Honors and Awards

UMass ADVANCE Announces Winners of 2023 Faculty Collaboration Award

UMass ADVANCE is pleased to announce this year’s winners of the ADVANCE Equitable Practices in Collaboration-Research Collaboration (EPiC-RC) Award. Research shows that when all voices are heard, including the voices of women and BIPOC faculty, research collaboration is better and has more effective outcomes. The award recognizes effective and equitable research collaboration practices in faculty-led groups of three or more; the winning teams will each receive $500.

The Winning Teams of the 2023 EPiC-RC Award are:

Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science Proposal Team has worked collaboratively to develop the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS). They are developing community-based research projects with Indigenous communities in eight regional hubs around the globe to address climate change, protect cultural places and ensure food sovereignty/security. Through these projects the team aims to transform the way research is carried out so that Indigenous and Western sciences are utilized in a productive partnership to address the common existential threat of climate change.

The team includes:

Sonya Atalay, Anthropology
Julie Brigham-Grete, Geosciences
Rob DeConto, Geoscience
Haeden Stewart, Anthropology
Enrique Suarez, Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies
Banu Subramaniam, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Jon Woodruff, Geosciences
Laura Valdiviezo, Education

Counterspace Support for BIPOC Library Employees Research & Implementation Team is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, interdisciplinary and intergenerational group of four librarians in MSP and one library professional in PSU which grew organically. It started as an idea for researching, publishing and implementing a fund to help Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) to find counterspaces and experience support for their work as librarians of color. The collaborative’s scholarship includes a forthcoming open access book chapter: “Counterspace Support for BIPOC Employees Within a Holistic JEDI Library Framework,” in Perspectives on Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Libraries. IGI Global, 2023.

The team includes:

Suenita Berube, UMass Libraries
Isabel Espinal, UMass Libraries
Katherine Freedman. UMass Libraries
Anne Graham, UMass Libraries
Maria Rios, UMass Libraries

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Artificial Intelligence Team is composed of 11 active faculty members from 10 different departments and nine colleges who developed a shared interest through their involvement in the Center for Teaching and Learning Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Working group. It includes non-tenure and tenure-track members of varying levels of experience and rank who share a common interest in fostering ethical and equitable teaching practices. Their goal is to support each other on individual teaching and learning research projects, as well as to collaborate on interdisciplinary research. In the 2022-2023 academic year, a shared curiosity about the impact of AI on teaching and learning led to the development of the research project, “Student Perspectives on ChatGPT.” The project aims to understand how tools like ChatGPT are perceived and used among our undergraduate students. Their findings will provide opportunities for innovation and revision of teaching practices to respond to the increased accessibility of generative AI models.

The team includes:

Anne Bello, Writing Program
Skylar Davidson, Sociology
Christina DiMarco-Crook, Food Science
Colleen Kuusinen, Center for Teaching and Learning
Anna LaChance, Chemical Engineering
Erica Light, Integrated Concentration in STEM and Business Program
Siobhan Mei, Computer Science
Becky Miller, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Julia McDougal Ronconi, Nursing
Nick Tooker, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Torrey Trust, Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies