Eric Decker, the university’s head of food science, was one of the 13 expert members of a National Academies of Sciences (NAS) committee that this week released new dietary recommendations for sodium and potassium, essential nutrients that play vital roles in the human body. His expertise was featured prominently in the Boston Globe.
Brigitte M. Holt, associate professor of anthropology at UMass Amherst, was recently awarded a three-year, $788,810 National Science Foundation grant to examine whether greater physical activity levels lead to greater bone strength and protect against age-related bone loss. Holt will serve as co-principal investigator of the study along with Jonathan Stieglitz, assistant professor at Université Toulouse 1 Capitole.
New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen may face a difficult re-election bid in 2020 should Gov. Chris Sununu toss his hat into the ring, a new poll of Granite State voters conducted by UMass Amherst shows.
In this month’s cover story in the journal Advanced Materials, polymer scientists Todd Emrick, Al Crosby and colleagues describe a new approach using liquids for simultaneously cleaning nanoparticle debris from surfaces and depositing that debris into damaged regions of the same surfaces, a process that quickly and efficiently “heals” them.
In the latest of her many career honors, Lila Gierasch, Distinguished Professor of chemistry and biochemistry and molecular biology, was recently recognized for her “outstanding contributions to peptide science” by the American Peptide Society (APS). She will formally receive its lifetime achievement honor, the Merrifield Award, at a ceremony at the society’s annual meeting in June.
Now beginning its eleventh year, the campus’s Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP), which supports educational activities that enhance biomedical, behavioral and clinical research workforce diversity, recently was awarded its third grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue funding the program.
The Arbella Insurance Human Performance Laboratory (HPL) and the Learning Lab are currently looking for licensed drivers ages 18-24 who do not wear eye glasses (contact lenses are okay) to participate in a driving study. Participation will include two separate on-campus lab visits.
Two teams of international researchers led by UMass Amherst faculty have been awarded funding from the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) to initiate global projects designed to impact millions of people in the developing world. Four other UMass researchers are collaborating on projects led by other universities.
Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst, has received a five-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop nanoscale sensors that can measure both the mechanical and electrical properties of a cell at the same time. The grant is from NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program.
Joseph C. Bardin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has helped scientists at Google design and build a small, low-power controller to be used with quantum computers – devices that operate at near absolute zero to take advantage of physical phenomena that only occur at those temperatures.
