Congratulations to UMass Astronomy students Giselle Hoermann and Andrew Wright who have been awarded the 2023 David van Blerkom Research Scholarship.  The David van Blerkom Research Scholarship is an endowment fund established by Janet Van Blerkom. The purpose of the fund is to endow undergraduate research scholarships in the Department of Astronomy in memory of her husband, David J. Van Blerkom, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts. Professor Van Blerkom came to UMass as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1969, joined the faculty in 1970, served as Chair of the Astronomy Program from 1980-1999, and then continued on the faculty until 2001. This scholarship fund is awarded based on academic excellence to a University of Massachusetts undergraduate and supports a research internship for that undergraduate.

The Office of Faculty Development is pleased to announce that Emily Heaphy, Associate Professor of Management, Sindiso MnisiWeeks, Associate Professor of Legal Studies, Bogdan Prokopovych, Senior Lecturer of Management, Grant Wilson , Professor of Astronomy, and Ximena Zúñiga , Professor of Student Development, have been awarded Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowships within Academic Affairs for the 2023-24 academic year.

"The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows program provides an opportunity for faculty to expand their leadership development by advancing a project in an area of particular interest to them and benefit to the campus," explains Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Tricia Serio. "I am looking forward to collaborating with them in the coming year."

The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship (CLF) program seeks to cultivate future campus leaders by offering a half-time, one-year temporary appointment to an administrative area on campus and providing mentoring from the leader of the host unit. In addition, fellows are expected to launch a significant program during their fellowship year.

The CLF nomination and application process commences annually in January. Full-time tenured faculty, senior lecturers, and librarians on continuing appointments are eligible for the fellowship which is administered by the Office of Faculty Development.

Grant Wilson, Professor of Astronomy, will work on understanding and ameliorating institutional impediments to faculty taking on and managing their research grant portfolios. The goal is to identify ways to increase the total number of grant dollars per capita by identifying key areas of institutional investment, workflow bottlenecks, or any other areas of support that faculty identify as being critical to UMass' evolving research enterprise. Wilson will be working with Mike Malone, the Vice Chancellor of Research and Engagement.

Wilson did his graduate work in physics at Brown University where he studied cosmology by building balloon-borne instruments to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background - the oldest radiation in the Universe. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1998 he did postdoctoral work at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and then at the University of Chicago. Since coming to UMass in 2001, Professor Wilson won the College Outstanding Teacher Award and also built and deployed the AzTEC camera which helped to identify hundreds of new galaxies. Wilson chairs the Science Advisory Board of the Large Millimeter Telescope, is Director of the Graduate Program in Astronomy, and now leads a multi-national collaboration of scientists in the building and deploying the TolTEC camera - a revolutionary new imaging polarimeter.

"As a Chancellor's Leadership Fellow, my principal goal is to help to find ways to make research easier to manage and more efficient to conduct at UMass. Whether it is IT issues, space allocation issues, or availability of resources, it is critical that we understand what factors limit our existing research activities as well as what we even dare to propose," explains Wilson. "I hope to end this fellowship with a clear prioritized plan for what the administration could do to help maximize our research efforts."

Dr. Wilson's webpage on the UMass Astronomy Website can be found here: Grant Wilson | Department of Astronomy (umass.edu)

Honor Senior student Timothy McQuaid has been selected as a 2022-2023 UMass Amherst Rising Researcher. The award recognizes exceptional accomplishments of UMass Amherst undergraduate students who excel in research, scholarship, and creative activity. 

A team of astronomers, including assistant professor Kate Whitaker, recently published research in the journal Nature that many popular publications have said “breaks the universe.” While not literally true, the team, which used the newest trove of data retrieved from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), discovered that very old, very massive galaxies seem to exist on the fringes of the universe—which, according to current astronomical theory, shouldn’t be possible.

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