University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

What is a Strategic Strength?

Strategic Strengths: A series of eight distinguished, cross-disciplinary areas of progress indigenous to the University at Buffalo:

• Artistic Expression and Performing Arts
• Civic Engagement and Public Policy
• Cultures and Texts
• Extreme Events: Mitigation and Response
• Health and Wellness Across the Life Span
• Information and Computing Technology
• Integrated Nanostructured Systems
• Molecular Recognition in Biological Systems and Bioinformatics

Each strength serves as an infrastructure for pulling together researchers from across the university to work cooperatively in pursuit of solutions to wide-ranging problems through a non-traditional approach. This faculty-driven, transdisciplinary initiative represents eight areas of scholarly strength in which UB has an ongoing tradition of excellence.

Through a distinctive multidisciplinary paradigm, these strategic strengths will make a dramatic impact on society and our future. The collaborative nature of these programs opens new opportunities for excellence in scholarship, research, education, and public service. We believe the shape of things to come is inspired by the power of such collaborative strength. We know it is our university’s contribution to fulfilling the promise of tomorrow.

The Strategic Strengths in Action:

The new centers and research developed under the direction of the Strategic Strengths Initiative are already greatly impacting UB and the community at large. For example, The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, which opened in September 2006 with a concert by renowned composer Philip Glass (during the campus visit of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama), is home to “June in Buffalo,” one of the longest-running festivals of its kind in the nation. June in Buffalo 2008 will offer an extraordinary opportunity to work with a distinguished, international faculty of composers and researchers, leading experts in algorithmic, interactive, multimedia, acousmatic, and electroacoustic computer music.

Festivals such as this illustrate The Center for 21st Century Music’s commitment to exposing students and the community to new composers and techniques. The Center is dedicated to such exposure, promoting the creation of new work upholding the highest artistic standards of excellence, while simultaneously fostering a complementary atmosphere of creative research.

The Strategic Strengths Initiative encourages research across the university, from the creative activities in the arts to nanomedicine research in the sciences. Take for example, the ongoing work being done at UB on targeted drug delivery within several of UB’s departments. Beginning with Dr. Paras Prasad, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry, our university is continuously striving to develop safer and more effective treatments for wide-spread diseases such as cancer.

In conjunction with the Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI), Dr. Prasad has helped to originate projects with far-reaching consequences for the treatment of several diseases. Photodynamic therapy (PDT), a technique pioneered at RPCI, exploits the tendency for tumors to retain greater amounts of photosensitive drugs than other tissues. As a result, the therapy can be targeted to the tumor, with reduced effects to the surrounding areas. “ ‘We are optimistic that they [the PDT drugs] will be able to deliver a wide range of therapies to tumors or other disease sites in the body without any significant loss in the circulatory system of in normal tissues,’ said Prasad,” (Buffalo News, Article # 7983).

Another project developed by Prasad and the RPCI is a drug delivery system utilizing nanocrystals. The nanocrystals of a hydrophobic drug, on their own, serve as the transport vehicle for the drug. Through this innovative use of nanomedicine, the need for a separate delivery system is avoided, allowing for a simpler (and less toxic) treatment solution.

In addition to Dr. Prasad’s ongoing work, similar targeted drug delivery projects are also being pursued by a number of our outstanding new faculty members. For example, Dr. Chong Cheng from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, who was recruited specifically for the synergistic relationship between his research and the ongoing scholarship at UB: Cheng’s work seeks to expand upon the idea of less toxic drug delivery, as he strives to create a smaller and more effective biodegradable template for this purpose. Such a system would again allow for minimal toxic build-up in healthy tissue, allowing for more successful and pinpointed treatment for patients.

Through these novel and collaborative approaches to nanomedicine, our university and community researchers are working together to perfect the targeted delivery of drugs, an area of research that greatly impacts today’s society.

Brief descriptions of each strength:

• Artistic Expression and Performing Arts.
• Civic Engagement and Public Policy. As an urban public research university, UB has the intellectual resources to address social challenges including poverty, educational access and reform, housing, substance abuse, crime and criminal justice, health and environment, family violence, and persistent inequalities related to race, social class, and gender. The goal of this initiative is to collect and align university human, programmatic, and financial resources, to promote and enhance the quality of life within the region, state, and beyond.
• Cultures and Texts. At the heart of this strategic strength is a distinguished faculty whose research explores the meanings of being human through examining cultures and texts from the ancient world to cyberspace. Our faculty is particularly well-known for research on race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, poetics, aesthetics, and other aspects of history, language, literature, art and culture in the Americas, the Atlantic World, Africa, and Asia, as well as the routes/roots of various empires and diasporas. Our unique interdisciplinary resources include the Humanities Institute, the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology, the Institute for Jewish Thought, the Digital Humanities Initiative, and world-class archival collections.
• Extreme Events: Mitigation and Response. With a world population of 6.6 billion and growing, the planet is becoming increasingly urbanized. As cities grow, we face an increasing risk from natural and human-caused disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, and even terrorist attacks. The challenges posed by extreme events are unique and varied, requiring complex solutions. By focusing on the mitigation and response efforts of increasing the resiliency of communities to extreme events, we can reduce the effects these events have on critical facilities and lifelines.
• Health & Wellness Across the Lifespan. Living better and more independently into one’s tenth decade is at the core of this strength. Given the reality of an aging population, research into the areas that have the greatest impact on our population represents a significant opportunity for growth. Additionally, as many diseases affect the full range of the population, our vision seeks to facilitate research pertinent not only to optimal aging but to the promotion of health and the prevention of disease across the life span. These achievements will have an outstanding scientific, technological, cultural, clinical, and social impact on our world.
• Information and Computing Technology. This strength is clustered into three major areas: information science, computational science, and human-computer interaction. ICT builds upon strong foci of research excellence at UB and has the potential to expand our boundaries through innovation and collaboration. Within those areas, ICT involves two synergistic initiatives: smart environments and enabling discovery. Smart environments embed sensors and computing devices in everyday objects, enabling seamless and intelligent interaction with humans. High-performance computing, high-end visualization, and advanced simulation and modeling techniques enable UB researchers to make discoveries in such diverse domains as the sciences, engineering, and management.
• Integrated Nanostructured Systems. Through the preparation and study of objects thousands of times smaller than a speck of dust, Integrated Nanostructured Systems research forges ahead into new territories that greatly impact our society. The focus areas of our research include: spintronics and nanoelectronics (yielding dramatically more efficient information processing and storage); biomedical and biological nanotechnology (detecting and remedying disease states or harmful agents, from nature to our own bodies); and nanotechnology for energy applications (providing efficient means of capturing and storing clean, renewable solar energy). This transformation of nanoscience discoveries into integrated technologies will benefit human health, the environment, industry, and society.
• Molecular Recognition in Biological Systems and Bioinformatics. This strength represents an integrated approach to medical and biological discovery and transitioning the resulting information from labs into treatments for human disease. Our group exists at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines, including biochemistry, chemistry, cell biology, structural biology, biophysics, immunology, molecular pharmacology, and computational biology. A major emphasis is to understand the complex signaling networks that exist in all living organisms, thereby enabling design of molecular modulators of these pathways. These discoveries will lead to novel drugs for controlling disease, thereby maintaining quality of life from conception and throughout the aging process.