Past News & Announcements

November 2013:  Five Microbiology majors are also members of the UMass Marching Band:  Pat Conboy, Meghan Falvey, Adam Lerman (not pictured), Jonathon McHatton, and Clarissa Ronzio. These students recently returned from New York City where they performed in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Congratulations on a fine performance!

November 2013:  Graduate student Jesús G. Alvelo-Maurosa provided insight regarding an Acinetobacter baumannii outbreak in a hospital in Puerto Rico for the newspaper El Nuevo Dia. Infections caused by A. baumannii are notorious for complicating treatment of U.S. soldiers following traumatic injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the newspaper article, Alvelo-Maurosa provided an analysis of a CDC report and explained how resistance of A. baumannii bacteria to multiple antibiotics results in serious infections in civilian hospitals as well as in combat zones. The article was cited by multiple high-profile online news sites in Puerto Rico. In a second unrelated article in Mi Puerto Rico Verde, an online environmental news site, Alvelo-Maurosa explained the benefits of using trash and microbial communities to produce biogas as a way to tackle the expensive costs of energy production on tropical islands such as Puerto Rico.

November 2013:  Dr. David Hahn, MD, Director of the Wisconsin Research and Education Network recently published a book entitled: “A Cure for Asthma?”  The book challenges the conventional wisdom about the causes and treatments for asthma with the use of strong scientific evidence and compelling case histories. Dr. Hahn is a long-time collaborator on asthma research with the Webley Lab and part one of the book consists of stories told by patients whose asthma has been cured by antibiotic treatment to eliminate Chlamydia pneumoniae from their lungs. These patients had their blood and bronchial lavage samples tested in the Webley Lab as part of a case series study. The work performed by the Webley is repeatedly highlighted in this book and Dr. Webley wrote one of the forewords for the book and is one of three colleagues who statements can be found on the back cover. The stories highlighted in this publication and the conclusions drawn provide unmistakable validation of the clinical importance of the work currently being undertaken in the Webley Lab.

September 2013:  Effective September 1, 2013, Dr. Stephen Rich and Dr. Klaus Nüsslein have both been promoted to the rank of Professor.

August 2013:  Kristen DeAngelis, Assistant Professor of Microbiology, along with Jeffrey Blanchard in the Biology Department and Jerry Melillo at the Ecosystem Center in the Marine Biological Laboratories received a three year grant from the Department of Energy. This project, entitled "Changes in Soil Carbon Dynamics in Response to Long-Term Soil Warming – Integration Across Scales from Cells to Ecosystems," takes advantage of a 22-year climate warming experiment ongoing at the Harvard Forest LTER. Cultivation of microbes, meta-transcriptomics of soils, and development of an ecosystem model for decomposition will increase understanding of the microbial mechanisms that control soil carbon loss in the context of a changing climate.