Department News

From the moment Selma Blair walked on stage with her service dog, Scout, the audience sensed this talk was going to be like no other. Indeed, the March 15 appearance by the actress, author and disability rights advocate proved to be a riveting sharing of her deeply personal journey, one that captivated those in attendance.

Imagine waking up one day and finding that you are suddenly having difficulty swallowing, walking and talking. You start experiencing involuntary muscle contractions called dystonias. Then imagine that these symptoms do not go away.

Brain lesions — areas of brain tissue that show damage from injury or disease — are the biomarker most widely used to determine multiple sclerosis disease progression. But an innovative new study led by the University at Buffalo strongly suggests that the volume of white matter lesions is neither proportional to, nor indicative of, the degree of severe disability in patients. 

Nicholas J. Silvestri, MD, clinical associate professor of neurology at the University at Buffalo, has been named a recipient of the 2023 A.B. Baker Teacher Recognition Award by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN).

Researchers at the University at Buffalo are hard at work studying rare diseases and caring for the many patients suffering from them. UB will hold an event recognizing rare disease patients, their clinicians and the researchers working to discover causes — and ultimately cures — for these conditions.

When she talks about why she wants to be a doctor, Sydney Johnson tells the story of how she and her twin sister came into this world. Sydney was supposed to be delivered by C-section, since she was in a breech position, but somehow, regrettably, that didn’t happen. The physician decided to deliver both babies naturally. It was a decision that Sydney and her mother nearly paid for with their lives.

University at Buffalo faculty members Stelios Andreadis, PhD, and M. Laura Feltri, MD, have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

From the time she heard about the inaugural Graduate Student Research Day, Taylor Wicks was thrilled with the opportunity to showcase her work.

Adults experiencing long COVID may be interested in a new University at Buffalo clinical trial that is testing low-dose lithium as a potential treatment.