News Releases

Squeezing the toothpaste from the wrong end, sneering at her cat or putting the toilet paper roll on backwards can irk your partner no end, even after decades together. But new or old relationships, says a prominent social psychologist from the University at Buffalo, are far more likely to be ruined by one partner's low self-esteem.

Amid the human catastrophe that is AIDS in Africa, the absence of health-care systems and practices that are taken for granted in other parts of the world routinely hampers efforts to care for patients even when assistance is being provided by international organizations and charities. But in Zimbabwe, a native son who is the nation's first pharmacologist is helping to remove these obstacles and provide meaningful care to HIV/AIDS patients as the result of a joint program between the University at Buffalo and the University of Zimbabwe.

When Jim D. Atwood became the chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University at Buffalo in 1998, he said he wanted to make freshman chemistry "a little less hated." And with about 30 percent of freshmen flunking out of General Chemistry 101, he had a tough job ahead of him. Now, five years later, having instituted major changes in the freshman chemistry courses, Atwood and his faculty have succeeded beyond their most ambitious dreams.

Non-essential employees at the University at Buffalo were sent home at 1 p.m. Friday and university offices closed for the remainder of the day, after New York State Governor George E. Pataki closed state offices across New York State in an effort to help reduce the demand for power on the electrical system in the wake of Thursday's power outages.

W.W. "Woody" Maggard, president of Reichenbach Technologies, has been appointed associate director for the University at Buffalo Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach.

Victor Paquet watches workers work -- over and over again. An expert on ergonomic job analysis and workplace injury prevention, the University at Buffalo assistant professor of industrial engineering is looking for patterns of repetitive movement that may cause injury to workers on the job.

The world can expect more SARS-like outbreaks in the near future due to evolving cultural, environmental and economic conditions that provide viruses with new opportunities to infect humans, according to an expert on infectious disease and geographic medicine at the University at Buffalo.

When officials communicate the dangers of volcanic hazards to local populations, one picture may be worth a thousand words. Keeping that sentiment in mind, scientists at the University at Buffalo working on volcanic hazard mitigation have left no technology untapped as they create images of past volcanic flows in order to better predict future ones.

The University at Buffalo has received a grant of $1,999,200 from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas to establish a Geriatric Center of Excellence in its School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

The first demonstration of reduction-oxidation, or redox, chemistry in RNA -- a critical missing link in the experimental evidence for an ancient RNA world -- was reported Sunday by University at Buffalo chemists in Nature Structural Biology online.