In the long-term battle between a herpesvirus and its human host, a University of Massachusetts Amherst virologist and her team of students have identified some human RNA able to resist the viral takeover – and the mechanism by which that occurs.

Karen Giuliano, associate professor at the Institute for Applied Life Sciences and the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, along with Kelly Landsman, a nurse-biomedical engineer in Minneapolis, are writing a new column for the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) called Nurse Innovators. 

The University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Engineering (COE) has received a $10 million gift from Jerome ’60 and Linda Paros aimed at accelerating its cutting-edge work in atmospheric research and hazard mitigation by enabling a new center of excellence. The gift is the largest ever received by the college.

A research study by Professor Priyank Arora has won the 2022 People’s Choice Award at the recently concluded Early-career Sustainable Operations Workshop. At this workshop (organized by the Wharton School on Feb. 26-27), Arora and his coauthors showcased their ongoing study that examines the “Uber for tractors” business model in emerging economies.

College of Engineering researchers Jinglei Ping, mechanical and industrial engineering, and Jun Yao, electrical and computer engineering, have received National Institutes of Health (NIH) Trailblazer R21 Awards to pursue their promising emerging research.

A yearlong collaboration between student activists and University of Massachusetts Amherst administration has led to the launch of easily accessible equity-minded and graphics-rich data dashboards about the enrollment and retention of students of color. The new dashboards are designed to quickly and easily provide information about students, including those who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color), says Barb Chalfonte, executive director of strategic analytics.

New research led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst into the life and times of a New England salt marsh fundamentally changes our understanding of how salt marshes acquire the sediment that keeps them viable. This research, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, has wide-ranging implications for managing New England’s coastline as it struggles to keep up with development, sea-level rise and other environmental impacts.

Among primates, including humans, hair is an important feature of diversity and evolution, serving functions tied to thermoregulation, protection, camouflage and signaling. However, the evolution of wild primate hair has remained relatively understudied until recently.

“Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan,” a groundbreaking new book by Garrett Washington, associate professor of history at UMass Amherst, has been published by the University of Hawai'i Press.

“Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan” is a spatially explicit study on the influence of the Protestant church in imperial Japan. 

Associate Professor Jessica Schiffman, the interim department head of the Chemical Engineering Department at UMass Amherst, has been selected to the “2021 I&EC Research Class of Influential Researchers – the Americas” by the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research (I&EC), a mainstay in the field of chemical engineering since 1909.