Category: Faculty Honors & Awards

Jane Fountain, along with seven other members of UMass’s faculty, received honors for outstanding accomplishments in “research and creative activity” at the sixth annual Faculty Convocation on October 1st.

Chancellor Robert Holub announced that faculty are key in order to continue the outlook of building a reputation as a large national research institution without sacrificing a focus on undergraduate education, offering new alternatives in student life, expanding access to faculty, tending to special undergraduate populations, building Commonwealth Honors College, strengthening diversity and access on the part of students from underserved communities, and bolstering mutually beneficial relationships with cities such as Springfield.

“I hold the following conviction,” he said. “We should worry less about being called the flagship campus and more about being the flagship campus. If we excel in the ways that flagship campuses excel, and in the way that great institutions of higher education excel, if we profile ourselves as the flagship campus, then the recognition will come naturally, and the entire question can be put to rest.”

Read the full story and watch a video of the Faculty Convocation of 2010 here.

Dr. Sylvia Brandt was appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Advisory Council for Clean Air Compliance Analysis (COUNCIL). Established in 1991, the Council provides guidance on methodologies used to evaluate the Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments of 1990.

Brandt is an Associate Professor of Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she holds a joint appointment with the Center for Public Policy and Administration. Her primary research interests include valuation of chronic illnesses, measurement of disparities in health outcomes and methodologies for evaluating health interventions. Her work expands on traditional economic models to include factors such as exposure to environmental triggers, disparities in asthma treatment, and diversity of preferences among affected populations. She specializes in developing surveys on risk perceptions and health behaviors to improve models of household behaviors. She has also previously done extensive research on fisheries regulation, focusing on the design, implementation, and effect of tradable property rights.

Her current projects include estimating the costs of asthma linked to traffic-related pollution (funded by the South Coast Air Quality Management District) and modeling responses to climate change. In 2005-2006, Brandt was a Visiting Scholar in the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as a reviewer for a dozen public health and environmental economics journals.

Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science Jane Fountain has accepted chairmanship of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. This marks her third year on the Council.

An independent international organization, the World Economic Forum seeks to improve the state of the world by partnering with leaders in order to shape global, regional, and industry agendas. It created the Network of Global Agenda Councils in 2008, combining the intelligence and cooperation of academia, government, business, and other fields to address key challenges in various world affairs. Each Council serves as an advisory board to the Forum, governments, international organizations, and other interested parties and is comprised of between fifteen and twenty members. The Network as a whole consists of upwards of 1000 members from more than fifty countries.

Professor Fountain is the founder and Director of the National Center for Digital Government, which was established with support from the National Science Foundation to develop research and infrastructure for the emerging field information technology and governance. She also directs the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Initiative, a campus-wide effort based at the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts. The STS Initiative is designed to build social science, policy, and cross-disciplinary research on a range of social, political, and economic challenges posed by science and technology. Fountain is the Principal Investigator of the Ethics in Science and Engineering Online Resource Beta Site project and of the International Dimensions of Ethics in Science and Engineering project (IDEESE).

Fountain is the author of Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2001), which was awarded an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her articles have been published in scholarly journals including Governance, Technology in Society, Science and Public Policy, the National Civic Review, and The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

On top of chairing the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government, she served on the American Bar Association Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of e-Rulemaking and has served on several advisory bodies for organizations including the Social Science Research Council, the Internet Policy Institute, and the National Science Foundation. She has delivered invited lectures and keynote addresses and has worked with governments and research institutions including the World Bank, the European Commission, Knowledge Management Asia Pacific, Japan, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Chile, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Joya Misra, professor of sociology and public policy, has been selected as the next editor of Gender and Society, the premier journal in the sociology of gender.  Misra’s selection recognizes her outstanding scholarship and many contributions to the field.  Misra has been a faculty member at CPPA since 1999.  Additional information can be found at the CSBS website.

Joya Misra, professor of sociology and public policy, received the 2010 Mentoring Award from the Sociologists for Women in Society at this year’s annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, Georgia.

The mentoring award was begun in 1990 to annually honor an SWS member who is an outstanding feminist mentor.  The SWS award recognizes Misra’s many contributions toward encouraging feminist scholarship, membership in the academy, and feminist change.  Recipients of the prestigious award are known for their mentoring of junior women, both inside and outside of sociology, and for their work as role models, teachers, and advocates. 

Misra is Chair of the Race, Gender & Class section of the ASA and previously served on the SWS Sister-to-Sister Task Force. At UMass, she has received several Mellon Mutual Mentoring grants, including to develop a CPPA grantswriting workshop.  She also has chaired the UMass Joint MSP/Administration Work Life Committee, which conducts research about, and advocates for, family-friendly policies on campus. She regularly publishes with graduate students in Sociology and CPPA.