AMHERST, Mass. – U.S. combat soldiers who suffered a moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) are more likely than soldiers with other serious injuries to experience a range of mental health disorders, according to a new retrospective study by University of Massachusetts Amherst health services researchers.

AMHERST, Mass. – For more than 50 years, social scientists and practitioners have suggested that having members of different groups interact with each other can be an effective tool for reducing prejudice. But emerging research points to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the effects of contact between groups, say Linda Tropp at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Tabea Hässler, leader of a multi-national research team based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

UMass Amherst civil engineering Ph.D. student Alyssa Ryan has been named a 2020 Traffic Safety Scholar (TSS) and awarded a $1,000 scholarship to attend the 38th annual Lifesavers National Conference on Highway Safety Priorities, March 14 through 17 in Tampa, Florida. She is one of an elite group of 50 U.S.

The University of Massachusetts Boston and SeaAhead, Inc. have formed a partnership to improve research and commercial ventures promoting ocean sustainability. Together they plan to catalyze a New England bluetech “cluster” by fostering venture-based innovation.

The National Science Foundation recently awarded $500,000 to professor Eliot Moss of the College of Information and Computer Sciences to build a platform that provides lasting data storage in devices that use non-volatile memory (NVM), such as the flash storage in a phone or a laptop’s solid-state drive.

Plant ecologist Kristina Stinson, environmental conservation, and her team were recently honored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) with one of its 2019 Project of the Year Awards for Resource Conservation and Resiliency, given at an annual symposium in Washington, D.C.

The agency’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program recognizes “scientific advances and technological solutions to some of DoD’s most significant environmental and installation energy challenges.”

Maciej J. Ciesielski, professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate head of the department, has been elected as a 2020 Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). A fellow is the highest grade of membership in the IEEE and is afforded annually to less than 0.1% of the more than 423,000 voting members in more than 160 countries.

AMHERST, Mass. – A University of Massachusetts Amherst cancer epidemiologist has received a $462,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to expand her research into the effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on the breast density of college-age women. High breast density is a strong risk factor for breast cancer. 

Given the chances of a snowstorm in New England in mid-January, it was risky for the American Meteorological Society (AMS) to hold its 100th annual meeting in Boston.  

Turns out the thousands of meteorologists, climate scientists, hydrologists and academics – including many faculty, students and alumni from the Kennedy College of Sciences – who descended on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for the weeklong event were better off packing shorts and T-shirts than winter coats and snow boots.