Each year, the Summer Undergraduate Research Program, Summer Enrichment Program and High School Health Careers Program host high achieving students from backgrounds underrepresented in health care and biomedical sciences at UMass Medical School. They carried on this year despite the COVID-19 pandemic, going all online.

The 54 college undergraduates and 18 high school students applied themselves to rigorous virtual academic classes, performed experiments and conducted research in small groups on- and offline.

AMHERST, Mass. – A chemist and kinesiologist got on a bus, but this isn’t the set-up to a joke. Instead, kinesiologist and lead author Ned Debold and chemist Dhandapani Venkataraman, “DV,” began talking on their bus commute to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and discovered their mutual interest in how energy is converted from one form to another – for Debold, in muscle tissue and for DV, in solar cells. 

AMHERST, Mass. – The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Food Science has been awarded a five-year, $482,549 grant to fund an experiential learning program for undergraduates, including independent research opportunities with faculty mentors and paid summer internships with industrial partners in the greater Boston area.

USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) has awarded a two-year, $300,000 grant to an interdisciplinary group of researchers from UMass Amherst to develop tools to estimate the mass of carbon stored in salt marshes. Brian Yellen of the geosciences department has spearheaded this effort, and will work with Konstantinos Andreadis of civil and environmental engineering and Justin Richardson, Jonathan Woodruff, and Qian Yu of the geosciences department.

Michael Ash, economics and public policy, has developed a visualization that offers a novel perspective on President Donald Trump’s approval and disapproval ratings leading up to the November election.

This month the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $132 million in funding awards to researchers at more than 50 universities, including physicist Stephane Willocq and his team, who are working on topics in high energy physics. The purpose is “to advance knowledge of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.”

AMHERST, Mass. – A team of climate scientists and geologists including Robert DeConto at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently received a five-year, $7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to drill through the Greenland Ice Sheet and into the bedrock below, where they will be able to evaluate how long it has been since the last ice sheet retreated from the continent.

AMHERST, Mass. – A research team led by a University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher recently received a $749,998 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to improve drone capabilities through edge- and cloud computing.

AMHERST, Mass. – Woodrow Winchester, a senior lecturer and director of engineering management in the mechanical and industrial engineering (MIE) department with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was today named a fellow in the second cohort of the IAspire Leadership Academy, a leadership program aimed at helping STEM faculty from underrepresented backgrounds ascend to leadership roles at colleges and universities.

In the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has disproportionately affected Massachusetts seniors, UMass Boston’s Gerontology Institute is using its research to identify the state’s most vulnerable residents and advocate for better policy and assistance programs for older residents moving forward.