The University at Buffalo, The State University of New York--popularly known as UB--is New York's premier public center for graduate and professional education. With 15,000 undergraduates and 9,000 graduate students, it is the state's largest and most comprehensive public university. It is the only campus with schools of pharmacy and architecture, and one of only two public universities in New York with a school of law. The University at Buffalo stands in the first rank among the nation's research-intensive public universities.

The University at Buffalo was organized as a school of medicine in 1846. Millard Fillmore, later the thirteenth president of the United States, was its first chancellor. 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. The 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 unusual 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 anti-cancer 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.

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--particularly in its professional schools--to the needs of society, and the university's public charter allows it to offer graduate and professional education at a reasonable tuition cost.

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, 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; the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis; the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition; the Center for Advanced Molecular Biology and Immunology; the Center for Cognitive Science; and the Research Institute on Addictions. Altogether, the university supports cross-disciplinary research in more than forty research centers and institutes.

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 university has two major campuses. The South Campus, located in the northeast corner 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 and, in Park Hall, the Department of Psychology. 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.