William T. O'Neill, 84, of Chicopee, a retired maintainer I with the Grounds Department, died Dec. 8 at the Holyoke Soldiers Home.
Born in Holyoke, he was educated in the city’s schools.
He was a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War.
He worked joined the campus staff in 1972 as a custodian and later worked as a motor truck driver, handyman/skilled laborer and a maintainer. He retired in 1994.
He leaves his wife, Tessie F.
Campus researchers have received a two-year, $867,040 grant from the National Science Foundation to build a high-bandwidth optical data network to handle large amounts of computerized research data. The new network is designed to separate research data traffic from the rest of the data traffic on the Amherst campus.
A new high-resolution climate study by campus scientists, the first to apply regional climate models to examine likely near-term changes in temperature and precipitation across the Northeast United States, suggests temperatures are going to be significantly warmer in all seasons in the next 30 years, especially in winter. Also, they project that winters will be wetter, with more rain likely than snow.
Associate professor Aviva Ben-Ur of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies has been awarded a Senior Grant in History from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for her book project “Eurafrican Identity in a Jewish Society: Suriname, 1660-1863.”
Maureen O’Leary, adjunct assistant professor in Veterinary and Animal Sciences, discussed institutional animal care and use committee and institutional biosafety committee collaboration for animal model research at the Massachusetts Society for Medical Research Conference on Oct. 2 in Wellesley.
The American Association of Anatomists (AAA) recently awarded Thomas Maresca, assistant professor of Biology, the 2013 R.R. Bensley Award in Cell Biology for his “elegant cell biological approaches to the study of spindle assembly and dynamics during mitosis, resulting in important contributions to our understanding of force and signaling at kinetochores.” Maresca will present a lecture titled “Stepping into a Tense Relationship: Mechano-molecular Regulation of Cell Division by Force” at the AAA annual meeting in 2013.
Professor Lixin Gao of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department has been selected as a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), an honor achieved by only 1 percent of that organization. She was cited by the ACM “for contributions to network protocols and internet routing.” Gao now becomes the first faculty member in the ECE Department to earn selection as a fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the ACM.
Joseph Goldstein, Distinguished Professor in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, is part of a research team trying to produce an iron-nickel alloy that is currently only found in meteorites, for use in making supermagnets. The goal of the research is to develop bulk quantities of commercially viable, environmentally sound supermagnets, which can be used in electric vehicles, wind-turbine generators and many other machines.
Campus officials this week praised the completion of a two-year, $12.3 million laboratory renovation in the Lederle Graduate Research Center, saying the project will enhance research in the biological and physical sciences and make the campus competitive nationally.