UMass Medical School has been awarded a grant from the National Institute on Aging to develop a roadmap for developing clinical trials networks to study COVID-19 in nursing homes. Jerry Gurwitz, MD, the Dr. John Meyers Professor of Primary Care Medicine, professor of medicine and family medicine & community health, chief of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and executive director of the Meyers Primary Care Institute, will serve as principal investigator for the project.

Nili Amir, SOM ’21, an aspiring OB/GYN, was born at UMass Memorial Medical Center on Aug. 3, 1992. Last week, on her birthday, Amir had the privilege of helping to deliver babies at the same hospital.

The National Science Foundation this week announced a five-year, $26 million initial grant to a consortium led by the University of Arizona to form a new Engineering Research Center, the Center for Quantum Networks (CQN), with partners at Harvard, Yale and MIT, among others, and including Distinguished Professor Don Towsley of the College of Information and Computer Sciences.

Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) has named Michelle Farkas, chemistry, one of 13 new Fellows for its Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell (CMC) initiative.

Growing up in Beaumont, TX, Amilcar Shabazz, Afro-American studies, celebrated Independence Day on June 19 – Juneteenth. 

Juneteenth is a significant part of American history, but many people are only now becoming aware of the importance of the day.  In Massachusetts, the day has been recognized with an annual proclamation, but it was not a legal holiday.  This year, as June 19 drew near, Shabazz decided that now was the time. “Massachusetts recognizes it as a day, but it was not a true holiday,” He said.

Evolutionary biologist Ana Caicedo, associate professor of biology, has received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award to support her collaboration with Detlef Weigel, head of the molecular biology department and executive director of the Max Plank Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Caicedo spent the recent spring semester there as a guest researcher while on sabbatical.

Rachel Walker, associate professor and Ph.D. program director, and Lisa Wolf, director of emergency nursing research at the Emergency Nurses Association and part-time College of Nursing professor, have been selected by the American Academy of Nursing as members of the 2020 Class of New Fellows.

AMHERST, Mass. – In an unexpected new finding, biochemists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report observing that a damage-containment system in stressed bacteria can become overrun and blocked, but that this leads to cells responding by turning on very different pathways to make sure that normal growth continues.

AMHERST, Mass. – One of the new realities in biomedical research is that it’s increasingly difficult to use a general approach to score advances. Now, investigations into disease mechanisms, for example, are often conducted at the molecular level by specialists who dedicate years to interrogating a single protein or signaling pathway.

AMHERST, Mass. – A new report published this week details a number of steps that can be taken following the 2020 elections to ensure data security and privacy rights of individuals.