Social Sciences

The Center for Urban Studies in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning has received a three-year, $359,090 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to fund a comprehensive, university-assisted community development plan for two Buffalo neighborhoods in serious decline.

Being hospitalized can be a traumatic experience, especially for older persons. Hospitals are noisy, disorienting, full of strangers and infections often spread among patients. Now a new study has shown that for older persons with certain acute conditions, hospital-level care can be provided at home for less money and with fewer clinical complications than in-hospital care.

Early in 2006, researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) will be going into the field with a study designed to translate alcoholism research findings into the "real world" of community-based substance abuse treatment clinics.

The Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth will be aligned with the UB Law School, effective immediately, in a move designed to advance the institute's mission to become one of the nation's premier university-based centers for the study of regions and governments.

With local budget woes cutting, and in some cases eliminating, funding to local public and nonprofit agencies, a program offered by the School of Social Work is providing training to help strengthen the planning and management skills of their staffs.

Dermatologists seem to agree that something in milk and dairy products may be linked to teen-age acne. But is it hormones and "bioactive molecules," as a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology suggested, or is there something else? University at Buffalo dermatologist Harvey Arbesman, M.D., says there could be something else: Iodine.

The Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc., has announced the publication of "Uncrowned Queens: African American Women Community Builders," Volume III, a commemorative publication celebrating the centennial of the Niagara Movement, a major step on the road to black militancy that had its roots in Western New York.

Screeners at airport security checkpoints perform an important task in which they search for objects that belong to threat categories in complex X-ray images. New research by cognitive psychologists at the University at Buffalo and Georgia State University explores the cognitive processes that underlie screening, suggests limits on those processes, and has implications for the training and evaluation of screeners in the field.

A leading ADHD researcher from the University at Buffalo is consulting with mental-health experts and physicians in Japan who are developing the first programs for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in that country, where treatment of ADHD in children has become a national health-care priority.

Three faculty members in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work have been appointed associate deans.