Castañeda to Advise Student Bridges
Associate Professor Mari Castañeda (communication) is assuming the role of faculty adviser for Student Bridges, a student-initiated outreach program that expands pathways to higher education for residents from Holyoke. Primarily funded by and housed under the Student Government Association, Student Bridges places UMass Amherst students as tutor-mentors with partner schools and organizations, and provides them opportunities to use their talents and creativity to coordinate youth-centered events, college preparatory workshops and campus visits for local schools and programs. Read more about Student Bridges... Read more about Castañeda...

National Cancer Institute Grants $2.29 Million to Study Depression Risk Predictors
Social psychologist Paula Pietromonaco, who has been a faculty member at UMass Amherst since 1986, studies how people think, feel, and behave in the context of their closest relationships. Her particular interest lies in how individual functioning in these relationships is connected to emotional and physical health. “Some of my past research,” Pietromonaco says, “has shown that how women think about their close relationships predicts their risk for depression.” Read more...

Badgett Named Among Top Lesbian Researchers
The March 2008 issue of Curve Magazine includes profiles of their selection of the top twenty most powerful lesbians in academics. Among them is M.V. Lee Badgett (economics), director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration. Says the author, Rachel Pepper, who is the coordinator of LGBT studies at Yale, "Through some combination of teaching, writing, research and leadership, all these women are changing the face of academia, a world that, until recently, has been run exclusively by straight white men. Read more...

Award-winning Journalist Brings Multimedia Talents to the Classroom
Technological innovations are causing a massive transformation in the field of journalism. These days, telling stories involves blogs, audio, video—and elements of all three—in addition to the old standards. This multimedia approach, or convergence journalism, has created mobile journalists—MoJos—who carry laptops, audio recorders, digital cameras, video cameras, and more wherever they go. Many rarely go to the office, opting instead to file their photos, videos and stories from wherever their assignment has taken them. Read more and watch a video...

Anthropologist Uses Archaeology to Study Today’s World
“Archaeology is the science that makes sense of human material artifacts—of any period,” says Professor H. Martin Wobst, whose main interest lies in theory and method of archaeology, one of the four main branches of anthropology. “In our society that is about as materialistic as any ever was, archaeology is the only field that is really focused on that subject matter. Read more...