The campus will honor contributions to civic engagement and public service at the first-ever Salute to Service award ceremony on Wednesday, Nov. 14 at 6 p.m. at the Boston Harbor Hotel.
The event will recognize Robert Kraft, chairman and CEO of the Kraft Group and the New England Patriots, Liz Walker, founder of Walker Group, LLC and co-founder of My Sister’s Keeper, and Dr. Robert Littleton, founder of the Evergreen Center, for their volunteer leadership and professional achievements. Steve Buckley, Boston Herald sports columnist and host of Press Box, will emcee the event.
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 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.
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.
Jing Hao, doctoral student in Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, has been awarded the 2012 American Public Health Association (APHA) Student Presentation Award.
Several campus events are planned in observance of Veterans Day to pay homage to veterans as well as family members who have been affected by military deployments.
The School of Education and 4-H's Operation Military Kids are co-hosting “Living in the New Normal (LINN) Institute: Helping Children Thrive in Good and Challenging Times,” on Nov. 14-15 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. in 165-69 Campus Center. The program is sponsored by the Military Child Education Coalition (MCEC).
The UMass Poll’s exit poll from the Nov. 6 Massachusetts election shows that the gender gap helped propel Elizabeth Warren to victory in a competitive race against incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown. The poll shows that women voters preferred Warren to Brown by a margin of 20 percent, while men split evenly between the two candidates. Brown was also faced with an electorate that looked much different than the one that elected him to office in 2010.
Athletic director John McCutcheon is scheduled to address the Faculty Senate and answer questions on Nov. 15 at 3:30 p.m. in 227 Herter Hall.