Public History Graduate Appointed Director of Ten Broeck Mansion
By Dan Kinne
The Albany County Historical Association (ACHA) recently appointed Brian Buff to serve as executive director of the Ten Broeck Mansion, a 1798 federal-style house museum located at 9 Ten Broeck Place in downtown Albany. In his new position, Buff also manages the historical association.

Paul Cohen, president of the ACHA Board of Trustees, went about finding a candidate to be the executive director of the Ten Broeck Mansion. Cohen consulted Ivan Steen, Ph.D., director of UAlbany’s public history program, and asked him for a candidate who was knowledgeable about museums and public history. Steen selected Buff without hesitation. “When Paul Cohen of the Albany County Historical Association called to inform me that the executive director’s position was open, and to ask if I could recommend someone for the job, I immediately concluded that Brian Buff was the best possible candidate,” Steen said.

Buff, a native of Albany, earned his bachelor’s degree in European history at St. John Fisher College in Rochester. To further his education and prepare for a museum career, he returned to Albany to work on his M.A. in public history. He completed that degree in December 2001 and has continued in the Ph.D. program in the Department of History.

The public history program requires students to complete a semester-long, full-time internship. Buff benefited from this program, gaining more experience by taking curatorial coursework at the Albany Institute of History and Art, and serving as an intern and later collections assistant at the Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, N.Y.

Buff’s concentration in public history was “Historical Agency Studies.” In this concentration, students are taught to work at historical societies, museums, and similar agencies. Buff said he is using everything he learned from the public history program to help him to continue to enhance the operation and practices at the ACHA. “The public history program strives to give students ‘real-life’ experiences. Dr. Steen and the program’s instructors are recognized experts in their fields. They come from the Albany Institute, the New York State Museum, the New York State Office of Historic Preservation, and federal historic sites, and they encourage us to get our ‘hands dirty’ with history,” said Buff.

Buff has many plans in mind for the mansion; one of the most outstanding changes to be seen shortly is the creation of an orientation gallery which will help visitors learn the history of the mansion. “Our visitors will be able to watch a short video about the people who once lived here. This will help them put the mansion and its beautiful gardens into context as they tour,” he said.

Supervising a staff of two full-time employees, Buff will also oversee research, care of the association’s collection, and development of new programs and fundraising methods. “Brian’s academic coursework has provided him with a solid background in history, as well as training in good historical agency practices,” said Steen. “The internship provided him with excellent practical experience.”

Ten Broeck Mansion’s exhibition season opens May 5 with “Living History Day,” which features demonstrations, Revolutionary and Civil War re-enactments, musical performances, and tours. Buff hopes that, with new interpretation and programming, Ten Broeck Mansion will become an active partner in helping the community discover its rich and diverse past.

Ten Broeck Mansion/Photo by Laura Pye

Two UAlbany Students Receive Intern Honors
By Sharon Allen
UAlbany senior computer science majors Steven Dale and Kevin Carey took two of the honors in a three-way tie for Intern of the Year at the sixth annual Software Company Awards Luncheon April 2. Several hundred local business and technology leaders attended the event, which was held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Albany.

In nominating Dale, an intern at ES11, LLC, in Albany, for the award, Christine Malone, partner and director of marketing at the firm, praised his technical expertise and his social and interpersonal skills. He was an integral part of a team responsible for developing a large-scale e-commerce application, one of ES11’s most intensive projects to date. In addition, Malone noted, Dale has exemplified “intelligence and motivation and can be trusted with any task, be it daily coding, researching the latest in application development strategy, or impacting fellow team members with his enthusiasm.”

Born in Israel, Dale moved with his family to Brooklyn at age six. A business minor at the University at Albany, combined with his internship and his computer science major, is helping to shape his career plans. He has already been hired full time at ES11; after graduating in May, he will continue his work in the field of Web development, which has a strong business/consulting component. Dale’s long-term plans remain open as he continues to gain valuable experience and explore the rapidly changing technologies and business environments of the 21st-century workplace. UAlbany’s Career Development Center, he notes, has been “a great help” with his job search since his sophomore year, and he urges more students to take advantage of its services. Dale credits his internship at ES11, where he has had the opportunity to assume responsibility and work with specialists on high-level projects, with helping him to develop the skills he will find useful in the workplace.

Carey began his internship at GlobalSpec in Troy by learning the details of daily production through data entry tasks, then moving into the technology group, where he has developed productivity tools for use throughout the business. His intimate knowledge of production processes has enabled him to develop very effective tools for productivity enhancement.

Currently, Carey is working on back office support software crucial to the successful launch of GlobalSpec’s forthcoming enterprise software product, Specstation. He has also played a key role in supporting software for internal customers and is credited with responding quickly and cheerfully to support requests for his own software and that written by others.

According to Stephen MacMinn, chief technology officer at GlobalSpec, Carey demonstrates “very mature and well-developed software engineering skills with respect to project management, teamwork, coding, testing, documentation and support” and is now supervising a team of interns, mentoring them in the software engineering skills he himself has developed. “During our respective careers, the management team at GlobalSpec has seldom seen another intern with Kevin’s combination of productivity, dedication, and maturity,” states MacMinn. Carey plans to continue working at GlobalSpec while he attends graduate school at UAlbany in the fall.

Carey and Dale shared the Intern of the Year honor with Jeff Britton, a senior at SUNY Institute of Technology.

Sponsored by the Center for Economic Growth, the former Tech Valley Software Alliance, now known as techconnex, was begun in response to the needs of the growing Capital Region software industry, which now includes nearly 600 companies. Other award recipients were Sawbucks, Inc. (“Most Innovative and Unique Company”); eTransmedia Technologies, Inc. (“A Promising New Enterprise”); Comsoft (“Contributing to Job Growth”); C.M.A. Consulting Services (“An Economic Winner”); and Ebeling Associates, Inc. (“Long-term Contribution to the Software Industry”).

A Unique Collaboration in the Life Sciences
Over the last several years an unusual collaboration has developed at the University at Albany among four women science faculty - two physicists, a chemist, and a biologist - to investigate complementary aspects of reproductive biology with the aim of developing comprehensive infertility and birth control treatments. Biology’s Caro-Beth Stewart, a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award, has pioneered research in protein evolution that led her to the desire to explore the structural basis of mammalian fertilization. Rabi Musah, upon joining the Department of Chemistry faculty in 1998, began a research program to develop new drugs derived from plant extracts used in African and South American folk medicine, with a specific emphasis on treating infertility and diseases associated with menopause. Physicist Susanne Lee, after developing a new crystalline form of estrogen that was more readily absorbed by the body, began exploring the use of structural changes in potential plant-derived pharmaceuticals to make their delivery to the body safer and more efficacious. These three women were brought together by their need to determine the three-dimensional structures of the complex molecules that form the basis of their work.

When such three-dimensional information is needed, scientists frequently turn to X-ray diffraction and are faced with two compromises. High-powered synchrotrons enable very quick measurements, but are located at national facilities that require long scheduling times and travel, which the notoriously unstable biological crystals may not survive. Alternative laboratory-based systems are frequently too weak to measure the structure quickly enough before it changes. Out of a collaboration between Lee and Carolyn MacDonald, also from the Department of Physics, arose a solution that would almost completely eliminate the need for such compromises. Lee and MacDonald had been working on a unique X-ray technology, called polycapillary optics, that acts like a fiber-optic for X-rays and is capable of radically increasing the intensity of standard laboratory X-ray machines. Using these optics to focus X-rays onto a small sample produces diffraction results hundreds of times faster than is conventionally possible. The optics are manufactured by the University at Albany spin-off company X-ray Optical Systems, which recently donated $100,000 to this research.

With this technology, the four scientists have been working as an interdisciplinary team to develop a next-generation X-ray diffractometer optimized specifically for the samples arising from their research. This approach is a departure from tradition, where systems for measuring biological materials are normally modified systems for measuring inorganic compounds such as steel or computer chips. This new X-ray diffractometer is expected to play an important role in the University’s progress in the life sciences, where one of the research cornerstones is determining the molecular structure of biological materials.

The Life Sciences Research Building, now rising on campus, is the keystone of an ambitious initiative that will invest more than $100 million to build national excellence in the life sciences. A campaign is underway to raise funds for the $78 million building.

The interdisciplinary collaboration exemplified by these four women is becoming increasingly important in life sciences research, where many questions can be answered only by pooling the knowledge of all the different science disciplines. The new life sciences initiative at UAlbany will be particularly effective, because the barriers between the traditional science disciplines have not been established. The lack of such disciplinary boundaries has enabled the four researchers to collaborate on developing a new instrument aimed at significantly advancing the efforts of researchers in the life sciences.

Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity Supports Scholarships for UAlbany Students
By Carol Olechowski
Nearly a century ago, black men who were college graduates founded a fraternity in Philadelphia. Today, Sigma Pi Phi is flourishing. The fraternity has grown to include more than 100 chapters, or boulés, in more than 25 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the Bahamas, and its thousands of members are hailed for the contributions they make to their communities.

Beta Psi Boulé, organized in 1984, is active in the Capital Region - and with the University at Albany, as well. Its 25 members include UAlbany Professor of Africana Studies and English Leonard A. Slade Jr., and Adjunct Professor of Africana Studies Maurice Thornton.

According to Sire Archon Bernard F. Ashe, Esq., a retired attorney who heads Beta Psi, “Sigma Pi Phi is a fraternity of professional men who, through mutual commitment, aim to cultivate and develop among their members the best qualities inherent in one another.” His explanation echoes that of fraternity founder Henry M. Minton, who noted that Sigma Pi Phi was established “to bind men of like qualities, tastes and attainments into close sacred union, that they might know the best of one another” (History of Sigma Pi Phi, Vol. 1, by Charles H. Wesley).

Fraternity members also pursue goals “that will promote the greatest good for the entire membership and for their communities,” commented Ashe. In the 98 years since its founding, Sigma Pi Phi has welcomed to its ranks a number of distinguished personages. They include the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; W.E.B. Du Bois; physician and scientist Charles R. Drew, who pioneered the collection, storage, and use of blood for transfusions; historian and writer Carter Godwin Woodson; poet and lyricist James Weldon Johnson and his brother, composer John Rosamond Johnson; and chemist Percy Lavon Julian, founder of Julian Laboratories, which developed synthetic cortisone.

In keeping with its mission, the fraternity supports higher education through scholarships and other awards. That benevolence has been evident at UAlbany as well. Since 1995, Beta Psi Boulé has contributed nearly $5,000 to the Seth Spellman Memorial Fund, which honors the late distinguished service professor and administrator who chaired UAlbany’s Africana studies department and served as dean of the School of Social Welfare. Spellman also headed the James E. Allen Collegiate Center and was special assistant to the University president.

Supporting the Spellman Fund serves a twofold purpose, Ashe believes. In Spellman’s memory “and out of respect for his many contributions to the University, to the Albany community, and to education, Beta Psi Boulé, of which he was an active member, chose to make periodic contributions to the Uni-versity. The purpose of the contributions is to provide some financial assistance and encouragement to students who distinguish themselves academically in the School of Social Welfare and the Department of Africana Studies.” Beta Psi Boulé began supporting the Spellman Fund in 1989, Ashe added.

Slade, who now chairs UAlbany’s Department of Africana Studies, is grateful for the “tangible support” Sigma Pi Phi’s Beta Psi Boulé has given the department and its students. Such support, Slade noted, “helps to improve the intellectual life of the University at Albany community.”

“Boulé members’ families,” Slade pointed out, “are also committed to contributing to the social, intellectual, and aesthetic enhancement of people’s lives.”

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