Environment and Sustainability

The University at Buffalo and the New York State Department of Health are teaming up to conduct a study to investigate the incidence of autoimmune and respiratory diseases in the Bellevue neighborhood of the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga.

Thirty-three years after the first Earth Day was celebrated in April 1970, the energy officer at a university that has led the move toward sustainable campuses has issued a "to-do list" for institutions of higher education in order to make further progress toward the "green campus."

Specks of dust may have traveled from America's Great Plains all the way to Greenland in the Arctic Region during the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930s, according to new findings by atmospheric physicists at the University at Buffalo.

University at Buffalo doctoral student Brent Garry has always wanted to go to Mars, but for now he'll settle for Utah. For the next 10 days, he and Abby Semple, another UB doctoral student, will be part of a small team that is simulating the living and working conditions on Mars by donning space suits, exploring the geology of the very "Mars-like" canyons of Utah.

Middle East oil may have center stage right now, but because many scientists and policymakers fear that water will be at the center of future regional disputes, a University at Buffalo professor is studying the environmental impact of the region's hydrology resources and projects.

Lt. Governor Mary Donohue today praised the University at Buffalo for its commitment to become the state's largest purchaser of wind-generated electricity. The university was the first campus in the State University of New York system to purchase a portion of its power from a commercial supplier of wind-generated electricity.

Joseph A. Gardella, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and associate dean for external affairs in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, this week will receive a national award recognizing his efforts working with communities affected by environmental hazards and using them as a backdrop against which he teaches undergraduate students about politics, society and analytical chemistry.

A robust, new geographic information systems (GIS) software tool developed by a University at Buffalo geographer is helping the U.S. Forest Service to more quickly and accurately assess and contain the devastation wrought by forest fires.

Research at the University at Buffalo is focusing on the residues of antibiotics used to promote growth in livestock and to treat their diseases that end up in the environment and could potentially alter microbial ecosystems in humans and animals, as well as in the environment.

When engineers conduct research on groundwater, the water that flows beneath Earth's surface, they usually think of "large-scale" as one watershed -- an area of land where all of the water on it or under it drains into the same place, such as a lake and its tributaries. Using a 300-node Dell high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) in the Center for Computational Research (CCR) at the University at Buffalo, researcjers are working to turn that definition on its head.