Incoming students in the interdisciplinary graduate programs in the life sciences (MCB, NSB, OEB and PB) enjoyed a day of whitewater rafting on the Deerfield River. Several faculty, staff and current students joined the group. The rafting adventure was a great way to get to know one another and have a ton of fun at the same time.

Patricia (Pat) Wadsworth, Professor and Associate Chair of Biology, who will become the Director of IDGP in June 2018, has been awarded the 2018 CNS Outstanding Service/Engagement Award. CNS Outstanding Achievement Awards recognize excellence and honor faculty and staff members and students who have made important contributions to their discipline, department, college, and university. Recipients are presented with their awards at a special ceremony in the spring. Read More

Are you interested in finding a larger audience for your research or pursuing a career in outreach and public engagement? If so,then please attend the April 11th Outreach and Public Engagement Summit, which will help you make the connections and provide you with information necessary to achieve your goals.  Pre-registration is requested: https://tinyurl.com/OPESummit.

Amy Strauss was awarded a Developmental Science Initiative Dissertation Fellowship in the amount of $10,000 from UMass Amherst's Center for Research on Families, an interdisciplinary research center based in the College of Natural Sciences and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The award funds PhD students who exhibit the potential to make an outstanding contribution to the field of developmental science. 

Amy's research explores vocal learning in male songbirds, a process in which young birds learn to sing by reproducing the songs they hear during a 'sensitive period' early in life. This award will support Amy's work investigating the social and acoustic factors that influence how juvenile songbird brains store and represent auditory memories of tutor songs heard during early development. This process of sensory input storage occurs before vocal production even begins, laying a neural foundation that enables young birds to eventually produce adult song. The developmental process of song learning in birds parallels that of speech learning in humans, so this work will not only provide insight into birdsong developmental pathways, but may have applications in the field of human speech and language pathology. Amy is an OEB PhD candidate in the Podos Lab, and this research is part of a collaboration with the Remage-Healey Lab.