Historic Campaign Fuels UB's Progress

As this issue of At Buffalo lands in your mailbox, UB will have concluded a fall semester punctuated by several memorable milestones. In September, we held the ceremonial groundbreaking for Russell L. Agrusa Hall, a new engineering building that will foster student innovation and embolden future engineering professionals to tackle grand challenges. October marked the grand opening of the Brittany Murchie Mulla Sports Performance Center, a state-of-the-art facility that doubles as the training space for UB’s student-athletes and enables them to compete at their peak. The same month, we welcomed New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul to our Downtown Campus, where she launched the $400 mil- lion statewide consortium Empire AI at UB. As we look to construction of the permanent supercomputing center on our North Campus, we are delighted to have Empire AI’s initial computing power installed—18 months ahead of schedule!

As if these events weren’t exciting enough, this fall also marked the closing celebration for UB’s Boldly Buffalo campaign. This historic campaign has significantly fueled our university’s progress, with more than $1.1 billion contributed by donors and alumni in support of our scholarly community—and, by extension, the local and global communities we serve.

At UB, we are driven by our mission to translate our universitywide standard of excellence into meaningful societal impact that resonates across the region, nation and world. To this end, our faculty are providing keys to successful aging and developing an antidote to resistant bacteria. For regions impacted by wildfires, they are conceiving more effective emergency management plans. To combat misinformation, they have built an on- line platform where users can ascertain authentic media from deepfakes.

And our students? When it comes to channeling their excellence into im- pact, they aren’t content to wait until graduation. Instead, they are meeting the moment by tutoring in public schools, creating reading zones in a homeless shelter and testing methods to reduce carbon emissions, to highlight a few initiatives undertaken in recent months.

Across all of UB’s endeavors—in scholarship, research, creative activities and clinical care—our scholarly community has benefitted immensely from the Boldly Buffalo campaign. Philanthropic investments in UB have made our world-class education even more accessible, accelerated game-changing discoveries and inspired our students to make their mark on the world. Whether you gave a gift in support of our living-learning environment, helped endow a scholarship or professorship, or made a student’s dream of studying abroad a reality, you have empowered the boldest ambitions of our great public research university.

As I look ahead to the coming year, it is with a sense of both anticipation for the positive impact our scholars will make on society, and gratitude for all that you—our alumni and friends—do to help UB fulfill our commitment to the public good. Thank you, and best wishes for a joyous New Year!