The Office of Community Relations & University Events has announced the 2026-27 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series and recipients of the Chancellor’s Medal.

Established in 1974, the annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture is dedicated to acknowledging the work of the university’s most esteemed and accomplished faculty members. The lecture series not only honors individual faculty members and their achievements but also celebrates the values of academic excellence shared by the UMass Amherst community.

Each honoree is presented with the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed upon faculty by the campus.

All lectures will be held at 4 p.m. in the Great Hall of Old Chapel. Event details are available on the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series website prior to each lecture.
 

2026-27 Distinguished Faculty Lecturers and Recipients of the Chancellor’s Medal
 

Image

Elizabeth Evans 

Professor of Health Promotion and Policy, School of Public Health & Health Sciences
“From Harm to Support: How Public Health Research Is Transforming Drug Policy”
Wednesday, Oct. 7

The overdose epidemic is a major public health challenge of our times, worsened by decades of public policies that have harmed the most vulnerable people in our communities. Massachusetts has taken a remarkable public health approach to confront the problem. In this talk, Evans will highlight how her research on justice-involved people who use drugs helped advance understanding of the benefits of investing in treatment instead of punishment. She will present results from her Massachusetts Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (MassJCOIN) project in which she studied the implementation, outcomes, and costs of a legislative mandate requiring Massachusetts jails to offer treatment for opioid use disorder during incarceration and linkage to care post-release. She will end by sharing how inclusive partnerships—involving people with lived experiences of drug use and incarceration, carceral-legal actors, health-care practitioners, and policymakers—can enrich our ability to find evidence-based solutions for better public health. 

Image

Jianhan Chen

Professor of Chemistry, College of Natural Sciences
“The Orderly Chaos of Proteins”
Wednesday, Dec. 2

For decades, we believed that every protein in our bodies requires a stable, well-defined 3D structure to function, but we have recently discovered a hidden world of biological “shape-shifters” that defy conventional wisdom. These Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) are the “dark matter” of our cells, existing not as stable shapes but as shifting and apparently chaotic clouds of dynamic conformations. IDPs masterfully control our most complex cellular decisions and even form mysterious “liquid droplets” that organize major cellular processes. While this flexibility is essential for life, it also has a dangerous side. When these shape-shifters go awry, they become the primary drivers of devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancers, where they represent a staggering two-thirds of all cancer-associated proteins. In this lecture, Chen will explore the fascinating ways that nature has been able to take advantage of the apparent “chaos” of IDPs for function and how we are using computational modeling as “digital microscopes” to decode this functional chaos, showing that understanding these fascinating molecules is the key to unlocking the next generation of life-saving medicines. 

Image

Todd Emrick

Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering, College of Natural Sciences
“Materials Chemistry for a Sustainable Future”
Wednesday, Feb. 17

Emerging cross-disciplinary research is bringing new principles of organic and polymer chemistry into materials discovery. Emrick will share innovative research from his laboratories at UMass and place it in the context of a global effort to create materials that yield enhanced energy efficiency and sustainable replacements for polymers and chemicals used today. Prominent examples of topics include the design of smart fluid droplets that pick up and transport contaminants and debris from materials, functional polymer zwitterions that form the backbone of efficient electronic devices, and creative chemistry designed to insert triggered degradation into high-volume plastics. While conveying state-of-the-art advances in polymer materials science, Emrick will also highlight pressing challenges that are poised for campuswide interdisciplinary collaborative research. 

Image

Jeffrey Podos

Professor of Biology, College of Natural Sciences
“Neotropical Songbirds and Their Musical Ecologies”
Wednesday, March 10

The songs of songbirds strike us for their ephemeral beauty, but to the birds themselves, they are an essential language for negotiating major life challenges, including sociality, territoriality, and choice of mating partners. Another hallmark feature of birds’ songs, as many bird-watchers know, is that they vary consistently in musical structure across species. Where do these differences come from, and why might it matter to birds in their lives and in their evolution? In this seminar, Podos will discuss and reflect on these questions, featuring his lab group’s field research on two of the world’s most fascinating bird groups, both from the Neotropics—Darwin’s finches of the Galápagos Islands and the cotingas of continental South America, which include the world’s loudest birds. He will describe how his lab analyzes the acoustic structure of birds’ songs, how they have linked key variations in bird songs to feeding ecology and beak structure, and ultimately how beak-related song variations impact key patterns of evolution, especially regarding mate choice and speciation. These reflections will support the case that birds, like all of us, live and have evolved within tightly wound webs of ecology and adaptation.