Kudos

Rajat Kanti Chakraborti, a graduate student in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, won the Don Rennie Memorial Outstanding Student Award for excellence in research and presentation at the recent Great Lakes Research Consortium Student/Faculty Conference held at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. His paper, "Dynamic Particle Characterization During Aggregation Using Image Processing Technique," was cited for its superior quality in research and professionalism.

Susan R. Schapiro, director of the Methods of Inquiry program in the Graduate School of Education, has been selected as one of the nation's outstanding first- year student advocates by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. She was honored Feb. 20 at the annual National Conference on the First-Year Experience at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She also will be featured in a story in the First-Year Experience Newsletter.

The Department of Clinical Laboratory Science (CLS) in the School of Health Related Professions has been rated among the top 15 such departments in the nation in faculty-research productivity by the journal Clinical Laboratory Science. The study, conducted at The Ohio State University in collaboration with the University of Tennessee at Memphis and the University of Minnesota, involved 127 college and university CLS programs. The UB department was the only one in New York State and one of only three in the Northeast ranked among the top 15 by the journal.

Russ Crispell, men's tennis coach, recently was honored for his outstanding accomplishments by the United States Tennis Association (USTA) at its annual Seminar and Awards Dinner held in White Plains. Crispell was named the 1998 Western New York College Coach of the Year and also received the Eastern Division College Tennis Coach of the Year Award. The division includes colleges and universities in New York, northern New Jersey and southern Connecticut.