Everything is pleasant inside the Rist Urban Agriculture Greenhouse. The air is warm and tranquil, filled with fresh, earthy notes from the spring seedlings of tomato plants, scallions, ginger and turmeric. The only sound is the muffled white noise of the nearby Merrimack River.
In a Thursday email to the campus community, Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy thanked on-site campus staff for their continued service and faculty for their swift transition to remote learning. He also addressed budget concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, plans for a virtual celebration of the Class of 2020 and preparations for the fall semester.
That email is as follows:
Dear Colleagues,
AMHERST, Mass. – To help resource managers in the Northeast meet a climate change challenge – more than 100 new invasive plant species could expand into the area – University of Massachusetts Amherst ecologists are offering a new analysis that narrows the large list down to five priority species with the greatest potential impacts.
AMHERST, Mass – The university’s Board of Trustees unanimously voted April 15 to name the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center (FAC) for the late Randolph W. “Bill” Bromery, in honor of the former chancellor who played a transformative role in creating today’s vibrant and diverse public research university.
Rationing health care resources during a pandemic is a complex undertaking, says Assoc. Prof. Carol Hay of Philosophy.
What’s clear, though, is that COVID-19 is exposing deep inequities in access to health care and other basic resources that existed long before the pandemic arrived – and it presents an opportunity to address those inequalities, she says.
Nancy A. Anoruo, MD, MPH, a third-year resident in the Department of Medicine, has been working over the last three weeks as a medical contributor and journalist for the ABC News Medical Unit in New York.
“World News Tonight, Good Morning America, all of those programs—everything medical within those shows that you see on ABC comes through us first,” Dr. Anoruo said about the unit’s medical experts and fact checkers.
Anoruo said she has long been a fan of medical journalists such as Sanjay Gupta, MD, at CNN and Jennifer Ashton, MD, ABC’s chief medical correspondent.
The Integrated Concentration in Science (iCons) Program this month unveiled an online, web-based “innovation portal” to showcase student research projects into real-world problems as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and as a remote instruction tool, says iCons founder and professor of chemistry Scott Auerbach. He and the program’s faculty researchers and instructors intend the portal to allow iCons student research to enjoy increased impact through online dissemination.
As previously announced, the Fine Arts Center has been hard at work shifting its programming online, with the goal of streaming performances, providing interactive virtual gallery experiences, and sharing other engaging content and conversations with the public.
Ric Grefé, former executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and Design Thinker in Residence at Williams College will be providing a talk and question and answer session on Thursday, April 23rd at noon. The talk will be held online and all members of the UMass community are welcome.
AMHERST, Mass – As college students adjust to distance learning, Riley J. Walter, a senior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has completed his senior thesis project by releasing a musical album. The record, which is primarily hip-hop and experimental music, is a culmination of over a year of work, and was written, produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely by Walter.