UB Faculty Members Receive SUNY Research Recognition Awards

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Three faculty members at the University at Buffalo have received the Chancellor's Research Recognition Award for 2002 for being among leading State University of New York researchers in science, medicine and engineering.

The UB honorees are Maurizio Trevisan, interim dean of the School of Health Related Professions and professor and chair of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; Aidong Zhang, professor of computer science and engineering and adjunct assistant professor of electrical engineering, and Huw Davies, professor of chemistry.

They were among 38 honorees recognized at a dinner in Albany on Oct. 24.

SUNY Chancellor Robert L. King has championed research in the SUNY system, setting the goal of doubling sponsored research within five years-to $1 billion annually.

A UB faculty member since 1985, Trevisan is director of the Center for Preventive Medicine -- part of the Women's Health Initiative -- as well as chair of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine. He has served as interim dean of the School of Health Related Professions since Sept. 1, 2001, and in that capacity is spearheading an effort to create a School of Public Health and Health Professions at UB.

A prolific researcher, Trevisan has authored or co-authored more than 110 articles in scholarly publications, and delivered numerous presentations at national and international meetings. A recipient of grants from such funding entities as the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association and the National Cancer Institute, his current work is focused on cardiovascular disease epidemiology.

Zhang leads the CSE Database and Multimedia group that is pursuing active research in the areas of bioinformatics, data mining, client server multimedia presentation system, and content based image retrieval systems. One such project involves a multidisciplinary team of UB pharmaceutics and computer-science researchers that has developed a method for interpreting the massive amount of information that results from the use of DNA microarray technology in studies of multiple sclerosis.

She was one of 19 faculty members selected last September as "innovators" in the Upstate Alliance for Innovation, a group of New York education, industry and government partners that aims to generate economic success in the western part of the state. The alliance is creating a community of innovators to act as accelerators for commercialization of their discoveries and technologies.

Larkin Professor of Organic Chemistry, Davies has been a UB faculty member since 1995. He is the recipient of a Sustained Achievement Award from UB this spring, and a 2002 SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also received an Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Director of the Department of Chemistry's graduate program, Davies holds more than 10 drug-related patents and has published widely in journals and books, as well being a frequent presenter at national and international meetings. His current research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and Johnson and Johnson.

Among his more recent accomplishments, he is the leader of a team of UB organic chemists that made an important advance that greatly facilitates the use of combinatorial chemistry and its commercial potential as a method for drug discovery and development.