Category: News

CNS faculty receive grant through ADVANCE program to study sustainability in New England’s fishing industry  The ADVANCE program has announced that two research teams are recipients of ADVANCE’s first Collaborative Research Seed Grants. The competitive grants aim to foster the development of innovative and equitable collaborative research projects among faculty.     Recognizing longstanding gender gaps in the academy, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds universities to build institutional transformation programs in order to advance gender equity for faculty in science and engineering. Through the power of collaboration, ADVANCE cultivates faculty equity and inclusion—especially for women and minorities in science and engineering.  Two winning teams demonstrated innovative research and well thought-out and equitable collaborations. One team will be working on the project "Elucidating mechanoselective adhesion and antibiotic resistance for catheter-associated bacterial infections using genomics approaches.”  The principal investigators for this team are:  Lauren Andrews, Marvin and Eva Schlanger Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, department of chemical engineering  Jessica Schiffman, James M. Douglas Career Development Faculty Fellow, associate professor, department of chemical engineering  This project...

UMass ecologists’ research will fill a gap in information on the needs and mortality rates of river herrings A team led by director of the Gloucester Marine Station Adrian Jordaan and including ecologists Michelle Staudinger and Allison Roy of the U.S. Geological Survey recently received support for their study of migrating alewife and blueback herring in freshwater, river and estuary environments.  They intend to provide new information on the density, mortality and resource needs of juvenile life stages and explore the link between spawning adults and the success of their offspring. The project is one of seven sponsored by Woods Hole Sea Grant that will focus on priority issues in the Massachusetts coastal environment, including not only river herring population studies but shark-seal-human interactions, coastal resiliency and the sources and fate of microplastics in marine ecosystems.  The awards represent a total anticipated research investment of $1.47 million over two years from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other non-federal matching funds, and are subject to release of federal funds. Woods Hole...

First-of-its-kind pyrogeographic study conducted by UMass ecologists identifies combustible invasive grasses In a first national-scale analysis, ecologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with colleagues at the University of Colorado-Boulder, report that across the United States, invasive grasses can double the number of fires.    One species, invasive cheatgrass, has a long, well-earned reputation as a firestarter, making wildfires worse and more common. It is now clear that this effect is much more pervasive than a single species, they report. The new analysis finds at least seven other non-native grasses can increase wildfire risk around the country, some doubling or even tripling the likelihood of fires in grass-invaded areas. Details are now online in the Latest Articles from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Post-doctoral researcher and lead author Emily Fusco, says, “In the southeast pine systems there is cogon grass, while in the desert southwest there is buffelgrass. In eastern temperate forests we have Japanese stiltgrass, and in the Great Basin we have medusahead. These regions are all ecologically distinct, and...