Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Sustainability facculty members Dr. Susan Clark and Dr. Nicholas Rajkovich will be moderators for two upcoming NYS webinars discussing the social and infrastrucutral impacts of extreme heat.

Sustianability Month at UB is about celebrating our faculty, staff, and student work in making progress towards the goals of our university-wide Climate Action Plan. 

Fifteen students from UB have been recognized for their outstanding achievements in leadership, community service, campus involvement, or the arts, earning the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence, the highest student award offered by SUNY. 

SUNY Distinguished Professor Andrew Whittaker is part of a cohort led by TerraPraxis, a non-profit focused on action for climate and prosperity, that is developing a digital platform to repower coal plants using advanced nuclear energy. 

A plan to offset carbon emissions by converting brownfields to fields of bamboo. An “ecoscaping” initiative that would encourage even the busiest of people to grow food in their backyard by using ready-to-install garden beds. 

The Center for Industrial Effectiveness has received a $500,000 grant from the NYS Offshore Wind Training Institute, a move that will improve the lives of those who have dedicated their careers to harnessing the power of wind energy.

UB has been named a recipient of a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop technology to improve on the U.S.'s emerging clean energy economy. In addition to these technological developments, the new Center for Accelerated Innovation through Materials hub will support workforce training and fund graduate student research.

A UB-led research team has just secured $1.5 million in funding, including $1.17 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), to develop a two-year project that works to produce clean hydrogen, furthering UB's committment to achiveing carbon neutrality across campuses by 2030.

The UB Center for Industrial Effectiveness (UB TCIE) received a $300,000 grant from the New York State Offshore Wind Training Institute (OWTI) for the project "Preparing NYS’s Renewable Energy and Offshore Wind Supply Chain." Its goal is to promote careers in New York’s supply chain workforce for offshore wind and other renewable energy and sustainability sectors such as solar, green building, and nanotechnology.

UB researcher Dr. Scott Santos is analyzing Halocaridina rubra, or tiny red shrimp, to study ocean population vulnerability and transformation in the face of climate change. 

A UB research team has secured a nearly $3 million grant from the Department of Energy to enhance semiconductor technology, aiming to upgrade the nation's power grid. This grant, among the $48 million in projects unveiled by the energy department in February, will drive the development of advanced high-voltage power switches for better management of electricity flow and a reduction in energy usage, ultimately improving grid resilience against unforeseen outages.

A newly-formed partnership between the Buffalo Sewer Authority and UB's Dept. of Geology is looking at the characteristics of lava to improve wastewater treatment in the City of Buffalo.

First-year MBA students Matthew Mullens and Neharika Korati have won the 2024 Panasci competition, an inititiative that aims to maximize the entreprenurial spirit of students and create viable businesses in Western New York. The company, Empasta - a plant-based, cheese-alternative sauce - secured $25,000 in capital funding and $40,000 in in-kind services to further develop and expand their product offering.

A senior UB physics major and current NASA intern explores the intersection of STEM and the indigenous perspective, delving into cultural values within indigenous communities and highlighting the convergence of science, technology, engineering, and math.

The UB Teacher Residency Program has secured a whopping $3.5 million to expand itself to other areas among WNY. The U.S. Dept. of Energy's SEED Program awarded UB this funding based on the program's success in meeting its goals of diversifying school faculty while strengthening the infrastructure of the public school system.

First-year students enrolled in UB’s geographic information science (GIS) program at Singapore Institute of Management have earned the top prize in an international geospatial science competition for their work mapping food waste across the island nation.

Several UB researchers have been sleected by NASA to contribute to a salletite-based mission that will help better our understanding of climate change. This mission - happening sometime between 2030-2032 - will provide essential real-time data in understanding greenhouse gases and changes in ice and glaciers around the world.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The University at Buffalo has been named to The Princeton Review’s 2022 Green College Honor Roll for earning the highest possible score in the publication’s Green Rating.

Students in Nicholas Rajkovich’s Sustainability 601 course gave their presentations, shared their final reports and received their final grades for the spring semester seminar. Now, the real fun begins as the students’ work will be folded into UB’s climate action planning efforts.

UB has partnered with two other institutions in the development of research to promote equitable and inclusive grading practices in the computing education community. This partnership was made possible by a collaborative $2 million National Science Foundation grant and work will being June 1st.

A UB-led research team is developing new catalysts that aim to turn climate-warming methane emissions - the second most abundant greenhouse gas and the primary component of natural gas - into useful commercial products, such as chemical feedstocks .

UBIT and UB Sustainability have collaborated to modernize telecommunications infrastructure on campus, ensuring state-of-the-art connectivity that is essential for sustainability operations. Preceding the pandemic and continuing on, UB Sustainability embraced technologies like Zoom to optimize communication channels and minimize environmental impact through virtual meetings, underscoring the importance of reliable tech in advancing climate action across UB campuses.