Recipients of 2022-23 Conti Faculty Fellowship Award Announced

The Office of Research and Engagement has announced the 2022-23 Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship Awardees. The Conti Fellowship acknowledges the high quality and importance of a faculty member’s accomplishments in research and creative activity at UMass Amherst and their potential for continuing excellence, particularly with respect to the project that they propose to undertake during the fellowship. More information on the program and previous Conti Fellows is available here.

The 2022-2023 Conti Fellows are:

Paul Collins, Jr., political science

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Paul Collins’ research interests include understanding the democratic nature of the judiciary, interdisciplinary approaches to legal decision making, and social movement litigation. This Conti Fellowship will allow Professor Collins to focus on a project and a collaborative research agenda for which he, Jesse Rhodes (co-PI), and Douglas Rice (co-PI) were recently awarded a ~$400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The research examines the long-term changes in the coverage and discussion of law and legal ideas in media serving the LGBTQ+ community over nearly five decades. His scholarly reputation was highly praised in his references, stating that, “without question, Paul Collins is, and will continue to be, one of the most influential political scientists in the field,” and that “his work is provocative and compelling. Importantly, he has changed the research trajectory of the field.”

Shelly Peyton, chemical engineering

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Shelly Peyton’s research areas include biomaterial platforms, human cell-material interactions, cardiovascular disease, test beds to study personalized chemotherapeutics, and regenerative medicine. She is the Principal Investigator for the Peyton Lab on campus that creates biomaterial systems as “tissue mimics” to study disease progression and drug response. References commended her research, stating, “Dr. Peyton is an internationally recognized leader in the field of bioengineering, tissue engineering, and cancer biology, who has published seminal papers in prestigious journals and whose innovative research has been funded by highly competitive extramural grants.” The Conti Fellowship will allow her to elevate her research program that focuses on extending her approaches toward (1) breast cancer in the developing world, (2) advanced studies in breast cancer metastasis, and (3) new functional biomaterials.

Banu Subramaniam, women, gender, sexuality studies

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Banu Subramaniam’s research explores the philosophy, history, and culture of the natural sciences and medicine as they relate to gender, race, ethnicity, and caste. Her latest research rethinks the field and practice of botany in relation to histories of colonialism and xenophobia and explores the wide travels of scientific theories, ideas, and concepts as they relate to migration and invasive species. This Conti Fellowship will enable Professor Subramaniam to complete a book, Decolonizing Botany: Empire and the Environmental Humanities. The monograph addresses growing calls to “decolonize” botanical science knowledge. References expressed that she “has a distinguished record of scholarly achievement and is recognized as a leading scholar of the history of science and feminist theory. Her work skillfully blends scientific and social science inquiry and analysis and her current project will surely make a significant and timely contribution to the field of environmental humanities.”