The Office of Research and Engagement has announced the three recipients of the 2025-2026 Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship. The Conti Fellowship recognizes the exceptional quality and significance of a faculty member’s accomplishments in research and creative endeavors at UMass Amherst and their potential for continuing excellence, particularly with respect to the project that they propose to undertake during the fellowship.

The 2025-2026 Conti Fellows and descriptions of their planned fellowship research can be found below. More information on the program and the current and former Conti Fellows is available at https://www.umass.edu/research/samuel-f-conti-faculty-fellowship-award.
 

Bethany Bradley, Professor of Environmental Conservation 

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Bradley’s research focuses on how the geographical locations of species across landscapes and regions can help us understand the risks posed by invasive species and inform conservation planning. Her research has a strong focus on how climate change increases risks from invasive plant species and she co-founded the Northeast Regional Invasive Species & Climate Change (RISCC) network, which serves natural resource managers across the Northeast.

With climate change driving unprecedented shifts in the distributions of plant species, her work during the fellowship will address the urgent need for science-based guidance on managed relocation — a conservation strategy that aims to help species expand their ranges in response to climate change. Despite its potential benefits, managed relocation remains underutilized due to scientific uncertainties and the absence of clear protocols. Her research will focus on the translation of two key science areas for natural resource management: 1) understanding that managed relocation of non-native species is an urgent and relatively low-risk activity and 2) outlining a data collection protocol and experimental set up that natural resource managers can use to monitor the outcomes of managed relocation consistently across the Northeast.

Bradley was highly praised by her references, stating that she “is committed to translational science—the process of turning complex research findings into actionable knowledge that can be readily applied by practitioners. Her success in producing highly accessible, informative synthesis documents underscores her ability to translate cutting-edge ecological science into practical guidance.”
 

Brian Dillon, Professor of Linguistics

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Dillon, whose area of research is psycholinguistics, has investigated the processes by which the brain comprehends language, with a particular focus on how the structure of grammar and working memory guide language processing in real time. His work integrates symbolic, structured models of language with artificial neural network models of language to better understand how both humans and artificial intelligence systems interpret sentences in real time.

References wrote that “he is an internationally recognized leader in the study of how human beings process and understand language, at both the neural and cognitive levels, focusing especially on the ways that human memory influences these processes. His research, which has garnered near a million dollars in extramural funding since 2017, is both cross-disciplinary and highly collaborative, involving faculty from leading outside institutions (NYU, Tel Aviv University) as well as UMass faculty and students in the colleges of CNS (Psychology) and CICS (Computer Science).”

The Conti Fellowship will afford Dillon the opportunity to advance a new research project he has launched at the intersection of the psychology of language and artificial intelligence and develop substantial new training and course modules in this area. The fellowship will allow him to significantly deepen this major new branch of research.
 

Friederike Jentoft, Professor of Chemical Engineering

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Jentoft conducts fundamental research to understand how catalysts, which are materials that accelerate chemical reactions without being transformed during the reaction, do their job of breaking and making chemical bonds. Catalysts are critical for many applications, including production of fuels, chemicals, plastics and for purifying waste streams (like the catalytic converter in an automobile), and the use of catalysts is generally beneficial for the environment by lowering energy consumption and reducing waste. The outcome of her research – the fundamental knowledge of how catalysts interact with molecules – serves to develop and improve catalytic materials and processes.

Her references praised her work, writing that “Professor Jentoft is an internationally renowned leader in the field of catalysis with a record of outstanding, broadly recognized, and high impact research accomplishments. Since joining UMass in 2015, she has established a world-class research program on the design and use of chemicals that stimulate reactions to generate specific byproducts. Professor Jentoft studies chemical transformations that, among other effects, make carbon-neutral biofuels, reduce carbon dioxide, and clean up chemical waste. These are very important applications with direct and potentially major benefits to our climate, and therefore with substantial broader societal impacts.”

Jentoft has organized the project she will complete as a Conti Fellow into three general areas: improving the sustainable production of monomeric molecules; characterizing the properties of catalytic materials and writing an authoritative review on this subject; and optimizing the transformation of monomeric molecules to plastics. She intends the impact of her research to be both global and local, closing the carbon cycle by using renewable feedstocks mitigates climate change, whereas eliminating hazards and waste streams from chemical processing benefits the often underprivileged communities living in the vicinity of chemical plants.