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Rosenberg named Senate majority leader

State Senate President Therese Murray last week named alumnus Stan Rosenberg to the No. 2 spot on her leadership team, tapping the longtime Amherst Democrat as majority leader.
 
Since 2003, Rosenberg has served as president pro tem of the Senate, the first senator in the state’s history to hold the leadership position. He previously held several other leadership posts, including four years as assistant majority leader and three years as the first western Massachusetts legislator to chair the Senate Committee on Ways and Means.
 
“As a stalwart advocate for UMass Amherst and public higher

New website highlights campus sustainability efforts

A new interactive website, the Campus Sustainability Explorer, is allowing students, faculty, staff and the public to click on more than 100 icons to read about “green” buildings, research programs in sustainability, a student farmers’ market and related topics.
 
Bill Stanton, the Sustainability Explorer’s lead designer and developer, says, “a powerful tool like this is intended to serve as a vehicle for educational outreach.

Caswell, Mammen help draft national study of SNAP's adequacy

A new report, drafted by a national panel that included two Resource Economics faculty members, says the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), should consider several factors in determining whether benefits are adequate. These include time constraints on low-income families and their ability to cook healthy meals, differing food prices across the country and the availability of healthy foods from local food stores.
 
The report was drafted by a committee of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and was chaired

Gutermuth, international team observe 'hungry twin' stars gobbling first meals

Just-forming stars, like growing babies, are always hungry and must “feed” on huge amounts of gas and dust from dense envelopes surrounding them at birth. Now a team of astronomers including Robert Gutermuth, a research assistant professor and expert in imaging data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, reports observing an unusual “baby” star that periodically emits infrared light bursts, suggesting it may be twins, that is, a binary star. The discovery is reported this month in Nature.
 
The extremely young object, dubbed LRLL 54361, is about 100,000 years old and is located about 950 light

Women for UMass Amherst supports campus through new fund

Women for UMass Amherst (WFUM), a network of alumnae and friends of the campus who have made gifts to support the university, is boosting its impact through a new dedicated, collective fund that is providing awards to worthy projects.
 
Women become members of WFUM by donating to any area of campus, according to Stephanie Flaherty, senior associate director of Annual Giving in the Development Office.
 
“Through WFUM, we want to build a network of like-minded women who inspire and encourage other women to support the university through philanthropy,” she said.

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