UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco today announced the appointment of Associate Professor Joseph N. Cooper as special assistant to the chancellor for Black life. The newly created position is intended to bring greater focus throughout the campus community to issues of inequality, racism, and social justice.

AMHERST, Mass. – University of Massachusetts Amherst alumnus Larry Bohn, Class of 1974, has established an endowed fund with a $1 million gift, plus $500,000 in incentives from the state, which will provide scholarship support to the children of veterans.

Environmental health sciences (EHS) doctoral student Abosede Sarah Alli was named one of the winners of the 2020 New Researcher Abstract Award by the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE). She received the distinction as part of the ISEE’s 32nd annual conference, held virtually this year with 1800+ participants from 70+ countries convening online to share valuable research and discussion for improving environmental health policy worldwide.

AMHERST, MASS. – A University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental health scientist has used an unprecedented objective approach to identify which molecular mechanisms in mammals are the most sensitive to chemical exposures.

Banu Subramaniam, professor in the department of women, gender, sexuality studies, won the 2020 Society for Literature, Science & the Arts (SLSA) Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize for the best book in Literature, Science & the Arts for the book “Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism.”

The ADVANCE program has announced that three research teams are recipients of ADVANCE Collaborative Research Seed Grants for 2020-21. These competitive grants aim to foster the development of innovative and equitable collaborative research projects among faculty.  Recognizing longstanding gender gaps in the academy, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds universities to build institutional transformation programs in order to advance gender equity for faculty in science and engineering.

AMHERST, Mass.— The German and Scandinavian Studies program in the department of languages, literatures, and cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been designated a German Center of Excellence by the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG). The German Center of Excellence designation is presented only to, “well-established and growing German program[s] with strong support from the administration, colleagues, alumni, parents, and students.”

AMHERST, Mass. – In a new paper with results that senior author Eric Strieter at the University of Massachusetts Amherst calls “incredibly surprising,” he and his chemistry lab group report that they have discovered how an enzyme known as UCH37 regulates a cell’s waste management system.

Strieter says, “It took us eight years to figure it out, and I’m very proud of this work. We had to develop a lot of new methods and tools to understand what this enzyme is doing.”

AMHERST, Mass.

As coastal communities face increasing climate-related threats, a new innovative and collaborative ecosystem has launched that aims to become a global hub for testing and scaling up nature-based solutions in the high-energy environment of the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park.