It usually isn't feasible to get members of Congress to come to campus to see firsthand the quality of research that goes on at UB.

So on Tuesday, UB faculty members and administrators brought a piece of UB to Capitol Hill.

President William R. Greiner and Mrs. Greiner; Bruce A. Holm, senior associate vice president for research; Robert Davies, associate vice president for alumni relations, and UB's government relations staff made the trip, accompanied by Russ Miller, director of the Center for Computational Research (CCR), and Tom Furlani, CCR associate director.

Courtesy of CCR's "virtual reality machine," lawmakers and staff members were able to take a virtual walk through CCR, just as if they were right on campus, and see some of UB's world-class research up close and personal.

It marked the first-ever "UB Day in Washington," which UB officials plan to make an annual event.

Modeled after "UB Day in Albany," in which faculty members and alumni spend a day meeting with state legislators to inform them about new developments at the university, "UB Day in Washington" was designed to apprise members of the New York State delegation about new initiatives at UB.

UB faculty members and administrators met with Reps. John LaFalce and Jack Quinn, and with staff members from the offices of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer. They also met with staffers from SUNY and Gov. George Pataki's office.

The purpose of the trip was to educate lawmakers about major advances the university has made in the burgeoning field of bioinformatics and to showcase the high-performance computing and visualization capabilities of CCR, which plays a central role for research in the field.

CCR, one of the nation's leading academic supercomputing centers, has the large-scale computing and visualization capabilities and the staff expertise necessary to tackle the massive computational problems presented by the data in the human genome.

CCR already serves as the computational backbone for research under a $25 million National Institutes of Health grant in structural genomics to a consortium of nine institutions, including UB and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI).

Bioinformatics research projects now under way at CCR include investigations into protein folding, molecular-structure determination, data visualization, bioimaging, pharmacokinetics, and pattern discovery and data mining.

In addition to taking a virtual tour of CCR, members of Congress and their staff members had a chance to view molecules virtually using SnB, the software developed by scientists at UB and HWI, which allows researchers to solve difficult molecular structures based on X-ray diffraction data. Using the ImmersaDesk, UB researchers were able to demonstrate how viewing a solved molecular structure as a virtual environment helps drug designers develop more precisely targeted pharmaceuticals.

Legislators also had the chance to "walk through" or "fly through" virtual-reality representations of designs that were proposed last spring for the Peace Bridge. The designs were the result of a partnership last spring between CCR, IBC Digital, the Virtual Reality Lab in the UB Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and the Public Bridge Authority.

Equipped with a 4-foot-by-5-foot angled screen, CCR's Fakespace Systems ImmersaDesk allows users to virtually immerse themselves in and "walk through" an environment.