The Office of Research and Engagement has announced the 2023-24 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 2023-2024 Conti Fellows are:

Lynn Adler, Biology

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Professor Lynn Adler’s research program is focused on the role of floral traits on pollinator health and disease transmission. Pollinators provide billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of billions to the global economy in ecosystem services, but many pollinator species are in decline due to stressors including pathogens.  Flowers impact pollinator-pathogen interactions by providing “medicinal” nectar or pollen and by serving as sites of disease transmission.  Adler’s lab discovered that sunflower pollen dramatically reduced levels of a common bumble bee pathogen, demonstrating a significant and overlooked role of floral rewards on bee health. This work received national media attention and financial support from the USDA Pollinator Health panel.

This Conti Fellowship will enable Adler to advance research in analyzing the composition of volatile compounds, collecting wild pollinators, and analyzing pathogens in wild bee infections. This will lead to a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits of ‘pollinator-friendly’ plants and future funding via the USDA Pollinator Health panel as well as NSF programs, including Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease (EEID).  Adler’s scholarly reputation was highly praised by her references, stating that, “Lynn is an international leader in her field, she has a stunning publication record, accolades, a record of citation by others, and she is impacting a generation of young scientists through her teaching and mentoring.”

Maria José Botelho, Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies

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Professor Maria José Botelho studies how school literacy practices can be re-imagined to affirm children’s cultural and linguistic knowledge as well as to offer tools for cultural production and social participation and re/organization. Botelho's research in critical multicultural analysis of children's and young adult literature challenges researchers, teacher educators, and teachers to reconsider how multicultural children’s literature and other texts are studied in elementary and secondary classrooms.

References expressed that “Dr. Botelho’s teaching and service in combination with her scholarship provides strong evidence of the integrated nature of her work and her tremendous productivity as well as her passion and commitment to this work.”

Botelho is under contract with Routledge Publishers as the sole author of two scholarly book projects; a new book, “Reimagining K-8 Literacy Teaching with Ethnographic and Critical Literacies Practices: Teaching as Text (TT)” and an invited-second edition of “Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors (CMA).” These texts are for a mixed audience of teacher candidates, experienced practitioners, literacy coaches, teacher educators and researchers. The Conti Fellowship will enable Professor Botelho to complete these two manuscripts.

Gretchen Gerzina, English

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Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is an internationally acclaimed scholar widely known for her work in British literary and cultural studies.  Recently, an updated edition of her book “Black London” was published in the U.K. under the new title “Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History.” Gerzina’ s work reaches beyond the field of literary studies and has made significant contributions to scholarship in history, art history and African American studies.

The Conti Fellowship will give Gerzina the opportunity to complete her current book “The Black Wife in British Literature and Culture.” This will draw upon her decades of research and publication on Black Britain, but also use new books and databases and archives of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-centuries’ Black presence, including newspaper articles and court cases, to allow the actual lives and events of Black and mixed-race people to come into focus and reveal a far more nuanced and fascinating picture of race and gender in early Britain through to the early twentieth century.

Referees noted her important contributions to understanding British culture; “Gretchen’s new project will be an amazing addition to our knowledge and insights into forgotten Britain. Her focus on black women, often with agency, often in what we might perceive to be unusual contexts, is original and fascinating.”