UB Overview

The University at Buffalo (UB) is the State University of New York's most comprehensive university center. The university's enrollment is the largest, and its range of academic programs the widest, of any public institution in New York and New England. In 1989, the university was accepted into the Association of American Universities, an association of 62 of the nation's leading public and private research universities, one of only two public universities in New York and New England to be admitted.

Many of New York State's best students take their place here annually among a diverse community of approximately 27,000 students, pursuing their interests from more than 100 undergraduate programs (majors, special majors, and concentrations), more than 70 minors, 115 master's, 6 professional degrees, 43 advanced certificates and 80 doctoral-level programs. The undergraduate division awards the largest number of bachelor's degrees in the state each year. UB's 173,662 living alumni reside in all 50 states and more than 120 foreign countries.

The University at Buffalo is the only unit of the State University of New York (SUNY) with professional Schools of Law, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Architecture and Planning. It is home to one of only three publicly supported schools of engineering in New York State. SUNY's only doctoral program in management is located here. Along with Albany, Binghamton, and Stony Brook, the University at Buffalo shares the distinction within the state university system of being a university center.

The university's wide disciplinary spectrum includes the departments and programs within the College of Arts and Sciences and 12 schools: Architecture and Planning, Dental Medicine, Graduate School of Education, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Informatics, Law, Management, Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Nursing, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Public Health and Health Professions, and Social Work.

UB has a distinguished faculty of approximately 4,000 full-time and affiliated individuals. Among them are many scholars and educators who are nationally and internationally recognized in their fields. On the faculty are Nobel Prize winners; a Pulitzer prize recipient, a MacArthur Foundation fellow, recipients of the National Medal of Science and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry; several holders of prestigious Fulbright and Guggenheim awards; many recipients of grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other agencies that support first-rank scholarship; and an array of nationally published authors and scientists.

UB's libraries are ranked fifty-ninth among major universities by the Association of Research Libraries. Library holdings exceed three million volumes. The university ranks in the top third of America's public research universities in total research dollars, with total research expenditures of nearly $240.2 million in fiscal year 2003. The first cancer research center in the world was established at the University at Buffalo in 1898. Today there are more than ninety organized research centers and institutes here, including the Center for Computational Research; the Great Lakes Program; the Institute for Local Government and Regional Growth; the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis; the Institute for Lasers, Photonics, and Biophotonics; the Electronic Poetry Center; the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research; the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition; and the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. UB also has numerous joint research partnerships with Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

Along with these accomplishments, the faculty are at home in the classroom. The State University of New York has recognized more Distinguished Professors and Distinguished Teaching Professors at UB than at any other SUNY unit. More than 151 of UB's faculty have received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching - again, the largest representation of any unit in the SUNY system.

The University at Buffalo has achieved recognition as an international institution, attracting a diverse and talented population of 3,463 students from 111 countries. It is also a leader in overseas study programs. Academic-year, semester, and summer language and culture programs are arranged with universities in France, Spain, Poland, Japan, Israel, China, and Russia. Students may also participate in academic exchanges in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Latvia, and Australia. These programs allow study in specialized fields with students from the host country. Students may apply credit earned from study abroad to most undergraduate academic programs, including preprofessional studies.

The University at Buffalo's lively intellectual atmosphere includes hundreds of political, social, cultural, and recreational events and scientific symposia every week - more than many campuses offer in an entire semester. Hundreds of student clubs and affinity groups provide outlets for just about any interest.

Because of its size and the variety of its programs, UB is a university in the richest sense. Along with graduate and professional education, it also displays remarkable breadth, diversity, and quality in undergraduate programs in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and fine arts, as well as in a variety of undergraduate preprofessional programs. In short, New York State's major public university provides unparalleled opportunities for learning, for career preparation, and for developing a rewarding way of life.