Kudos

Henry J. Durand Jr., former senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education and executive director of Cora P. Maloney College, is the recipient of the Education Award from the Minority Bar Association of Western New York for his efforts to help minority students succeed scholastically.

He will receive the award at the bar association’s 32nd annual Scholarship and Awards Celebration on Sept. 18.

Durand stepped down from his administrative positions at UB earlier this year to take a full-time appointment as a clinical associate professor in the Graduate School of Education.

Andrew McConnell Stott, professor of English and dean of undergraduate education, will celebrate the U.S. publication of his new book, “The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters,” with a reading and book signing at 7 p.m. Sept. 11 at Talking Leaves … Books, 3158 Main St., Buffalo.

The book looks at the time Byron; his doctor, John Polidori; the Shelleys; and Mary Shelley’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont, spent together in Lake Geneva in the spring of 1816, and the far-reaching emotional and literary effects of the gathering.

The book launch is free of charge and open to the public. Those wishing to have a copy of the book signed by Stott are expected to purchase it from Talking Leaves.

Stott, who also serves as director of the Honors College, is the author of “The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi,” which won the Royal Society of Literature Prize and the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography, and was a Guardian Best Book of the Year. “The Poet and the Vampyre” is his first book to be published in America.

In 2011, Stott was named a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Calyampudi Radhakrishna (C.R.) Rao, UB research professor in the Department of Biostatistics, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, at the institution’s convocation on July 26.

Rao was honored “for his contribution to the foundations of modern statistics through the introduction of such concepts as Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao-Blackwell theorem, Rao Distance and Rao Measure, and for introducing the idea of orthogonal arrays for industry to design high-quality products.”

This is Rao’s 38th honorary doctorate. The degrees have been awarded from universities in 19 countries spanning six continents.

Two UB electrical engineering PhD students won a national competition that supports academic researchers developing new wireless technologies.

The students, Emrecan Demirors and George Sklivanitis, won the 2014 Nutaq Software-Defined Radio Academic U.S. National Contest. They will receive software, transmitter/receivers and other equipment valued at $16,000.

Demirors and Sklivanitis work in the Software Defined Networks Lab in UB’s Department of Electrical Engineering. They entered the contest under the guidance of professors Dimitris Pados and Stella Batalama, and associate professor Tommaso Melodia, all from Electrical Engineering. They bested teams from The Ohio State University, Virgina Tech, University of Wisconsin, Madison and other institutes of higher learning.

Based in Quebec City, Nutaq develops software and hardware for a variety of applications.