Professor John Tobiason, civil and environmental engineering (CEE) department head, has won the 2021 Gordon Maskew Fair Award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists (AAEES) for his contributions to the environmental engineering profession.

AMHERST, Mass. – Two employees who have been coordinating UMass Amherst’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic since March 2020 recently were honored by Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy for their efforts.

AMHERST, Mass. – Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas, with 300 times the warming ability of carbon dioxide. Due to fertilizer runoff from farm fields, an increasing load of nitrogen is washing into rivers and streams, where nitrogen-breathing microbes break some of the fertilizer down into N2O, which the river releases into the atmosphere as it tumbles toward the ocean. But, until now, scientists haven’t had a clear picture of how the process works, what fraction of the runoff winds up as N2O or what steps might be taken to mitigate N2O emissions.

“I am saddened to learn of the passing of former U.S. Secretary of State General Colin Powell. General Powell’s trailblazing career was marked by many firsts – the first Black national security advisor; the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the first Black Secretary of State. I had the honor of working with General Powell when I served on the House Armed Services Committee, and I can attest to his commitment to public service, his loyalty to those he served and led, and his unyielding love for this country.

AMHERST, Mass. – Clinical decisions made in the delivery setting as to whether to employ vaginal delivery or cesarean section are often made under high pressure, and with great uncertainty, and have serious consequences for mother and baby.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (CEERE) has received a five-year, $1.75 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to continue in the Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) program, providing industrial facilities with assessments to help reduce their environmental impact and operating costs.

A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has announced a major new advance in understanding how our genetic information eventually translates into functional proteins—one of the building blocks of human life. The research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), elucidates how chaperones display “selective promiscuity” for the specific proteins—their “clients”—they serve.

In a pair of recently published papers, Michael Rawlins, a professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s geosciences department and associate director of the Climate System Research Center, has made significant gains in filling out our understanding of the Arctic’s carbon cycle—or the way that carbon is transferred between the land, ocean and atmosphere.

Twenty years ago, when professor of operations and information management Bob Nakosteen agreed to teach Isenberg’s first online graduate course to 18 MBA students, it did not start out well. “Online classes were more like the old ‘correspondence course’ format,” he recalls. “All written. Not a good way to learn statistics.”

Martín Espada, poet and professor of English, is a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry for his collection “Floaters.”

Five books are now shortlisted for National Book Awards in each of five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Winners will be named in November.