University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

What is a Strategic Strength?

Imagine a community health clinic that functions not only as a center for patient diagnosis and treatment, but as a learning ground for economists, psychologists, lawyers, doctors, and architects, and a center for world-class scholarship and research.

Collaborative Power

To get a picture of our faculty driven transdisciplinary research initiative, download a copy of Strength: The future in our hands.

Take, for example, the problem of falling, the second leading cause of accidental death among those 65 and older. For many whose injuries are not fatal, an accidental fall is often the beginning of a cycle of ever-worsening problems. Yet traditional approaches, even those that are cutting edge, tend more often than not to create silos of treatment.

Departure from this compartmentalized approach opens new opportunities for excellence in scholarship, research, and public service. These opportunities spawned an innovative approach to academic planning and a focus on strategic strengths—one part of our revolutionary UB 2020 framework for change.

While other institutions focus on individual components, the University at Buffalo is strengthening and bringing together various disciplines in order to improve the quality of life into the tenth decade (the vision of our strategic strength in Aging and Chronic Disease), build resilient communities (the vision of our strategic strength in Extreme Events), and revitalize communities through cultural citizenship (the vision of our strategic strength in Artistic Expression).

By acknowledging our current strengths, and understanding our previous investments, and with an eye toward our most promising future opportunities, the university’s strategic strengths become new ways of organizing and empowering our exceptional faculty, better utilizing and identifying needed infrastructure, and planning more strategically to achieve our many missions.

UB is investing in the growth of strategic strengths in the following areas:

• Artistic Expression and Performing Arts - UB’s long history of excellence in the arts and arts scholarship provides the basis for building cultural citizenship in the region. Our Center for 21st Century Music reflects an established strength of the university; our proposed Center of Excellence in Visual and Literary Arts through Digital Technology will focus on one of our emerging areas of academic excellence.
• Civic Engagement and Public Policy - As an urban public research university, UB possesses exceptional intellectual strengths for understanding the origins of, and finding new solutions to, social problems. We bring our expertise to bear on social challenges ranging from those associated with poverty, to the persistent inequalities related to race, social class, and gender.
• Cultures and Texts - UB has a history of excellence in the humanities. Literature records the ways we think and feel about our humanity—it is what poets and storytellers and philosophers tell us about ourselves. History and cultural studies are bridges to different times and other places that lead to our understanding of the world. This body of thought and art and study is the core of the liberal arts education.
• Extreme Events: Mitigation and Response - Building resilient metropolitan centers through effective research is critically important today for protection and recovery when disaster strikes. UB has significant research programs in mitigation and response to extreme events in geohazard studies, earthquake engineering research, biometrics, and geographic information service. This research ultimately works to improve our safety.
• Health & Wellness Across the Lifespan - UB researchers are working together to significantly impact our knowledge of the onset, progression, and prevention of diseases and disabilities so that, with appropriate intervention, our population can reasonably expect independence and wellness to be maintained into the ninth decade of life.
• Information and Computing Technology - UB works at the forefront in the information, digital, and computing technologies that exert such a profound impact on almost all human endeavor. As a premier public research university, UB fosters initiatives that develop these technologies for research, education, and outreach, as well as studying the technologies themselves to further understand how they affect individuals and society.
• Integrated Nanostructured Systems - Our high-tech world depends increasingly on devices and systems so small that their components may be only single molecules. UB is a leader in developing new ways of designing, fabricating, and interfacing with these extremely tiny components of miniaturized devices, creating technologies that improve our lives in a number of ways, ranging from the life sciences to consumer electronics.
• Molecular Recognition in Biological Systems and Bioinformatics - Molecular recognition in biological systems is one key to understanding diseases such as cancer, Crohn’s disease, and diabetes, opening the door to new discoveries, treatments, and cures for these and other diseases. Through this strategic focus in understanding key molecular landscapes, UB is positioning itself at the forefront of a medical revolution with significant potential for producing breakthroughs in human health. In conjunction with UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, whose economic mission is to stimulate the creation of life science companies in Western New York, UB is bringing together scientists with expertise in genomics, structural biology, and the most advanced computational technologies to illuminate the new scientific frontiers.