Past News & Announcements

Wilmore Webley, Associate Professor Microbiology, will serve as the inaugural Senior Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion effective January 1, 2023. UMass Amherst Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Tricia Serio announced the appointment of two new senior leaders for diversity, equity and inclusion for Academic Affairs. The other appointment is Sofiya Alhassan who will serve as the Graduate School’s new associate dean for inclusion and engagement.

Kristen DeAngelis, Professor of Microbiology, received a $2,358,722 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to lead an interdisciplinary group of researchers to investigate a poorly understood, yet crucial, ingredient of the Earth’s soil: necromass.

Derek Lovley is among a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who recently announced that they have figured out how to engineer a biofilm that harvests the energy in evaporation and converts it to electricity. This biofilm, which was announced in Nature Communications, has the potential to revolutionize the world of wearable electronics, powering everything from personal medical sensors to personal electronics.

Grapevine Trunk Diseases, or GTDs, devastate grapevines each year and are responsible for significant annual economic damages for vineyards. Barry Goodell, Professor of Microbiology, and an international team of researchers have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that is deployed by a group of pathogenic fungi working in concert and which are responsible for the death of the grapevines. The researchers found that there is a potential fix, so common consumers probably eat it every morning with cereal: antioxidants and low-toxicity chelators. Often added to food products to preserve freshness, they also interrupt the production of reduced iron and hydrogen peroxide.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst has received a $10 million, five-year award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to create the New England Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases (NEWVEC). Stephen Rich, professor of microbiology, will serve as the project's principal investigator and Andrew Lover, assistant professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences will serve as the center's deputy director, with co-investigator Guang Xu, and investigators at Northern Vermont University, the University of Maine, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island and Western Connecticut State University.