Annual meeting of voting faculty Sept. 11

President William R. Greiner will deliver the Annual Report of the President at the meeting of the voting faculty, to be held at 2 p.m. Sept. 11 in the Center for Tomorrow on the North Campus. All members of the university community are invited to attend.

GSE gets grant to help teacher IT preparation

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded a $1.3 million three-year grant to a consortium composed of the Graduate School of Education (GSE), the Center for Applied Technologies in Education (CATE), the Buffalo Public Schools and WNED-TV.

The grant was awarded under an initiative called Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology—PT3 for short—designed to assist teacher-education programs in preparing technology-proficient educators for 21st-century schools.

Last year, a consortium consisting of the GSE, the New York State Department of Education, Columbia University Teachers' College and Syracuse University received a $495,000 PT3 catalyst grant to develop a program of technology instruction for pre-service teachers, particularly those in urban schools.

The new implementation grant will fund in-service education in the use of educational technology for teachers and pre-service teachers—those who do not have their permanent New York State teaching certification—at 15 Buffalo schools.

"Bunny Bunny" sets WNY debut at UB

Alan Zweibel, a 1972 UB graduate whose penchant for crafting comedy earned him a place among the original "Saturday Night Live" writing team, will return to the university Sept. 15 to honor his longtime friend and "Saturday Night Live" colleague Gilda Radner with a performance of "Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner, A Sort of Love Story."

The Western New York debut of "Bunny Bunny"—based on memories Zweibel documented after Radner died of ovarian cancer in 1989—will take place at 8 p.m. Sept. 15 in the Center for the Arts as part of "Live From BuffaloÉIt's Saturday Night." Proceeds from the event will benefit the nonprofit organization bearing Radner's name—Gilda's Club—and the American Cancer Society.

The event also will feature dinner at 6 p.m., with live entertainment and dancing following the performance.

For more information or to purchase tickets, contact Sara Mobilia at (800) 743-6724.

Long-term care to be discussed at luncheon

A consumer's guide to the issues related to long-term care will be presented by Anthony H. Szczygiel, professor of law, at the UB Alumni Association's Senior Alumni luncheon program at noon on Sept. 13 in the Center for Tomorrow on the North Campus.

An expert in the field of elder law, Szczygiel is director of the law school's Clinical Education Program.

Getting appropriate long-term-care services at an affordable cost requires knowing the questions to ask before and after the care is needed.

The popular luncheon programs, designed for UB senior alumni and their guests, also welcome seniors in the community on a space-available basis.

UB Alumni Association members pay $14 and non-members pay $16. Call 829-2608 for reservations and information.

Creative Craft Center to offer workshops

The Creative Craft Center in the Ellicott Complex is offering early fall workshops beginning the week of Sept. 10.

Workshops are scheduled in photography, pottery, weaving, quilting, embroidery, knitting and crocheting, beginning and advanced stained glass, jewelry construction and basic drawing.

Workshops run from 7-10 p.m. one night a week for six weeks.

"Pottery for Children" and "Creative Kids" will be held from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. "Pottery for Teens" will be held from 1-3 p.m. on Saturdays.

Fees are $30 for UB students and $60 for all others.

For further information, call 645-2434.

Liturgy of Holy Spirit to be held Sept. 16

The Newman Centers will mark the opening of the 2001-02 academic year with the 25th annual Convocation and Liturgy of the Holy Spirit, to be held at 11:30 a.m. Sept. 16 in St. Joseph University Church on Main Street adjacent to the UB South Campus.

Dennis Black, vice president for student affairs, will receive the 2001 Newman Award.

All members of the campus community are invited to attend.

Medical, law schools offer new master's degree programs

The School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the Law School will offer three new master's programs this fall.

The medical school is offering a master's program in public health (MPH), as well as a law and public health program in conjunction with the Law School under which recipients will obtain both the J.D. and MPH degrees.

In addition, the Law School is joining with the School of Informatics to offer a collaborative program in legal information management and analysis that is one of the first programs in the nation with an emphasis on academic law librarianship. Students in this program can obtain both a J.D. and an MLS degree.

Both the MPH and J.D./MPH programs are being offered through the medical school's Department of Social and Preventive Medicine.

The MPH program aims at training professionals to study and manage current and emerging community health issues.

"We think this degree program fills a real need in this region," said Dennis Bertram, clinical assistant professor of social and preventive medicine and program director. "People who wanted an MPH either had to leave the area or forego the degree.

"The federal government is placing increasing demands on the states and counties to monitor and improve health. The MPH is seen more and more as the basic training to fill the positions needed to do that work," he added.

Students may choose between two concentrations: health services administration or epidemiology and biostatistics.

The MPH prepares people for responsibilities in several areas critical to a community's well-being, including primary prevention of disease; monitoring and surveillance of infections, toxic agents and environmental contaminants; targeting hard-to-reach populations for clinical services and outreach programs, and educating the public about disease risks and preventive measures.

The collaborative program in law and public health, one of seven in the U.S. and the only one offered in New York State, is based on the critical interrelationship between the delivery of health care services, the protection of public health and the legal system. It focuses on the role of public policy, laws, regulations and the courts as tools in formulating effective public health interventions.

Sheila Shulman, adjunct associate professor of law and program director, said graduates of the J.D./MPH program will be prepared to deal with the complexities of the current legal and health-care systems and to appreciate the expanding sources of conflict between the individual and the broader community-based health-care needs and interests.

Applicants must combine an area of interest in the law school with an MPH emphasis in either epidemiology and biostatistics, or health services administration.

The program in legal information management and analysis—a collaborative program of the Law School and the Department of Library and Information Studies in the School of Informatics—offers students preparation for careers as law librarians and legal-information professionals.

Under the direction of James Milles, associate dean of the Law School and director of the Law Library, the program blends solid grounding in the techniques of librarianship and knowledge management with a critical understanding of legal concepts, information resources and services.

"While our focus in the short term is on academic law librarianship, I believe that the technical and intellectual training that is the basis of this program will in the long term prepare the best and brightest law students for careers as future leaders in the legal information profession," said Milles. "Those careers may take them into law librarianship, knowledge management, legal publishing, or even into new paths that we can't yet foresee."

OxyContin: Potential for misuse

OxyContin, one of the newest drugs prescribed for pain, has become a destructive drug of abuse among recreational drug users obtaining it illegally.

In its time-release pill form, OxyContin is safe taken as prescribed. When abusers crush the pill and sniff the powder, they defeat its time-release function. In this form, the opiod drug is highly addictive.

Jeffrey Lackner, clinical assistant professor of anesthesiology and director of the behavioral medicine clinic at UB, warns that the potential for abuse also is high among patients receiving the drug legitimately if they are not monitored closely by their physicians.

"Unfortunately, narcotics for chronic pain are—literally and figuratively—a prescription for disaster if the physician neglects to consider abuse potential, history of self-medication, and other behavioral and psychological factors that bear on the trajectory of pain states." Lackner says.

"By the same token, patients who see 'oxy' as a 'cure' for an incurable problem without enhancing self-care skills can be a problem. This is particularly true with anxious pain patients who often misinterpret negative emotions for pain and ratchet up their use of drugs.

"The push to prescribe OxyContin started with cancer pain, but has lead to misuse and misprescription of 'oxy' for benign pain," Lackner says.

Electronic script key to cutting illicit prescription drug use

Electronic prescriptions—not fingerprinting of patients at pharmacies as proposed by some policymakers—could help cut a substantial amount of illicit use of medications like OxyContin, a according to a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

"We're starting to see prescriptions go electronic," says Karl D. Fiebelkorn, assistant dean for student affairs and professional relations in the pharmacy school and editor of "Pharmacy Law," a newsletter covering pharmacy practice laws in New York published by the school.

"Already some doctors are writing prescriptions on their personal digital assistants and sending them electronically into pharmacies while the patient is still in their office. That gives the doctor and the pharmacist an 'electronic paper trail,' if you will, so that they both know where the prescription originated and for whom it was written."

Fiebelkorn says the use of personal digital assistants such as Palm Pilots by physicians to write a script may lead to elimination of the "paper prescription" that a patient takes to a pharmacy.

"It's not only going to cut down on abuse, he says, "it's also going to cut down on transcription errors, such as when a physician or the person writing it down makes a mistake, or when the pharmacist misreads what's on the script."

Fiebelkorn notes that as a result of the increased reliance on such technologies, UB pharmacy students probably will be required to learn how to use PDAs as part of the curriculum within the next two to three years. Already, a student committee is studying the feasibility of using PDAs as a standard classroom tool.

Peace Corps volunteers sought

The Office of International Education is seeking members of the UB community who have served in the Peace Corps for inclusion in an article in the office's newsletter, "UB International," marking the 40th anniversary of the Peace Corps.

Anyone who has served in the Peace Corps may contact John Wood, assistant director of the English Language Institute, at 645-2077 or jjwood@buffalo.edu by Oct. 1.

Program offers certification

A new online program at UB this fall offers an innovative master's degree in general education that will satisfy the state Department of Education requirements for permanent teaching certification.

The 33-credit-hour program is unique in that it will be a complete graduate program—including non-education courses—delivered entirely through the use of interactive video and Web-based technologies.

The program, a collaborative effort of the Graduate School of Education (GSE) and College of Arts and Sciences, targets provisionally certified K-8 and special-education teachers in outlying areas of Western New York who want to earn permanent New York State teaching certification while they continue to teach in their own communities.