Education

David L. Dunn, M.D., Ph.D., Jay Phillips Professor and chair of the nationally prominent Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota and University of Minnesota Hospitals, has been appointed vice president for health sciences at the University at Buffalo by UB President John B. Simpson.

Christopher G. Barrick, Ph.D. '99, of Amherst, has been elected president of the alumni association of the University at Buffalo's Graduate School of Education.

Just in time for the world celebration of physics and its most famous practitioner, Albert Einstein, the University at Buffalo is enjoying a banner year in the discipline. This semester, the total number of physics majors at UB has jumped to 73, an impressive 82.5 per cent increase over January 2002, when there were just 40.

The premise: Teams of budding young entrepreneurs pit their skills and savvy against one another in an attempt to win praise and reward from an accomplished marketing pro. Sound familiar? No, it's not the latest episode of Donald Trump's hit reality-TV show "The Apprentice." It's a new three-credit course, called "The Marketers," modeled after the TV show and offered this semester at the University at Buffalo.

In a run-down section of city street in Niagara Falls, N.Y. -- flanked by abandoned homes and across from a shuttered hospital -- a dilapidated old dormitory for nurses is getting a new start as transitional housing for homeless women and their children. The building's rehabilitation is being made possible, in large measure, by the efforts of University at Buffalo law students attracted to an unglamorous, roll-up-your-sleeves niche of law practice known as affordable housing.

The appointment of Lucinda M. Finley, Frank Raichle Professor of Trial and Appellate Advocacy in the University at Buffalo's Law School, as UB's vice provost for faculty affairs was announced today by Satish K. Tripathi, the university's provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.

Two University at Buffalo faculty members who have spent years researching a concept called contextual vocabulary acquisition, in which readers use clues to figure out meanings of unfamiliar words, plan to turn their findings into a curriculum designed to improve reading skills for students nationwide.

The Internet, mobile technologies and new-media technologies may be the most influential drivers of cultural change in American society today, according to University at Buffalo faculty members offering courses this semester exploring the social and cultural consequences of information and communication technologies.

The next generation of buildings at the University at Buffalo will be the "greenest" ones it has ever constructed, thanks to a new set of guidelines on constructing green, or environmentally sustainable, buildings, published recently by the university.

Freudian claims about the "meaning" of slips of the tongue not withstanding, when it comes to children, such errors reveal much more about what they know about the structure of language than they do about repressed thoughts, according to a University at Buffalo psycholinguist who is the author of a groundbreaking book on the topic.