On a typical day, family nurse practitioner Valery Joseph ’10, G’18 sees between 15 and 18 patients at the Whittier Street Health Center in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. Most of her patients range in age from 50 to 90. About 90 percent speak Spanish, one of four languages spoken by Haiti-born Joseph. But since Whittier became a COVID-19 testing site in April, things have been anything but typical. Fortunately, she felt well prepared to handle the situation.
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco remembers Boston from the decade he taught at Harvard and raised his family in Cambridge, in the late ’90s and early aughts, as a city in the throes of physical upheaval—the Big Dig gouging a new transportation network through the heart of the city. As he returns to this city to become chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston, he is transfixed by the changes he’s seen. “It’s a beautiful city; it’s so pristine,” he said in a recent interview, relishing the opportunity to return to Boston. “It’s completely transformed.”
The Practitioner Scholars Program (PSP) pilot has launched its third cohort this fall, bringing together a new group of distinguished government, business, and community leaders who will co-teach courses with UMass Boston faculty. This year’s program has been curated with courses that have a racial equity and social justice focus, with a deep connection to community engagement.
Seven UMass Boston students have been selected as the inaugural cohort of the Civic Action Fellows Program. The fellows will build their civic agency and skills for collective action through bi-weekly workshops with community-engaged leaders and an internship with a community-based organization.
Tim Scalona, a graduate student at the School of Public Policy, has been elected student trustee for the Amherst campus on the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees, where he plans to advocate for first-generation and low-income students, among other issues.
His priorities on the Board of Trustees include the creation of a first-generation student support center on every campus in the UMass system, advocacy for unions that represent student workers and expanded support for BIPOC students and campus cultural centers.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst continues to be among the nation’s most environmentally responsible higher educational institutions, according to The Princeton Review’s 2021 Guide to Green Colleges.
For the sixth consecutive year, UMass Amherst has been recognized on the list, which this year profiles 416 green colleges. The Princeton Review chose the colleges and universities based on its 2019-20 sustainability survey of administrators and students at 695 institutions.
A research team including Charlie Schweik and Brenda Bushouse of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been awarded $3.4 million in grants from the National Science Foundation’s Growing Convergence Research program for their project, “Jumpstarting Successful Open-Source Software Projects with Evidence-based Rules and Structures.”
More Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, or other non-binary identities (LGBTQI+) than ever before, but significant gaps remain in data collection and understanding of their well-being, says a new report from a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee that includes M.V. Lee Badgett, economics and public policy.
Kalpen Trivedi, associate provost and director of the International Programs Office (IPO), has been selected to serve in the chair stream for the International Education Leadership Knowledge Community (IEL KC) at NAFSA: Association of International Educators. The term for this position is January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2023.
AMHERST, Mass. – A team of researchers led by microbiologists Klaus Nüsslein and Marie Kroeger at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in a new report say they have pinpointed the source – methane-producing microorganisms – for large amounts of methane emitted from rainforest-turned-cattle-pasture in Brazil’s Amazon region.
Deforested areas there are most often converted to cattle grazing, the authors point out, which for decades were known to be large methane sources, but until now the reason was not clear.