16th Science Exploration Day Set At UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- More than 1,000 high-school students from Erie, Niagara, Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties will visit the University at Buffalo North (Amherst) Campus on May 18 during the 16th annual Science Exploration Day.

Presentations, which will range from preparing for natural disasters to weather forecasting using state-of-the-art technology, will be held from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Most sessions will be held in Baldy, Knox, Norton, O'Brian and Capen halls.

Among the speakers will be William Gregory, a Lockport native and NASA astronaut, who served aboard the space shuttle Endeavor in 1995. Gregory is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force.

His presentation will be given at 9:15 and 10:15 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. in 20 Knox Hall.

Currently spacecraft operations branch chief at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Gregory is a graduate of Lockport Senior High School and the U.S. Air Force Academy. He also is an alumnus of Columbia University and Troy State University.

Science Exploration Day is sponsored by the Niagara Frontier Science Supervisors Association (NFSSA) and the Western Section of the Science Teachers Association of New York State.

Also, the UB College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Admissions, Graduate School of Education, Educational Technology Services and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

In addition, the New York Sea Grant/Great Lakes Program, Wilson Greatbatch, Ltd. and West Valley Nuclear Services Co., Westinghouse.

The program is being organized by Bob Sorensen, chair of the Science Department at Springville-Griffith Institute and Central School and program chair for NFSSA, and Rodney L. Doran, UB professor of learning and instruction and campus coordinator for NFSSA.

Large group demonstrations will feature such topics as new techniques on weather forecasting by Don Paul, WIVB-TV's chief meteorologist; science in everyday life by Donald L. Birdd, associate professor of science education at Buffalo State College, and the cold world of cryogenics by Robert McClellan, a technologist at Praxair.

Other topics will include the humane care and the role of laboratory animals in cancer research by Mike McGarry, director of Laboratory Animal Resources at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and the history of radioactivity by Ronald Palmer, principal scientist at West Valley Nuclear Services.

Rounding out the large-group sessions will be presentations on protecting endangered species by Andrew Steelman, wildlife inspector for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and preventing head and spinal-cord injury by Krisann Piazza, coordinator of the Think First program in the Department of Neurosurgery at Kaleida Health, Millard Fillmore Hospital.

Some 30 additional sessions will be held on such topics as the physics of sound, digital processing and a simulated veterinary medicine surgical procedure.