Talking Points

Kinesiology graduate students receive awards at regional meeting

Two Kinesiology graduate students received presentation awards at the New England American College of Sports Medicine (NEACSM) Conference held Nov. 8-9 at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence.
 
Thomas Longyear (left) received the Outstanding Masters’ Student Presentation Award for his presentation titled “The Molecular Mechanism of Fatigue: Examining the Role of H+, Pi, and Ca2+.” Jeffer Sasaki received the Outstanding Doctoral Student Presentation Award for his presentation on “Validation of the Fitbit Wireless Activity Tracker® for the Prediction of Energy Expenditure.”
 
The

Ganz developing new system to save lives at mass-casualty disasters

Aura Ganz, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been awarded a four-year, $1.6-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue her research on a computerized disaster-management response system. Ganz says the system is designed to quickly organize chaotic, mass-casualty, disaster scenes, such as airliner, bus and train wrecks, and cut the evacuation time of survivors in half.
 
For the past several years, Ganz has been developing what she calls the DIORAMA I system, designed to coordinate the initial response in mass-casualty incidents and improve the

Researchers set to begin building shared computer cluster at new Holyoke center

When Gov. Deval Patrick, President Robert Caret and other state officials cut the ribbon Nov. 16 to open the new Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, a small group of scientists was waiting in the wings, ready to step in and begin actually building a shared computer cluster, an “academic cloud” to provide service to university users.
 
Four principal researchers, Computer Science professor Prashant Shenoy, Chris Hill of MIT, Claudio Rebbi of Boston University and Gene Cooperman of Northeastern University recently were awarded a $2.3 million grant from the

School of Education awarded total of $21M to help Afghanistan rebuild higher education system

Having traveled to Afghanistan three times in the past five months, the last thing professor David Evans seems to think about is withdrawal.
 
In fact, as the United States prepares to end its military presence in that country 2014, Evans and the project team at the School of Education’s Center for International Education (CIE), which he directs, are ramping up efforts to help create, expand and extend higher education capacity there under a new $11.2 million agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
 
Evans is principal investigator for the CIE’s Higher Education Project

Campus symposium to pay tribute to Congressman Olver

A symposium honoring Congressman John W. Olver on the eve of his retirement from the U.S. House of Representatives is being held Monday, Nov. 19 from 9:15 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. in the Campus Center Auditorium.
 
Olver has represented the 1st Congressional District – spanning Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin, Worcester and Middlesex Counties – since June 1991. He is currently the only member from the Massachusetts delegation serving on the House Appropriations Committee.
 
In 2011, his colleagues named him the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and

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