UMass Amherst is among the nation’s top 10 friendly colleges and universities for transgender people, according to Campus Pride, a national nonprofit organization for student leaders and campus groups working to create safer, more friendly learning environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students at higher education institutions.
The list, which does not rank the 10 schools, says UMass Amherst in the past five years “has gone from having almost no trans-supportive policies in place to being at the forefront of trans inclusiveness, including developing a policy that supports
UMass Amherst is among the sponsoring organizations of an Oct. 10 debate between Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren at Springfield’s Symphony Hall.
New England Public Radio will broadcast the First Congressional District Debate between Congressman Richard Neal, humorist and activist Bill Schein and Berkshire County register of deeds Andrea Nuciforo on Monday, Aug. 20 at 8 p.m. on WFCR, 88.5 FM. The debate will be hosted by WGBY-TV. "Jazz a la Mode" will begin at 9 p.m. 
New Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy will be one of the featured speakers at the 46th Annual Community Breakfast on Wednesday, Aug. 29 from 7:30 to 9 a.m. in the Student Union Ballroom. The event is open to the public.
John K. Horvath of the Hartford Police Department in Connecticut has been appointed as the campus's new police chief and director of Public Safety by James P. Sheehan, vice chancellor for Administration and Finance. Horvath succeeds Johnny Whitehead, who served as chief from 2009 until this past February. The new chief begins his duties in September.
The UMass Amherst Police Department’s own K9 Diezel is featured on a 2013 color calendar from Vested Interest in K9s, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds to provide bullet and stab protective vests for police dogs.
Campus officials say a new state law that provides $50 million in state matching funds for institutions pursuing major research and development grants is a powerful new tool that will boost the state’s innovation economy.
Caitlyn Shea Butler, assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, has designed and is now field-testing a new “green latrine” that purifies human waste, turning it into compost for farming and generating electricity.Her multipurpose invention is called a “Microbial Fuel Cell Latrine.”
By some estimates, a third of the Earth’s organisms by mass live in our planet’s rocks and sediments, yet their lives and ecology are almost a complete mystery. This week, microbiologist James Holden and others report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the first detailed data about a group of methane-exhaling microbes that live deep in the cracks of hot undersea volcanoes.