office of international education, university at …...ics. ub global health faculty and programs...

UB INTERNAUB INTERNAUB INTERNAUB INTERNAUB INTERNATIONALTIONALTIONALTIONALTIONALO F F I C E O F I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D U C A T I O N , U N I V E R S I T Y A T B U F F A L O

Refugee Health Summit.2

President in Japan............3

Nursing Programs.............5

Pediatric Residency............6

Medical StudentsOverseas..........................7

Service in Panama..........8

Health Studies in India......9

Addressing Air Pollutionin Bangladesh...............10

RENEW Institute...........11

Pesticides in Egypt..........12

Zimbabwe Project..........13

Social Work Institute....15

Rwandan Genocide.....17

Levinas Seminar............19

Fulbright in China.........21

UB Women's Club.........22

International Activitiesof Faculty & Staff..........23

C O N T E N T S

S P R I N G 2 0 1 4 VOL. XXIII, NO. 1�

UB INTERNATIONALVisit the Office of International

Education website at:

http://www.buffalo.edu/intled

UB GLOBAL HEALTH

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By Pavani Ram

Students, faculty, scientists, and edu-cators in all the schools of the Aca-demic Health Center (AHC) at the

University at Buffalo are learning aboutand contributing to solutions to healthconcerns of global proportions.

UB Global Health represents a newcollective of individuals from all schools inthe Academic Health Center working tohighlight the various global health activi-ties already ongoing at UB, to increasecollaboration and cooperation betweenthe various schools, to enrich our collec-tive experiences in global health, and toaddress global health problems.

Faculty, staff, and students within theAHC (Schools of Dental Medicine, Medi-cine and Biomedical Sciences, Nursing,Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences,Public Health and Health Professions, andSocial Work) are immersed in diverse re-search projects ranging from HIV/AIDS

treatment, hand hygiene, obesity and otherlifestyle related non-communicable chronicdiseases, child survival, effects of environ-mental pollution, and assessment of pesti-cide exposure in Brazil, China, India, Egypt,

Kenya, and Zimbabwe.These global health research initiatives

provide opportunities for faculty collabora-tion, capacity building in resource limitedcountries, as well as international researchprojects for undergraduate and graduatestudents at UB.

Through partnerships with universities,government, and industry, students gain anew understanding of the opportunitiesthat can be realized, and how those inter-face with public policy and health econom-ics.

UB Global Health faculty and programsalso benefit through interactions and cul-tural exchange that broaden our abilities toengage in bi-directional academic andtechnology transfer.

Through global health activities, service

UB medical students join Dr. Ellis Gomez, Family Medicine (4th from r.), on a medical mission in Panama (see p. 8)

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UB HOSTS REFUGEE HEALTH SUMMIT

By Jessica Scates

On April 24, 2014 the UB Office of Global HealthInitiatives (OGHI) of theSchool of Public Health

and Health Professions, in col-laboration with 22 communityagencies and UB entities,hosted a Refugee Health Sum-mit in the UB Educational Op-portunity Center on theuniversity’s downtown campus.

Approximately 130 individu-als representing over 30 agen-cies and communities aroundBuffalo and Western New York,including all of the Western NewYork refugee resettlement agen-cies, were in attendance. Thesummit’s aim was to examinebarriers and explore solutions toculturally engaged health careprovision for refugees in Buffalo.

One of the largest refugeeresettlement areas in the coun-try, Erie County received 1,361refugees for initial resettlementin 2013, in addition to severalhundred more transferring from elsewhere in the U.S.The largest source countries were Burma, Bhutan, Sudan,Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

To better understand the existing barriers to culturallyengaged health care, panelists from Journey’s End Refu-gee Services, International Institute of Buffalo, New YorkState Department of Health, Bhutanese/Nepali Commu-nity, UB School of Nursing, and the Burmese CommunitySupport Center shared their insights and answered ques-tions from the audience.

Access to primary care, cultural unfamiliarity amongproviders, poor interpretation and interpretation costs,lack of mental health programs and screening, and in-ability to access health insurance were some of the barri-ers mentioned by participants.

The director of the OGHI is Pavani Ram, associate pro-fessor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environ-mental Health, School of Public Health and Health Profes-sions, a medical epidemiologist who has worked in morethan a dozen countries from Bangladesh to South Sudanhelping public health practitioners work more effectivelyin regions that often include vast numbers of refugees.

“Refugee families in Western New York come from na-tions on several continents or political regions, and oftenendure much difficulty and loss before they arrive here,”

Ram says.“Nevertheless, many — if not most — are imbued with

energy and hope. They enrich and diversify our regionalculture; broaden our globalperspective; introduce us to theart, music, literature, languageand other aspects of the cul-tures they have carried withthem; and build new enter-prises that support themselves,as well as our shared commu-nity. “Upon arrival,” she says,“refugees are supported by re-settlement agencies, whichprocess government docu-ments, facilitate school enroll-ment, provide English lan-guage courses and link refu-gees to primary medical careproviders. “The agencies also offer in-terpretation and translationservices,” she says, “help ad-dress any unresolved healthproblems and arrange ongo-ing primary medical care oncerefugees’ six-month initial

Medicaid coverage has expired.” OGHI invited guest speakers Myron Glick, MD (JerichoRoad Community Health Center), Kim Griswold, MD,MPH, RN, FAAFP (UB Family Medicine), and Jim Sutton,RPA-C (Rochester General Hospital) to share differentmodels of care that exist in and around Western NewYork.

Their insight provided participants with opportunitiesto explore and ask questions about models of care thatcould be employed in Buffalo to help provide quality cul-turally-engaged care to refugees.

Participants broke up into small groups to discuss ac-tion items and to develop short- and long-term actionstrategies to address barriers to care. Breakout sessionsfocused on the following topics: coordination of stakehold-ers, mentorship of providers, mobilizing human capital,interpretation, and improving linkages of care by address-ing gaps in care.

Participants provided innovative ideas like producinginterpretation apps for smart phones, incorporating cul-turally-engaged training into residency programs, and or-ganizing a community-based steering committee to de-velop deliverable action plans.

We anticipate holding the summit annually in order toreconvene the stakeholder community, to monitor

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President Satish Tripathi made his first official visit toJapan as UB’s 15th president April 12-20, 2014 tostrengthen ties to key exchange partners and to par-

ticipate in a reception hosted by Japan’s large Alumni As-sociation chapter.

Accompanied by his wife Kamlesh and StephenDunnett, Professor and Vice Provost for International Edu-cation, Tripathi visited three longstanding institutionalpartners during this trip. He started in the capital with avisit to Tokyo Uni-versity of Agricul-ture and Technol-ogy (TUAT), whichfirst signed anagreement withUB back in 1993and which has en-gaged in faculty,student and staffexchanges withUB.

The next stopwas Konan Uni-versity in Kobe,where the UB del-egation was re-ceived by seniorleaders of Konanto discuss currentand possible future cooperation. The institutional relation-ship with Konan University is among the most extensiveof any of UB’s institutional partners.

The UB delegation met with administrators and facultyof Konan’s CUBE Program, which annually sends 30-40undergraduate business students to UB for a year of man-agement studies. In addition, the visitors met with thegroup of UB students currently studying abroad at Konan.

From Kobe, the President traveled to Kanazawa Uni-versity on Japan’s west coast. This is UB’s oldest exchangein Japan, dating back to 1973 and inspired by the SisterCity relationship established between the City ofKanazawa and Buffalo in the 1960s. The institutional andcity linkages have remained strong over the years thanksto the active participation by the sister city committeesand the universities themselves.

In line with the strategic initiatives of UB2020 and partof President Tripathi’s continuous effort in engaging withalumni and friends of the university, a reception foralumni and friends of UB was held at Meiji University, UB’slatest international exchange partner in Tokyo, Japan, onApril 19.

Joining the UB delegation for the alumni event wereJoseph Hindrawan, Associate Vice Provost for International

Education and Wei Loon Leong, Director of InternationalAlumni Relations.

The reception drew an attendance of over 140 alumniand friends from across Japan with one attendee comingfrom the city of Kagoshima located in the southern part ofJapan, over 7 hours by high speed train from Tokyo.

Alumni and friends attending the event include alumniwho graduated from UB in the early 1970s to graduateswho have recently returned to Japan after completing

their degreesat UB. Stu-dents who at-tended theEnglish Lan-guage Insti-tute at UB andparticipated inthe exchangeprograms thatUB has hadwith universi-ties in Japanalso attendedthe reception. The pro-gram of theevening be-gan with wel-coming re-

marks by Dr. Toshio Matsutani, MBA ’77, PhD ’85, Presi-dent, UB Alumni Association, Japan Chapter, followed byremarks by Prof. Kosaku Dairokuno, Dean, School of Po-litical Science & Economics, Meiji University and a wel-coming toast by Jack Witt, BA ’84, EdM ’87, Vice Presi-dent, UB Alumni Association, Japan Chapter.

Professor Dunnett introduced UB’s long term relation-ship with Japan through exchange and study abroad pro-grams while noting the decline in students from Japanstudying at UB in the past few years. Wei-Loon Leong in-troduced himself with the hope of furthering engagementopportunities with alumni in Japan through ongoing com-munication with officers of the UB Alumni Association, Ja-pan Chapter.

In his remarks at the reception, President Tripathi ex-pressed his appreciation to Meiji University for their kind-ness in hosting the event, and the UB Alumni AssociationJapan chapter for their hard work in organizing the event.President Tripathi shared the UB2020 strategic vision ofacademic excellence in his remarks. “Our aim throughUB 2020 has to raise UB’s stature even higher among theranks of the leading research universities in the UnitedStates, and the world. I am happy to report that we aremaking significant progress toward this vision,” President

L to r: Hiroshi Ota, Stephen Dunnett, President and Mrs. Tripathi, Joseph Hindrawan, Wei Loon Leong

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learning is fostered inmultiple countries such asBelize, China, DominicanRepublic, India, Mace-donia, Uganda, andeven here in the U.S. Ser-vice learning helps in-crease UB students’ andfaculty’s recognition andunderstanding of healthproblems affecting coun-tries and populations withsignificantly less access toquality healthcare thanthe U.S.

Students have com-pleted field practicum ex-periences in Bangladesh,India, Thailand, andUganda, leading them to appreciate the challenges ofservice delivery in low- and middle-income countries.There are also rich opportunities for future research col-laboration and for student exchange with partnerships inBrazil, India, and Zimbabwe.

Various institutes and offices around the University areinvolved in global health activities, including the Office ofGlobal Health Initiatives, the Institute for Sustainable Glo-bal Engagement, and the Institute for Immigrants andRefugees. Capacity building of clinician scientists also pro-vides new UB centers such as the Clinical and Transla-tional Research Center and the Center of Excellence inBioinformatics and Life Sciences to engage in globalhealth programs that reach across all of the health pro-fessions.

Schools in the AHC are bringing global health homeby working with refugees, who comprise a significant pro-portion of the Buffalo population. AHC students practiceglobal health locally through clinical experiences or vol-unteering in health centers and resettlement agencies,fundraising, and participating in a refugee health coursenewly started in spring 2014.

In addition, the Office of Global Health Initiatives, withsupport from the Office of Interprofessional Education andin collaboration with various University and communitystakeholders, hosted the first annual Refugee Health Sum-mit in Western New York on April 24th 2014 to addressbarriers and potential models to deliver culturally engagedhealth care for refugees right here at home (see articleon page 2).

April 11th was the 4th annual Global Health Day at UB.This exciting program developed by the SPHHP GlobalHealth Initiatives Graduate Student Association featured

speakers describingefforts to ensure pub-lic health in challeng-ing humanitarianemergencies and wassupported by the UBGraduate Student As-sociation, Office ofGlobal Health Initia-tives, and the Depart-ment of Epidemiologyand EnvironmentalHealth (formallyknown as the Depart-ment of Social andPreventive Medicine). Speakers includedDr. Ronald Waldmanfrom The George

Washington University (The Emergency Rooms of PublicHealth: A 40 Year History of Humanitarian Emergencies) andDr. Chun-Hai Isaac Fung from Georgia Southern Univer-sity (Cholera epidemic in Haiti: A long-term perspective in themidst of a humanitarian crisis).

Following their seminars, a poster fair featuring stu-dents’ and faculty’s global activities provided an opportu-nity to highlight the depth and breadth of global healthengagement occurring around the University.

Faculty, student leaders, and staff interested in globalhealth gathered after the poster session to identify cross-cutting interests in research and teaching, as well as de-velop campus-wide activities to foster collaborations andincrease understanding of global health in the larger con-text of UB 2020.

A social hour sponsored by International Pharmaco-therapy Education and Research Initiative (IPERI), Schoolof Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, brought col-leagues together to celebrate the compelling global healthwork being undertaken throughout the university.

Global Health activities at UB bring to life the prin-ciples of Realizing UB2020: local and global communityengagement, partnering across disciplines, sustained ex-posure to global cultures, and service learning throughrobust international collaboration in research and train-ing.

For questions or comments, please feel free to contactDr. Pavani K. Ram ([email protected]), Director, Officeof Global Health Initiatives, School of Public Health andHealth Professions, University at Buffalo. �

Pavani Ram is associate professor of Epidemiology and direc-tor of the Office of Global Health Initiatives.

UB GLOBAL HEALTHcontinued from page 1

Ronald Waldman addressing participants in UB's Global Health Day

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Chelsea Armstrong, Joann Sands, Kaitlyn Dietrick (rear) teaching oral hygiene in San Lazaro, Belize

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By Dianne M. Loomis and Joann Sands

The School of Nursing participated in two global ex-periences during the winter intercession. JoannSands led a group of undergraduate students to

Belize and Dianne M. Loomis, collaborated with SUNYBrockport in a trip to Ollantaytambo, Peru.

BelizeDuring the winter intercession, Professor Sands andseven undergraduate nursing students traveled to Belizeto provide medical care and education. This was the firsttime conducting a Study Abroadcourse in the School of Nursing, sowe worked closely with the UB StudyAbroad office as well as InternationalService Learning (ISL). In addition tothe nine days spent in Belize, stu-dents completed a week of pre-de-parture assignments, and upon theirreturn completed reflections and avideo production for this 2-credit ex-perimental course.

The group arrived in Belize Cityand travelled by bus to Orange WalkTown, which is where they stayed forthe most of their trip. Every day wasbusy working in the clinics, visitingthe local hospital, or conducting ahealth education fair, followed by aneducational or cultural experienceeach evening. The team visited thevillages of San Lazaro, San Jose, and Carmelita.

In the clinics, students began by organizing and set-ting up evaluation stations as well as the pharmacy. Thestudents were responsible for interviewing patients, ob-taining a history, and performing a physical exam. Stu-dents accompanied the patients in to see the doctor andreported their findings to the physician, who worked withthe students in reviewing his findings, developing a diag-nosis, and prescribing a treatment plan.

Once the physician was finished, the students filledthe patients’ prescription according to the physician’s or-ders, and then educated the patient on their diagnosis,medications, risk factor modification, and overall safety.Students agreed that this experience improved their in-terviewing and assessment skills and solidified their thera-peutic communication skills.

One of the many valuable experiences the studentsencountered was the need to rely on their knowledgeand assessment skills. There were no electrocardiogrammachines, computer tomography scanners, x-rays, orlabs to analyze blood samples. All patient diagnoses were

made solely on interviews and physical assessments.The students were also able to experience cultural hu-

mility rather than just learn about it from a lecture. As oneof the students stated during a presentation, “I hear aboutand think about how I would react to a person living in avillage in a remote part of the world, but I was actuallyable to experience it here and have a new perspective.”

In addition to the clinical work, the team experiencedBelize culture by participating in a Belizean dance class,enjoying numerous delicious Belizean dishes, touring theMayan Ruin of LaManai, and ending their trip with a stayin Caye Caulker.

PeruThe journey to Peru was a collaborative effort betweenSUNY Brockport and SUNY Buffalo Schools of Nursing(SON). Connie Lawrence, DNP, FNP-BC, from SUNYBrockport, invited interested family nurse practitioner stu-dents to accompany the established program “Interna-tional Health Adventure in the Sacred Valley” for a 14-daytrip. There were a total of 15 students on the trip; Profes-sor Loomis and three FNP students participated as volun-teers. Sacred Valley Health (SVH) has had a partnershipwith SUNY Brockport for the last three years. The SUNYBuffalo SON’s purpose was to evaluate the experience first-hand as a potential future partnership.

Students participated in four health campaigns. Theoverall goal for the health campaigns was to assist thepromotoras (community health workers) in educating thecommunity members regarding health issues and firstaid. Nursing experiences included performing physicalexams, identifying abnormalities, supporting individualpromotoras at each of the interactive stations and devel-oping culturally appropriate visual prompts.

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Tripathi added.The warm and friendly atmosphere in the crowded

reception hall of Shikonkan Building at Meiji Universitywas a moment for everyone to share and reminisce theirmemorable times at UB. A slideshow put together by Eri-Ota Kostova, BS ’02, with pictures and memories contrib-uted by the alumni who attended the event, brought ev-eryone back to their memorable days inside and outsidethe classroom at UB.

In his closing remarks on behalf of the UB Alumni Asso-ciation, Japan Chapter, Mr. Hiroshi Ota, EdM ‘01, PhD’08, thanked President Tripathi and his delegation fortheir visit to Japan and look forward to the continuoussupport and working together with the Office of AlumniRelations in furthering engagement of UB alumni in Ja-pan with UB.

The overwhelming attendance of the event is a resultof the leadership and hard work of Dr. Toshio Matsutaniand his team consisting of Jack Witt, Hiroshi Ota, TakumiTakeda, Eri Ota-Kostova and Rina Miyasaka. �

REFUGEE HEALTH SUMMITcontinued from page 2

progress towards the vision developed at the 2014 sum-mit, and to identify and address emerging issues affect-ing refugee health. This unique university-community ini-tiative aims to address the needs of the local global com-munity and provides space for the creation of partner-ships to implement solutions to barriers to care for refu-gees.

Additionally, invested students will have innumerableopportunities through inter-professional andmultidisciplinary projects to experience sustained expo-sure to global populations, one of the UB 2020 tenets.

A strengthened university-community partnership ad-dressing refugee health will leverage resources tostrengthen the various groups seeking to foster high-qual-ity health care provision for refugees, and empower vi-brant refugee communities throughout Western NewYork. �

Jessica Scates is coordinator of the Office of Global HealthInitiatives.

PRESIDENT IN JAPANcontinued from page 3

In July 2013,the Univer-sity at Buffalo’s

Pediatric Resi-dency Programintroduced a Glo-bal Health Electiveas part of the elec-tive rotationsavailable to theirresidents. UB nowjoins the increas-ing number of pe-diatric residencieswhich offer theirtrainees global health experiences.

Currently, the program provides experiences in refu-gee health care here in Buffalo, with plans to have resi-dents travel to Guyana, South America, for an interna-tional experience.

Dr. Lorna Fitzpatrick, Pediatric Program Director, has

PEDIATRIC RESIDENCY INTRODUCES GLOBAL HEALTH ELECTIVE

been an instrumentalpart of this initiative.She has teamed upwith physicians inGuyana to develop thePediatric Oncologyprogram at George-town Public Hospital. Guyana, a formerBritish colony, is theonly English-speakingcountry in SouthAmerica. Throughteam work, there havebeen great advances in

providing care for children in this developing country.The Pediatric Residency Program is proud to offer this

elective, helping residents to gain greater insight into thechallenges and rewards of caring for our newest citizens,and using these skills to care for children abroad. �

Georgetown Public Hospital, Guyana

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By Ellen Goldbaum

A diagnosis of acute appendicitis, based solely onclinical observation. A mother’s reluctance to un- dergo Caesarean section based on cultural beliefs

about going through labor. An interest in birth controlmethods that don’t require a husband’s approval.

These are just a few of the dramatic clinical experi-ences UB medical students have had while taking part inoverseas medical programs.

Students will discuss some of those experiences tonightat “Global Health Electives and Medical Relief Projects,”an event that aims to promote volunteer medical oppor-tunities available to UB medical students and educatethem about some of the situations they may encounteroverseas.

“Interest in global health is definitely up at UB,” saysDavid Holmes, director of global health education andclinical associate professor of family medicine in theSchool of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He saysabout a quarter of UB medical students participate in anoverseas medical program, up from the teens a few yearsago.

Some of those students worked at clinics in the Demo-cratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Lebanon and Peru.Two residents in UB’s family medicine program recentlystaffed clinics in Haiti and Mexico.

In her first year at UB, Julie Garchow, now a fourth-year medical student, became co-president of UB’s Inter-national Health Interest Group, working with several like-

minded classmates to help facilitate overseas rotations.“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for medical

students to do global rotations,” she says. Members alsogather regularly to discuss issues in international health.The value of these overseas rotations is hard to overstate,she explains. Last month, she returned to UB after spend-ing four weeks in rural Uganda.

Garchow and two UB classmates worked in a hospital’smaternity, pediatrics and adult internal medicine depart-ments. Because of the lack of medical practitioners of all

kinds, the medical students arecalled upon to play a more ac-tive role, under supervision, inan overseas clinic than they canin the U.S. “In the U.S., a medical stu-dent wouldn’t get to do first as-sist on a C-section because that’swhat the interns and residentsdo,” Garchow says. “So whenyou’re a medical student you’reusually delivering the placenta,not the baby. But in Uganda,we were able to do first assiston C-sections. We had the op-portunity to have more respon-sibility, all the time under thesupervision of a physician.” The students also workedwith many HIV patients withcomorbidities, including ma-laria and typhoid. “You see dis-eases that you just don’t see

here in the U.S.,” says Garchow. While working with HIVpatients in Uganda, she developed a color-coded label-ing system for HIV medications to enable patients withminimal literacy to know what to take when, even if theycouldn’t read the instructions.

The experiences drive home how powerfully cultureand personal experience can impact medicine. Whileworking at a remote mountain clinic in Haiti sponsored bythe international medical relief organization Heart toHeart International, UB family medicine resident AlishaRazack optimized an older woman’s hypertension medi-cations and recommended some blood tests.

The medications are provided for free by Heart toHeart. The woman’s adult son was so thankful he brokedown and cried, sharing his story of how his father haddied of cholera and how he was trying to care for hismother.

Sometimes the cultural differences directly influencehow receptive a patient is to medical care. “One womanneeded an emergency Caesarean delivery, but she didn’t

Rachel Ochotny, Tyler Moore and Julie Garchow at Bwindi Community Hospital in Uganda

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TREATING PATIENTS IN PANAMA DURING SPRING BREAK

By Ellis Gomez, MD

A group of six medical students and two Family Prac-tice attending physicians spent their spring break week working with “Floating Doctors” in Bocas Del

Toro, Panama. We worked alongside twelve other volun-teers, some full time and others part time, to bring amedical clinic to the islands of this area.

The trip provided medical care to remote areas of thenortheastern corner of the country while allowingfirst year medical students to learn about primarycare in a very different setting than they were ac-customed to. The people we served were indig-enous to this province of Panama and were called“Ngobe Bugle.” Students learned to assess pa-tients, interview and examine, as well as dispensemedications—even learning to do some minorprocedures as well.

The team was organized by Dr. David Holmesand the International Health team within the Fam-ily Medicine Department. The interest among themedical students was such that two groups formed,one of which went to Dominican Republic, and theother to Panama. Supervising physicians were onlyavailable to run these two groups at that time.

The group traveled from Panama City to BocasDel Toro (about 400 miles to the north – near theborder with Costa Rica) to meet the group fromFloating Doctors. Our group consisted of othermedical students from England and the U.S.(mostly 3rd and 4th year students), nurses, and physicians.The Floating Doctors group provided housing and somemeals for the week as well as medical supplies for ourclinic.

The first day there we visited a nursing home and dis-pensed medications, examined patients and just spenttime with the elders there. We also helped organize thepharmacy supplies for our multi day trip to a more re-mote region.

The first year medical students learned a lot aboutpharmacology and physical exams, and honed their in-terview skills in the Spanish language. Being a nativeSpanish speaker myself, I was very proud of the fluency ofour group. Every student who went on this trip spokeSpanish, as well as the other attending that was travelingwith us. This was a great tool in understanding and help-ing people from a culture different from our own.

Our second day in “Bocas” we traveled by canoe(called a “cayuco” made from a hallowed out tree) outfit-ted with a motor another 3 ½ hours to a town on a pen-insula called Kusapin.

No easy ride for the twenty people on that “cayuco”—a number of volunteers got a bit sea sick on the way. In

this small town we set up a multi-day clinic that was heldat the local elementary school on their basketball court(which of course was outdoors). Luckily we at least had aroof over our heads to shield us from sun and rain.

Over the next three days we had our “outdoor” clinicand saw over 250 patients. We were able to dispense de-worming medication, anti-inflammatory medications, andantibiotics to the various patients there.

Many of the ailments were related to the living condi-

tions in Kusapin: worm infestation, fungal infections, para-sitic infections, and your common ailments of hyperten-sion and diabetes. This area of northern Panama is veryhot and humid – and located in the rainforest. Many olderpatients asked for glasses for their failing vision (which wewere also able to provide.

In addition to learning about tropical medicine in adifferent cultural setting, at this multi-day clinic the stu-dents were able to experience living in these communi-ties. They experienced the hardship of living in this cli-mate, without the luxury of air conditioning, or runningwater and eating very basic meals (like rice and beans fortwo meals a day).

Some students were thrilled to give their first injection,irrigate a child’s ear, and even debride a foot ulcer. Asmall group even got to make a house call on a patientwho lived in the mountains and offer some surgical careand antibiotics to his infected foot ulcer. �

Ellis Gomez, MD, assistant clinical professor in the Depart-ment of Family Medicine, accompanied the medical studentsto Panama in spring 2014.

Caring for younger patients in Panama

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By Patricia Donovan

Michael Healy, a second-year graduate student inthe UB Department of Epidemiology and Envi-ronmental Health, School of Public Health and

Health Professions (SPHHP), recently returned fromKolkata, West Bengal, India where he spent the summerworking on two major projects that will employ new tech-nologies to screen for cancers.

“In the first case,” he says, “I helped the ChittaranjanNational Cancer Institute (CNCI) in Kolkata write and sub-mit aresearch protocol for a research project that will testthe effectiveness of the portable VELscope in the earlydiagnosis of oral cancers.

“In the second, I am writing a cost benefit analysis of aCNCI cervical cancer screening project, the largest suchproject in eastern India, and one that also employs newdiagnostic technology. The analysis will facilitate theinstitute’s application to extend the study,” Healy says.

The VELscope is an autoflourescence device developedby LED Dental, Inc.to define surgical margins (the visiblenormal tissue or skin margin removed with the surgicalexcision of a tumor, growth, or malignancy) in a hospital-based population, and to to aid in the diagnosis of oralcancer, in this case in a population with a high preva-lence of the disease and a high risk of developing it.

“This major three-year study represents the first col-laboration between CNCI and Roswell Park Cancer Insti-tute (RPCI),” Healy says.

The principle investigator is Mary Reid, PhD, associateprofessor of oncology at RPCI, where she directs collabo-rative research in the Department of Medicine. Reid isalso a research professor of Epidemiology and Environ-mental Health in the UB School of Public Health andHealth Professions.

Arthur Goshin MD, MPH, clinical professor of globalhealth in the school, founded and directs the HealthyWorld Foundation, which supports public health initiativesthat serve the world’s poorest and most vulnerable popu-lations.

The Healthy World Foundation paid for Healy’s partici-pation in this oral screening study, purchased the por-table VELscope (its portability is a requirement for use inrural areas) and provided funding for pilot testing of thestudy.

As Healy points out, carcinomas of the head and neckare especially prevalent in India where they account for30 percent of all cancers.In fact, such cancers are mostcommon in developing countries. By way of comparison,they account for five to ten percent of cancers in the US.Researchers say the rate of incidence in India is due inlarge part to the extensive use of of tobacco, the commonpractice of chewing betel nut and exposure to human

papillomaviruses (HPV).“More than 60 percent of Indians with cancer of the

oral cavity present with late stage disease, which has thepoorest prognosis,” Healy says. “Early diagnosis is difficultin poor rural areas of India where routine oral cancerscreening is non-existent and poverty greatly influencesthe decision to seek health care.

“This project will train and assist Indian health practi-tioners working with a rural population in the use of theportable VELscope and examine its effectiveness in con-junction with other screening methods, in the early diag-nosis of oral cancer,” he says, “when it is is more ame-nable to treatment.”

While working on the oral cancer protocol, Healy wasasked by Partha Basu,MD, MBBS to conduct a cost-effec-tiveness analysis for a second CNCI undertaking. Basuheads the CNCI Department of Gynecology-Oncologyand is project coordinator for the CNCI Cervical CancerPrevention and Control Initiative.

His project is screening women for cervical cancer withvisual inspection of the cervix using acetic acid and Hy-brid Capture, a new technology that detects the pres-ence of HPV DNA. HPV is implicated in cervical cancer.The Hybrid Capture test is being provided by Qiagen.

“This is the largest such evaluation project in easternIndia” Healy says, “and so far has screened 30,000 of the50,000 women it set out to examine. The cost-effective-ness analysis I produce will be used by project directors toapply for funding from the Indian government to con-tinue the project beyond 2015.”

Healy is using his work for the cervical cancer initiativeto complete an integrative project, an analog of a master’sthesis that is a qualification for his master’s degree in pub-lic health.

He says that upon graduation he plans to work for theU.S. Public Health Service (PHS).

“My interest lies in building rapport with disenfran-chised and underserved populations in programs thataim to improve their health status,” he says, “and I wouldlike to work specifically with the Alaska Area Indian HealthService.”

This is a PHS program that works with Alaska Nativetribes and tribal organizations to provide comprehensivehealth services to about 142,000 thousand indigenousAlaskans.

“My experiences with the projects in India,” Healysays, “have given me an entirely new perspective on thedeveloping world and taught me how working in a low-resource environment can foster the kind of innovationand teamwork that overcomes obstacles to public healthsuccess.” �

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By Anne Weaver

From late July to late September, 2013, I had the op-portunity to travel to Dhaka, Bangladesh to conductfield work for a study that

is a part of my PhD dissertationin the Department of Epidemi-ology and EnvironmentalHealth at UB. I am studying un-der the advisement of Dr.Pavani Ram, and have addi-tional collaborators at UB, JohnsHopkins, and the InternationalCentre for Diarrhoeal DiseaseResearch, Bangladesh.

My trip was sponsored bythe School of Public Health andHealth Professions Office ofGlobal Health Initiatives’ Inter-national Field Work Scholarshipand the Department of Micro-biology and Immunology Mi-crobial Pathogenesis TrainingGrant.

Respiratory infections arethe leading cause of death inchildren under the age of fiveworldwide and in Bangladesh.Exposure to air pollution is be-lieved to be a major risk factorfor respiratory infections. Thefocus of my dissertation is to identify the risk factors forexposure to air pollution in Bangladesh.

In a previous study, I examined the effect of householdventilation (windows, doors, and fans) on air pollution inthe Kamalapur slum area in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I foundthat homes with windows had reduced indoor air pollu-tion compared to homes without windows. Additionally,indoor air pollution levels were similar to outdoor air pollu-tion levels.

One of the major sources of household air pollutionworldwide is cooking with wood, bamboo, animal dung,or similar fuels (biomass fuel). Biomass fuel use is relativelyrare in urban Dhaka slums (6-10% of homes use only bio-mass fuel for cooking), but high levels of air pollution havebeen observed, even in homes that do not use biomassfuel.

Given my previous findings that indoor and outdoorair pollution levels were related, I traveled to Bangladeshto identify whether or not biomass smoke from a neigh-boring home may affect indoor air pollution in a homethat uses cleaner fuel. My team recruited homes that usewood for cooking and neighboring homes that use elec-

tric stoves in the Mirpur slum area in Dhaka.We monitored air pollution levels in each home, and I

am currently analyzing the data.Due to the previous study I com-pleted in Bangladesh, I was pre-pared for daily life there, butphysically being in Bangladeshand visiting participants’ homeswas incredibly valuable to un-derstanding the lifestyle and liv-ing conditions of study partici-pants. I was struck again by the hos-pitality of the residents and mycolleagues. When I visitedhomes, people insisted that Icome in to sit and rest. I waswarmly welcomed and offeredfood or tea in nearly every homeI visited. Although I know very littleBengali, participants and col-leagues alike were thrilled that Iknew any at all. This hospitalityand friendliness are nearly-uni-versal in a country that gainedindependence in 1971, after adevastating revolutionary war.Bangladesh has also been

plagued by cyclones, droughts, and famines. I amamazed at how far the people of Bangladesh have comein just 42 years and how they continue to work unceas-ingly to better their country, despite so many obstacles.

I have been involved in global health work for most ofmy graduate studies. For my Master’s thesis, I conducteda secondary analysis of data that was previously collectedin Nyanza Province, Kenya. Having never been in Kenya,I struggled to put these data into context.

Working in Bangladesh in-person for an extended pe-riod of time for two of my dissertation projects has helpedme to better understand and analyze the data. Addition-ally, supervising the implementation of a study and lead-ing a team with a variety of English skills was a dauntingtask.

This experience challenged me, but I gained self-con-fidence as a researcher. I would strongly encourage any-one to work internationally. I never imagined how much Iwould learn about myself and about the world. �

Anne Weaver was the recipient of the Office of Global healthInitiatives’ International Field Work Scholarship.

The Mirpur Slum where Anne Weaver did her research

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By Patricia Donovan

UB has announced the launch of RENEW (Researchand Education in eNergy, Environment and Wa-ter), an ambitious, university-wide, interdisciplinary

research institute that will focus on the most difficult andcomplex environmental issues, as well as the social andeconomic issues with which they are intertwined.

One of the most expansive initiatives launched in re-cent years by the university, RENEW will harness the ex-pertise of more than100 faculty across theuniversity, with the goalof hiring 20 more out-standing faculty withexpertise in such areasas aquatic ecology, pol-lution law, behavioraleconomics, environ-mental planning, com-munity health and en-ergy/envi ronmenta lsystems.

The RENEW Institutewill place the universityat the forefront of envi-ronmental and energyresearch focused onsustainability, climatechange and natural resources, says Provost Charles F.Zukoski. The initiative will build upon faculty strengthsacross six UB schools and colleges. It will receive up to $15million in university funding over the next five years tohire faculty and develop new academic programs for stu-dents.

“This is what great research universities do. We bringtogether the best minds to address timely topics and solveproblems,” Zukoski says.

“One of the most urgent challenges faced by human-kind is finding ways to sustain human existence whileadapting to climate change and the evolving needs forenergy and fresh water,” he adds.

RENEW, Zukoski says, evolved from the UB 2020 plan toposition the university as one of the world’s leading uni-versities by investing in and harnessing UB’s researchstrengths to bring positive changes to the world.

Environmental problems, he noted, are of particularconcern in Western New York, which is surrounded bywater, including two Great Lakes, and a legacy of earlyindustrialization.

An international search for a world-class scholar andresearcher to direct the institute is underway, saidAlexander N. Cartwright, vice president for research and

economic development.The director will foster collaborations among UB re-

searchers, lead the search for additional faculty research-ers to join the institute, coordinate with academic depart-ments to develop new undergraduate and graduate pro-grams, and establish partnerships with organizations,agencies and community leaders.

Alan J. Rabideau, professor of civil, structural and envi-ronmental engineering, will lay the groundwork for RE-NEW as the search gets underway. Rabideau will serve as

UB’s first Research andEconomic DevelopmentLeadership Fellow andwill begin to coordinatefaculty involvement inthe institute and meetwith local communityleaders. RENEW’s researchthrusts will address a va-riety of prominent is-sues, such as energy di-versification, freshwaterprotection and restora-tion; ecosystem science,engineering and policy;societal adaptation tochanging environ-ments and the green

economy; public health; and environmental manage-ment and governance.

The institute’s interdisciplinary focus—involving the fac-ulties of the School of Architecture and Planning, Collegeof Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering and AppliedSciences, Law School, School of Management and Schoolof Public Health and Health Professions—is designed tofoster new collaborations and produce new ideas.

The initiative will tap the leadership and vision of thedeans and faculty at the six UB schools and colleges.

“Using this integrated approach, we will bring to-gether researchers in the sciences, technology, publichealth, human behavior, public policy and other disci-plines to develop new ways to strengthen and supportour natural and human-made environments,” Cartwrightsays.

The establishment of the RENEW Institute was recom-mended by an advisory group chaired by Cartwright,whose members were the deans of the six schools andcolleges participating in the institute, and from a facultysteering committee, also from across the six schools andcolleges.

The faculty steering committee that developed specificrecommendations for RENEW’s operation included Diana

Students in the lab of Berat Haznedaroglu, a water resources expert, developingbiological control mechanisms against harmful algae blooms.


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By Lamya Hamad

The Nile Delta region in Egypt is primarily an agricul-tural community with many farmers growing cot-ton. To ensure that the cotton is of high quality, the

Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture monitors the cropthroughout the season, including the application of pesti-cides by government workers.

As in other developing countries, workers in Egypt walkthrough the cotton fields and use backpack sprayers to

apply the pesticides However, workers seldom use safetyequipment to protect themselves from exposure. The pri-mary pesticide applied to the cotton is an organo-phos-phorus pesticide that is widely used around the world andis also a known neurotoxin.

UB professors Jim Olson (Pharmacology and Toxicol-ogy and Epidemiology and Environmental Health) andMatthew Bonner (Epidemiology and EnvironmentalHealth) were concerned about the adverse health effectsfor community members and agricultural workers in farm-ing communities.

In June 2008, Olson and Bonner, joined an interdisci-plinary team of investigators, led by Kent Anger and PamLein from Ohio State, and scientists from Menoufia Uni-versity in Egypt and the University of Washington, to con-duct a four-year study of pesticide workers in Egypt.

This work was funded by the National Institute of Envi-ronmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The goal was to mea-sure exposure to pesticides in agricultural workers and toidentify ways to reduce exposures.

Working together with an Egyptian team of research-ers, they set out to establish a functional research labora-tory at Menoufia University to characterize inhalation anddermal exposure to pesticides and assess potential defi-cits in cognitive performance. The study found higher

exposure to pesticides, by absorption through the skin, inagricultural workers compared to non-agricultural work-ers. These findings were communicated to the Ministry ofAgriculture and the workers and strategies were offeredto reduce exposure to pesticides.

A second project, funded by NIEHS and the FogartyInternational Center, provided an opportunity to expandthis collaboration. Working with Diane Rohlman from theUniversity of Iowa and a team of Egyptian collaborators,Olson and Bonner (UB), examined occupational and en-

vironmental exposure to pesticides in adolescents. This study focused on characterizing the change inexposure across the application season. Tracking ex-posure before, during and after the application sea-son revealed that pesticide exposures increased dur-ing the application season and then were reducedwhen application ended. This pattern was found inadolescents working as applicators and in adolescentsliving in the community, demonstrating both occupa-tional and environmental exposure. In 2013, this team of investigators received addi-tional funding from NIEHS and the Fogarty Interna-tional Center to continue the work with adolescents.The new project will continue to follow adolescentsliving and working in agricultural communities andevaluate methods to reduce exposure.An important part of this project is to build capacity atMenoufia University and to support Egyptian scientists,

to allow this research to be conducted at a local level.These projects build international partnerships and pro-vide opportunities to address public health issues that area concern worldwide.

All research has challenges, and this project is no ex-ception. In addition to the usual obstacles faced by fieldresearch projects, the volatile political situation in Egyptadded another challenge to be overcome. Because travelto Egypt was difficult for the US researchers and travel tothe US was difficult for Egyptian researchers, an alterna-tive solution had to be found.

Thinking outside the box, the team met in Dubai inDecember 2013 for a workshop organized by the ProjectCoordinator, Lamya Hamad, a 2013 Masters in PublicHealth graduate from UB.

Ten members of the research team participated in thecapacity building workshop designed to facilitate one-on-one training with the field research staff, as well as pro-viding an opportunity to plan future research and train-ing activities. Perhaps the most successful outcome of theworkshop was the strengthening of the partnershipamong members of the research team.

Agricultural workers around the world are at risk toexposures from pesticides. Limited resources and occupa-tional and environmental conditions all contribute to this

Agricultural workers spraying pesticide in a cotton field in Egypt


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By Sara Saldi

With 14 percent of Zimbabwe’s population livingwith HIV/AIDS, the need for prevention pro-grams for the entire country, as well as new

drugs, treatment and support of those living with HIV, isessential.

Because of these numbers, the University at Buffalo hasbeen working with the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) toestablish training programs for scientists and citizens inan ongoing effort to study, reduce and treat the incidenceof HIV in Zimbabwe.

Recently, as part of its ongoing collaboration with UZ,a team of researchers from the University at Buffalo vis-ited Zimbabwe – some for the fourth time – to work withcollaborating scientists and meet with adult and adoles-cent HIV community support groups.

The UB team, led by Gene Morse, professor and asso-ciate director of UB’s New York State Center of Excellencein Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, included: VenuGovindaraju, a SUNY Distinguished Professor of ComputerScience and Engineering; Robin DiFrancesco researchassistant professor; Kelly Tooley, senior research supportspecialist and program administrator for CPQA and AITRP;and Samantha Sithole, a current HIV implementation re-search fellow in the Translational Pharmacology ResearchCore in the Center of Excellence.

During the visit, the UB Clinical Pharmacology QualityAssurance Program (CPQA) and the UB-UZ AIDS Interna-tional Training & Research Program (AITRP) worked withresearchers and laboratory technicians at the NationalInstitutes of Health (NIH)-funded Harare InternationalPharmacology Specialty Laboratory (HIPSL) at UZ.

The HIPSL at UZ, directed by Professor Charles C.Maponga, ’88, is one of six pharmacology specialty labo-ratories in the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) Labora-tory Center Network that provides clinical pharmacologyexpertise and a bioanalytical resource to conduct drugassays for samples collected from ACTG clinical studies.

The UB CPQA provides technical guidance for analyti-cal aspects of drug assays and conducts a comprehensiveon-site assessment as part of its mission to seek consis-tency across pharmacology laboratories in the network.

The HIPSL, located in the same building with the Medi-cines Control Authority of Zimbabwe, is a growing labo-

ratory facility that will provide an importantresearch core laboratory for the National In-stitute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases(NIAID) HIV Research Networks. In additionto building the research facility, capacitybuilding efforts have focused on trainingyoung scientists and laboratory technologiststhat will increase HIV research capacity. A second component of the visit includedthe continued growth of the UB-UZ AITRP,which is funded by the Fogarty InternationalCenter at the NIH and has a primary goal ofincreasing HIV clinical pharmacology re-search capacity at UZ through mentoredtraining of UZ graduate students and facultyin HIV clinical pharmacology research meth-odology, laboratory sciences and appliedtherapeutics.

This team was led by Tinashe Mudzviti,an AITRP mentor at UZ, and visited the Op-

portunistic Infections (OI) Clinic at the Parirenyatwa Hos-pital and the Newlands Clinic to review the current ap-proach to medical records and the status of implementa-tion of electronic medical records (EMR) systems. The UB-UZ AITRP previously received a supplemental award todevelop standardized approaches to the use of EMRs tofacilitate clinical research.

Govindaraju is planning pilot implementation researchprojects that will employ the handwriting recognitiontechnology he developed at UB to create legacy recordsfrom paper medical charts that can be incorporated withgrowing EMR use.

The UB group additionally met with the PARI SupportGroup, a group of adult HIV-infected patients who meetat the OI Clinic and provide support for its members to beadherent to anti-retroviral drugs, achieve viral suppres-sion and participate in clinical research projects.

Morse led a week-long workshop on HIV Research Pub-lications. The workshop included informal group and in-dividual meetings and provided an opportunity for directmentoring in preparing a research manuscript, criteria

L to r: Gene Morse, Charles Maponga, Kelly Tooley, Robin DiFrancesco, and Venu Govindaraju

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Aga, professor of chemistry; Debabrata Talukdar, profes-sor of marketing; Richelle Allen-King, professor of geol-ogy; D. Scott Mackay, professor of geography; ErrolMeidinger, professor of law; G. William Page, professor ofurban and regional planning; Rabideau; and JenniferZirnheld, assistant professor of electrical engineering. �

Patricia Donovan is a senior editor with University Communi-cations.

problem. Understanding exposure during agricultural ac-tivities and the impact on health will allow researchers todevelop effective interventions to reduce exposure andprotect the health of both workers and members of agri-cultural communities. �

Lamya Hamad, a 2013 Masters in Public Health graduatefrom UB, is the coordinator of the pesticide project.

RENEW INSTITUTEcontinued from page 11

PESTICIDES IN EGYPTcontinued from page 12

ZIMBABWE PROJECTcontinued from page 13

for identifying peer-reviewed journals, identifying andfacilitating co-author contributions and establishingtimelines for manuscript writing and submission. All cur-rent AITRP fellows participated in the workshop and eachhas a manuscript that is being finalized for journal sub-mission.

The UB investigators then gathered with faculty of theUZ College of Health Sciences during the initial meetingof the AITRP with the leaders of the UZ Medical EducationPartnership Initiative (MEPI).

The UZ MEPI is home to the Novel Education and Clini-cal Trainees and Researchers (NECTAR) Program that isan NIH-PEPFAR supported grant.

NECTAR is a grant awarded to the UZ College of HealthSciences (UZCHS) for the implementation of a programto improve medical education and strengthen researchcapacity at the college for the period 2010-15.

The AITRP and NECTAR have jointly established anImplementation Sciences and Research Committee thatwill focus on including education, training and researchopportunities within the curriculum as well as develop-ment of multidisciplinary pilot implementation researchprojects for faculty and graduate students. The membersof the committee include Maponga, Mudzviti and DexterChegwena (UZ-AITRP), Morse (UB-AITRP), James Hakim,Zvavahara (Mike) Chirenje, Kusum Nathoo, JonathanGandari and Gibson Mandozana (all from UZ-MEPI).

The AITRP mentors and fellows contribute to this effortby working with the members to complete various agri-cultural projects that are aimed at increasing food secu-rity, thereby improving patient retention in care, treat-ment and medication adherence.

Through his AITRP mentoring at the Newlands Clinic,Mudzviti has also established a community leadership roleat Africaid Zvandiri, a support group for HIV-infected chil-dren and adolescents in the Harare area.

The Zvandiri program provides community-based pre-vention, care and psychosocial support for HIV-positive

children and adolescents. These services complement thecare provided in clinics and promote a continuum of carefor children and their families. The Zvandiri model isheaded by HIV-positive adolescents who lead and planservices for counselors, trainers and advocates for theirHIV-positive peers.

The Zvandiri group has gained international recogni-tion for its recent release of a music video, “How to Dance”focusing the public’s awareness on the needs and hopesof children who have grown up with HIV infection,achieved sustained viral suppression with combinationantiretrovirals and are now planning their future as mem-bers of the local community.

During the visit to the Zvandiri group, Morse discussedthe outstanding contributions the group is making towardassisting HIV-infected children in Zimbabwe and consid-ered the opportunities for networking with UB programsthat will foster medication adherence, peer counseling,vocational training and small business development mod-els. Tooley met with a pediatric AIDS support group in thecommunity setting, which is also assisted by Africaid andmeets every month to teach HIV-infected adolescents andchildren the critical life lessons necessary to be wellequipped to address issues of growing up with HIV.

“This trip provided an opportunity to discuss the im-portant progress that has been made through the UBpartnership with UZ,” said Morse.

“The UZ group of researchers have become leaderswithin their academic community through their focus onbuilding pharmacology laboratory resources for research,clinical programs for HIV-infected individuals and by link-ing patient support groups to clinical researchers whowork closely with the government ministries to advancethe national effort to conduct the Evidence to Action (ETA)project that was announced at our meetings last March.

“Great progress is being made through the persever-ance and dedication of the newly trained researchers toachieve the national goals of Zimbabwe.” �

Sara Saldi is a senior editor with University Communications.

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By Charles Anzalone

Two faculty members in the School of Social Workhave launched a graduate student and research institute to encourage global activities that extend

trauma-informed treatment, human rights perspectivesand other themes championed by the school to otherparts of the world.

The Institute on Sustainable Global Engagement is thebrainchild of Laura Lewis, director of field education, and

Filomena Critelli, associate professor.“After seeing faculty and students involved in an in-

creasing number of global activities, we felt it was impor-tant to make these more visible,” says Lewis.

“We have students completing their social workpracticum in other parts of the world — Macedonia,Thailand, South Korea — and a growing number of part-nerships with non-governmental organizations andschools of social work. These experiences can be trans-formative for students and for participating faculty.”Lewis says the institute will encourage students and fac-ulty to think about social problems more broadly andlearn new ways of responding to these concerns.

“Our study abroad trip to the post-Soviet Republic ofMoldova, for example, increases our understandingabout what is happening on the world stage and eventsin Ukraine,” says Lewis. “We hope to further attract inno-vative projects and partnerships. This work is importantbecause people around the world are united by similarissues and concerns.”

The new institute begins its work with an InternationalAssociation of Schools of Social Work-funded project re-garding transnational migration. The project will exam-ine the experiences of transnational families who live forprolonged periods of separation due to the migration ofone family member. This phenomenon is one by-productof an increasingly globalized world and illustrates the waysin which a global lens is increasingly necessary to under-stand and address social problems, according to Lewis and

Critelli. The institute’s planned activities includeresearch and partnerships that empha-size cross-national collaboration to addresseducational opportunities. There will becross -national research projects, facultyresearch and scholarship focused on glo-bal issues that identify innovative socialwork and multidisciplinary responses tothem. “Social workers need to be more knowl-edgeable and have an understanding ofthe larger political and social issues thatare going on in the world,” Critelli says. “We really recognize that as socialworkers — and preparing people to workin social work — there is a need for agreater global perspective to the work,”Critelli says. “So much of what we do isvery connected to globalization and toglobal trends.” “Our School of Social Work emphasizes‘from local to global’ in its mission state-

ment,” says Lewis. “So it’s building on thecurrent existing foundation of the school’s global activities,emphasizing our curricular focus on a trauma-informed —and human rights issues.”

A trauma-informed approach recognizes that traumais present in a large percentage of the population andworks to avoid repeating the trauma. A human rights per-spective complements this approach and is fundamentalto social work because of its emphasis on universality ofrights on the basis of being human. The rights-based ap-proach represents a shift from looking at social problems,such as poverty or lack of education, as “needs” to under-standing them as “rights for all,” emphasizing the needfor respect and advocacy to ensure these rights.

“We see these ideas integrated in the work of our col-leagues in other parts of the world and have much to learnfrom them,” says Lewis.

“When you live your life in one country, it’s easy to losesight of all the ways you are privileged. Working in anacademic institution in the U.S., we have access to re-

INSTITUTE ON SUSTAINABLE GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT

Through the efforts of the Institute, organizations in Moldova are supporting the rights of personswith disabilities.


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sources. I’ve seen people doing great work in countrieslike Moldova, where Amazon.com does not deliver. Thebooks we can share and materials make a tremendousdifference there. But you see people doing tremendouswork. These people are being forces for social change,supporting the rights of people — people with disabilities,for example — building community supports where therehave not been any before.”

Colleagues at Prerana, an NGO in India that operatesa shelter for children of brothel workers in Mumbai, askedthe young residents what they think social workers needto learn.

“Social workers should ensure that they possess a non-judgmental attitude and do not force their choices uponchildren,” the residents answered.

“And that really sums it up,” says Lewis. The two social work professors are connected around

their shared interest in international social work. Critellilaunched a course on this topic in the School of SocialWork in 2008.

One of Critelli’s particular areas of expertise has beenresearch based in Pakistan, where she has chronicled howwomen’s activism has helped curb dramatic widespreadviolations of women’s rights.

In India, after meeting with social workers at a college,a hospital and several non-governmental organizations,

SOCIAL WORK INSTITUTEcontinued from page 13

Critelli and Lewis learned their Indian counterparts take adifferent approach. Not only do they work with clients onan individual basis, they also go back and advocate on agovernmental level for changes in policy.

“We don’t often operate that way in the U.S.,” Lewissays.

The two also have twice traveled together to India,where they saw many innovative programs and witnessedfirsthand the application of human rights approaches toaddress such social problems as child labor and commer-cial sexual exploitation.

They are seeking ways to sustain partnerships withthese organizations to promote professional and scholarlyexchanges, and engage in joint research to seek solutionsto these issues.

“As social workers, we care about the equitable distri-bution of resources, we care about the needs ofmarginalized populations and we care about basic hu-man rights,” says Lewis. “We see work being done that istruly inspiring and there is always potential for collabora-tion. I get excited about bringing together faculty, practi-tioners and students using online tools.

Technology makes it possible to continue conversationsfrom a distance; conversations that first began face-to-face.” Currently, the two are working on a project relatedto transnational migration, with post-Soviet countries astheir focus. �

Charles Anzalone is a senior editor with University Communi-cations.

MEDICAL STUDENTS OVERSEAScontinued from page 7

want it,” Garchow recalls. “We thought she was justscared, but then we found out that in her culture, peoplebelieve that if you don’t push the baby out, you’re not awoman. In that culture, laboring is a badge of honor.”With encouragement and support, the mother did un-dergo the procedure and delivered a healthy baby.

Students are expected to pay for their travel and ac-commodations, but student fundraising efforts at UB arehelping to offset these costs. This year, first-year medicalstudents are raising funds to send a group to a clinic inHaiti; they have been so successful that they have moneyto spend on medications for the clinic as well.

Another UB group of second-year students went toPanama this spring (see page 8) to work with FloatingDoctors, which provides free health care to isolated re-gions worldwide.

Holmes began leading overseas rotations with UBmedical students in the late 1990s. Since then, he has ledUB medical students on medical rotations in Haiti and the

Dominican Republic; he also has done medical mission-ary work in Kenya, India and Costa Rica.

“Dr. Holmes is our biggest cheerleader,” saysGarchow. “When we wanted to start the InternationalHealth Interest Group, he and the Department of FamilyMedicine said, ‘Tell us what you need. We’ll help you.’Karen Devlin, the department’s program coordinator,also has been extremely helpful and helps coordinate allthe detail. �

Ellen Goldbaum is a senior editor with University Communi-cations.

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By Sue Wuetcher

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the geno-cide in Rwanda, in which an estimated 800,000people lost their lives over 100 days beginning in

April 1994.To commemorate this anniversary and honor the

memory of Alison L. Des Forges, internationally knownhistorian and human rights activist, UB presented twoevents on April 24, 2014.

The first, an international symposiumthat brought together some leading survi-vors of the genocide and experts on its ori-gins, course and consequences, was heldfrom 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at UB's North Cam-pus. The symposium was free and open tothe public.

Alison Des Forges, an internationallyknown historian and human rights activist,was one of the world’s leading experts onRwanda.

Later that day, a Scholarship Fund Din-ner and Discussion took place at the JacobsExecutive Development Center in down-town Buffalo.

Both events were sponsored by theAlison L. Des Forges Memorial Committee,the UB Humanities Institute, Office of the Vice Provost forInternational Education and UB Department of History,and Hodgson-Russ LLP.

One of the world’s leading experts on Rwanda, DesForges was senior adviser to the Africa Division of HumanRights Watch at the time of her death in 2009 in the crashof Continental flight 3407 in Clarence Center, near Buf-falo.

She was an adjunct member of the UB history facultyduring the 1990s and received an honorary doctoratefrom SUNY during UB’s 155th general commencementceremony in 2001.

Her book, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide inRwanda, is a landmark account of that event and her tire-less efforts to awaken the international community to thehorrors of the genocide earned her much recognition,including a MacArthur Foundation Award in 1999.

The symposium, “The Rwandan Genocide: 20 YearsLater,” featured six main speakers addressing three top-ics: “Justice for the Perpetrators,” “Healing for the Survi-vors” and “Contemporary Rwandan Politics.”

The panel on “Justice for the Perpetrators” addressedwhat happened to the perpetrators of the genocide andhow justice was sought and administered. Francois-XavierNsanzuwera, appeal counsel in the Prosecutor’s Office forthe United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for

Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, brought to trial andconvicted some of the most egregious perpetrators of thegenocide. He assessed the record of the tribunal and itslegacy.

While those most responsible for planning and incit-ing the genocide were tried at the ICTR, thousands of thelesser figures implicated were judged by their neighborsin a process of popular justice called “gacaca” courts.

Lars Waldorf, formerly head of the Human Rights fieldoffice in Rwanda and now a professor at the Centre forApplied Human Rights at York University in the U.K.,evaluated the work of the gacaca courts and the results ofthese efforts at mass justice.

The panel on “Healing for the Survivors” focused onhow the survivors of the genocide are coping and theconsequences that have affected their lives. Buffalo resi-dent Nicole Fox, a doctoral candidate at Brandeis Univer-sity and newly appointed assistant professor of sociologyat the University of New Hampshire, has talked to dozensof Rwandan survivors about how they have been copingand how they have memorialized their loved ones.

Aimable Twagilimana, a native of Rwanda and a UBgraduate, professor of English at SUNY Buffalo State Col-lege and author of several books on the genocide, talkedabout how history, culture and identity might bereimagined in post-genocide Rwanda—as Germansreimagined their country after the Nazis.

The third topic, “Contemporary Rwandan Politics,”addressed how politics have changed in the country sincethe genocide: The majority Hutu were in power leadingup to the genocide; now the minority Tutsi dominate thegovernment. Jean-Paul Kimonyo, senior policy adviser tothe president of Rwanda, was expected to present aninsider’s view, but unfortunately he could not attend.

SYMPOSIUM COMMEMORATES ANNIVERSARY OF RWANDAN GENOCIDE

A memorial to victims of the Rwandan genocide (Photo: Shkuru Afshar)


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By Shaun Irlam

Across the sky came a screaming …. Twenty years ago,the shriek of a small jet, shot from the sky, ripped open the tranquil Rwandan twilight. It plunged out

of the night to a fiery end over Kigali. The crash tookdown the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi as well as afragile peace process that had been stumbling towardssome truce in a bitter civil war.

Like an exterminating angel, thatflaming debris would sweep almost amillion Rwandans to their deaths in car-nage that soon engulfed the thousandhills of Rwanda; that fiery scream wasthe clarion to let slip the paramilitarygoon squads who would spill a widen-ing tide of blood across this tiny, tightly-woven nation no bigger than Vermont.Over some hundred days, thousandsupon thousands were tumbled intooblivion by deaths less dignified thanbeasts, all sinews leading back to hu-manity prematurely snapped.

What demons rose that Easter in1994? The genocide must be mappedboth regionally and historically. Thegenocide, like the Nile whose headwa-ters it clouded with blood, has originsin Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. Itsgenealogy, too, stretches far back, to the introduction ofidentity cards by colonial authorities in 1934, to the rancidracial fables of nineteenth-century anthropology, and ulti-mately to the Bible, the source of wildly fanciful specula-tions about this region’s peoples.

One could almost say that the genesis of this genocidelay in Genesis. The story of Noah’s son, Ham, scripted thenotorious hypothesis about the Tutsi as ‘Hamitic’ interlop-ers from north-east Africa and post-colonial Rwanda laidits foundations in this fable. Modern Rwanda has been atale of fratricides, the clash of Cain and Abel writ large asnational history — the vengeance of Hutu cultivatorsagainst Tutsi pastoralists.

Historians have often noted that old, colonial scriptslong ago severed Rwanda from its own history to entangleit instead in a fabricated web of toxic myths. These in-vented histories later unraveled in a cycle of pogroms,culminating in the genocide of April 1994 when Hutu ex-tremists tried to exterminate their Tutsi compatriots andmoderate Hutu allies.

Whatever those names once meant, the imaginaryidentities of ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ today are largely remnantsof a prosthetic history engineered by colonial authoritiesand grafted into the national psyche through decades of

colonial educational and administrative policy, as well asreligious instruction. Belgium left this prosthetic history be-hind in 1959 to script the future catastrophes in Rwanda.

A bitterly divided and ethnically polarized Rwanda be-came independent in 1962 and the first deadly reprisalssoon followed. The emancipated Hutu majority turned ontheir former Tutsi overlords, setting in motion a pattern ofpersecution repeated until 1994. Rwanda is one grim andpotent reminder of how often imperial meddling in thehistories of others has sown unforeseen and disastrousconsequences. The fate of Rwanda is still tragically

haunted by lingering colonial mytholo-gies. April 1994 is perhaps the cruelestmonth in modern African history: whilethe collapse of apartheid and the rise ofNelson Mandela to the presidency ofSouth Africa bred celebration every-where, Mandela’s triumph was eerilybacklit by the dance of death turningRwanda into a wasteland. As South Af-rica at last laid one colonial misadventureto rest, the unquiet ghosts of anotherstirred from the grave. Hope contendedwith horror for our attention, as thoughthe fell and better angels of empirestruggled for the soul of history. Now it is April again. Twenty years on.Across the globe, as the rains return toRwanda, people gather to reflect back onthe genocide and the terrible losses itwrought; Philip Gourevitch recalls how

birds of carrion “over massacre sites … marked a nationalmap against the sky.” Every evening still, almost in ritualobservance of that season of slaughter, the crows at duskwheel in wide circles over the hills of Kigali.

Now, in solemn ceremonies of commemoration, knotsof Rwandans and their friends, at home and abroad,gather to offer tributes of remembrance burning brightlyagainst oblivion. Slowly, painfully, steadily, reknotting tornfibers of memory, those who now hallow this anniversary,strive to raise its victims from the common grave of ano-nymity, restore to them their stolen individuality, and re-call the love and esteem they once inspired among thecommunity of the living. We celebrate their lives and givethem sanctuary in our hearts.

Here in Buffalo this April, like many other communitiesacross this nation and around the world, we rememberthe hundreds of thousands who died during the Rwandangenocide, but we will also celebrate the memory of AlisonDes Forges, without whom far less of the Rwandan storywould have been told.

After the genocide, Rwanda found in Dr. Des Forgesone of the most courageous human rights activists of ourtime and a tenacious champion of its cause. Until her un-

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INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH THOUGHT AND HERITAGE ORGANIZESINTERNATIONAL LEVINAS SUMMER SEMINAR

The Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar (LPSS) isan annual one-week long summer seminar of re-search and discussion, organized by Professor Rich-

ard A. Cohen, director of the Institute for the Study ofJewish Thought and Heritage, and a recognized authorityon the work ofEmmanuel Levinas.

The inaugural LPSSwas held in July, 2013,in Vilnius, Lithuania,birth country of Levinas.The second LPSS isscheduled for July 7-11,2014 at the UB NorthCampus.

Each summer the in-tellectual focus is on adifferent aspect ofLevinas’s philosophy. In2014 it will be the “pri-macy of ethics” consid-ered in the encounter ofLevinas and Kant.

The seminar is com-posed of ten invitedscholars – graduate stu-dents, post-doctoral stu-dents and professors - selected from applicants fromaround the world.

Both Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant assert theprimacy of ethics. At the same time, both see this primacyas supporting rather than undermining science. Indeed,for Levinas ethics provides the very justification of truth.Nevertheless, despite their proximity, these two thinkersare as far apart as classical and contemporary philosophy.

The critical idealism of Kant concludes and culminatesthe grand project of representational philosophy – theprimacy of knowledge - which began with Parmenides’equation of being and logos. In the Critique of Pure ReasonKant shows the grounds and the boundaries of naturalscience and metaphysics.

Building on these analyses, in the Critique of PracticalReason, he shows the grounds and boundaries of rationalethics. Post-Kantian thought from Schelling to Nietzscheto Heidegger, from Romanticism to Expressionism toDadaism, breaks with Kantian objective rationality byshifting to creative imagination.

Levinas opens up a radically different post-Kantianpath: renewing the primacy of ethics Kant proclaimed byliberating it from its Kantian dependence on objectivistrationality. For Levinas neither science nor aesthetics but

rather “ethics is first philosophy.” Only in this revolution-ary ethical reorientation of philosophy do science and aes-thetics for the first time find their proper significance.

Thus, Levinas does not reject ethics in a positivist orpretentious “beyond good and evil.” But this is because

ethics beginsnot in respectfor law, not inautonomy, notin pure free-dom, butrather in re-sponsivenessto the suffer-ing of theother person. Moral re-spons ib i l i t yemerges inand as theprimacy of theother, theother’s tran-scendence asethical obliga-tion. To better

understand what is new in Levinas’s thought, this semi-nar will compare and contrast it to Kant, and especially tothe Kantian “primacy of practical reason.” Participantswill enter into a dialogue between Levinas and Kant basedon the idea that though these two thinkers are radicallyseparated by the divide between classical representa-tional philosophies oriented by eternity, the soul and di-vinity, and contemporary philosophies which takes seri-ously time, history, language, the body and worldly be-ing, that these two thinkers are in special and fruitful prox-imity across this divide.

It is directed by Professor Cohen, who is assisted bytwo additional scholars, in 2014: Professor JamesMcLachlan of Western Carolina University, and Levinasscholar and LPSS co-organizer Jolanta Saldukaityte, Ph.D.,Vilnius, Lithuania.

The seminar participants will prepare by reading se-lected readings from Levinas’s two major works, Totalityand Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Es-sence (1974), as well as selected articles or portions ofarticles related to the Levinas-Kant encounter.

The Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar is sponsoredby The Levinas Center; Institute of Jewish Thought andHeritage; Humanities Institute. �

Participants in the 2013 LPSS in Vilnius, next to a plaque marking Levinas' birthplace

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timely death in the plane that crashed one icy night nearBuffalo in 2009, she tirelessly fought for justice, bothagainst those who committed the genocide and againstthose among the current president’s minions who stillelude prosecution for human rights atrocities.

From her, we today draw renewed resolve for causeher own life embraced, bearing witness for those who nolonger can. More than ever, humanity needs her exampleand moral guidance on this anniversary of the Rwandanapocalypse, as we see Syria, South Sudan and the CentralAfrican Republic riven by ethnic and religious slaughterand hear the pledge of ‘Never again!’ sound ever morehollow.

Rwanda is renowned as a nation of master weavers.Their basketware is celebrated as the finest found in Af-rica. Yet nowhere have those legendary skills been moretested than in these twenty years since the genocide, dur-ing which Rwandans have worked so hard to mend asocial fabric once feared torn beyond repair. A tapestry ofhuman dignity begins to emerge, but it remains far fromcomplete. History has yet to tell us whether the old ghostshave been exorcised. �

Noel Twagiramungu, a Rwandan human rights activistwho fled the country in 2005 to become a Scholar at Riskat Harvard University and is now a doctoral candidate inthe Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts Univer-sity, offered an insider-outsider view of the genocide andof Rwanda today.

Each of the panels was followed by general question-and-answer periods, and then by small-group discussionsled by the six principal speakers and seven others whoare survivors of the genocide and/or experts on humanrights and Rwanda. All but two of these participants knewDes Forges well as colleagues in the Africa Division of Hu-man Rights Watch, as co-workers at the InternationalCriminal Tribunal for Rwanda, or as graduate studentswhom she mentored and/or protected.

The Scholarship Fund Dinner held later in the day pro-vided members of the Buffalo community with an oppor-tunity to speak with the 13 symposium participants andraise funds for the Alison L. Des Forges Memorial Scholar-ship Endowment Fund at UB. The fund supports four-yearscholarships at UB for promising Buffalo public school stu-dents interested in pursuing a course of study and careerin human rights. �

Sue Wuetcher is the editor of the UB Reporter.

RWANDAN GENOCIDEcontinued from page 17

Education in managing chronic problems such as backpain in limited resource settings was also provided. Therewas often a lack of trust with existing health services whenreferral for more comprehensive services was suggested.The overall experience highlighted the impact of healthcare disparities.

Thinking “outside of the box” was demonstrated byadapting equipment and using readily accessible materi-als for demonstrating the various techniques at each sta-tion. For example, balloons filled with dirt and pebbleswere utilized as breast models for self-breast exams,branches from trees were utilized to stabilize fractures,etc. Consistent with the Belize experience, studentsneeded to depend on strong clinical skills.

This trip allowed immersion into the culture throughSpanish lessons, attending a bullfight, participating in theEl Día De Los Reyes’ festivities and staying with host fami-lies. The “lived experience” of cold showers and familymeals requiring students to use Spanish in casual conver-sations posed challenges for most students. We touredMachu Picchu and climbed Waynu Picchu and ended ourtrip near Puerto Maldonado for a three-day Amazonjungle eco tour.

ConclusionThe opportunities certainly outweighed the challenges.Both partnerships provided clinically and culturally rel-evant experiences in safe environments. These globalexperiences embraced the importance of the nursing rolein a global society.

There were several challenges encountered whichwould be applicable to other winter intercession trips.Flight costs are typically higher in January, which impactthe overall cost for students and faculty. There is also agreater chance for weather-related travel issues, whichdid significantly impact the Peru trip.

The next steps for the School of Nursing, will be toevaluate the experiences and make appropriate changesto the experimental course. Suggestions include choosinglocations in the world that require eight hours or less traveltime, advertising earlier so that students have an ad-equate time to secure financial resources, and partneringwith organizations that provide sustainable services.

Ideally, it would be good for the schools in each of thehealth sciences to work collaboratively. Utilizing the fullcadre of skills in one global setting could provide a moresustainable and lasting impact. �

Dianne Loomis, clinical associate professor, and Joann Sands,clinical assistant professor, led the inaugural School of Nurs-ing Winter Session programs.

WINTER SESSION NURSING PROGRAMScontinued from page 5

GHOSTScontinued from page 18

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ASSOCIATION OF CANADIAN STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATESMAKES UB ITS NEW HOME

By Munroe Eagles

On January 1st, 2014, UB became the new institu-tional home for the next three years for the Asso-ciation of Canadian Studies in the United States

(ACSUS), one of the oldest, largest, and most prestigiousprofessional organiza-tions in the field of Ca-nadian Studies.

UB was selectedfrom proposals fromfour universities to beACSUS’ new home lastsummer in a competi-tive application processby a special committeeof the ACSUS executive.

Announcing the out-come of the competi-tion, then-ACSUS Presi-dent Myrna Delson-Karan (Professor ofFrench, St. John’s Uni-versity), wrote: “We atACSUS are … thrilled athaving the University at Buffalo as our host. We look for-ward to a pleasant and productive relationship with Buf-falo and in seeing our organization grow and thrive inthe right environment for success.”

Founded in 1971 at Duke University, ACSUS is a multi-disciplinary organization that provides a wide variety ofservices to academics and students who share an interestin our neighbor to the north. is a multi-disciplinary mem-bership based organization committed to raising aware-ness and understanding of Canada and the bilateral rela-tionship.

ACSUS supports research and academic activitythrough its publications (an occasional paper series, andthe American Review of Canadian Studies which is man-aged by ACSUS members at Western Washington Univer-sity in Bellingham, Washingtons), conferences, and grantprograms; promotes the academy through active advo-cacy and outreach; and positions the community by pro-filing the scope and diversity of research undertaken bythe ACSUS membership in the humanities and social sci-ences.

The extraordinary level of interdependence betweenCanada and the United States makes our partnershipeach county’s most important bilateral relationship. Un-derstanding Canada is therefore of immediate and press-ing importance for the United States.

The academic community plays an important part inhelping to educate policy makers and the public-privatesectors about the economic, political, trade, security, de-fense, environmental, technological, scientific, and cul-

tural dimensions ofCanada-US relations. In the United Statesthere are more than sev-enty universities teachingcourses on Canada to anestimated 20,000 under-graduate students eachyear. Five regional asso-ciations are also activelyengaged in raisingawareness of Canada. The integrated natureof the Canada-US part-nership demands futureleaders possessing thetools to successfully navi-gate an increasinglycomplex world.

The academic community represented and supportedby ACSUS is key to this future success.

UB’s location on the Canada-US border makes us a‘natural’ university home for ACSUS, and our selectionrecognizes our growing reputation for leadership in theCanadian Studies community. Within ACSUS itself, UB fac-ulty members have long been active members.

Most recently, for example, Munroe Eagles (CanadianStudies and Political Science) just completed a four-yearelected term as a member of the ACSUS Executive Coun-cil, and Jean-Jacques Thomas (Canadian Studies and Ro-mance Languages and Literatures) is a currently servingas an elected member of that body.

Eagles was elected last fall to a two-year term as theAssociation’s Vice-President, and will succeed KennethHolland (Ball State University) as ACSUS President in No-vember 2015.

ACSUS is affiliated with UB’s Canadian Studies Aca-demic Program in the Department of Transnational Stud-ies, and is now located in 1013 Clemens Hall. �

Munroe Eagles is professor of political science and director ofCanadian Studies.

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UB WOMEN'S CLUB MAKES INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS FEEL AT HOME

By Kevin Stewart

The sign outside 210 Student Union reads “Interna-tional Brunch,” but inside looks more like a neigh-borhood hangout at Grandma’s house. The room is

usually empty, or hosting the quiet anxiety of a blooddrive, but on Monday it was humming with the satisfiedsighs of college students and the comforting chattiness ofthe women whohave taken the timeto put on this event.

Once a month,the UB Women’sClub and its inter-national activitygroup — led byMeena Rustgi andRose Marie George— host a brunch togive UB’s growinginternational stu-dent population achance to sit down,socialize and, mostimportantly, eat.

For the past 68years, the Women’sClub has been fos-tering a sense ofwellness and com-munity at UB,whether throughevents like themonthly brunch or the Grace Capen Award, a scholar-ship the group sponsors. Club members hold numerousevents throughout the year to raise money for the schol-arship fund, among them fashion shows, wine-tastings,soup luncheons and a wreath and poinsettia sale.

The Grace Capen Award is available to students whohave completed at least 45 hours of study at UB and haveearned a GPA of 3.9. But the international brunch servesa different purpose: It’s a way for the women to showtheir support for a greater number of students than thescholarship can encompass.

And despite its name, it wasn’t just international stu-dents who were there.

“Everyone is international,” explains Ardis Stewart, aproud member of the Women’s Club for more than 30years. “This is an opportunity for students from differentcountries to interact with one another, and that includesstudents from America.”

In an age where much social interaction happensonline, it can be hard to meet new people and form real

bonds. But for students like BingBing Liang, who devotesmost of his time to his studies and research while still learn-ing the English language, it can be nearly impossible.

“I spend most of my time in my office with a penciland paper,” says the 23-year-old graduate student fromChina. “Even when we go to seminars, many of the stu-

dents are Chinese, so we usually don’t speak in English.It’s nice to have somewhere that I can come and talk topeople. I get to practice my English and I get to eat. Onestone, two birds.”

Liang wasn’t the only student to appreciate the freemeal; more than 100 students from all over the worldcame to enjoy the cold cuts, fruit salad and a Indian ricedish fondly referred to as “Meena’s rice.”

“I come almost every month to eat here,” says SoniaJing Jian Ang, a first-year finance student. But the easyconversation and the fact that Ang was accompanied forthe second time by her friend Daniel Chan, a third-yearmechanical engineering student who she refers to as her“brother,” shows that the brunch is doing more than justfilling empty stomachs.

While students may come to the event initially for thebreak it offers from Ramen noodles and microwaved din-ners, they come back for the people. �

Kevin Stewart is a student in the English Department.

Members of the UB Women's Club share brunch with international students in the Student Union (Photo: Nancy J. Parisi)

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SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNINGDepartment of ArchitectureBrian Carter, professor, was a major contributor to the book UneasyBalance that was recently published by the Mackintosh School of Artin Glasgow, Scotland. In addition, he was the editor of the mostrecent book in the series that focuses on the work of young architectsin Canada published by TUNS Press. The book, which has beenenthusiastically reviewed in Canada, highlights the work of BattersbyHowat.

Jin Young Song, assistant professor, has won the Grand Prize in the2013 Hyundai Engineering & Construction Technology Forum for hisproposal for a prefabricated unit for apartment remodeling. Theorganizer, South Korea-based Hyundai Engineering & Construction,is a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group and one of the leadingconstruction companies in the world. Competing for the prize ininnovative technology for the building industry were 159 teamsfrom around the globe. Song’s proposal, developed through hisarchitectural practice Dioinno Architecture, was noted as an innova-tive approach to remodeling urban housing. As a prefabricatedfacade unit, it eliminates the need for onsite reconstruction andremodeling, radically reducing construction time and cost. Its de-sign also contributes to a novel streetscape for urban environments.Song will receive a $10,000 award with additional support to patentthe proposal. Hyundai Engineering & Construction will registerDioinno Architecture as a cooperative firm in the continued devel-opment of the project. Song’s housing and memorial project, SlantedMemorial has won Special Mention for the Unbuilt Visions 2013 in-ternational architectural design competition. Unbuilt Visions exhibi-tion showcased Song’s Slanted Memorial project at the TSMD Turk-ish Architectural Center in Ankara, Turkey from Jan. 7-21, 2014.

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCESDepartment of AnthropologyDeborah Reed-Danahay, professor, has been elected to the Execu-tive Committee of the Council for European Studies (CES), an inter-national and interdisciplinary organization based at Columbia Uni-versity, and will serve a term from 2014-2018. UB is a member of theAcademic Consortium of CES, and Reed-Danahay serves as the insti-tutional liaison. UB’s membership in the consortium is supported byfunding from the departments of Anthropology and History and bythe Center for European Studies (CEUS) at UB.

Department of Biological SciencesPaul Cullen, assistant professor, has been invited to Marburg, Ger-many to present his work at the Marburg Meeting on Microbiologyin March 2014. Cullen will be one of 25 speakers presenting at theevent, which will be attended by faculty and students at the Philipps-Universitat Marburg. Cullen will be talking about the roles of mucinreceptors in signal transduction, adherence, and pathogenesis.

Department of ClassicsNeil Coffee, associate professor and chair, has won a joint grant withthe University of Geneva, Switzerland for a three-year project study-ing the application of digital search methods to the tracing of liter-ary history and artistry. A particular focus is the work of the UBClassics – Linguistics Tesserae Project, which offers a free web tool forintertextual research. The UB – Geneva project kicked off in February2014 at the Fondation Hardt, a foundation for classics research out-side of Geneva, with a workshop that convened distinguished schol-ars of classical literary history and several digital project groups. Inaddition to UB and Geneva, contributors to the workshop came fromCa’ Foscari University of Venice, Carnegie Mellon University, OhioUniversity, Oxford University, Penn State University, the University ofGöttingen, the University of Leipzig, the University of Pennsylvania,the University of Toronto, and other international institutions. Also

attending was Christopher Forstall, UB Classics Ph.D. candidate. Inaddition to convening and organizing the event together withDamien Nelis of University of Geneva Classics, Coffee gave a presen-tation on the Tesserae Project, along with Forstall and their collabo-rator Neil Bernstein, associate professor of Classics at Ohio Univer-sity. The goal of the workshop was to outline an agenda for futuredigital studies of literary history that could inform the work of boththe UB – Geneva collaboration and the scholarly community at large.

Department of Comparative LiteratureRodophe Gasché, SUNY Distinguished Professor and EugenioDonato Chair, recently delivered several invited lectures in othercountries: Brasilia, Brazil. International conference on PensamentoIntruso: Literatura, Filosofia e Infinito (no Limiar de Nancy &Derrida). Lecture: “The Eve of Philosophy: On ‘Tropic’ Movementsand Syntactic Resistance in Derrida’s White Mythology;”Santiago,Chile. Universidad Diego Portales. Conference on “Derrida y elhegelianismo frances”.Lecture: One Before the Other? On Jean Wahland Jacques Derrida;” Rome, Italy. International Conference on “TheReasons of Europe: History and Problems of a Philosophical Con-cept.” Keynote Address: “Is ‘Europe’ an Idea in the Kantian Sense?”Gasché’s book The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy ofReflection (Harvard 1986) was published in Italian under the titleDietro Lo Specchio: Derrida e la Filosofia della Riflessione, (trans. F. Vitaleand M. Senatore, Milano: Mimesis Edition, 2013). Gasché also pub-lished articles in international journals: “Viitta, Laskos, Kuva. GustaveFlaubertin Salambosta, trans.Kääntänyt Anne Savioja, in Romaaninhistorian ja teorian kytköksiä, ed. H. Meretoja and A. Mäkikalli,Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2013, pp. 83-112; “Sobrela figura del Archipielago,“ trans. N. Parra, A la sombra de lo politico :Violencias institucionales y transformaciones de lo comun, ed. M. delRosario and C. Andres Manrique, Bogota, Columbia : EdicionesUniandes, 2013, pp. 267-76; “Nach Poussin,“ in: Alexander JohannesKraut, Tagundnachgleiche, Berlin: Revolverpublishing, 2013, pp. 99-102, 136-37; and “Unter dem Zeichen des Anderen. Jaspers‘ Blickzurück auf den Ursprung Europas in der ‘Achsenzeit,‘“ inGrundordungen. Geographie, Religion, Gesetz, Berlin: Kadmos, 2013.

Department of EconomicsIn June-July 2013, Paul Zarembka, professor, presented a theoreticaland empirical paper demonstrating the unchanged relationship inthe United States from 1956 to 2011, using a Marxist measure, ofhours required to produce the means of production U.S. workers areworking with, compared to the number of hours worked. The pre-sentations were made at political economy conferences in Bilbao,Spain and in The Hague, Netherlands. On March 8, 2014 (whichhappened to be International Women’s Day), he presented a paperat a workshop in Berlin celebrating the 100th anniversary of RosaLuxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. Zarembka considers Lux-emburg the most important Marxist theorist of the 20th century. Hepresented a paper entitled “‘Marx’s Evolving Conception of Valueand Luxemburg’s Legacy: A Process of Intellectual Production.”

Department of EnglishDavid Alff, assistant professor, delivered an invited talk at McMasterUniversity (Hamilton, Ontario) on Wednesday, March 12, 2014. Thetitle of the talk was “What is a project?”

Tim Dean, professor, co-organized a two-day symposium, “Con-sent,” at the University of Birmingham, UK, in November 2013.

Jerold C. Frakes, professor, delivered a paper, entitled “Marvels ofthe East and the Paradisical Otherworld in the Nordic West: TheVínland Sagas,” at the conference: Trans-Cultural Entanglementsand Global Perspectives in the Pre-Modern World,” organized bythe Freie Universität Berlin, 12 July 2013. He delivered the keynote

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address, entitled “Brautwerbungsepos auf den altjiddischen Kopfgestellt” at the conference “Aventiuren in Aschkenas. JüdischeAneignungen nichtjüdischer Erzählstoffe im vormodernen Europa,”at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin on 5 March 2014.

Walter Hakala, assistant professor, gave a paper titled “DictionaryDacoits: Self-Quotation and Plagiarism in Colonial Urdu Lexicogra-phy” at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsinin October 2013. Hakala received a travel grant from the AmericanInstitute of Pakistan Studies to participate in the conference.

Graham Hammill, professor and chair, was elected President of theInternational Spenser Society. He began a two-year term in January2014.

Stacy Hubbard, associate professor, co-organized and co-led a semi-nar (with Melissa Zeiger of Dartmouth College) on “ModernistWomen Poets and the Everyday” at the Modernist Studies Associa-tion Conference in Sussex, UK on August 31, 2013.

Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Chairof American Culture, has a photograph selected for this year’s VeniceBiennale by curator Rem Koolhaus.

Steve McCaffery, professor, delivered “Frame-Time: Variant Cin-ematic Temporalities in Gertrude Stein and Bob Brown,” at theMDRN Conference on Time & Temporality in European Modernismand the Avant-Garde (1900-1950), at the University of Leuven, Bel-gium, September 18, 2013. He also delivered “Pataphysics andPotential Architecture,” at New Architectures, New Landscapes,University of Greenwich, London, September 20, 2013. He gavereadings at the Ottawa Arts Court, October 19, 2013; theUnAmerican Readings Series, a transatlantic reading series heldsimultaneously in New York City and Cambridge, UK, November17, 2013; and St. Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo, OntarioNovember 29, 2013.

Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. But-ler Chair of Literature, gave lectures during January 2014 in Ger-many at the University of Bonn; in England at Portsmouth and Cam-bridge Universities; and was a keynote speaker at a conference onModernist Revolutions in Toulouse, France. She is now helping tocoordinate a conference on Emily Dickinson and Translation that willtake place at Fudan University in Shanghai in November 2014.

Joseph Valente, UB Distinguished Professor, delivered the keynotelecture at the Psychoanalysis in Ireland Conference in Halifax, NovaScotia, August 25, 2014. He was elected Treasurer and Vice-Presi-dent International Yeats Society.

Department of HistoryDavid Gerber, professor emeritus, presented a paper, “Exploringthe Mental Lives of Immigrant Letter Writers: Nostalgia and Adjust-ment to Changed Circumstances,” at Comparison, Exchange, andNew Perspectives: International Symposium on TransnationalMigration Letters, a conference at Wuyi University in Jiangmen,China, 6-9 December, 2013.

Department of Media StudyLoss Pequeño Glazier, professor, had the following works pub-lished internationally: “La Cuchufleta,” a visual poem exhibited inthe exhibition “Räume für Notizen”, Wechselstrom Gallery, Vienna,Austria, January 28 to February 12, 2014; “Form, Formations, Formu-lations: The poetics of it,” a paper presented at the International E-Poetry [2014] Intensive, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, PuertoRico, March 20-22, 2014; “Broméliacées à face blanche sur 20 hect-ares”, digital poem, exhibited at “Les Littératures numériquesd’hier à demain”, Labo BnF, BnF | François-Mitterand, Paris, Sep-tember 24-December 1, 2013;“Loss Pequeño Glazier Interview”

published in “Ars Poetica”, European Poetry Forum, Ars Poetica Asso-ciation, Bratislava, Slovakia.

In Fall 2013, adjunct professor Tanya Shilina-Conte hosted twoevents through the Center for Global Media, (1) a visit by ProfessorAlexander Livergant, Editor-in-Chief of the Russian monthly journalForeign Literature and chairman of the Union of Literary Translators,Moscow, Russia. Alexander Livergant gave a lecture, “American andRussian Literature: Politics of Translation,” followed by the screeningof the film, “The Woman with the Five Elephants,” directed by VadimJendreyko, about Svetlana Geier, translator of Dostoyevsky¹s novelsinto German. The event was co-sponsored by the “Juxtapositions”Lecture Series in the English Department; and (2) a retrospective ofdocumentary filmmaker Su Friedrich's films, organized togetherwith Sarah J.M. Kolberg, Department of Visual Studies. SuFriedrich's films are considered to be “a premonition of global cin-ema,” which reflected the movement in American film towardsinternationalization. Shilina-Conte also introduced and led the dis-cussion of the film, “The Prisoner of the Mountains” by Sergey Bodrov,presented as part of the Global Cinemaspectives series. The filmexplores Chechen culture and was discussed in light of the recentbombings that took place in Boston on April 15th, 2013.

Department of MusicSoprano Tony Arnold, associate professor of voice, gave the worldpremiere of Beat Furrer’s La Bianca Notte with Ensemble Modern onthe opening concert of their new music biennale in Frankfurt, Ger-many on November 21, 2013. She was invited back for a repeatperformance at the Philharmonie Köln on February 1, 2014, with thecomposer on the podium. Ensemble Modern is one of Europe’s pre-miere contemporary music groups. In October 2013, Arnold was inMexico as a guest at both the Festival Internacional Cervantino(Guanajuato) and the Fiestas de Octubre (Guadalajara) with theAtlanta-based new music ensemble, Bent Frequency, and PUSHPhysical Theatre performing Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon’s scenic can-tata, Comala. In July 2014, Arnold will return to Italy for her seventhconsecutive year teaching and performing at the soundSCAPE NewMusic Festival in Maccagno. In November 2013, the faculty trio ofsoundSCAPE (featuring Arnold with percussionist Aiyun Huang andpianist Thomas Rosenkranz) released their first CD on the New FocusRecordings label. Entitled Inflorescence, the disc is a compilation ofmusic commissioned and performed in recent years at soundSCAPE,including world premiere recordings of works by Josh Levine, Rich-ard Carrick, and Mark Applebaum.

James Currie, associate professor, gave two invited guest lectures inthe U.K. in December 2013. His “Listening and the Limits of Under-standing: Lacanian Reflections on Said’s Late Style,” was presentedat the Humanities and Arts Research Center of Royal Holloway Col-lege, University of London, as part of a series of talks on listening, andhe was also featured on the Department of Music’s Guest LectureSeries at the University of Southampton, where he gave a paperentitled, “When Straw Loves Tin: Sound and Sentiment in ComicModernity.” Other international papers include “Puccini’s Mortu-ary,” presented at the Royal Association and Music and PhilosophyStudy Group 3rd Annual Conference at King’s College, London. Hisbook, Music and the Politics of Negation (Indiana, 2012) was reviewedby James Garratt in the British journal Music and Letters (Volume 94,Fall 2013) and his article “The Death of Narcissus: On Musical Sub-jectivity,” appeared in the Brazilian journal Revista Vórtex (Volume1). He also worked during the year with Singapore composer DianaSoh on an experimental theater/vocal work, “Arboretum,” for whichhe wrote the text. It was commissioned and premiered at the Institutde Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), in theCentre Pompidou, Paris, France in June 2013.

Department of PhilosophyJames Beebe, associate professor, gave a lecture entitled “WhatTriggers Supernatural Ideas?” to the Centre for Human Evolution,

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Cognition, and Culture at the University of British Columbia inVancouver, Canada on March 3, 2014.

Department of PhysicsSurajit Sen, professor, presented a seminar at the Department ofPhysics, Brock University in Canada on November 28, 2013 and pre-sented two colloquia while on a visit to India in January 2014. OnJanuary 5, he spoke at the Department of Physics of the newly formedBengal Engineering and Science University (BESU) near Kolkata, andon January 22 he spoke at the School of Physics at the JawaharlalNehru University in New Delhi. His lectures focused on Solitarywaves, the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem and the frontier of nonlinearmany body physics. Sen is initiating a new collaboration with ex-perimentalists at BESU on nanoparticle collisions.

Department of Romance Languages and LiteraturesDavid R. Castillo, professor and chair, delivered the following paperin July 2013 at the Journadas ALCES XXI conference in Madrid, Spain:“Los zombies somos nosotros.”

Department of SociologyChristopher Mele, associate professor, and Megan Ng and May BoChim, 2013 graduates of UB’s Sociology program in Singapore, co-authored the article, “Urban Markets as a ‘Corrective” to AdvancedUrbanism: The Social Space of Wet Markets in ContemporarySingapore” which has been accepted for publication in the journalUrban Studies, in fall 2014.

Department of Theatre and DanceSarah Bay-Cheng, professor of theatre, presented on theatre, per-formance, and digital technology as part of a residency in Drama-turgy Studies at the University of Zagreb, Croatia in summer 2013.Funded by a grant from the US Embassy in Croatia, this programincluded scholars from UB, Northwestern, Columbia, and Stanfordfor teaching residencies in Zagreb’s Dramaturgy program. As partof the residency, Bay-Cheng presented research from her currentbook project, Digital Historiography and Performance. She also contin-ues as a member of the Board of Directors for Performance StudiesInternational, for whom she chairs the committee on Media.

Department of Transnational StudiesJosé F. Buscaglia, professor and director of the Program in Carib-bean and Latin/o American Studies, was honored with the 2013 Nicolás Guillén Prize for Philosophical Literature bestowed by theCaribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). Past recipients of thisaward include Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez and othermajor Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, Edwidge Danticatand Junot Díaz. According to the selection committee of the CPA,the award was given “for the overall impact of his work as a literarycritic, public intellectual, and institution builder. The committeepaid special attention to the influence of his book Undoing Empire,Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean, which has already influ-enced scholars across the globe since its publication in 2003.” Buscaglia published the following articles in international jour-nals: “Pan, tierra y tapaboca: Luis Muñoz Marín y el breve interregnodemocrático del Partido Popular (Puerto Rico, 1938-1948)” (Bread,Land and Censorship: Luis Muñoz Marín and the Brief DemocraticInterregnum of the Popular Party (Puerto Rico, 1938-1948), DiálogosLatinoamericanos, Arhus, Denmark, 20 (June 2013): 4-21; and “Losalarifes de Santo Domingo: la historia oculta de los musulmanes queconstruyeron la primera ciudad europea en América” (The Alarifes ofSanto Domingo: the Hidden History of the Muslim Masters WhoBuild the First European City in America), Dirasat Hispánicas, Tunis,Tunisia, 1(2014): 43-54. Buscaglia took his second-year Masters students to Spain in Fall2013 and has spent part of spring 2014 semester with this year’s classin Mexico. While in Spain during the fall he delivered the followinglectures: “Islas dolorosas del mar: el terror racialista y lapermanencia del antiguo régimen de cara al fin de la Pax Usoniana

en las Antillas,” (Sorrowful Islands of the Sea: Racialist Terror and thePersistence of the Old Regime at the End of the Pax Usoniana in theAntil les), Seminario de Historia y Cultura en el CaribeContemporáneo (Seminar on the History and Culture of the Con-temporary Caribbean), Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos,Seville, Spain, September 27, 1013; ¿Negro, cristiano o ciudadano?De cómo se desactivó en el Caribe el principal “punto de filosofía”de la verdadera différance en la colonialidad, 1673-1802, “ (Black,Christian or Citizen?: Of How the Main “Point of Philosophy” of theTrue Differance in Coloniality Was Deactivated, 1673-1802),Seminario Internacional “Juego de espejos: identidad y visionescomparadas en las Antillas (siglos XVII-XX),” Instituto de Historia,CCHS/CSIC, Madrid, October 11, 2013. In February 2014, Buscagliawas the main opponent in a doctoral defense at the University ofTromso in Norway.

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATIONDepartment of Educational Leadership and PolicyStephen Jacobson, UB Distinguished Professor, has several recentinternational publications: with Lauri Johnson (Boston College) asguest editor: special 2013 issue of the Journal of Educational Ad-ministration, 51(1): “Educational Leadership Development in Inter-national Contexts;” Garza, E., Drysdale, L., Gurr, D., Jacobson, S. &Merchant, B. (2014). Leadership for school success: Lessons fromeffective principals. International Journal of Educational Management;Minor-Ragan, Y. & Jacobson, S. (2014). In her own words: Turningaround an under-performing school. In Leading schools successfully:Stories from the field. (pp. 9-18). C. Day & D. Gurr (Eds.) London:Routledge; and Jacobson, S. (2013, May). Stable leadership andtrust: Critical elements for sustained success. Paper presented at theISSPP Practice and Research Conference. Umea, Sweden. Jacobsondelivered the following invited presentations at international con-ferences: Jacobson, S. (2014, April). Reshaping educational practicefor improvement: How schools mediate and enact government re-forms. Symposium discussant at the Annual Meeting of the Ameri-can Educational Research Association, Philadelphia, PA; Jacobson, S.& Schoenfeld, R. (2014, June). Leadership practices for sustainedimprovement in two high-need schools: Understanding the impor-tance of positional longevity and trust. Paper to be presented at theCommonwealth Council for Educational Administration and Man-agement Conference. Fredericton New Brunswick, Canada. Jacobson was named by the University Council for EducationalAdministration (UCEA) to a three-year term as Associate Director forInternational Initiatives (2014-2016). He was invited by the IsraeliCouncil for Higher Education (CHE) to serve a member of an Interna-tional Quality Assessment Committee that will evaluate the leadingEducational Studies programs in universities and institutes in Israelincluding Bar Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University, Hebrew Univer-sity, Open University, Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), TelAviv University, University of Haifa and Weizmann Institute.

English Language InstituteKeith Otto, program director, English as a Second Language Pro-gram, gave a lecture for the faculty at the Language Teaching andLearning Center at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Taiwanon March 5, 2014. His lecture topic was “Rubric Use in LanguageTeaching.”

Department of Learning and InstructionXiufeng Liu, professor, gave an invited talk at the Northeast ChinaNormal University on Nov. 13th, 2013 entitled “Latest Develop-ments in Science Education Reforms in the US”; he also gave an key-note presentation at the 10th annual conference of the ChineseNational Chemical Curriculum and Teaching Methodology on Nov.16th, 2013 in Wuhan entitled “Grand challenges for science educa-tion: Implications for Chemical Education Research.”

Yinyin Yang is this year’s Judith T. Melamed Fellowshiprecipient. Yinyin is a UB graduate student in TESOL who comes from

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26China and is expected to graduate in September 2014 with anEd.M degree from the Graduate School of Education.

X. Christine Wang, associate professor, is the co-PI for the researchproject “iPad App-Play for Young Children: Analyzing and evaluat-ing the educational qualities of iPad Apps” funded by Zayed Uni-versity, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She visited her research teamin Zayed University January 10-17, 2014. Wang presented two pa-pers at the annual meeting of the European Educational ResearchAssociation in Istanbul, Turkey in September, 2013: “Games of themoment: Social practice and identity construction in young children’sgame playing;” and “Addressing the challenges to classroompractices in early childhood through a community of practice pro-fessional development.”

Department of Library and Information StudiesLorna Peterson, associate professor, submitted an agreement tosupervise the postdoctoral studies under a Fulbright Scholarship ofZapopan Martin Muela. Muela is a 2001 UB Master of Library Sci-ence graduate and earned the Ph.D. in Information Sciences fromSheffield University, United Kingdom. Currently an adjunct facultymember for UNAL Nuevo Leon Autonomous University, Muela’s pro-posed Fulbright project is “A Mexican-U.S. Comparative Study ofthe Adverse Effects of Flexibility, Lack of Tenure, and RenewableContracts in Library and Information Science Faculty.” The project, ifaccepted, is slated to begin August 2014 and end July 2015.

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCESDepartment of Chemical and Biological EngineeringPaschalis Alexandridis, UB Distinguished Professor and Co-Direc-tor, Materials Science and Engineering Program, served as a Mem-ber of the External Evaluation Committee for the School of ChemicalEngineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece in De-cember 2013, at the invitation of the Hellenic Quality Assurance andAccreditation Agency.

Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental EngineeringSalvatore Salamone, assistant professor, has been invited to teach atwo-day short course on Structural Health Monitoring at the KoreUniversity of Enna Kore, Italy, December 19-20, 2013. This coursewas part of a project called Laboratory of Earthquake engineeringand Dynamic Analysis, recently financed with European Communityfunds from the Italian National Operative Program to the Kore Uni-versity of Enna. The objective of this course was to provide an intro-duction to the structural health monitoring methods and their ap-plication to the assessment of the state of health of a broad range ofmaterials and structures.

Department of Computer Science and EngineeringKui Ren, associate professor, taught a Dragon Star Lecture at Uni-versity of Science and Technology of China in August, 2013 on thesubject of Cloud Data Security, attended by more than 100 gradu-ate students and junior faculty members from all over China. DragonStar lecture series are designed to help the People’s Republicof China to improve its graduate education in Computer Scienceand Engineering. Each year, a few advanced graduate-level coursesin the field of computer science and engineering are offered in adiversified set of universities in China. Six to twelve internationallyrecognized scholars are invited to be the lecturers. During his visit toChina, Kui also attended and chaired The 8th International Confer-ence on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA2013). He also visited and delivered a number of invited talks atvarious universities including Hong Kong Polytechnic University, CityUniversity of Hong Kong, Zhejiang University, Nanjing University,Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Alan Selman, professor, and his student, Dung Nguyen, will presenta paper at the 31st Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of ComputerScience, held in Lyon, France, March 5–8, 2014.

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace EngineeringKemper Lewis, professor, gave an invited lecture entitled, “Han-dling Complexity: Design Processes and Design Analytics” at EcoleCentrale de Paris in France in September 2013 and an invited lec-ture in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill Univer-sity in Montreal, Canada entitled, “Handling Emerging Complexityin Engineering Design Processes” in November 2013.

SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCESDepartment of Microbiology and ImmunologyJohn C. Panepinto, assistant professor, was invited to participate ina workshop entitled “Gene expression as a circular process: cross-talk between transcription and mRNA degradation in eukaryotes”on November 4-6, 2013 as part of the “Current Trends in Biomedi-cine” workshop program at the International University of Andalusia,Baeza, Spain. He gave a presentation entitled “Breaking the circleof mRNA synthesis and degradation impairs stress adaptation in thepathogenic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans”.

Department of PediatricsVasanth Kumar, clinical associate professor, was an invited pre-senter at the Neonatal International Conference of Experts (NICE),National Neonatology Forum in Mumbai, India in September 2013.He gave two talks: “Difficult situations in weaning off the ventilator”and “Pharmacotherapy in the Management of Persistent PulmonaryHypertension of the Newborn.” During his visit to India in Septem-ber 2013, Kumar gave an invited presentation at the National Neo-natology Forum, Karnataka Chapter in Bangalore, India: “Manage-ment of Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy in the Newborn.”

SCHOOL OF PHARMACY AND PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCESGina Prescott and Carolyn Hempel, clinical assistant professors,went to the Dominican Republic with Score International in 2013.They precepted 21 professional pharmacy students on a medicalmission trip with UB alumnae, Michelle Ingalsbe and Emily Obrist.They provided pharmacy services and patient counseling with aninterdisciplinary team to over 1500 patients during 6 clinic days.

SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND HEALTH PROFESSIONSDepartment of Epidemiology and Environmental HealthWith support from Society of Toxicology (SOT) Global Initiative TravelAward, Xuefeng Ren, assistant professor, went to Guangzhou, Chinato attend the 6th national Congress of Toxicology of the ChineseSociety of Toxicology (CSOT), which was held on November 12-15,2013. Ren presented results of his long-term collaborative efforts ina talk entitled “Arsenic metabolism and arsenic-induced epigeneticmodifications: the role and implication for arsenic-induced carcino-genesis.” After the meeting, with the invitations from two universi-ties in China, the Inner Mongolia Medical University and FudanUniversity, Ren visited and presented two talks titled “Preventiveand Therapeutic Strategies for Arsenic-induced Carcinogenesis: theImplication of Epigenetic Modulators’ and “Tumor Suppressor, FRY,and Its Application in Clinical Diagnosis, Prognosis and Treatmentfor Breast Cancer,” respectively.

Youfa Wang, professor and chair, was invited to join a panel in theHealthcare Symposium “The Evolution of China’s Healthcare Indus-try: Opportunities and Challenges” held on March 6, 2014 in theSUNY Global Center in New York City. Wang provided an overviewof the growing burden of non-communicable chronic diseases inChina and the related opportunities and challenges. Wang gave aninvited presentation entitled “Fighting Global Epidemic of Obesityand Chronic Diseases—A Systems Science Approach” at ColumbiaUniversity School of Public Health on March 7 2014. Wang’s ongoingresearch includes his NIH R01 and part of the U54 Center grantrelated to childhood obesity and systems science research. One is aChina nationwide study and the other is a US nationwide study. Histeam is conducting a US-China comparison study based on the twoprojects: (1) The $1.6 million NIH R01 project, “Causes and Interven-

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Office of the Vice Provost forInternational Education(716) 645-2368, 645-2528 (Fax)[email protected]://www.buffalo.edu/intledStephen C. Dunnett, Vice ProvostJohn J. Wood

Senior Associate Vice ProvostPatricia Shyhalla

Associate Vice Provost and DirectorResource Management

Marvis RobinsonFinancial Resource Officer

International EnrollmentManagement(716) 645-2368, 645-2528 (Fax)[email protected] J. Hindrawan

Associate Vice Provost and DirectorRaymond Lew, Associate Director

International Admissions(716) 645-2368, 645-2528 (Fax)[email protected] L. Shaw

Assistant Vice Provost and DirectorJessica M. Kane, Assistant Director for

OperationsAmy Matikosh, Assistant Director for

OutreachJennifer A. Gammell

Admissions Advisor

International Student and ScholarServices(716) 645-2258, 645-6197 (Fax)[email protected] A. Dussourd

Assistant Vice Provost and DirectorJessica Ereiz, Assistant DirectorAmy Cleveland, SEVIS CoordinatorEric E. Comins

Coordinator for Student ProgramsChris Bragdon

Coordinator for Student EngagementDarla Maffei

International Student Advisor

Immigration Services(716) 645-2355, (716) 645-6197 (Fax)Oscar E. Budde, Esq.

Associate Vice Provost and DirectorMary Jean Zajac, Paralegal

Study Abroad Programs(716) 645-3912, 645-6197 (Fax)[email protected] Odrzywolski, DirectorOlga Crombie, Assistant DirectorKrista Pazkowsky, Study Abroad Advisor

Council on International Studiesand Programs(716) 645-2368, 645-2528 (Fax)David M. Engel, Chair

Fulbright Program(716) 645-0145; 645-6139 (Fax)Colleen Culleton, Fulbright Advisor

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tions for Childhood Obesity: Innovative SystemsAnalysis,” uses integrated conceptual frame-work, innovative statistical analysis ap-proaches, and rich data from multiplesources to study how complex factors mayaffect childhood obesity and test potentialintervention options in the U.S.; and (2) TheNIH U54 grant is a part of a $16 million NIHcenter grant awarded in 2011. The U54 por-tion at UB, “Multilevel Systems-Oriented Child-hood Obesity Study In China,” one of the threekey research projects in the grant, uses a sys-tems-oriented conceptual framework, lon-gitudinal data collected in China, and novelsystems analysis to study changes on indi-vidual children and their families’ decisionsregarding eating, physical activity, and adi-posity outcomes. The study findings will havemany important policy implications for theU.S. and other countries. Wang’s research team recently publishedan important study in Circulation, 2014 Feb.19. The paper entitled, “Effect of ChildhoodObesity Prevention Programs on Blood Pres-sure: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analy-sis.” Findings from the study have some im-portant public health implications consider-ing the growing global obesity epidemic.As part of an Agency for Healthcare Research& Quality funded 2-year comprehensivestudy, the project assessed the effects ofchildhood obesity prevention programs onblood pressure in children in developedcountries based on a comprehensive reviewof related literature databases up to April2013 for relevant randomized controlled tri-als, quasi-experimental studies, and naturalexperiments. Studies published worldwidewere included if they met inclusion criteria.Of the 23 included intervention studies, 21involved a school setting. Obesity preven-tion programs have a moderate effect onreducing blood pressure and those target-ing at both diet and physical activity seemto be more effective.

Department of Rehabilitation ScienceMary Matteliano, clinical assistant profes-sor, led the study abroad program “Healthin Brazil” in August 2013. Matteliano has co-directed the Health in Brazil program withDr. John Stone for 10 years. This programoffers UB students from several schools theopportunity to travel to different cities andcampuses in Brazil to learn about Brazil’shealth system.

UNIVERSITY LIBRARIESFred Stoss, associate librarian in the Arts &Sciences Libraries, received the first Friendof the Biblioteca Nacional Aruba (BNA, Na-tional Library of Aruba) Award, inOranjestad, Aruba, for his work with BNA ingreen education programs and his role indesigning the library’s Caribbean Energy,Environmental, and Sustainability EducationProgram. The award was presented at theopening session of the Green Education Sym-posium III, whose theme this year was Sus-

tainable Agriculture. The symposium tookplace April 7-11, 2014 at Cas di Cultura inthe capital city of Oranjestad, Aruba. Stoss’spresentation, “The Realities of Food’s Car-bon Footprint,” included select slides fromAl Gore’s climate change slide deck, forwhich Stoss trained. He also provided aworkshop in which he elaborated on thistheme by demonstrating various websitesfrom which statistics and data on climatechange and agriculture are found.

OFFICE OF THE VICE PROVOST FORINTERNATIONAL EDUCATIONStephen C. Dunnett, professor and vice pro-vost, was an invited speaker at ceremoniesin Krakow, Poland, marking the 650th anni-versary of the founding of the JagiellonianUniversity, UB’s longstanding institutionalpartner. Dunnett delivered remarks on be-half of the Jagiellonian’s many institutionalpartners around the world. Dunnett is a pre-senter for a panel titled “Mobility of GlobalTalent and Networking” as part of the 2014Congress of the Humanities and Social Sci-ences at Brock University in Ontario, Canadain May 2014.

Ellen A. Dussourd, assistant vice provostand director of International Student andScholar Services, co-presented a webinartitled “Cross-Cultural Dynamics in CrisisManagement” for NAFSA: Association of In-ternational Educators. The webinar pro-vided training for international educationprofessionals who provide support to inter-national students and scholars during crisessuch as arrest, death, disappearance, physi-cal injury, mental breakdown and naturaldisaster. The webinar discussed the impor-tance and development of crisis protocols,presented ways to provide practical andemotional support to crisis victims, and ex-plored the cross-cultural dimensions of crisismanagement. Individuals at sixty-sevenschools participated in the webinar and fol-low-up discussion.

Steven L. Shaw, assistant vice provost anddirector of International Admissions, is a pre-senter on a panel titled “Fighting Backagainst Fraud in the Academic Space” atthe national conference of NAFSA: Associa-tion of International Educators in San Diego,California in May 2014.

John J. Wood, senior associate vice provost,is chairing a panel titled “Cross-Border Re-search and Collaboration” as part of the2014 Congress of the Humanities and SocialSciences at Brock University, UB's partneruniversity in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canadain May 2014. Wood will chair a panel titled“Stepping into a New Era: Transatlantic Dualand Joint Degrees under Erasmus+” at theannual conference of the European Associa-tion for International Education in Prague,Czech Republic in September 2014. �

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PRESIDENT'S CIRCLE SCHOLARSHIP HAS BIG IMPACT

Christine Tjahjadi-Lopez, a gradu-ating senior in

Geography and one ofthe initial recipients ofthe new President'sCircle Study AbroadScholarship, partici-pated in a study abroadprogram to Mexico dur-ing the 2014 Winter Ses-sion.

The scholarship wasestablished in 2013 atthe initiative of Presi-dent Tripathi and ben-efits from the generousgifts of the President'sCircle of donors to UB,to help make it possiblefor students with financial need fromWestern New York to go abroad dur-ing their programs at UB.

To date, nearly 25 scholarshipshave been awarded totaling morethan $36,000.

Christine, who is from Buffalo, hadalways wanted to study abroad butcould not previously afford it.

"With the help of the President’sCircle Scholarship I was not only

given the opportunity to study abroadin Mexico and experience an entirelynew culture, but I was able to bringmy Spanish speaking skills to an en-tirely new level," she said.

"While I was studying abroad Ilearned about the people, the culture,and myself. I ended up teaching pho-tography to children and the last twoweeks I was there I ended up collectedfunds to sponsor two child street ven-

dors to attend schoolfor a year!

"Motivated and in-spired by this journey, Ihave now receivedmultiple fundingsources to return toLatin America and con-tinue teaching childrenphotography andleaderships skills. "From there, I hopeto connect childrenacross the globethrough a global pho-tography and pen palprogram. Thank youfor helping give my col-lege career a direc-tion!" �

Christine Tjahjadi-Lopez teaching photography in Mexico

office of international education, university at …...ics. ub global health faculty and programs...

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