Science and Technology

Students attending the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo received year-end scholarships and awards at a recent ceremony.

Paras N. Prasad, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry in the University at Buffalo's, College of Arts and Sciences and executive director of UB's Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, has been elected a fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering.

Students in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning recently received awards of excellence in their fields of study.

The new building on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus is nearing completion. The scientific agenda has been solidified, corporate partners identified and a formal organizational and governance structure adopted. Barely four years after Gov. George Pataki announced an ambitious proposal to create jobs and jump-start the New York State economy through the creation of high-technology "centers of excellence," UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences is well on its way toward fulfilling its dual mission of improving health care while facilitating economic development in Upstate New York.

Twenty-six students were honored for being the outstanding graduating senior in departments within the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo's 159th general commencement ceremony held on May 15.

The University at Buffalo will present Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert with Igniting Ideas Awards in recognition of their outstanding support of UB at the university's Business Partners Day luncheon at noon on June 6 in the atrium of the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

The development of geographic information science tools to help rangers and forest scientists determine whether logging or prescribed burning is the best way to reduce the fuel load to mitigate the risk of devastating wildfires is the goal of software-development work being done in conjunction with the U.S. Forest Service by Chris S. Renschler, Ph.D., of the University at Buffalo.

As part of an effort to anticipate -- and thwart -- the plans of potential terrorists, the Federal Aviation Administration is supporting the development of a new search engine by University at Buffalo researchers that is designed to detect "hidden" information that can be gleaned from public Web sites.

A University at Buffalo assistant professor is conducting fundamental studies on nanomaterials that may in the future boost detection of important biomolecules for medical or homeland security applications, thanks to a $200,000 James D. Watson Investigator grant from the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR).

When University at Buffalo theorist Surajit Sen published his prediction that solitary waves, tight bundles of energy that travel without dispersing, could break into smaller, "baby" or secondary solitary waves, experts in the field acclaimed it as a fine piece of work. They also felt that these waves might never be seen experimentally. But in a paper published this week in Physical Review Letters, Sen and his co-authors report that they have done just that.