The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women has awarded $300,000 to the Amherst Police Department that will fund several positions focused on dealing with cases of sexual and domestic violence.
The grant was obtained in collaboration with the UMass Police Department, the campus’s Center for Women and Community (CWC) and the Northampton Police Department.
The grant will continue to fund a full-time civilian advocate, Ilana Gerjuoy, who currently works on-site with the Amherst and UMass police departments assisting survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Anna Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management at the Isenberg School, received the Walter Isard Award from the North American Regional Science Council (NARSC) last week in Ottawa, Ontario. The award was presented during the annual North American meetings of the Regional Science Association International.
Building on its success in drawing more women and under-represented minority students to study computer science at Massachusetts public colleges and universities over the past five years, the campus’s Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE) has won a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and will now take a national leadership role in computer science education.
The UMass Amherst Permaculture Initiative recently learned that its recent video, part three of a series intended to tell the permaculture story in an engaging way to a wide audience, has been picked up by a national television program, “Real Green.” It will be televised across the country on the weekend of Nov. 17-18 and will air locally on WGGB Channel 40 in Springfield at 6 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 18. 
It may seem like common sense that the quality of online video streaming affects how willing viewers are to watch videos at a website. But until Computer Science researcher Ramesh Sitaraman and collaborators at Akamai developed a way to rigorously study the question, no one had been able to scientifically test the assumption.
Professor Jane Fountain, Political Science and Public Policy, has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, which was chartered by Congress in 1967 as an independent body to help government leaders build more effective, efficient, accountable and transparent public sector organizations. Her induction is scheduled for Nov. 15 during the academy’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
This year's Classical Legacy Lecture at the Renaissance Center will be given by writer Alison Brown, author of "The Renaissance, The Medici in Florence: The Exercise of Language and Power, and The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence," on Tuesday, Nov. 27 at 4 p.m.
Brian Walsh of Yale University's English department will give a lecture, “Local Reformations and London City Comedy: Middleton’s The Puritan Widow," on Thursday, Nov. 29 at 4:30 p.m. n the Renaissance Center's Reading Room.
Recently a research team led by Wei-lih Lee, associate professor of Biology, identified a new molecular player in asymmetric cell division, a regulatory protein named She1 whose role in chromosome- and spindle positioning wasn’t known before. Asymmetric cell division is important in the self-renewal of stem cells and because it ensures that daughter cells have different fates and functions.