Education

Students in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo are hitting the streets of several urban neighborhoods this semester as they take a close look at issues faced by Buffalo communities. And they'll only have to look as far as their PCs to do it.

Even in 2000, African-Americans who are studying to be -- or already are -- mathematicians face a lonely proposition: only about one-quarter of 1 percent of all mathematicians in the United States are black. But many of them are finding a thriving community at the unique Web site created and maintained by a professor of mathematics at the University at Buffalo.

When members of the University at Buffalo's School of Dental Medicine's Class of 2004 arrive on campus this August, they will purchase no textbooks, no laboratory manuals, no workbooks. They will pick up no course outlines or lists of recommended reading. They will receive instead one inauspicious-looking compact disc, which will contain the full content of 90 textbooks in 28 topic and the curriculum for all four years of dental school, including course syllabi, class notes, laboratory manuals and lecture slides.

J. Grant Hauber, an alumnus of the University at Buffalo School of Management, has given $500,000 to the school for construction of a state-of-the-art student center.

The first major national conference held to explore the lives, strengths, problems and needs of young urban women will be held in Buffalo April 14-15. The keynote speaker will be Lani Guinier, professor of law at Harvard University.

An extremely enthusiastic response by University at Buffalo faculty to the year-old, high-performance computing facilities in the Center for Computational Research (CCR) has prompted the center to double the capacity of its most powerful machine, a 64-processor SGI Origin2000 supercomputer. By acquiring 64 additional processors and a high-speed interconnect, the CCR now has a 128-processor Origin2000 supercomputer.

Despite the terror of "Jim Crow" and the backlash of white plantation owners, African Americans had managed to accumulate nearly 15 million acres of land by 1910. Today, that number has declined to less than 1 million acres. Although their numbers have decreased significantly, there are still a handful of black farmers who continue to hold onto their family farms.

When they first arrive on campus, college freshmen are deluged with orientation packets and publications. But after the first few weeks, that deluge dries up, often leaving students' questions unanswered. The University at Buffalo has figured out how to keep information flowing to freshmen -- but not flooding them -- through the development of MyUB, an online portal for freshmen that actually grows with the student.

Richard V. Lee, M.D., University at Buffalo professor of medicine, is editor of a special millennium issue of Annals of Internal Medicine devoted to various interrelationships between time and medicine. The issue was published Jan. 4, 2000.

David K. Anderson has donated to the University at Buffalo the internationally respected Anderson Gallery, with an estimated worth of up to $3 million, and has established a $2 million charitable remainder trust to assist with gallery maintenance and exhibitions. Anderson, whose previous donations to UB include support for the Center for the Arts and the donation of nearly 300 paintings, sculptures and prints with a value totaling more than $1.5 million, also plans to transfer to the university a substantial part of the Anderson Gallery permanent collection.