Science and Technology

Whether it's detecting the image of a knife on an airport X-ray scanner or detecting a hairline crack in an aircraft component, Colin G. Drury, Ph.D., has made a career out of studying how people can be taught to spot very rare events that carry very high consequences.

The University at Buffalo and several other educational institutions have been awarded $800,000 by the National Science Foundation to establish a Western New York Computational and Data Science Grid.

Entire rooms black with mold. Boats sitting in trees, miles from shore. Hospitals with windows broken -- not just by the storm, but by patients and staff desperate for fresh air. City officials standing at major intersections wearing sandwich boards that said "Boil water" since there was no other way to get the word out. Enough solid waste to fill 11 World Trade Center Towers. These are some of the vivid pictures that were drawnat the University at Buffalo by six researchers from various disciplines who presented findings to colleagues about what they saw during reconnaissance trips to the Gulf Coast in September and October.

Paras N. Prasad, Ph.D., SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University at Buffalo, has been named one of the Scientific American 50, the prestigious magazine's annual list of "outstanding acts of leadership in science and technology from the past year."

The Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDEA Center) in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning has received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) to fund a second five-year cycle of its Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Universal Design and the Built Environment (RERC-UD).

James Cathcart, the 2005 John and Magda McHale Fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, is an architect, artist, designer and planner of national and international museums, public institutions and events. Known as well for his exhibition design and intriguing interactive installations, Cathcart will present a free public lecture on Nov. 9 at the University at Buffalo.

In a live and online Webcast seminar, structural engineers and social scientists who were dispatched to New Orleans and Mississippi in the days after Katrina hit will describe the vast devastation they saw and discuss strategies for improving U.S. resilience and response to natural disasters, terrorist attack and other extreme events.

The National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR) at the University at Buffalo will present its inaugural conference from 2-5 p.m. Oct. 27 in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

Academic Management Systems (AMS), a software-development company located in the University at Buffalo Technology Incubator, has released CourseEval3, a Web-based evaluation tool. This new version of its well-established software provides colleges and universities with the ability to set up a wide variety of course, faculty and other assessment activities online.

The expertise of faculty members at the University at Buffalo in the field of nanotechnology, where materials are the size of a billionth of a meter, has brought Buffalo distinct recognition by the National Cancer Institute.