News

Dr. Wilmore Webley is the inaugural recipient of the Dr. John H. Bracey, Jr. Transformational Leadership Award.  On January 20th, the University honored Dr. Webley with one of three new awards meant to pay tribute to the legacy of Dr. Bracey, Jr's leadership at UMass, Amherst to strengthen diversity, equity, and inclusion across our community and beyond.  Dr. Webley's was celebrated for his incredible commitment to uplift and support the greater community of UMass and beyond with authenticity and integrity.

Effective September 1, 2025, the following faculty members have been promoted: Verena Carvalho, Lecturer in the Department of Microbiology, has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Jeffrey Kane, Director of the AMB Master's Program, has been promoted to Senior Lecturer II. 

Kristen DeAngelis, whose specialty involves understanding the role soil microbes play in the cycling of carbon through soil, plants and the atmosphere, is a dedicated teacher whose hands-on approach to undergraduate education was recently featured by the American Society for Microbiology in a series of six open-access, peer-reviewed journal articles—written by DeAngelis’s students themselves.

NASA awarded University of Massachusetts Amherst microbiologist James Holden $621,000 to spend the next three years using his expertise to help predict what life on Jupiter’s moon Europa might look like. For that, Holden turned to an unexpected place: the volcanoes a mile beneath our own oceans.

Lucca Mancilio, a microbiology doctoral student, and a group of UMass graduate students attended the Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering (CASE) workshop April 6-9 in Washington, D.C. The workshop was hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

On April 30, 2025, Michele Klingbeil, Professor of Microbiology, recently received an Exceptional Internal Service Award from the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst at CNS' Recognition Ceremony.

Stephen Rich, executive director of NEWVEC (New England Center of Excellence in Vector-borne Diseases), and his team of researchers from UMass Amherst stumbled upon a surprise finding: rabbit ticks harboring a new type of bacteria related to a group of pathogens that can cause sometimes life-threatening spotted fever rickettsioses (SFR) infections in humans.

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Kristen DeAngelis has been selected by the Center for Teaching and Learning as one of the members of the 2025 - 2026 TIDE Ambassadors (Teaching for Inclusiveness, Diversity, & Equity) Faculty Fellowship cohort.

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Selasi Dankwa and Sang Hyun Lee, Assistant Professors of Microbiology, were selected as Fellows for the 2025 Faculty Success Program. They were among  12 faculty members selected for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) Summer 2025 Faculty Success Program (FSP).

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