blair, who plays a key role in mediating the peace process as envoy for the Middle East Quartet, comprising the European Union, Russia, the United States and United Nations.

“You cannot in those circumstances have an old-fashioned attitude that says, ‘I pursue my interests as a nation irrespective of yours,’” he said. “The only global alliance that works is an alliance held together by common and shared values and purpose. It’s the same within a country. It’s the same within a community of nations.”

 

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Jorge V. Jose, Vice President for Research

UB has received $18.7 million in federal stimulus funding for 58 research awards since Congress enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) in February.

During a visit to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last week, President Barack Obama announced the $5 billion in grants that NIH has awarded to universities and research institutes across the nation to support critical research while simultaneously stimulating local economies. UB is one such recipient of these funds, to date receiving $18.7 million in awards through ARRA—$11.6 million from 41 NIH awards and $7.1 million from 17 National Science Foundation (NSF) awards.

“From the beginning, our goal has been to rescue the economy at the same time as we’re laying a new foundation for lasting economic growth,” Obama said.

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The Graduate School of Education is offering a number of information sessions this fall that may be of interest to you! The complete Fall schedule is listed below:
Thursday, Sept 24, 12pm
Wednesday, Oct 14, 2pm
Tuesday, Dec 8, 7pm

School Counseling Info Sessions
Wednesday, Sept 30, 4pm, 476 Baldy Hall
Monday, Oct 26, 11am, 479 Baldy Hall
Monday, Nov 23, 7pm, 425 Baldy Hall
Wednesday, Dec 9, 1pm, 425 Baldy Hall

Teacher Education Info Sessions, in 218 Baldy Hall

Counselor Education PhD Info Session
Thursday, Oct 15, 5:30pm, 425 Baldy Hall
Please RSVP at sjwatson@buffalo.edu

Library & Information Studies Info Session
Saturday, Oct 24, 11am, 218 Baldy Hall
Please RSVP at sjwatson@buffalo.edu

Higher Education Administration Info Session
Thursday, Nov 19, 2pm, 218 Baldy Hall

GSE Annual Open House (all programs represented)
Thursday, Nov 5, 5-7pm, Student Union Lobby

Mental Health Counseling Info Sessions
Monday, Jan 11, 2010, 6pm, 425 Baldy Hall
Saturday, Jan 16, 2010, 1pm, 415 Baldy Hall

Additional events will be listed here: http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/news/events.asp

Graduate students in the School of Architecture and Planning are working with officials of the Town of Amherst to make the town more “walkable”—that is, safer for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.

In particular, they want to make walking and biking to school safe and appealing to K-8 students and parents in the Williamsville Central School District.

To that end, the students will hold concurrent meetings with parents and students in the district from 6-7:30 p.m. Sept. 30 in the Amherst Pepsi Center, 1615 Amherst Manor Drive.

Walk-ins are welcome, but to assure a spot, those interested in attending are encouraged to RSVP by Sept. 28 by calling Kelly Ganczarz at 829-2133 ext. 225, or emailing amherstwalkability@gmail.com.

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“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buffalo Venture: From the Larkin Building to Broadacre City,” an exhibition focused on the context in which Buffalo became a locus for Wright’s architectural activities in the first decades of the 20th century, will be presented by the UB Anderson Gallery Oct. 2 through Dec. 30.

The exhibition will be free of charge and open to the public in the gallery, One Martha Jackson Place—off Englewood Avenue between Main Street and Kenmore Avenue. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 1-5 p.m. on Sunday. For information, call 829-3754.

The exhibition will present more than 130 objects, including those related to 22 buildings and projects—11 built works and 11 unrealized projects—that resulted from Wright’s 32-year association with the forward-thinking executives of the Larkin Company, a once-prominent soap-and-mail-order business based in Buffalo.

The exhibition will be open during the national conference of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, “Wright in the Drafting Room: Drawings for the Built and Unbuilt,” which will take place in Buffalo Oct. 7-11. The Anderson Gallery will host a reception for conference attendees on Oct. 8.

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BUFFALO, N.Y. — The University at Buffalo has earned full accreditation from the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP), a highly prestigious, national organization that assures the ethics of research on human subjects.

The distinction, which took effect on Sept. 10, puts UB into an elite cadre of universities that includes Duke, Harvard, Stanford, Penn State and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“With this accreditation, UB has achieved the ‘gold seal of approval’ for our Human Research Protection Program and the institutional review boards (IRBs) involved in the review of all of the university’s 1,700 research protocols,” said Jorge V. José, Dr. Sci., UB vice president for research. “It means that an objective third party has evaluated UB’s program and said that it exceeds federal regulations and meets best-practices criteria.”

“The University at Buffalo can be proud of its commitment to protecting participants and to being a leader among its peer institutions in earning accreditation,” said Marjorie A. Speers, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of AAHRPP.

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President John B. Simpson today rallied community support for the UB 2020 strategic plan, urging an end to the status quo hindering UB’s ability to help revitalize the regional economy and become one of the nation’s premier public research universities.

“We can either choose to maintain the status quo, or we can choose to change our path,” Simpson told an audience of about 500 people attending his fourth annual community address held in historic Asbury Hall in downtown Buffalo. “We either let Albany continue to argue that our universities are ‘good enough,’ or we can recognize and nourish our universities as the catalysts for New York State to regain its position as a fully competitive player in the 21st century global-knowledge economy.”

Choosing the better path will shape the way Western New York and the rest of New York State looks in the year 2020 and beyond, said Simpson. He expressed concern over continued budget cuts and the lack of a state strategy for higher education.

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Women at work will be theme of this year’s Gender Week: Gender Matters @ UB, a series of more than 20 lectures, panels and other events from Sept. 21-25 that will highlight the wide range of gender-inclusive and sex-specific scholarship being done at UB and by visiting scholars.

Gender Week activities range from a workshop on how to get published in peer-reviewed academic journals as a graduate student or junior faculty member to a screening and discussion of the film “The Naked Feminist,” an award-winning documentary about feminist women working in the American pornography industry.

On Tuesday, former UB professor Susan Hanson, a faculty member at Clark University in Massachusetts and a past president of the Association of American Geographers, will deliver a keynote address titled, “Gender and Mobility: Implications for Sustainability.”

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