Past News & Announcements
UMass Launches the School of Earth & Sustainability
April 2017: On April 19th, the University will launch the new School of Earth & Sustainability (SES). This cross-discipline partnership includes the Departments of Environmental Conservation, Geosciences, Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning, Stockbridge School of Agriculture and Environmental Microbiologists from the Department of Microbiology. The partnership includes over 100 faculty that share a common focus on sustainability, the environment and earth sciences. Read more...
Srishti Kashyap Wins Travel Award to Present a Talk at Astrobiology Science Conference
Yasu Morita Receives Faculty Award
February 2017: Dr. Yasu Morita, Assistant Professor of Microbiology, received the 2017 James F. Holden Distinguished Teaching Award on February 25. The award is presented annually to a member of the Microbiology graduate faculty who has made a positive impact on the educational experience of students in the Microbiology graduate program.
Begüm Topcuoglu Receives Graduate Student Award
February 2017: Begüm Topcuoglu, Microbiology Ph.D. candidate, was awarded the Curtis B. Thorne "Carry On" Award on February 25, 2017. The award was established in 2008 to honor former Microbiology Faculty member Curt Thorne. The graduate student is chosen based on contributions to the Department and their discipline and for serving as a role model to other students.
Marie Kroeger Wins Travel Award to present a talk at the Thünen Symposium on Soil Metagenomics in Germany
January 2017: Marie Kroeger, a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of Prof. Klaus Nüsslein, was selected to receive a travel award to present her recent rainforest genome analyses in a oral presentation at the 3rd Thünen Symposium on Soil Metagenomics sponsored by the international TerraGenome group in Braunschweig, Germany. This is the most specialized meeting in the area of soil genomics and Marie’s results were extremely well received.
Begum Topcuoglu Receives Award at American Geophysical Union Meeting
January 2017: Begum Topcuoglu, a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of James Holden, received an Outstanding Student Paper Award (OSPA) for the talk that she gave in December at the American Geophysical Union Annual Fall Meeting in San Francisco. With approximately 24,000 attendees in 2016, AGU's Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.
Gray Cited in Microbe Magazine
January 2017: Taylor Gray (M.S. Microbiology ’16), a former researcher in the laboratory of Wilmore Webley, was cited in the December 2016 issue of Microbe. Wilmore Webley and his team of researchers are exploring the role of Adenovirus 36 in breast cancer risk. Read more…
Pioneer Valley Microbiology Symposium 2017
January 2017: The Microbiology Pioneer Valley Symposium will be held on January 14, 2017 at UMass Amherst. Keynote speakers include Dr. Jessica Schiffman from UMass Amherst, Dr. Timothy F. Kowalik from UMass Medical School and Dr. Jonathan Klassen from UConn. Registration will begin on September 25, 2016. The mission of the Symposium is to bring together microbiology enthusiasts from the Pioneer Valley and showcase the diverse areas of microbiology through faculty and students talks and a poster session. The Symposium is open to all levels of microbiology research. Read more...
National Philanthropy Day 2016
November 2016: On National Philanthropy Day we thank all of our donors for the generosity and continued commitment to our Department and its programs.
6th Annual Life Sciences Graduate Research Symposium
September 2016: The 6th Annual Life Sciences Graduate Research Symposium will be held on Friday, December 2, 2016, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The event will feature research talks throughout the day and a poster session from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m.
After-School Science Club Studies Bacteria on Apples
September 2016: Seventh grade students in Amherst Regional Middle School's after-school science club recently studied apples and the method their cafeteria uses to handle and prepare the apples for school lunches. For more than four months students collected data and preliminary findings showed that washing and refrigerating apples is the best way to reduce bacteria. The cafeteria workers' method of preparing the fruit was to wash each apple and place them in individual plastic bags. Yasu Morita, Assistant Professor of Microbiology, and Anastasia Naritsin, and undergraduate researcher, provided the students with guidance in lifting bacteria from the apples and placing it on to petri plates to monitor the growth of bacteria and additionally determine what types of apples had more bacteria. Read more...
DeAngelis Awarded Department of Energy Grants
September 2016: Kristen DeAngelis, Assistant Professor in Microbiology, has been awarded two grants from the Department of Energy to study microbial feedbacks to climate in a warming world. The first is a three-year award from the DOE Genomic Sciences (GS) Program, entitled "The Who and How of Microbial Control over Soil Carbon Dynamics: a Multi–omics, Stable Isotope, and Modeling Approach.” The second is a two-year award from the DOE Terrestrial Ecosystem Sciences (TES) Program, entitled "Resolving Conflicting Physical and Biochemical Feedbacks to Climate in Response to Long-Term Warming". These complementary projects both examine microbial carbon use efficiency and availability as possible sources of climate-altered feedbacks to warming, by studying Harvard Forest soils exposed to 25 years of warming along with bacterial and fungal culture collections from these soils. Dr. DeAngelis is the PI for both, with co-investigators at UMass, Hampshire College, UNH, Argonne National Lab, and Marine Biological Labs.
Department of Microbiology