Courtney Babbitt, Biology, has received a three-year, $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to use new state-of-the-art computational, evolutionary and experimental methods to examine how natural selection has shaped gene expression in the human brain. Babbitt and colleagues will test the hypothesis that there are functional links between adaptation in the genome and changes in neural types that occurred during human evolution. Read more 

Graduate students in the UMass IDGP programs created That's Life [Science], an interdisciplinary outreach blog, in 2016. Since then, the group has published 150 articles covering interesting topics across life science fields for the general public. "A Day in the Life of a Bird Nerd" is their 150th article!

Eight faculty members from across seven departments and six colleges have been named Public Engagement Faculty Fellows by the Public Engagement Project (PEP). They will draw on their substantial research record to impact policy, the work of practitioners and public debates. The fellows, who will receive a stipend and technical training in communicating with non-academic audiences, will also travel to Beacon Hill to share their research with lawmakers. Read more

A paper by nutritional microbiologist David Sela, food science, and colleagues at Harvard and Arizona State University was recently named one of the top five most viewed papers of 2017 in the open access journal, PeerJ, in four topic areas: food science and technology, gastroenterology and hepatology, nutrition, and pediatrics. The article, “Handling stress may confound murine gut microbiota studies,” had 1,553 views over the year. Read more