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Donations sought for tornado victims
Members of the UB community who would like to assist victims of last week’s devastating tornadoes in the South can drop off donations at two sites on the North Campus.
Donations of bottled water, non-perishable food items, basic toiletry supplies and clothing, as well as cash, are being accepted through May 13 at the Undergraduate Academies, 17 Norton Hall, North Campus, and the Center for Student Leadership and Community Engagement, 235 Student Union, North Campus.
Donations will be sent to the American Red Cross for distribution to tornado victims.
For further information or to help in the collection effort, contact David Dodge at daviddod@buffalo.edu.
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Flags at half-mast
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has directed that flags on state government buildings—including those at UB—be flown at half-mast May 6 and May 9 in honor of a Fort Drum soldier and a Western New York resident killed in action in Afghanistan.
Army Spc. Preston J. Dennis died April 28 when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device in Kandahar Province. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum.
Army Sgt. Kevin W. White of Westfield died May 2 in Kunar Province of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.
Cuomo has ordered that flags on all state buildings be lowered to half-mast in honor of and tribute to New York service members who are killed in action or die in a combat zone.
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REV-UP program to recognize volunteers
The 21th annual REV-UP Recognition Ceremony and Reception will be held at 2 p.m. May 10 in 102 Goodyear Hall, South Campus, in conjunction with the May meeting of the Emeritus Center.
Emeritus Center members also will elect new members for the board of directors at the meeting. Amy Alonzo, who will be graduating this month from the School of Social Work, will be introduced as this year’s recipient of the Emeritus Center’s Rose Weinstein Memorial Scholar Award.
Speaking at the meeting will be Thomas B. Burrows, executive director of the Center for the Arts,” who will discuss “UB’s Center for the Arts: Community, International Programming and Special Initiatives.”
Burrows also will assist Jennifer Bowen, associate vice president for human resources, in presenting REV-UP members with certificates of appreciation, as well as recognizing representatives from departments benefiting from REV-UP volunteers.
The ceremony will recognize 83 REV-UP members who together contributed more than 2,800 hours of volunteer service to 22 UB departments from May 2010 through April 2011.
Since the inception of the REV-UP program in March 1990, more than 63,700 hours of volunteer service have been given to UB by its retirees.
REV-UP (Retired Employee Volunteers—University Program) is a joint program of the Emeritus Center and University Human Resources.
For further information about the REV-UP program, contact Leila (Lee) Baker at 829-2271 or bakerl@buffalo.edu.
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Irish poet to speak at Newman Center
Acclaimed Irish poet Eamon Grennan will give a free reading at 7 p.m. May 12 at the UB Newman Center, 495 Skinnersville Road, across from the Creekside Village apartments on the North Campus.
Grennan will read from his poetry, speak about his life as a poet and answer questions from the audience. A reception featuring Irish music will follow the reading.
Born in Dublin, Grennan studied English and Italian at University College Dublin, and received a PhD in English from Harvard University.
He taught at Vassar College until his retirement and currently teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at Columbia University and New York University. He divides his time between Poughkeepsie and Renvyle in the west of Ireland.
Grennan is the author of numerous volumes, among them “Matter of Fact” (Graywolf Press, 2008); “The Quick of It” (2005); “Still Life with Waterfall” (2002), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; “So It Goes” (1995), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; and “What Light There Is and Other Poems” (1989), a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
His “Leopardi: Selected Poems” (Princeton University Press, 1997) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His most recent collection is “Out of Sight—New and Selected Poems” (Graywolf Press, 2010).
He has received a number of Pushcart Prizes, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
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Info tech company wins Panasci competition
More than $10,000 in seed funding was awarded to a information technology company that won first place in the UB’s Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition (Panasci TEC).
Smruthi Mukund, a UB doctoral student; Anurag Bharadwaj; Venu Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Vedanth Satyanarayana; and Achint Oommen Thomas won the first-place prize for their business plan to launch Lectio Labs.
Lectio Labs proposes to develop a Web-based interface to help users discover new information through shared interests in their network of intellectual peers. After signing up to Lectio, users can receive and read personalized news through their myLectio accounts. They can link their Lectio accounts to their Facebook accounts.
The group also plans a consumer-based application, as well as a customized enterprise version that will facilitate collaboration within companies.
“The Panasci TEC competition was invaluable,” said Mukund. “There are thousands of good ideas, but only the one or two with a good business plan make it. Our Lectio idea was good, but we were definitely not equipped with the skills needed to make it a reality in terms of a business. Through the process laid out by the School of Management’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, we learned so much about revenue streams and marketing streams, and we had even more ideas about how to improve Lectio and make it more interesting to use.”
Now in its 11th year, Panasci TEC awards seed money and business services to the team that presents the best plan for launch of a viable new business. Eleven local ventures have been launched with first-place prize money since the UB competition began, and most are still in business.
In addition to the $10,000 in start-up funding, the Lectio Labs team will receive in-kind awards for legal services from Jaeckle Fleischmann & Mugel LLP, accounting services from Kopin & Co. P.C., human resource start-up services from the People Plan by HR Foundations Inc. and office space from North Forest Office Space, bringing the total package to more than $20,000.
The competition was created by the School of Management and the UB Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach, and is funded with a $1 million endowment from the late Henry A. Panasci Jr. to facilitate and promote the commercialization of UB-generated technologies.
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