Two Graduate School of Nursing DNP candidates have stepped up to help a college community stay protected from the coronavirus. Kelly Cutting, RN, FNP-C, and Olivia Slezik, RN, AGPCNP-BC, both graduating in 2021, are aiding COVID-19 tracing efforts for Student Health Services at Worcester State University.

“Both of us did our nurse practitioner clinicals at Worcester State, so the staff there reached out to us,” said Cutting.

Two MD/PhD students in the lab of Read Pukkila-Worley, MD, associate professor of medicine, have each received Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards from the National Institutes of Health for their projects analyzing the ways a host recognizes bacteria that can cause disease. Nick Peterson and Samantha Tse were awarded these highly competitive grants.

Atalanta Therapeutics, a biotech founded by UMass Medical School and three faculty research scientists to pioneer treatment options for neurodegenerative diseases, has launched with financing by venture capital fund F-Prime Capital and strategic collaborations with Biogen and Genentech.

UMass Medical School students are joining the “army of vaccinators” that Worcester Division of Public Health’s medical director, Michael Hirsh, MD, has called upon to get the COVID-19 vaccines to as many in the community as possible.

Now that two COVID-19 vaccines have received Food and Drug Administration emergency authorization, with more on the way, how do we encourage widespread acceptance among the public?

Two UMass Medical School researchers who surveyed Americans about their attitudes toward a COVID-19 vaccine last spring are preparing another study to evaluate ways for health care providers to talk with patients about COVID-19 vaccination.

UMass Medical School students are trained and ready to administer COVID-19 vaccinations to Worcester-area residents. Thirteen Graduate School of Nursing students taught more than 150 School of Medicine students to give the intramuscular injections. Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences students will help track participants.

An artificial intelligence model for computer-aided reading of mammograms may improve the detection of breast cancer, according to a study co-authored by UMass Medical School breast imaging expert Gopal Vijayaraghavan, MD, MPH, and published Jan. 11 in the journal Nature Medicine.

Nicole Bajdek ’20 has received the 2020 Student Investigator Masters Award from The New England Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine (NEACSM) for her research comparing blood pressure and autonomic recovery responses in African American and white women following repeated bouts of cycling exercise.

“I was honored to have my work recognized by NEACSM and that my abstract and e-poster presentation were chosen out of other great work,” she said. “I always enjoy attending the regional conferences and am proud to be a member of such a great organization.”

UMass Boston Professors of Psychology Zsuzsa Kaldy and Erik Blaser were awarded a three-year, $457,061 R15 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support their work studying the role of effort in visual working memory in infants and young toddlers.  

While the COVID-19 pandemic forced teachers across the country to adapt to remote learning environments, the UTeach Boston STEM teacher education program at UMass Boston is preparing future educators to teach virtually with an international twist.

A new initiative started by UTeach Boston Master Teacher WanSin Lim connected the program with classrooms in Malaysia this fall, giving UTeach Boston students a new global perspective.