Talking Points

Clingman’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture looks from South Africa to the world in tracking challenges of identity

Stephen Clingman, director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, will discuss “Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for Our Times” in the second of the campus’s 2012-13 Distinguished Faculty Lectures on Monday, Dec. 3.
 
All lectures in the series are free and open to the public and begin at 4 p.m. in the Massachusetts Room at the Mullins Center. A reception immediately follows each lecture. 
 
Clingman, who is a professor of English and a former chair of the department, will examine how South African activists and writers have approached the question of identity

State education secretary visits University Without Walls

Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville visited the University Without Walls Nov. 20 to see first-hand how innovations in technology and online learning are opening doors for adult students living and working in the Commonwealth.
 
Reville's visit was part of his statewide tour aimed at gathering information on best practices in educational technology in K-12 and higher education settings.

During the visit, Reville met with UWW director Ingrid Bracey, who described the program’s model.
 
Kyle Stephanie Kraus, instructional designer and trainer with CPE E-learning, provided an

Researchers use biomarkers from prehistoric human feces to track settlement and agriculture

For researchers who study Earth’s past environment, disentangling the effects of climate change from those related to human activities is a major challenge, but now campus geoscientists have used a biomarker from human feces in a completely new way to establish the first human presence, the arrival of grazing animals and human population dynamics in a landscape.
 
Doctoral student Robert D’Anjou and his advisor Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center, with colleagues Nick Balascio and David Finkelstein, describe their findings in the current online edition of

Kinesiology graduate students receive awards at regional meeting

Two Kinesiology graduate students received presentation awards at the New England American College of Sports Medicine (NEACSM) Conference held Nov. 8-9 at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence.
 
Thomas Longyear (left) received the Outstanding Masters’ Student Presentation Award for his presentation titled “The Molecular Mechanism of Fatigue: Examining the Role of H+, Pi, and Ca2+.” Jeffer Sasaki received the Outstanding Doctoral Student Presentation Award for his presentation on “Validation of the Fitbit Wireless Activity Tracker® for the Prediction of Energy Expenditure.”
 
The

Ganz developing new system to save lives at mass-casualty disasters

Aura Ganz, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been awarded a four-year, $1.6-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue her research on a computerized disaster-management response system. Ganz says the system is designed to quickly organize chaotic, mass-casualty, disaster scenes, such as airliner, bus and train wrecks, and cut the evacuation time of survivors in half.
 
For the past several years, Ganz has been developing what she calls the DIORAMA I system, designed to coordinate the initial response in mass-casualty incidents and improve the

Researchers set to begin building shared computer cluster at new Holyoke center

When Gov. Deval Patrick, President Robert Caret and other state officials cut the ribbon Nov. 16 to open the new Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, a small group of scientists was waiting in the wings, ready to step in and begin actually building a shared computer cluster, an “academic cloud” to provide service to university users.
 
Four principal researchers, Computer Science professor Prashant Shenoy, Chris Hill of MIT, Claudio Rebbi of Boston University and Gene Cooperman of Northeastern University recently were awarded a $2.3 million grant from the

School of Education awarded total of $21M to help Afghanistan rebuild higher education system

Having traveled to Afghanistan three times in the past five months, the last thing professor David Evans seems to think about is withdrawal.
 
In fact, as the United States prepares to end its military presence in that country 2014, Evans and the project team at the School of Education’s Center for International Education (CIE), which he directs, are ramping up efforts to help create, expand and extend higher education capacity there under a new $11.2 million agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
 
Evans is principal investigator for the CIE’s Higher Education Project

Campus symposium to pay tribute to Congressman Olver

A symposium honoring Congressman John W. Olver on the eve of his retirement from the U.S. House of Representatives is being held Monday, Nov. 19 from 9:15 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. in the Campus Center Auditorium.
 
Olver has represented the 1st Congressional District – spanning Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin, Worcester and Middlesex Counties – since June 1991. He is currently the only member from the Massachusetts delegation serving on the House Appropriations Committee.
 
In 2011, his colleagues named him the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and

Campus sharing $6.24 million NSF grant to improve computer science education nationally

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.
 
CAITE will share the new five-year, $6.24 million NSF grant with Georgia Computes!, a project at Georgia Tech, to create a national resource for other states that want to learn how to

Federal grant supports local efforts to address sexual and domestic violence

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.

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