News

Alum Wins $3,000 Second Prize in National Competition

Alumna Alaina Hanlon, the president and CEO of the PhenotypeIT company that provides health and wellness software solutions to help individuals and organizations better identify and manage chronic health issues, took home the second-place $3,000 prize at the National Health Promotion Summit, where the Healthy People 2020 Leading Health Indicators App Challenge was staged. Team Community Commons won the $10,000 first prize. PhenotypeIT guides individuals gradually to change behaviors that are putting their health at risk. The company also addresses the need for a better set of behavior modification tools for clinicians and dieticians to use with patients at risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome. 

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EWB Raises $18,800 for Projects in Developing Countries

On April 21, the UMass Amherst student chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) hosted its fifth annual Auction & Social, the high point of the seven-year-old organization’s best year of fundraising to support sustainable engineering projects in Kenya and the Amazon. “We surpassed our goal, raising $22,500, $16,000 from sponsorships and $6,500 from the auction,” explained Elaine Palmer, fundraising advisor for the EWB chapter. “The auction yielded 62 percent of retail value. After expenses and overhead we estimate our net income to be $18,800! With these funds, those traveling on a project will be able to participate regardless of their individual ability to pay for travel.”

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Zhao Wins Best Paper Award

The paper of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) graduate student Jia Zhao was selected for the Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Great Lakes Symposium on Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI), which took place in Salt Lake City, Utah from May 3 to 4. Zhao’s faculty advisor, ECE Professor Russell Tessier, and ECE Professor Wayne Burleson were co-authors of the paper, entitled “Distributed Sensor Data Processing for Many-cores.” As Tessier noted, “Jia's paper focuses on the on-chip monitoring of many-core processor chips which contain thousands of processor cores. His approach collects on-chip voltage and temperature information and uses the information to control processor performance. Significant performance and energy benefits result from this technique.”

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