Health and Medicine

While it's the husband among newlywed couples who has more influence on whether the couple engages in heavy drinking, it's the wife who appears to be in the driver's seat when it comes to determining her husband's marijuana use, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).

A ubiquitous bacterial strain thought to be uninvolved in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in fact is responsible for 2-4 million flare-ups of the condition that occur annually in the United States, researchers from the University at Buffalo have shown.

The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy has selected William J. Jusko, Ph.D., as this year's recipient of its Volwiler Research Achievement Award. Considered the AACP's premier research award, the honor recognizes outstanding research conducted by a pharmaceutical scientist/educator.

A University at Buffalo scientist created a stir in 2003 when he announced a much faster, more precise and far less expensive method of obtaining nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data to map a protein's atomic structure. In the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Thomas A. Szyperski, Ph.D., UB professor of chemistry, and a team of structural genomics scientists present a paper on how they determined the structures of eight proteins in just 10-20 days per protein.

Scientists from Europe, Asia and the U.S. will gather in Buffalo Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 for a symposium honoring the late Leon Farhi, M.D., a pioneer in the field of pulmonary medicine, environmental physiology and bioengineering. Farhi was a SUNY Distinguished Professor and chaired the Department of Physiology in the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biological Sciences for many years.

It's only fitting that the world's greatest rock 'n' roll group has a supercomputer named after it. "U2" has been selected by the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research (CCR) as the name of its newest and most powerful supercomputer, a 1,668-processor Dell high-performance cluster that will be used to support university research ranging from genomics, to groundwater modeling to the monitoring of human-rights abuses.

For any institution that is home to even a single winner in the international "protein structure Olympics," winning a top spot means automatic bragging rights. This year, three of the 17 winning predictor teams in the Sixth Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP), were from the University at Buffalo.

Research by Sherry Pomeroy, Ph.D., of the University at Buffalo School of Nursing on physical activity among rural older adults has earned her a $120,000, two-year postdoctoral fellowship in a national competition funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies.

The National Institutes of Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has selected a University at Buffalo researcher to receive one of its coveted MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) awards, worth $3 million over its first five years.

Sankyo Pharma Development is giving $120,000 to the University at Buffalo School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences for graduate fellowships, as a response to the shortage of qualified researchers in the study of body/drug interactions.