AMHERST, Mass. – In the four battleground states where Latino voters are most likely to influence 2020 election results — Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Texas — Latinos have lower wages, are less likely to have health insurance and have a higher likelihood of contracting COVID-19 than other racial or ethnic groups.

AMHERST, Mass. – Taking advantage of unique properties of sediments from the bottom of Sawtooth Lake in the Canadian High Arctic, climate scientists have extended the record of Atlantic sea-surface temperature from about 100 to 2,900 years, and it shows that the warmest interval over this period has been the past 10 years.

AMHERST, MASS. – The opening of MGM Springfield – the first resort-style casino in the state – stimulated the local and statewide economy and enhanced job and educational opportunities for a diverse workforce while not resulting in any increase in the rate of problem gambling or at-risk gamblers.

AMHERST, Mass. – New research from an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests that differential access to health care contributes to observed variation in environmental health damages, and that improving access to primary and preventative health care services may be a useful means of mitigating harm from a warming climate.

The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, has awarded Think College at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI), University of Massachusetts Boston, a five-year, $10 million cooperative agreement through the Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities to serve as the National Coordinating Center for institutions of higher education (IHE) that offer postsecondary education programs for students with intellectual disabilities.

As America’s streets filled with protests and its social conscience reignited following the killings of George Floyd and a long line of others earlier this year, organizers of the university’s Greeley Peace Scholar program decided to expand the annual discussion from a few weeks in April to a yearlong series of speakers and events. 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a team of researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering a three-year grant of nearly $500,000 to develop a new, wireless high-temperature sensor network for smart, coal-fired boilers used in industry.

A UMass Medical School researcher was recently awarded a $460,000, two-year grant from the National Institute on Aging to explore at the molecular level the connections between aging, health, and the onset and severity of Alzheimer’s disease.

“The idea of how you measure healthy aging is a big question,” said Heidi A. Tissenbaum, PhD, professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology.

Axovant Gene Therapies Ltd., a company developing innovative gene therapies for neurological diseases, has announced it received rare pediatric disease designation from the FDA for AXO-AAV-GM1, an adeno-associated virus-based gene therapy that is in Phase I/II development for GM1 gangliosidosis. AXO-AAV-GM1 also has orphan drug designation and is the only gene therapy in clinical development for both infantile (type 1) and juvenile (type 2) GM1 gangliosidosis.

An influential scientific journal’s list of top translational biotech researchers for 2019 includes Guangping Gao, PhD, the Penelope Booth Rockwell Professor in Biomedical Research, professor of microbiology & physiological systems, director of the Horae Gene Therapy Center and co-director of the Li Weibo Institute for Rare Diseases. Nature Biotechnology notes that its ranking of the top 20 biotech researchers is based on total patents (European and U.S.) granted for the y