Alumni

Five University at Buffalo Law School alumni and one non-alumnus will receive Distinguished Alumni Awards on May 3 as the Law Alumni Association holds its annual dinner at the Hyatt Regency Buffalo.

Since it was founded in 1975, June in Buffalo has been a landmark on the new music scene, a gathering place for musical visionaries and their works -- several generations of the finest composers on the international scene.

The world often breaks down into numbers and regular patterns that form predictable cycles. And the sooner children can inherently grasp these patterns, the more confident and comfortable they will be with the world of math. That's the discerning approach of University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education professor Ming Ming Chiu, and it's based on decades of teaching teachers and watching how students learn.

A senior astrophysicist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will regale guests of the University at Buffalo with a brief history of the universe. John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who specializes in infrared astronomy and cosmology, will deliver the UB Department of Physics' 18th annual Moti Lal Rustgi Memorial Lecture on Friday, April 20 at 5 p.m. in 225 Natural Sciences Complex on UB's North Campus in Amherst, N.Y.

Award-winning author and yoga instructor Matthew Sanford will visit the University at Buffalo April 26 to discuss his groundbreaking teaching methods, which approach the discipline from a perspective that creates new levels of awareness and lead his students down previously unexplored avenues of understanding concerning the mind-body relationship.

It turns out that the milk of human kindness is evoked by something besides mom's good example. Research by psychologists at the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Irvine, has found that at least part of the reason some people are kind and generous is because their genes nudge them toward it.

In a new book that scholars are calling one of the most important critical studies of Emily Dickinson ever written, Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and a noted Dickinson scholar, poses a significant challenge to popular and longstanding beliefs about the poet and her poetry.

Charles F. Zukoski has been named provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University at Buffalo, following an international search launched in September. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Zukoski is an internationally recognized scholar in chemical engineering. His appointment was announced today by UB President Satish K. Tripathi. He will be joining UB this summer.

One of the nation's most accomplished leaders in higher education and a Nobel Prize-winning economist will each receive honorary doctorate degrees in humane letters from the State University of New York as part of the University at Buffalo's 166th general commencement ceremony on May 13.

University at Buffalo junior Esther Buckwalter has won the nationally coveted Morris K. Udall Scholarship, awarded to outstanding students who have demonstrated a commitment to careers in the environment, health care or tribal public policy.