Science and Technology

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.

Alexander N. Cartwright, Ph.D., assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University at Buffalo, is the recipient of a prestigious Department of Defense Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program Award.

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.

A project led by a University at Buffalo geologist involving the topographic mapper being flown by the space shuttle Endeavour could help to develop a new and far more accurate way to map features of shorelines and aid scientists in determining past and future volcanic and seismic activity in an area.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo, in the Feb. 17 issue of Nature, report a new way to study the dynamics of proteins as they pass through the transition state between inactive and active.

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.

Jo Freudenheim, Ph.D., professor of social and preventive medicine at the University at Buffalo, is leading a project that will map the early-childhood residences of a group of women, the proximity of their homes to sites that may have been environmentally hazardous, and compare this data to the women with and without breast cancer to see if there is an association.

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.

Industry and academic experts from around the world will gather at the University at Buffalo on April 27-29 to investigate how a new wave of computer technologies is revolutionizing the way the world conducts business.

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.