Fall 2021 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series Announced

_{The University of Massachusetts is pleased to announce the Fall 2021 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series and recipients of the Chancellor’s Medallion: Nicholas G. Reich, Jennifer Lundquist, Erik Learned-Miller and Kristen M. DeAngelis. The lecture series recognizes individual achievements and celebrates the values of academic excellence that we share as a community. The Chancellor’s Medallion is the highest campus honor bestowed to members of the UMass faculty and will be presented at the conclusion of each lecture.}

_{Event details will be posted on the Distinguished Faculty website prior to each lecture.}

Nicholas G. Reich

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Professor of biostatistics 

How to Forecast a Pandemic: Lessons from COVID-19 

Oct. 5, 2021
4 p.m.

Nicholas Reich leads a team of researchers whose ensemble-model infectious disease forecasts have been among the nation’s most reliable at predicting COVID-19 deaths. His expertise has placed him in high demand among federal agencies, data science researchers, and national media. 

In this lecture, Professor Reich will provide an overview of infectious disease forecasting, detailing how for the last decade public health officials in the U.S. have worked with academic partners to improve our understanding about how outbreaks can be forecasted. He will describe his research group's close collaboration with the CDC and over 100 research groups from around the world to create operational forecasting systems for COVID-19. Finally, he will explain insights that we have gleaned from these projects about the predictability of epidemics and some of the key challenges facing this still-emerging field of inquiry. These are matters of global importance where Reich is at the forefront of research and debate. 

Jennifer Lundquist 

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Professor of sociology 

Romantic Apartheid? Online Dating as an Agent for Social Change  

Oct. 19, 2021   
4 p.m.

How do racial attitudes shape our most intimate interactions and decisions? Professor Lundquist shows how the conflux of individualization, consumerism, and fast-moving technologies gives rise to a unique form of digital sexual racism—one that disguises enduring racial discrimination in intimate life as merely random individual preference. She argues that such preferences are not individual at all; in fact, they are patterned and predictable, a reflection of the nation’s long history of anti-miscegenation law.  

Dating platforms are one of the only contexts left in modern U.S. society where it remains acceptable to check off racial preferences and exclusions. Along with the hidden role of matching algorithms, we see a systematic segregation of what could otherwise have been a much more racially integrated cyberspace. In this lecture, based on her recent book coauthored with two UMass graduates, Lundquist reveals the dynamics at play in digital dating spaces—and suggest pathways forward for change.  

Erik Learned-Miller 

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Professor, College of Information and Computer Sciences 

Face Recognition Today: We Can Minimize its Risks 

Nov. 15, 2021 
4 p.m.

In just a few years, face recognition technology has gone from a curiosity to widely used applications. However, with this deployment has come a host of problems—from insulting classifications to false arrests and violations of privacy. Some argue that it is too late to solve these problems. Others want to ban all face recognition software. 

Professor Learned-Miller sees a path to minimizing the societal risks of face recognition technology. A longtime leader in computational face recognition research, he also works in the forefront of efforts to deploy it reasonably and safely in the world. In this lecture, he will propose establishing a federal regulatory agency, much like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), that must approve the use of any face recognition application. He will look at the FDA’s successful management of both pharmaceuticals and medical devices and argue that this is the logical solution for face recognition technologies. 

Kristen M. DeAngelis 

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Associate professor, department of microbiology 

Healthy Soils: Our Hope for a Warming World 

Dec. 8, 2021 
4 p.m.

Climate change is the most important problem facing people today, and an important solution lies hidden in plain sight: soil. Soils are microbial super-organisms, and in this lecture, Dr. DeAngelis will give listeners a greater depth of appreciation for soil, as well as the means to foster its stewardship through composting, planting and support for sustainable agriculture.  

DeAngelis leads a team of researchers who integrate microbial, biochemical and bioinformatics tools to understand how soils form and degrade due to climate change. Her lab research began with a long-term field manipulation experiment, in which a forest field site has been exposed to warming for 30 years, allowing a peek into a future of climate change. Her current work employs model soils, a culture collection of thousands of strains, and a suite of computational tools to clarify the role of microbial diversity and bacterial activity in soil health and carbon storage. 

More details on the lecture series, abstracts and videos from past lectures:
http://www.umass.edu/distinguished-faculty-lecture-series.