The University and Community
The University
The University at Buffalo is New York's premier public center for graduate and professional education, and the state's largest and most comprehensive public university. As a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, the University at Buffalo stands in the first rank among the nation's research-intensive public universities.
The university was a private institution from 1846 until 1962; during that time, eleven of its twelve professional schools were founded. After merging with the State University of New York in 1962, the already mature University at Buffalo was a direct beneficiary of New York's aggressive investment in public higher education, and grew in size and ambition at a remarkable pace. This private-public heritage has endowed the University at Buffalo with a special character; it has the organizational profile of an Eastern private university on the scale of a large Midwestern public university.
The professional schools at the University at Buffalo share an unusually research-intensive orientation with their counterpart faculties in the arts and sciences, and together have established an outstanding record of research, scholarship, and creative activity. It is a hallmark of the university's academic organization that one can find world-class biochemists developing anticancer agents in its School of Pharmacy or world-class molecular biologists working on the basic science of oral disease in its School of Dental Medicine. Both these schools, as well as the university's School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, have recently been ranked among the top ten in their fields.
Interactions among the university's professional schools and its arts and sciences faculties, especially in cross-disciplinary research centers, give graduate and professional education at the University at Buffalo a particular richness and depth. The university's public mission of outreach to community, state, and nation ties a significant portion of its research and education efforts to the needs of society, and the university's public charter allows it to offer graduate and professional education to the state's citizens at a reasonable tuition cost. Newsweek magazine has listed the University at Buffalo as one of the country's best educational values, combining high quality education and training with low tuition costs. Combined with the relatively low cost of living in the Buffalo metropolitan area, UB is one of the most affordable major research universities in the country.
As
a comprehensive research institution, the University at Buffalo supports
faculty working at the forefront of such diverse fields as infant speech
perception, electronic music processing, periodontal disease, physiological
responses to special environments, the development of new construction
materials, intercellular gating mechanisms, psycholinguistics, and medical
informatics, among many others.
Among its more prominent organized research centers, the University at
Buffalo houses the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research;
the Center for Assistive Technology, which is the site of a national rehabilitation
engineering center for the disabled; the National Center for Geographic
Information and Analysis; the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis
and Recognition; and the Center for Advanced Molecular Biology and Immunology.
Altogether, the university supports cross-disciplinary research in more
than forty research centers and institutes. Grant and contract awards
for sponsored research at the university during one recent fiscal year
exceeded $284 million; sponsored research expenditures for that period
were $122 million.
An active center of international education, the University at Buffalo has academic exchange agreements with forty-one universities in twenty-four countries, and ranks among the top twenty-five institutions in the United States in attracting international students. Nearly 2,000 international students from more than one hundred countries attend the university each year. More than 80 percent are graduate students, most engaged in doctoral work. The majority of international students at the university are pursuing advanced degrees in the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the School of Management.
The university has two major campuses. The South Campus, located in the northeast corner of the City of Buffalo, was the university's main campus for most of the twentieth century and is now in the later stages of becoming its health sciences campus. The most recent addition to that campus is a $54 million medical research facility. Buffalo's rapid transit system connects the South Campus with the city center and the waterfront. The newer North Campus, located three miles from the South Campus in suburban Amherst, now houses most of the university's non-health sciences divisions. Recent additions to the North Campus include a $50 million Center for the Arts and a $45 million natural sciences building and lecture hall complex. The university offers graduate students access to a extensive library system and cutting-edge computing facilities.
The Community
Buffalo, the second largest city in New York State, is often described as "big enough to be big, yet small enough to be small." Big enough to have good music, good food, professional sports teams, and urban hustle and bright lights-but not so big that it will intimidate you. It's a livable, easygoing city.
Its people are a true cross-section
of the nation. Buffalo's deeply rooted African-American community dates
from the time when the city was one of the last stops before Canada on
the Underground Railroad. Buffalo has a strong Native American presence
from the surrounding nations of the Iroquois Federation. Poles, Germans,
Irish, and Italians settled here in large numbers during waves of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century immigration. The Hispanic American community,
too, has a long and rich tradition.
Buffalo lies at the eastern end of 250-mile-long Lake Erie, where the
lake empties into the Niagara River. Across the river, the Canadian shore
has beaches you can bike to if you're ambitious. Niagara Falls, the most
accessible of the wonders of the world, is only ten miles downstream from
Buffalo. In summer, thanks to the cooling breezes crossing this Great
Lake, Buffalo enjoys natural air conditioning and low humidity. In winter,
the lake is responsible for the local meteorological phenomenon known
as "lake-effect snow," most of which falls in the hills south
of the city-where the ski slopes are.
The city began to take its present shape when it was a rich industrial center. Its expansive park system and wide, scenic parkways, its comfortable neighborhoods, and its architectural treasures are a legacy of that time. The city's parks-designed by the great nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted-add to the city's architectural allure.
Today, most of Buffalo's heavy industry is gone, and education has become one of the city's main businesses. Buffalo also supports a rich cultural life that includes vibrant theater, a first-rate symphony orchestra, and one of the nation's premier collections of twentieth-century art in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. For summertime music and theater in a setting of great natural beauty, there's Artpark along the lower Niagara River north of Niagara Falls in Lewiston; the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake on the Niagara Peninsula; and the Chautauqua Institution, ninety minutes south on the shores of Lake Chautauqua.