Please join us in congratulating Katherine L. Dixon-Gordon (Assistant Professor | Psychological and Brain Sciences) on her selection for the 2018 Judy E. Hall, PhD, Early Career Psychologist Award. This award, presented by the National Register of Health Service Psychologists, is named after Judy E. Hall, PhD, the Executive Officer of the National Register from 1990 to 2013. The award recognizes excellence in a National Register credentialed psychologist with fewer than ten years of postdoctoral experience, and the associated $2,500 stipend supports a project that advances the mission, vision, and values of the National Register.

The UMass Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations announces a limited submission opportunity for the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships. This Fellowship assists exceptional faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest.  The program is intended to enable scholars in the humanities to work on problems that interest them most, at an appropriately advanced level of sophistication.  In addition to facilitating the work of individual faculty members, these awards should benefit scholarship in the humanities more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research.

An interdisciplinary UMass team led by ISSR Director Laurel Smith-Doerr (PI) and Co-PIs Enobong (Anna) Branch, Shlomo Zilberstein, Henry Renski, and Shannon Roberts has received a National Science Foundation conference grant funded under one of the NSF Ten Big Ideas—the Future of Work at Human-Technology Frontiers (HTF). On April 5-6th, the Institute for Social Science Research convened renowned social scientists, computer scientists, engineers and influential professionals from across the U.S. for the second of three meetings funded by this grant, to consider the question of racial equity in how scholars understand emerging technologies and the workplace. 

On May 17, the House Appropriations Committee approved the 2019 fiscal year Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies (CJS) Appropriations Bill. The CJS bill serves as the vehicle for annual appropriations for the National Science Foundation (NSF), Census Bureau, National Institute of Justice (NIJ), Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and many other federal departments and agencies. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) has shared its analysis of the key spending provisions in this important bill.