Science and Technology

Move over, Howard Roark! There's a new architect in town and she's not afraid of the color pink. Mattel's Architect Barbie, icon of the building trades, is ready for launch.

The 2011 earthquakes that struck New Zealand and Japan, research on improving nuclear power plant design, earthquake engineering research in the U.S. in the next quarter century and improving resilience of buildings, bridges and critical infrastructure are all on the agenda at Quake Summit 2011, Earthquake & Multi-Hazards Resilience: Progress and Challenges, in Buffalo, NY, June 9-11.

Each year, American drivers waste an estimated 3.7 billion hours, or the equivalent of five days, sitting in traffic, burning 2.3 billion gallons of fuel. Students at the University at Buffalo will soon be learning how to reduce that waste, creating less congestion and cleaner air, thanks to an IBM grant to Adel Sadek, PhD, UB associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has selected Michel Bruneau, PhD, professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering at the University at Buffalo and former director and deputy director of UB's MCEER, as the recipient of the 2011 George Winter Award.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has chosen Andrei M. Reinhorn, PhD, Clifford C. Furnas Professor of Structural Engineering at the University at Buffalo, to receive the 2011 Nathan M. Newmark Medal.

The iSciWNY workforce development program, created by the University at Buffalo's New York Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and Educational Opportunity Center (EOC), is collaborating with the West Seneca Central School District to create a first-of-its-kind academy that links high school students with potential employers in Western New York's growing life sciences industry.

Freshman architecture students from the University at Buffalo have designed and are building a 96-foot-long string of wooden micro-dwellings that will open to the public later this month at Griffis Sculpture Park. Assembly of "The Living Wall" will conclude the week of April 25. The UB School of Architecture and Planning is inviting the public as well as students, professors and critics to attend an opening reception and dedication ceremony for "The Living Wall" at 1 p.m. on April 29 at the main entrance of the Griffis Sculpture Park, 6902 Mill Valley Road, East Otto in Cattaraugus County.

Puneet Singla, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University at Buffalo, was recently chosen to receive a prestigious Air Force Office of Scientific Research award to develop more robust mathematical models to assess space situational awareness. The highly competitive Young Investigators Research Program award will fund Singla's research into "Information Collection and Fusion for Space Situational Awareness."

That's the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.

A new study from the University at Buffalo contradicts the dark flow theory, showing that exploding stars in different parts of the universe do not appear to be moving in sync. Working with data on 557 such stars, called supernovae, UB scientists deduced that while the supernovae closest to Earth all shared a common motion in one direction, supernovae further out were heading somewhere else. An article announcing the research results will appear in a forthcoming edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.