News

UMass Amherst Prepares for Innovation Challenge on Dec. 4

 
***MEDIA ADVISORY***
 
DATE:        Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012
TIME:         3:30 pm
PLACE:     Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union
 
A dozen teams of young entrepreneurs seeking $10,000 in prize money will be pitching their innovative business concepts to a panel of judges at the UMass Innovation Challenge Executive Summary and Elevator Pitch competition.
 
Competitors are interdisciplinary student/alumni teams working with faculty members and external advisors. For example:
  • Team Green Latrineoffers a solution for sustainable global sanitation, a latrine that purifies waste water at the same time

UMass Amherst to Hire Consultant to Review Residence Hall Security

AMHERST, Mass. – The University of Massachusetts Amherst plans to hire an outside consultant to undertake a comprehensive review of its residence hall security program, Police Chief John Horvath said today.
 
Horvath said, “UMass Amherst has a longstanding commitment to student safety, and this review will identify the strengths and any shortcomings of our current system while making recommendations based on best practices in the field. An independent set of eyes will serve us well.”
 
The move is part of a coordinated review and response to campus security following the alleged rape in

UMass Amherst Alumnus Christopher Larkin to talk on Health Care and Advanced Technology on Dec. 6

AMHERST, Mass. – University of Massachusetts Amherst alumnus Christopher Larkin will give a talk titled, “Keeping Patients Safe and Healthy with Advanced Technology,” at a special alumni seminar Thursday, Dec. 6 from 10-11 a.m. in the Gunness Student Center conference room in Marcus Hall on the Amherst campus. Larkin will discuss how technological advancements in modeling software and artificial intelligence can better foster healthcare optimization. The event is free and open to the public.

Larkin is chief technology officer for General Electric Healthcare, a company with more than 10,000

State Fire Marshal to Visit UMass Amherst as it Completes Installation of Fire Sprinklers in All Residence Halls

 
***MEDIA ADVISORY***
 
DATE:        Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012
TIME:        1:30 p.m.
PLACE:     Southwest Residential Complex, Thoreau Hall
 
UMass Amherst will welcome State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan as it completes a
massive, voluntary retrofit to install fire sprinkler systems in all 45 residence halls, a $27 million commitment to student safety. More than 12,100 students in 7,163 rooms are now protected by the sprinkler systems.
 
A news conference will include a tour of a residence hall and a student room.

Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Offers Docent Training for High School, College Students

The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is offering a training session on Wednesday, Dec. 5 from 3-4:30 p.m. for high school and college students interested in learning how to lead their student peers through the institute’s permanent Holocaust teaching exhibition, “A Reason to Remember: Roth, Germany, 1933-1942.”
 
Led by an experienced docent of the exhibit, this workshop will introduce students to the exhibition and its origins and will encourage further study and training in order to become student tour facilitators under the

Clingman’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture Looks from South Africa to the World in Tracking Challenges of Identity

AMHERST, Mass. – Stephen Clingman, director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 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

UMass Amherst Research Develops ‘Second Skin’ Military Fabric to Repel Chemical and Biological Agents

AMHERST, Mass. – Military uniforms of the future may offer a new layer of critical protection to wearers thanks to research by teams at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and several other institutions who are developing a nanotube-based fabric that repels chemical and biological agents.
 
UMass Amherst polymer scientists Kenneth Carter and James Watkins, collaborating with team leader Francesco Fornasiero of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), recently received a five-year $1.8 million grant to design ways to manufacture the new material as part of a $13 million project

UMass Amherst Researchers Use Biomarkers from Prehistoric Human Feces to Track Settlement and Agriculture

AMHERST, Mass. – 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 University of Massachusetts Amherst 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 at UMass Amherst, with UMass colleagues Nick Balascio and David

Author and UMass Amherst Professor Sabina Murray to Speak About Engaging History with Fiction

AMHERST, Mass. – The fall semester’s Commonwealth Honors College Faculty Lecture Series at the University of Massachusetts Amherst concludes with “The Writer’s Perspective: Literary Imagination and Living History” by English professor Sabina Murray on Monday, Nov. 26 at 6:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Auditorium.
 
Fiction is not always a story of pure imagination. Personal history and the public past inspire the works of fiction writers, including Murray.

UMass Amherst Engineer is Developing a New System Designed to Save Lives at Mass-Casualty Disaster Scenes

AMHERST, Mass. – A University of Massachusetts Amherst engineering professor 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. Aura Ganz, professor of electrical and computer engineering, 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

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