Two gifts to UB will help university's research and educational efforts

The UB School of Nursing has received a $70,000 gift from a trust created by the late Christian Wyant, who died in 1991 and was the husband of the late Gertrude Vaughn Wyant, a 1936 alumnus of the school.

Support from the unrestricted gift to the Nursing Endowment Fund initially will provide support for the school's Center for Nursing Research. The center, established in 1995, assists faculty and students in developing interdisciplinary research, provides computer resources, houses a research library and serves as a repository for research funding sources. Gertrude Wyant, a native of Corfu, was a teacher in Adams County School District 14 in Colorado and resided in Aurora, Colo., until her death in 1989.

The acquisition of a group of scholarly electronic resources in humanities for Lockwood Library to support new trends in database research has been made possible through a $50,000 gift from Irma DeVoe, a 1936 alumnus of the university.

The gift will be used to establish the Irma DeVoe Humanities Electronic Text Initiative, which will allow UB students and faculty full-text access to major humanities resources via computer. Databases on American poetry, African-American poetry, the Bible, Shakespeare, 18th-century fiction and the Oxford English dictionary are expected to be available via computer network by spring 1997.

DeVoe taught at a rural Wayne County school after graduating with a bachelor's degree in education from Syracuse University in 1931. During the summer, she commuted daily by bus from her hometown to UB, where she received a master's degree in history. After completing her studies at UB, DeVoe taught history at a high school in Clyde, N.Y., and later in LeRoy until her retirement in 1970.