A UMass Medical School infectious disease specialist is urging people to get vaccinated soon against influenza, as the threat approaches of what has been called a “twindemic,” the annual spike in seasonal flu coinciding this year with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
UMass Medical School is enrolling healthy volunteers to take part in a Phase II/III clinical trial testing whether a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine candidate can prevent infection with the virus that causes 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The trial, by Pfizer and BioNTech, follows review of preclinical and clinical data from a Phase I trial, which assessed safety, tolerability and immune response in a group of volunteers.
Christian Rojas, professor in the department of resource economics, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to Malta. Rojas will be studying the impact of the hotel industry in the Maltese economy as well as the impact of the recent rise of the sharing economy (i.e. Airbnb) on the formal lodging industry. Of special interest will be quantifying the effect of, and prospects for recovery after, the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, Rojas will be teaching an applied game theory course at the University of Malta.
AMHERST, Mass. – An international task force, including two University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientists, concludes in new research that mobile health (mHealth) technologies are a viable option to monitor COVID-19 patients at home and predict which ones will need medical intervention.
Professor Friederike Jentoft, department of chemical engineering, has been awarded a $550,000 U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Financial Assistance Program to continue her work on acid catalyst design.
Acid catalysis plays a key role in commercially established and emerging processes for the transformation of petroleum- or biomass-derived feedstocks to chemicals and fuels. Jentoft’s project focuses on acid-catalyzed processes that are characterized by long-lived surface species, which are often trapped in the pores of a solid catalyst.
AMHERST, Mass.
AMHERST, Mass. – The Geological Society of America’s (GSA) Continental Scientific Drilling Division (CSD) has named University of Massachusetts Amherst geologist Julie Brigham-Grette as one of its two Distinguished Lecturers for 2020, which means she will be available to give online seminars on her Arctic drilling research to geologists anywhere in the world by request this fall and into spring 2021.
AMHERST, Mass. – In a new paper this week, geographer Forrest Bowlick at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues at Texas A&M offer first-hand accounts of what is required for GIS instructors and IT administrators to set up virtual computing specifically for providing state-of-the-art geographic information systems (GIS) instruction.
If the United States is at the forefront of the quantum information industrial revolution, it will benefit the U.S. economy as a whole and create new opportunities for people from disadvantageous backgrounds.
Professor Cheng Wang (Mathematics) was part of a research team that received a $350,000 National Science Foundation grant for their project "Collaborative Research: Efficient, Accurate, and Structure-Preserving Numerical Methods for Phase Fields-Type Models with Applications".