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UB to commemorate Fillmore’s birthday
The 213th anniversary of the birth of Millard Fillmore, UB’s first chancellor and 13th president of the United States, will be celebrated at a ceremony to be held at 10 a.m. Jan. 7 at Fillmore’s gravesite in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Charles Zukoski, UB provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, will deliver the memorial address at the annual observance, which honors Fillmore, who played a major role in the founding of numerous cultural, civic and community organizations in Erie County.
Hosted by UB, the Forest Lawn Group and the Buffalo Club, the event is free and open to the public. For more information or to RSVP, visit the Special Events website.
“The annual Millard Fillmore commemoration is a time-honored tradition that celebrates the life of a man who made monumental contributions to Buffalo, and who served the United States from its highest office,” says William J. Regan, director of special events at UB.
Col. Kevin Rogers of the 107th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard based at Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station will place a wreath from the White House at the gravesite.
David Pfalzgraf Jr., President of the Buffalo Club; Dean Jewett, chairman of the Forest Lawn Group; and Larry Gingrich, associate dean for Millard Fillmore College, also will be on hand to present wreaths.
The Rev. Margret O’Neall of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo will provide an invocation. The UB Police Color Guard will present the flags. To close the ceremony, West Richter, a UB student, will play taps.
A reception will follow immediately in the Forest Lawn Chapel.
Born on Jan. 7, 1800, Fillmore was instrumental in founding the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, the Buffalo Club and The Buffalo General Hospital. His activities also led to the creation of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences.
This year’s commemoration marks the 48th consecutive year UB has organized the ceremony, a tradition that dates back to 1937.
From 1937 until 1965, the anniversary ceremonies were a cooperative staging by the city of Buffalo and the Buffalo Board of Education.
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Flags at half-mast to honor fallen soldiers
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has directed that flags on state government buildings—including those at UB—be flown at half-mast on Dec. 20 and Dec. 21 in honor of two New York State soldiers who died in Afghanistan.
Army Staff Sgt. Nicholas J. Reid of Rochester will be honored on Dec. 20. Reid died Dec. 13 in Landstuhl, Germany, from wounds suffered on Dec. 9 in Sperwan Village when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device. Read was assigned to the 53rd Ordnance Company (rxplosive ordnance disposal) of the 3rd Ordnance Battalion (explosive ordnance disposal) based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.
Flags will be flown at half-mast on Dec. 21 in honor of Sgt. 1st Class Kevin E. Lipari of Baldwin, who died Dec. 14 in Logar Province.
Lipari was assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, based in Bamberg, Germany.
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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MBA program ranked nationally
Bloomberg Businessweek has again ranked the School of Management as one of the nation’s best business schools in its ranking of full-time MBA programs.
The UB School of Management was ranked No. 57 in the biennial ranking and had the sixth-lowest program cost of all the ranked schools.
“With more than 600 accredited MBA programs considered, we are pleased to be in this elite group,” says Arjang A. Assad, dean of the School of Management. “This ranking is a reflection of the success of our efforts to enhance the quality of our academic programs and global reputation by focusing our resources on the recruitment of high-caliber students and top faculty.”
The rankings are based on student satisfaction (45 percent), corporate recruiter satisfaction (45 percent) and an intellectual capital rating (10 percent) based on the number of articles published by each school’s faculty in 20 publications. Bloomberg Businessweek also ranks the top non-U.S. schools.
More than 10,400 MBA graduates from the class of 2012 at 114 schools in North America, Europe and Asia were surveyed. They evaluated their schools for teaching quality, the effectiveness of career services and other aspects of their B-school experience.
A total of 206 recruiters evaluated their top 20 schools according to the perceived quality of graduates and their company’s experience with MBAs past and present. Companies could rate only schools at which they have actively recruited in recent years, on or off campus.
Results from both the student and employer surveys were combined with the 2010 and 2008 rankings, creating a weighted average with 2012 counting as 50 percent and the other two years counting as 25 percent each.
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Murray honored by psychology society
Sandra L. Murray, UB professor of psychology, has received the 2012 Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.
The award, presented at the society’s annual conference in October, “celebrates scientific contributions made in the early-to-mid stages of a research career (and) is intended to recognize uniquely creative and influential scholarly productivity at or near the peak of one’s scientific career.”
It is one of several honors that have recognized Murray’s scholarship, among them the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, the Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, the Early Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity, and the New Contribution Award from the International Association for Relationship Research.
Murray’s research, which has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, examines motivated cognition in the context of close relationships.
“Specifically,” she says, “(it) examines how individuals in romantic relationships interpret and construct reality in ways that protect them from potential threats to commitment, such as the perception of a partner’s faults, the risks inherent in depending on another and the potential of rejection.”
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Canty to head cardiology group
John M. Canty Jr., the Albert and Elizabeth Rekate Professor of Medicine in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and UB’s chief of cardiovascular medicine, has been named president of the Association of Professors of Cardiology (APC) for 2012-13.
The APC is the pre-eminent professional organization for directors of academic divisions of cardiology and cardiovascular medicine representing academic health care centers throughout the United States. Its mission is to promote the professional development of its members, to lead the effort to train the next generation of cardiovascular specialists and to be the voice of academic cardiology faculty. The organization provides a forum for chiefs of cardiology to meet regularly and discuss issues related to the tripartite mission of academic cardiology divisions.
Canty has been a faculty member of the UB Department of Medicine since 1983 and became the head of the division of cardiovascular medicine in 2006. Since then, he has led UB’s cardiovascular medicine faculty, fostered expansion of programs in education, research and clinical care, and integrated the university’s cardiology sections at the Buffalo Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Erie County Medical Center and Kaleida Health.
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Exports program a cross-border success
Business, education and government leaders last month celebrated the success of the inaugural Exports to Canada program, a collaboration between the School of Management and the Erie County Industrial Development Agency (ECIDA).
The Exports to Canada program is an economic development program that connects School of Management interns with local businesses to help them increase their level of exports across the border.
Carrie Gardner, director of the School of Management’s Credit-Bearing Internship Program (CBIP), and Maryann Stein, director of international programs for ECIDA, worked together to launch the program, which provides training to local businesses seeking to expand their customer base into Canada and then matches them with School of Management interns to help achieve that goal.
“We received strong support from our dean, Arjang Assad, and the UB Office of Economic Engagement, in getting the program under way,” Gardner says.
Stein brought MBA students Mark Bortz and Chris Courtney on board to help run program. Their internships were partially funded through Western New York Prosperity Scholarships.
Bortz and Courtney then matched MBA interns with participating companies, including Ascension Industries, Buffalo Newspress, Life Safety Engineered Systems, RJR Engineering, Secura Technologies and ValueCentric.
“While the anticipated benefit to the businesses is quite clear, this program has also provided our interns with access to some of Western New York’s most fascinating companies and has given them insight into the ECIDA’s mission,” Stein says.
Bortz notes that while he was “pretty green” at the beginning of the internship regarding IDAs and economic development, “this experience has given me an appreciation of how economic development entities directly benefit companies and the community.”
The Exports to Canada program will now be a recurring internship opportunity for MBA students, Gardner says, calling it “a valuable resource for students who wish to gain international business experience.”
John Dunbar Jr., an adjunct instructor in the School of Management, served as faculty mentor to the interns in the program. He is principal of Strategic Investments and Holdings Inc., a private equity firm specializing in growth capital, recapitalization, acquisitions, family businesses and management buyouts of middle market companies.
National Grid provided a grant to assist the program through an approved economic development plan from the New York State Public Service Commission.
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