Zhang Jie, professor, Sociology, and director, Center for China Studies, was invited by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Buffalo Port to give a talk at its Asian American Awareness Month seminar on May 5. The title of his talk was “Understanding China and Chinese Culture through the Criminal Justice Systems in China.”
Vida Vanchan, assistant professor, Geography and Planning, chaired two of the three sessions that she co-organized with Professor John Bryson (University of Birmingham) and Professor Tara Vinodrai (University of Waterloo) on “Manufacturing Capitalism: Adaptation, Survival, Resilience, and New Geographies of Production,” at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Washington, D.C., April 14–18.
Buffalo State science education faculty members and graduate students presented the panel “Science Education Curricular Studies” at the 33rd annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Curriculum History, held April 29–30 in conjunction with the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Denver, Colorado. Presenting were John Elliot(graduate student, science education): “A Comparative Study of One Hundred Years of High School Biology Laboratory Exercises”; Katrina Klas (graduate student, physics education): “The Incorporation of the Photoelectric Effect”; Jason Lindley (graduate student, physics education): “Harvard Project Physics”; Joseph Zawicki and Kathleen Falconer (associate professor, science education, and lecturer, elementary education): “Physics in New York State: Curricular Trends”; and organizer Catherine Lange (assistant professor, science education): “Shaping Science Curricular Reform in the 21st Century.”
Dermot Coffey, associate professor, and Michael De Marco, chair and professor, Physics, published their paper “Absence of the Hyperfine Magnetic Field at the Ru Site in Ferromagnetic Rare-Earth Intermetallics” in Physical Review B 81 (18), with physicists from the University of California San Diego, California State University at Fresno, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The work at Buffalo State was funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Tao Tang, associate professor, Geography and Planning, published a paper titled “GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Spatial Analysis of Population Exposure to Fine Particulate Air Pollution in Beijing, China” in the journal Environmental Geosciences 17 (1): 1–16, with several coauthors at the Capital Normal University of China. The paper contains the results of a three-year (2006–2008) field survey and GIS analysis. Tang also published a paper, “Feature Shape and Elevation Based Road Classification and Extraction on High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imageries,” with X. Wang, J. Carbonara, and Z. Shi in IEEE Proceedings: 17th International Conference on Geoinformatics, 2009.
Deborah Silverman, assistant professor, Communication, is the recipient of two Excalibur Awards from the Buffalo-Niagara chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. She received a Gold Excalibur Award for her article “A Community Comes Together: The Crash of Continental Flight 3407,” published in the national PR journal the Public Relations Strategist, and a Silver Excalibur Award for a conference presentation on the same subject at the 2008 PRSA Northeast District Conference. She will receive the awards at the Excalibur Awards program on June 17 at Salvatore’s Italian Gardens in Depew.
Charlotte Roehm, assistant professor, Geography and Planning/Great Lakes Center, gave an oral presentation titled “Hydrologic and Nutrient Dynamics in Coastal Regions of the Great Lakes” at the annual New York State Wetlands Forum, held in Buffalo April 28–29.
Subodh Kumar and his research associate Srinivasan Saravanan published their research paper “A Facile Synthesis of 11,12-dimethoxydibenzo[def,p]chrysene, a Preferred Precursor for the Synthesis of the Proximate and Ultimate Carcinogens of Dibenzo[def,p]chrysene (DBC)” in Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds 29 (5): 282–288. Dibenzo[def,p]chrysene is one of the most potent environmental carcinogens identified in the environment and cigarette smoke.
Zhang Jie, professor, Sociology, and director, Center for China Studies, published his article “Access to Farming Pesticides and Risk for Suicide in Chinese Rural Young People” in Psychiatry Research (in press). The study’s coauthor was Kong Yuanyuan, a Ph.D. student and visiting scholar from China during the 2008–2009 academic year.
William White, assistant professor of French and foreign language education, Modern and Classical Languages, published “Engaging the Self in Teacher Education: Critical Self-Narratives and the Creation of Educational Communities” in the peer-reviewed journalAction in Teacher Education 31 (3): 11–18.