The University at Buffalo School of Nursing has received a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant of $297,491 to fund enhancements within its Patient Simulation Center (PSC).

The PSC of the Nurse Anesthetist Program enables UB nursing students to practice patient care in a simulated operating room, using a full-body, computer-controlled mannequin and advanced patient monitoring and anesthesia delivery technologies.

The grant will be used to update and expand the PSC’s simulation training capabilities, according to Thomas E. Obst, PhD, CRNA, and director of the UB Nurse Anesthesia Program.

It will fund the replacement of the current patient simulator, anesthesia gas machine and surgical table, and expand the PSC’s training capabilities by the addition of a pediatric anesthesia simulator, fiber optic airway management equipment, ultrasonic imaging equipment and a range of surgical equipment.

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Students in the University at Buffalo School of Management will get a taste of the real business world when IBM professionals come to campus on Oct. 15 to run a business simulation exercise. The event will be organized by the school’s Financial Management Association.

Thirty-two undergraduate and graduate students will participate in the daylong event, competing against each other in teams.

Each team will be given a packet of information outlining the strengths and weaknesses of a mock technology company. Using this information, students will create and execute sales strategies and go on several “sales calls,” trying to sell their product to the competition’s judges.

“The simulation is a negotiation in which students use market intelligence and handle quickly changing industry conditions to persuade the IBM manager to make a deal,” says Charles Lindsey, assistant professor of marketing in the School of Management, and a competition judge. “Participants need to demonstrate strategic thinking, marketing and sales expertise, ethical decision-making, leadership skills and a winning attitude.”

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Friday, Oct. 22 will kick off the annual UB tradition True Blue Days — a time for students, alumni, faculty, staff, family and friends to paint themselves blue and white and celebrate in the glow of a giant bonfire.

To the UB faithful, it means one thing: It’s time for the UB homecoming football game, which this year pits the UB Bulls against the Temple Owls. Kickoff is noon, Saturday, Oct. 23, in UB Stadium.

True Blue festivities will begin at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 22, with a reception in the Center for the Arts (CFA) featuring welcoming remarks by UB President John B. Simpson. Light hors d’oeuvres will be served. Visitors can take backstage tours of the CFA, which will conclude with the UB Art Gallery’s new exhibit, “Golden Days of Artpark,” a glimpse of radical art created during the park’s first decade.

Friday’s homecoming events will continue with “Augusten Burroughs: A One Night Stand!” a comedy presentation at 8 p.m. in the Mainstage Theatre in the CFA. Burroughs’ best-selling memoir, “Running with Scissors,” was on The New York Times best-seller list for more than four years and was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film in 2006.

Read more about this year’s homecoming events.

In the midst of expanding economic ties but troubling trade disputes between the United States and China, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., U.S. ambassador to China, will present a speech on U.S.-China relations via live interactive webcast at a China Town Hall at the University at Buffalo.

The Oct. 18 event will take place in 120 Clemens Hall, UB North Campus. It will be free and open to the public, and its format will permit Huntsman to take questions from the audience.

Huntsman’s talk will be part of “China Town Hall: Local Connections, National Reflections,” an event coordinated by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and presented simultaneously at 50 sites throughout the country.

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The White House announced this week that Nadiaa Ansari, who graduated from the University at Buffalo in June with dual majors in Asian studies and political science, has been selected to participate this fall in the 2010 White House Internship Program.

According to internship program coordinators, Ansari, from Endicott, N.Y., will be given a unique opportunity through the program to gain professional experience and to build her leadership skills, all while helping the government to run effectively.

White House interns work in myriad different White House departments, including the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the First Lady and the Office of the Chief of Staff.

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The University at Buffalo has received an $8.2 million award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to administer a new round of studies that extend the Women’s Health Initiative research for another five years.

The initial 40 WHI centers across the U.S. have been grouped into four regional centers to carry out this new initiative. UB will oversee scientific direction and the participant contacts of the Northeast region’s nine institutions.

These include Harvard University, Brown University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, University of Massachusetts at Worchester, Stony Brook University, George Washington University, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Medstar Health Research Institute, in addition to UB.

The WHI 2010-2015 Extension Study will fund continuing research into many chronic diseases of aging, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, osteoporosis, stroke and cognition, and will support new studies focusing on predictors of healthy aging.

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Charles Olson (1910-1970), the influential second-generation modernist poet and essayist, was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and the New American poets of New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat movement and the San Francisco Renaissance.

This year, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Olson is being feted at conferences and symposia at several universities and poetry centers, including UB, where he taught from 1963 to 1965.

The UB Poetics Program will present “Olson at the Century: A Symposium” Oct. 14-16 on North Campus and at venues in Buffalo.

All events are free and open to the public.

Olson is best known for his height (6-foot-6), his seminal theoretical essay “Projective Verse” and for “The Maximus Poems,” a series of 300 poems written over a period of almost 20 years that are rich in myth, geography, history, architecture and personal reflections, and which have been the subject of a great deal of scholarly research and critical inquiry.

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The University at Buffalo and Toronto Rehabilitation Institute are partnering on a $4.75 million initiative to make housing, public buildings and outdoor spaces more accessible for people with disabilities and people of all ages.

The five-year effort, which launches Oct. 1, encompasses multiple research and development projects on topics including home modifications and the design of public rights-of-way such as sidewalks and street crossings.

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) is funding the work with a grant that establishes UB and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute as partners in a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Universal Design in the Built Environment.

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