Education

A much-anticipated debate Sept. 26 between John Edwards, former Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. senator, and Karl Rove, former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to President George W. Bush, will kick off a high-powered lineup of speakers for the University at Buffalo Distinguished Speaker Series.

The Chinese people resent media reports about exceptional air pollution in Beijing, China's Internet censorship, poor construction of Olympic venues, half-empty hotels, algae-thickened beaches, visa problems and world-wide protests of China's Tibet policy as examples of Western imperial attitudes, says the director of the University at Buffalo's Asian Studies Program.

University at Buffalo faculty members challenged teams of Western New York's best and brightest high school students to prove their scientific and mathematical mettle in a brain-teasing race around the UB North (Amherst) Campus today. Using some of UB Engineering's high-tech lab resources, student teams competed to destroy a miniature building in a simulated earthquake, detect hidden weapons in X-ray images of luggage, use trigonometry to operate a mechanical robot and calculate turbulence in a wind tunnel.

Redemption stories. That's what adminstrators at the Educational Opportunity Center call them. Take the resources of the University at Buffalo's EOC, then mix in the sheer determination and grit of men and women who refuse to be defeated. The result: a steady stream of graduates, many of whom illustrate the triumph of the human spirit and the continuing impact UB has on a frequently overlooked segment of the community.

With females accounting for between 10 and 15 percent of all U.S. engineers, high school can sometimes get lonely for young women who are interested in engineering and technology. But that won't be the case this week when 16 tech-minded young women entering grades 10-12 attend the University at Buffalo's 2008 Fisher-Price Cyber Engineering Workshop for Young Women.

The University at Buffalo is rated very highly as a "great place to work" by the Chronicle of Higher Education in a national survey of the quality of the academic workplace.

Human Resources at the University at Buffalo has been named the recipient of the 2008 Excellence in Human Resource Practices Award from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) in recognition of UB's HR Transformation Initiative.

The University at Buffalo is looking for high-achieving middle school students to fill remaining slots in its two-week summer mathematics and science camp at the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Founded more than 70 years ago, the University at Buffalo Poetry Collection was the first to archive the manuscripts and artifacts of living writers, many of them largely unknown outside their field and some of whom were considered outrageous. Today they are famous and however wild and wooly it was when archived, this enormous trove of material written on the vanguard is "ripe" today and widely accepted as seminal to some of the most important movements and literary forms of the 20th century.

Two University at Buffalo Law School professors have taken steps to make the school a world-renowned center for confronting what they call the epidemic of domestic-violence crimes, locally and internationally, using their teaching positions to coordinate a network of domestic violence advocacy that so far reaches from the classrooms of UB's O'Brian Hall to at least two other continents.