Following approval on June 19 by the Board of Trustees, the schools of Education and Nursing are now colleges, a move intended to clarify the role of academic units amid some other name changes on campus.
The action follows the designation last December of the Department of Computer Science as a school within the College of Natural Sciences, which also houses the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, which was organized as a department in May 2012.
According to background materials submitted to the trustees, “Such designations are in name only: the affected units remain academic departments
Stephen Miller, associate professor of Japanese language and literature, recently published a monograph with the Cornell University East Asia Series titled “The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period.”
The National Academy of Sciences has awarded a three-year, $271,930 grant to Chemistry professor Vincent Rotello to develop, test and deploy new, sensitive, reliable and affordable inkjet-printed, nanoparticle-based test strips for detecting disease-causing bacteria in drinking water, with researchers at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan.
A proposal to freeze tuition and fees for the coming academic year moved ahead July 1 as the Legislature approved $39 million in additional funding for the UMass system as part of a $34 billion state budget and sent the measure to Gov. Deval Patrick.
Reporting this month in Molecular Microbiology, assistant professor of Biochemistry amd Molecuar Biology Peter Chien and colleagues describe using a combination of biochemistry and mass spectrometry to “trap” scores of new candidate substrates of the protease ClpXP to reveal how protein degradation is critical to cell cycle progression and bacterial development. The new understanding could lead to identifying new antibiotic targets.
President Barack Obama’s office has named computer science education pioneer Beverly Woolf a Presidential Innovation Fellow for 2013, recognizing her leadership in designing software tutors that respond to a student’s mood and personal learning pace, for example, to dramatically improve lesson effectiveness.