The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation annually awards approximately 200 Fellowships from between 3 – 4,000 applications. The Fellowship awards, also deemed as “midcareer awards”, are for men and women with careers and abilities in the arts, sciences, and history.
Former Guggenheim Fellows become advisers who help narrow down the competition by sending their critiques to a Committee of Selection then onto the Board of Trustees. Winners from the United States and Canada competition were announced in early April.
We are proud to have 5 current Guggenheim Fellows within the SUNY family:
The new Clinical and Translational Research Center, a 170,000 square-foot research facility that houses the laboratories of several UB physician-scientists.
The University at Buffalo has made another major addition to its campus: the Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC).
The School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences held the grand opening of its CTRC in the joint UB-Kaleida Health building at Goodrich and Ellicott streets in downtown Buffalo on September 20.
The 170,000-square-foot research facility allows UB’s physician-scientists to see patients, conduct research and work with clinicians downstairs in Kaleida Health’s Gates Vascular Institute. The CTRC’s offices and laboratories occupy the building’s top four floors, while Gates Vascular Institute is housed on the bottom four.
The CTRC is an important step in the relocation of UB’s medical school to downtown Buffalo. When it is completed by 2016, the new medical school will bring approximately 1,200 people to downtown Buffalo. In total, the CTRC and medical school projects will create more than 3,000 jobs, 250 of which are physician-scientists and staff.
The new facility houses the laboratories of some of UB’s highest-profile researchers, who collectively have earned more than $25 million in research funding. They are conducting research to develop treatments for a broad range of diseases and conditions, including diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular disease, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer’s and memory disorders.
In addition to custom-designed laboratories and common spaces, the CTRC includes:
Clinical Research Center, which coordinates clinical research activities among institutions in the Buffalo Translational Consortium.
Center for Research in Cardiovascular Medicine, an interdisciplinary research center.
Jacobs Institute, which conducts research, development and training in vascular medicine.
Toshiba Stroke and Vascular Research Center
Biosciences Incubator, to assist UB researchers with the commercialization of new medical therapies.
Design concept produced by Rafael Vinoly Architects with Foit-Albert Associates.
The award winning design concept produced by HOK that will be used to produce the final design for the new UB medical school in downtown Buffalo.
HOK brings an impressive and deep portfolio in health sciences complexes. The firm designed the acclaimed King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia and the Francis Crick Institute’s cardiovascular and cancer research center in central London, which will be the largest center for biomedical research and innovation in Europe.
Because of UB’s sustainability and climate-impact reduction goals, HOK’s green-design credentials influenced its selection: UB has set a goal of LEED Gold for the new medical school building. LEED is a sustainability ratings system created by the U.S. Green Building Council.
HOK has been repeatedly ranked the “top green design firm” by Engineering News-Record, while KAUST was certified in 2009 as the world’s largest LEED Platinum project. Continue reading →
Located in Tifft Nature Preserve along the Lake Erie shoreline in South Buffalo, “Bat Cloud” is a high-tech habitat for bats.
Our favorite superhero Batman is always scouring the streets, searching for crimes to stop and people to save.
However, this time it’s the bats that could use some help.
A fungal infection known as “White Nose Syndrome” hit upstate eastern New York in 2006. The fungus, which afflicts brown bats, causes them to emerge from hibernation early and, as a result, starve and freeze to death.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that the disease so far has killed nearly 7 million bats, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest.
White Nose Syndrome — named for the white fungus encircling the noses of some of the afflicted bats — generally falls within the purview of biologists and mycologists.
But Joyce Hwang, assistant professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, thought there was a need for an architectural intervention and began designing wildlife habitats that could exist within areas populated by humans.
Her solution: the “Bat Cloud”.
While it sounds like one of Batman’s expensive toys, it is actually a group of self-sustaining pods — homes for the bats — that hang together from cables. Each pod is made of stainless steel mesh in an all-weather insulating blanket. They collectively form a “cloud” that resembles a cluster of roosting bats.
The upper portion of the pod serves as the bats’ roosting area and the lower portion is filled with soil and native plants. Bat guano (dung) collects in the bottom of the pods and fertilizes the plants, which attract insects, a principle food source for bats. The pods also allow for slow water drainage.
Hwang’s first design of unique living environments for bats was “Bat Tower,” installed in 2010 in Griffis Sculpture Park in East Otto, Cattaraugus County. Bat Cloud, she says, is a natural extension of her first project.
The cloud hovers above a stand of eastern cottonwood trees in Tifft Farm, a 264-acre woodland nature refuge on Lake Erie. It was installed at the refuge in May to provide a habitat for bats, and help the public see their plight as crucial, not only to the bats’ well-being, but to their own as well.
“Bats are seen as ‘bad’ animals, but they are very helpful,” Hwang says, pointing out that the loss of bats, which eat a vast number of disease-carrying insects, weakens ecosystems and provokes an increase in the use of chemicals for insect control.
Smokers who ate more fruit and vegetables smoked fewer cigarettes per day, waited longer to smoke their first cigarette of the day and scored lower on a common test of nicotine dependence.
If you’re trying to quit smoking, eating more fruits and vegetables may help you quit and stay tobacco-free, according to a new study by University at Buffalo public health researchers.
The research is the first longitudinal study on the relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption and smoking cessation.
The UB study found that smokers who consumed the most fruit and vegetables were three times more likely to be tobacco-free for at least 30 days than those consuming the lowest amount of fruits and vegetables. These findings persisted even when adjustments were made to take into account age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, household income and health orientation.
Researchers also found that smokers who ate more fruit and vegetables smoked fewer cigarettes per day, waited longer to smoke their first cigarette of the day and scored lower on a common test of nicotine dependence.
Several explanations are possible, such as less nicotine dependence for people who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. Or the fact that higher fiber consumption from fruits and vegetables make people feel fuller, since smokers sometimes confuse hunger with an urge to smoke.
And, unlike some foods which are known to enhance the taste of tobacco, such as meats, caffeinated beverages and alcohol, fruits and vegetables may worsen the taste.
The UB researchers caution that more investigation is needed to determine if these findings replicate and if they do, to identify the reasons why fruit and vegetable consumption may help smokers quit. They also want to research how other aspects of one’s diet affect smoking.
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The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation annually awards approximately 200 Fellowships from between 3 – 4,000 applications. The Fellowship awards, also deemed as “midcareer awards”, are for men and women with careers and abilities in the arts, sciences, and history.
