Subbaswamy, area leaders kick off new academic year at Community Breakfast

The annual Community Breakfast is always a big draw for local academic, civic and business leaders, but this year’s crowd had more than bacon and eggs on their minds. Nearly 400 people attended the Aug. 29 event in the Student Union Ballroom to hear new Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy set the tone for the new school year.

Subbaswamy, who took office July 1, quickly charmed the audience by joking, “Nancy [Buffone] said we’ve got to finish by 9, so thank you and goodbye.”

Noting time he’d spent in college towns in India, Indiana, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky and Italy, Subbaswamy said he was

Ethnic food project helps bring locally grown specialty crops to inner city markets, immigrant families

Food from home is one of the things immigrants miss most, and newcomers to Massachusetts, host to an estimated 150,000 transplanted Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Mexicans, are no exception. Recently the campus’s Ethnic Crops Program, which has brought dozens of crops popular among many ethnic groups to markets across the state, added chipilín, a leafy green loved by Latinos from many lands.
 
Frank Mangan, director of the ethnic crops initiative at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, says farms in Methuen, Dracut, Lancaster and Amesbury shipped 2,000 pounds of chipilín in recent weeks to

Entering class is most academically accomplished in campus history

The Class of 2016 is the most academically accomplished first-year class in campus history, according to university officials.
 
The class includes approximately 4,560 students with an academic profile that is at an historic high—SAT scores have increased by seven points, compared to last year, to 1196, and the high school grade point average has increased from 3.64 to 3.66. On average, students rank in the top fifth of their high school class.
 
Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said, “We are attracting outstanding students from across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the country, and that

Native landscaping in urban areas can help native birds, says study

A recent study of residential landscape types and native bird communities in Phoenix, Ariz., led by a campus urban ecologist, suggests that yards mimicking native vegetation and wildlands offer birds “mini refuges,” helping to offset the loss of biodiversity in cities and supporting birds better than traditional grass lawns and non-native plantings.
 
The study, led by postdoctoral research associate Susannah Lerman with her advisor, associate professor of Environmental Conservation Paige Warren, and Hilary Gan and Eyal Shochat at Arizona State University, is one of the first to use

Researchers win $2 million NSF grant to develop self-folding polymer sheets for new materials

A group of scientists and mathematicians led by physicist Christian Santangelo has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) grant for 2012, one of only 15 given to investigators at 26 institutions and totaling nearly $30 million.
 
Santangelo and colleagues including polymer scientist Ryan Hayward are experts in developing self-folding polymer sheets, which take advantage of origami principles to provide highly tunable mechanical responses.

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