Kudos

Undergraduate student Amelia Liddle and 1999 graduate Paula Jacobi were featured in a "Dateline NBC" episode on survival in the wilderness that aired Nov. 17. Liddle, a junior physical therapy major, and Jacobi, who received a bachelor's degree in geology, were interviewed on campus in October about their experience of being lost in the wilderness while hiking on Superstition Mountain in Arizona last spring.

Rebecca Farnham, art director, and Krysia Kij, copy editor, both in the Office of Publications, received an Excellence Award from the University and College Designers Association for the promotional materials they created for UB Summer Sessions.

Frina Arschanska Boldt, associate professor of music, has been touring the country, performing two piano works with her husband, Kenwyn Boldt, as well as rarely played solo works by Russian composers. During the 1999-2000 concert season, Boldt has performed or will perform concerts in Columbus, Ind.; Washington, D.C.; San Bernardino, Calif.; Milwaukee; Ogden, Utah, and Cedarsville, Ohio. As part of each appearance, Boldt is teaching master classes in solo and duo repertoire. She will play a faculty recital March 26 in Slee Hall as part of the 10th Piano Festival, a three-day event that she organizes and directs.

Senior Diana Pratt, who volunteered this summer to help deliver needed medical services to villagers in remote areas of the Himalayas, is the first recipient of the Mary Rosenblum Somit Scholarship. The award, made possible by an endowment established by Albert Somit, former UB executive vice president, provides Pratt with an $1,800 scholarship for the 1999-2000 academic year. She will graduate from UB in May with a bachelor's degree in special studies, combining her interests in medicine and anthropology, and hopes to pursue a medical career.

A team of chemical-engineering majors won third place in a national design competition for developing an apparatus and procedure to purify and recycle methyl ethyl ketone, a substance used as a solvent in the rubber industry. The design saves money for the user, who purchases less solvent and pays less for disposal, while at the same time having a positive impact on the environment. The student team is made up of 15 undergraduates from the Department of Chemical Engineering who are part of the UB student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The project team leaders are seniors Tracey Blaszak, Gilbert Doucet, Jessica Tworek and Paul Trillizio.

Lin Yang, a graduate student working with Paschalis Alexandridis, assistant professor of chemical engineering, took third place in the Materials Science and Engineering Student Poster Contest held at the annual meeting of AIChE. Her poster was entitled: "A SANS Study of Shear-Induced Structural Transitions in Micellar Cubic Crystals Formed by Solvated Block Copolymers." Her co-authors were T. M. Slawecki, a student in the department, and Alexandridis.