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Highlights:

  • Profs. Wang and Cheung Awarded Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grants

    Profs. Dong Wang (at left) and Alice Cheung, along with four other faculty from the Microbiology and Plant, Soil and Insect Sciences Departments, are members of a team awarded a Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grant in the amount of $10,000.  The goal of the grant is to establish a mentoring program that brings together new, early-career, and/or tenured faculty as mentoring partners around a particular issue, such as a research interest. Prof. Wang was also awarded a $1,200 Mellon Mutual Mentoring Micro Grant, an individual grant "intended to encourage pre-tenure faculty to identify desirable areas for professional growth and opportunity."  The UMass Center for Faculty and Teaching Development established these two grant programs to support early-career faculty and faculty of color through Mutual Mentoring.  They are funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  • Prof. Heuck Awarded 5-yr, $950,000 NIH Grant

    Prof. Alejandro P. Heuck has been awarded a five-year, $950,000 grant from the NIH's National Institute of General Medicine. The project is titled "Molecular Mechanism of Translocon Assembly into Cell Plasma Membranes" and the goal is to analyze the structure and mechanism of assembly of the type III secretion translocon complex employed by pathogenic bacteria to inject virulence factors through the plasma membrane of human cells.  These studies may ultimately lead to novel therapeutic strategies that block protein translocation and interfere with bacterial colonization by a broad variety of threatening human pathogens such as  Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the major cause of death in cystic fibrosis patients.

  • Prof. Gross Awarded 2012 CNS Outstanding Teaching Award

    Prof. David Gross has been recognized for his teaching innovation with the CNS Outstanding Teaching Award.  He was an early adopter of “inking” technology, in which lecture presentations are recorded and made available to students to review outside of class. He published the interactive electronic textbook "Physical Chemistry: Applications in the Life Sciences," developed a blended format for a physical chemistry course, and soon for the GenEd course Biochem 100. This format combines webcasts and online problem solving activities with in-class problem solving by students, maintaining a small-class interactive environment while reaching more students.

  • Profs. Vierling and Schnell named ASPB Fellows

    Profs. Elizabeth Vierling and Danny Schnell have been selected to be Fellows of the American Society of Plant Biologists.   The society chooses Fellows each year in order “to recognize and honor long-term members of the Society who have made major contributions to the discipline in diverse areas that include research, education, mentoring, outreach, and professional and public service.”  Congratulations to both of you!

  • Gierasch and co-authors report model of E. coli proteostasis

    Distinguished Professor Lila Gierasch, along with co-authors Evan Powers and David Powers, describe in the March 15 issue of Cell Reports a computational model, called FoldEco, for protein folding fates in E. coli. The understanding of how proteins fold to their functional native states in complex cellular environments is crucial to understanding diseases associated with failures of folding, such as neurodegenerative diseases. FoldEco allows one to explore the relationships between the properties of a given protein and the networks of species in the cell that facilitate folding or carry out quality control when misfolding occurs.

  • Science Comes Naturally at UMass Amherst

    Undergraduates in the College of Natural Sciences, two of whom are Biochemistry majors, discuss their experiences in the sciences at UMass Amherst.