Dear UMassD Community,
Welcome back to another exciting semester at UMass Dartmouth. I hope you were able to recharge during the winter break and spend time with family and friends.
Before we get too far into 2020, it is worth noting the incredible accomplishments of 2019. Every one of you made this possible and I am proud of all that you have done to make our university an amazing place to live, learn, and grow.
Implicit biases are unconscious attitudes that individuals hold about other people based on racial, social and other stereotypes. Implicit bias is important in health care because it can affect how a provider treats a patient. In a study published in PLOS ONE, UMass Medical School students found that trainees value becoming aware of their own implicit biases as they prepare to practice medicine.
UMass Medical School is participating in World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day on Thursday, Jan. 30, the first day dedicated to the eradication of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). NTDs are a group of ancient diseases, including intestinal worms, river blindness, guinea worm and trachoma, that threaten 1.6 billion people living in the poorest and most marginalized communities worldwide.
The Jake Kennedy ALS Fund, launched last month by Jake and Sparky Kennedy, supports research at UMass Medical School to find a cure for ALS. A Jan. 20 Boston Globe column by Kevin Cullen details the man behind the fund, recently diagnosed with ALS, and the kindness he and his wife have shown since launching Christmas in the City 30 years ago.
Four teams of UMass Medical School students have been awarded Martin Luther King Jr. Semester of Service Awards to implement community service programs. They will use the $500 awards to help improve access to cervical cancer screening, train youth in a lifesaving emergency intervention, integrate medical health records into free medical care, and expand tutoring opportunities for high school students.
Five Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning (LARP) students were recently awarded the Jury Prize in the 2020 Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Awards Student Competition.
The interdisciplinary team of graduate students; Keith Benoit, Kinjal Manish Desai, Tianyi Guan, Christopher Ramage and Peter Wackernagel; was one of four winning teams out of 2500 registered teams from all over the world.
Mathematics professor Andrea R. Nahmod has been named a principal investigator for a Simons Foundation Collaboration in Mathematical and Physical Sciences that will involve leading mathematics and physics researchers in the United States and Europe in a systematic, coordinated study of wave turbulence.
The four-year, $8 million grant with possibility of extension is a collaboration directed by Jalal Shatah at the Courant Institute at New York University (NYU).
NEWTON, Mass. – CoachUp, the nation’s leading private coaching provider, has relocated its headquarters to the innovation and collaboration space on the Mount Ida Campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
AMHERST, Mass. – Geochemist Isaac Larsen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been granted a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award and will spend the coming spring semester at the University of Salzburg, Austria.
"Our current system of expiration dates isn't working," insists Isenberg sophomore Harsha Prakki, explaining that arbitrary sell-by dates can't take food storage and transport conditions into account. "People throw away way too much food."