The Royal Irish Academy honored a UMass Medical School researcher and world-renowned immunologist with admission as an honorary member, in an online video ceremony on Friday, May 22. 

Joanne Lewis, ACNP-BC, PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Nursing Class of 2020, will serve as class speaker at the GSN Commencement, which will be held virtually on Sunday, May 31, at 10 a.m.

“I’m honored; it’s a big deal to be class speaker,” said Lewis. “It’s nice to be thought of and recognized by faculty who I’ve worked closely with over the years.”

AMHERST, Mass. – Farmers, well known for keeping an eye to the sky and adapting to whatever nature brings, are adjusting to new realities with COVID-19, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Student Farming Enterprise at the Agricultural Learning Center (ALC) is no exception, says director and senior lecturer Amanda Brown.

Elisabeth Hamin, professor of regional planning, has been appointed as the co-chair of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Task Force on Climate Action.

The Task Force on Climate Action will examine the role for scholarly leadership from ACSP in climate change research and in its programs’ curricula.

The Center for Research on Families has announced the 2020 cohort of the Graduate Student Grant Writing Program. The group of six were selected for the program based on their promising work in family research. Rebecca Spencer, professor of psychological and brain sciences, will lead the 9 month program which supports students through the development of NSF and NIH pre-doctoral fellowship proposals.

The Center for Research on Families (CRF) has announced the recipients of this year's Student Research Awards. 

CRF is committed to supporting students engaged in family research, with student researchers addressing family challenges such as malnutrition in older adults, women’s health in remote regions of the world, health effects of breastfeeding, socioemotional development of the multiracial children, how brain structures affect memory and how young children’s ability to understand language influences brain development.

The campus’s Armstrong Fund for Science has announced its award for 2020 to principal investigator Jun Yao, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Derek Lovley, professor of microbiology – an interdisciplinary team that is developing a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air. They will receive a two-year, $40,000 grant to support scaling up the invention for practical applications.

AMHERST, Mass. – Finding that homophobia and transphobia cost 1% or more of a country’s GDP, University of Massachusetts Amherst economist M.V. Lee Badgett argues in a new book that in addition to moral and human rights reasons, we can now also make a financial argument for LGBT equality.

AMHERST, Mass. – The academic year is over, but a cluster of University of Massachusetts Amherst students, led by faculty and staff, remains active in ongoing COVID-19 response efforts.

New research from UMass Boston’s Center for Survey Research suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic is having a negative impact on the physical and mental health of Boston residents.