Information for Alumni and Friends
You will always be part of the UB family - stay connected, and involved.
With much of our country and the world navigating an uncharted course through the short- and long-term impact of COVID-19, we extend our most heartfelt and best wishes for the health and safety of you and your families. Our concerns and support extend beyond our own community to all who are affected by this health crisis. We know that many of our alumni and friends across the world are being impacted by this issue, and we continue to keep you in our thoughts during these challenging times.
As you may know, the University at Buffalo has implemented a distance learning model for our students and is moving to a remote work accommodation for our faculty and staff to the extent possible. It’s important to share that, in this ever-evolving situation, our two guiding principles are the health and safety of our community, and the continued academic progress of our students.
In many ways, it is your ongoing support of UB that enables the university to provide the resources to support our community in these difficult times. Whether your gifts have been to the UB Fund, or to a specific scholarship or research initiative, each and every day we put your contributions to work where they will have the maximum impact at UB. Thank you for your investment and commitment to UB.
While we won’t be able to see you in person at UB programs and events in the short term, we are working on ways to keep your connection to UB – and to each other – strong. Pursuant to recent University, CDC and local health department guidelines, all alumni, in-person gatherings, including events, conferences, meetings and other forums, are being cancelled or postponed until at least early June.
Noteworthy Alumni
COM's Yini Zhang guest on BBC
Published April 12, 2024
Department of Communication's Yini Zhang, Assistant Professor, was a guest on the BBC: The Media Show to discuss the impact of Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, on news coverage in the U.S. Zhang has published research looking at Truth Social’s ability to drive news attention in the 2020 presidential election compared with Trump’s similar use of Twitter in the run-up to the 2016 election. “Truth Social was almost as effective as Twitter in terms of driving news attention to Trump and his social media activity,” said Zhang. “But Truth Social was not as effective compared to Twitter in the sense that in the midterm election cycle journalists stopped directly embedding Trump’s Truth Social posts in news stories on their websites. The number of such stories is actually orders magnitude smaller than the number of stories that embedded his Tweets back in 2016.”
Listen to the episode on BBC: The Media Show.