Past News & Announcements

Graduate Student Receives Dissertation Research Grant

April 2015:  Jonathan Miller, Microbiology Ph.D. candidate, has been awarded a Dissertation Research Grant through the University of Massachusetts Graduate School.  The purpose of the grants are to provide funding for expenses incurred in connection with the student’s doctoral dissertation research.  Read more...

Giffen Named Goldwater Scholar

April 2015: Congratulations to Samantha Giffen on being named a Goldwater Scholar. Ms. Giffen is a double Public Health and Microbiology major in the Class of 2016. The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established in 1986 to honor Senator Barry M. Goldwater. The program is designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Ms. Giffen was one of four UMass students named Goldwater Scholars. Read more...

Microbiology Graduate Student Awarded Robinson Scholarship

March 2015: Gina Chaput, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Microbiology, has been selected as a recipient of the Edith Robinson Scholarship. The Edith Robinson Scholarship, given by the UMass Graduate School from the bequest of Edith Robinson, is for a continuing graduate student from Vermont or New Hampshire who is studying health, the environment, or psychology. Ms. Chaput is a second year graduate student in the research laboratory of Dr. Kristen DeAngelis.

New Addition to the Microbiology Faculty

January 2015: UMass Microbiology welcomes M. Sloan Siegrist as an Assistant Professor to its faculty. Dr. Siegrist received her Ph.D. from the Harvard School of Public Health and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Berkeley and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Siegrist's research focuses on the cell wall of intracellular pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Listeria monocytogenes.

Webley Named Director of Pre-Medical and Pre-Dental Advising

January 2015:  Effective January 1, 2015, Wilmore Webley, Associate Professor of Microbiology, has been named the Director of Pre-Medical and Pre-Dental Advising at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Dr. Webley will advise approximately 1,500 undergraduates as they explore careers in the health fields. Read more...

Stewart Paper Recognized at AGU Meeting

January 2015: Lucy Stewart, Microbiology Ph.D. candidate, was recognized with an Outstanding Student Paper Award (OSPA) in Biogeosciences at the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting held in San Francisco in December 2014.

Korobkova Receives Joel Goldenberg Memorial Scholarship

January 2015: Luiza Korobkova, Microbiology Class of 2015, has received the Joel Goldenberg Memorial Scholarship from the Boston Area Chapter of the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE). ISPE is a non-profit, professional society serving the life sciences industry, including college and university students preparing to entr related fields. The scholarship program was established to honor the memory of Boston Area Chapter Past President Joel Goldenberg.

Whole Plant Therapy Shows Potential in Fighting the Malaria Parasite

January 2015: In the fight against malaria, Stephen Rich and a team of researchers from UMass and Worcester Polytechnic Institute have found using the whole plant from Artemisia annua resists and remains effective for up to three times longer than the pure drug artemisinin, the current pharmaceutical drug used to treat malaria.  Details of the research team's findings have been reported this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more...

These recent findings by Dr. Rich's research team were also featured in the New York Times. Read more...

Lovley Named Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science

December 2014: Derek R. Lovley, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advance of Science (AAAS).  Deputy Chancellor Robert S. Feldman and Jeffrey D. Blaustein, UMass Professors of Psychological and Brain Sciences were also named fellows of the AAAS.  Read more...

Graduate Students Receive Dissertation Research Grants

December 2014:  Jennifer Hayashi and Maria Rocha-Granados, Microbiology Ph.D. candidates, have been awarded Dissertation Research Grants through the University of Massachusetts Graduate School.  The purpose of the grants are to provide funding for expenses incurred in connection with the student’s doctoral dissertation research.  Read more...

Nature Nanotechnology Reports Findings by Lovley and Colleagues

November 2014:  A collaborative study between Derek Lovley and UMass physicists Nikhil Malvankar, Sibel Ebru Yalcin and Mark Tuominen, provides strong evidence that support their claims that Geobacter produces small electrical wires. This group of researchers confirmed the discovery using EFM, a technique that can show how electrons move through materials.  Their findings were reported in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.  Read more...

Lecture by Arthur Allen Featured on November 20

The Department of Microbiology is cosponsoring a lecture by Arthur Allen entitled, “The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis”. Arthur Allen currently editor at Politico’s Pro eHealth, has decades of experience in journalism as a correspondent for The Associated Press. He covered the war in El Salvador for three years and was based in Germany in the 1990s. He is the author of Vaccine (Norton, 2007), a social and scientific history of vaccination, and Ripe (Counterpoint, 2011), a study of tomato breeding, genetics and production. The lectur will take place on November 20 at 4:00 p.m. at the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, 758 North Pleasant Street. Read more...

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