MIE’s Frank Sup and Erin Baker Win UMass Amherst ADVANCE Awards

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Professors Frank Sup and Erin Baker of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department have won esteemed awards from the UMass Amherst ADVANCE Program. Sup won one of the ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentoring Awards, which recognize the vital work that faculty members perform in mentoring and supporting the professional development and success of their faculty colleagues. Baker was part of the faculty team that won an Equitable Practices in Collaboration (EPiC) Award for the Holyoke Community Energy Project, which was led by Professor Krista Harper of Anthropology. The EPiC Award recognizes groups of faculty who are leading the way in developing equitable and effective collaboration practices that foster inclusive excellence. 

According to the ADVANCE program, “The Faculty Peer Mentoring Award for the College of Engineering goes to Dr. Frank Sup…As director of the Mechatronics and Robotics Research Lab and co-director of the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation, Dr. Sup’s generous mentoring supports colleagues across the nursing and engineering disciplines. 

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One nominator said that Sup ‘truly exemplifies the qualities of an exceptional mentor through his dedication, knowledge, and unwavering support for our junior colleagues.’” 

The ADVANCE website noted that, in his formal role as official faculty mentor for junior faculty, Sup is heralded as “a leader in fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and supportive environment within the department.”

Sup’s research focuses on developing human-centered mechatronic technologies for augmenting human performance and exploring the design and control space for enabling robots to fluently interact physically with humans. His teaching interests are focused on developing mechatronics and control curriculum and fostering sustainable, hands-on, interactive educational experiences for students. 

Baker was one of six UMass faculty members participating in the Holyoke Community Energy Project, a research collaboration co-designing clean-energy solutions “that address residents' energy needs, center the community's voice, and work to repair a legacy of environmental injustice in Holyoke,” as the ADVANCE program said. The project is part of the Energy Transition Institute, which focusses on research at the intersection of energy technology and social justice.

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This project engages Holyoke residents through workshops on home-energy use, barriers to energy alternatives, community solutions, and city-level planning. The project’s equitable-collaboration model, described as “participatory convergence,” brings together “interdisciplinary specialists from UMass and community partners to produce collaborative research that is rigorous, relevant, and has reach beyond academia.” 

Baker is a distinguished professor in the MIE department and the faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at UMass Amherst. Her research is in decision making under uncertainty applied to the field of energy and the environment, with focus on energy justice. Her work uses modeling to address questions about energy policy and planning in the face of climate change. 

“UMass ADVANCE is an interdisciplinary, faculty-led network that develops and supports campus-driven research and programming as the drivers of faculty equity on our campus,” said the organization’s website. “We include a Leadership Team and Faculty Fellows network, and we work with leadership partners across campus.” (April 2025)