UMass Boston

A new collaboration for public education

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced during her annual state of the city address in January a new partnership between Boston Public Schools (BPS) and UMass Boston to transform the BCLA- McCormack School on Columbia Point into the city’s first University-Assisted Community Hub School. 

“Together, we’ll give our high school students direct access tocollege coursework and resources, partner educators from both institutions, and create a seamless pathway into UMass Boston for our graduates as we renovate a state-of-the-art high school campus embedded in the Columbia Point community,” Mayor Wu said in her address. 

The new partnership developed over a year of research and strategizing, including a fact-finding mission to California, where UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, in his previous position as dean of the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA, led the development of a new model of high school aimed at enhancing college success. 

“As Boston’s only public research university, we are committed to providing BPS students with an equitable pathway to and through UMass Boston. We look forward to working alongside the mayor and superintendent with BCLA-McCormack leadership, teachers, students, parents, and the community to ensure this is a successful collaboration,” said Suárez-Orozco. 

UMass Boston has a long-standing collaboration with BCLA-McCormack, which is located just a block from campus. The new partnership expands the relationship significantly. In keeping with the community school model, the partners will focus not just on academics, but also on wraparound services that contribute to student, family, and community engagement and wellness. At UCLA’s partner school, these initiatives include extended school days, health clinics, family legal services, and more. 

In codeveloping what will be Massachusetts’ first university-assisted community school, the partners are positing “a new vision for educational transformation in Boston Public Schools,” said Tara Parker, dean of the Umass Boston College of Education & Human Development. 

A deepened partnership with BPS and the City of Boston presents the university with “an incredible opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to anti-racism, health promotion, and education for the future,” she said. “In the spirit of Ruth Batson and others who fought for equity in public schools, we seek to mobilize our resources and work in partnership with school leadership, teachers, students, families, and the larger community to cocreate meaningful change in this school and beyond.” 

Collaborations between the two schools have already begun. When the college brought acclaimed poet and educator Nikki Giovanni to campus in March for a distinguished lecture, they also arranged for her to speak to more than 200 students at BCLA-McCormack and meet with teachers over lunch. Some of the students shared their own poetry with Giovanni. “It was amazing—a very special day at the school,” said Dean Parker. “When we left, the school leaders said, ‘Now we really know what this partnership with UMass Boston can be!’” 

 

Light of Hope

By Sandra Mason

In rural India, and other parts of South Asia, the high incidence of oral cancers is a major health concern. In these areas, even when early-stage cancers are detected, treatment may not be accessible to patients. When available, current care options often require that patients travel long distances to receive care like radiation and chemotherapy, which involve multiple rounds of costly medical treatments and may come with debilitating side effects. A new method for managing the disease is urgently needed to address the health crisis while considering the barriers to health care access including infrastructure. 

This spring, UMass Boston Professor of Physics Jonathan Celli was awarded $608,000 from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support his efforts to advance the development of a low-cost, compact medical device for screening and treating oral cancers. The award is part of a five-year, $2.87 million, multi-PI NCI cooperative agreement in collaboration with Tayyaba Hasan, professor of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Rongguang Liang, professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona. 

The joint project aims to create an affordable, user-friendly, handheld therapeutic device that can put cancer treatment within reach for more patients. “The device’s purpose is to screen for early signs of oral cancer, identify lesion locations, and provide immediate treatment at the point of care,” explained Celli. 

Both a diagnostic and treatment tool for cancerous oral lesions, the device eradicates malignant cells through photodynamic therapy (PDT), which involves using a light source in combination with light-activated medication. It is a method that has already shown great promise in treating oral cancers. 

The PDT device is specifically designed for low-resource, rural locations. In a single appointment, medical providers can use the device to both screen for oral cancer and treat malignant or pre-malignant oral lesions, offering a medical intervention for oral cancers that is more feasible and less invasive than traditional cancer care. 

“This work builds on an earlier prototype device built at UMass Boston through previous NCI funding. A clinical trial in India using this device produced excellent results. Out of 29 patients with early-stage oral cancer, 22 had complete tumor response in a single PDT session with our hardware. And compared to other therapies, healing was excellent, with oral mucosa returning to a shiny and healthy state after PDT. We are excited about designing and testing the next- generation device to build on what we saw with the previous system,” said Celli. 

Once the device is ready, the technology will undergo testing in a Phase IIb clinical trial in India. Clinical partners in India are Moni Abraham Kuriakose, an oncologist with Karkinos Healthcare and Mazumdar Shaw Cancer Center, and Mohd Akram, a radiotherapist at Aligarh Muslim University. 

UMass Boston Postdoctoral Research Associate Shakir Khan has been instrumental in the project. Graduate and undergraduate students studying biology, engineering, and physics have also participated in the project through research positions in Celli’s lab. 

The research has led to a pending U.S. patent and the launch of a start-up company named Photodynamic Solutions.

 

ADVANCEing faculty diversity

The National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE program awarded a three-year, $1 million grant to a team of five UMass Boston faculty members tackling gender and racial inequity among the university’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty. “While the student body at UMass Boston is one of the most diverse in the country, the faculty is not as diverse,” explained Associate Professor of Leadership in Education Katalin Szelényi, who is a co-principal investigator on the grant with Biology Professor Adán Colón-Carmona, Chemistry Professor Hannah Sevian, Management Professor Maureen Scully, and Dean of Faculty and English Professor Rajini Srikanth. Their project aims to provide clarity around factors affecting the career outcomes of women faculty and faculty of color in STEM fields, with approaches that are relevant to all faculty at the university, both tenure- and nontenure- stream. This may include the way faculty activities are recognized and rewarded or undervalued, and organizational barriers that inhibit equity. In addition to cultivating and supporting the university’s increasingly diverse faculty, the project will create “a model for other universities,” said Provost Joseph Berger. UMass Boston was one of only six higher education institutions in the U.S. to receive an ADVANCE Adaptation grant in 2023.

 

New Campus Hub for Native & Indigenous Students 

Last fall, the campus community celebrated the grand opening of the Native & Indigenous Student Resource Hub, a space that Assistant Professor of Native American History Maria John hopes will provide a natural home, meeting place, and dedicated space for students to socialize, collaborate, and access resources through community events, staffing support, and more. 

“I don’t think we can under- estimate the power of having a place that is just for the students,” said John, adding that it’s been challenging for Native and Indigenous students to find one another on campus without a dedicated space to do the work of community building. The hub, sponsored by the Institute for New England Native American Studies and the Native American & Indigenous Studies minor, is located on the third floor of the Campus Center. “This brings visibility, community, the opportunity to build, a sense of belonging, and so much more.” 

Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Karen Ferrer-Muñiz said the hub continues an important collaboration of students, faculty, and staff to “further uplift an ecology of acknowledgement of Native communities as the traditional land caretakers of Massachusetts.” 

“It also provides a space for our community to centrally offer tailored support, community, and cultural celebration for the Native community and their allies that focuses on holistic student success through belonging,” she said. “I look forward to seeing how this hub grows and hopefully flourishes in the coming years.” 

 

Giving the mic to climate-impacted communities 

The Waverley Street Foundation has awarded a shared two-year, $2.3 million grant to the School for the Environment and the environ- mental news radio program Living on Earth, which is produced at UMass Boston and airs on 250 public radio stations nationwide. 

Together, the partners will use the funds to launch a joint Center for Climate & Environmental Justice Media. The center will provide media skills training for students of color and members of marginalized communities, then help participants create micro-podcasts to deliver their stories of climate injustice and progress. The goals: amplifying the voices of climate-impacted communities and catalyzing grassroots climate action. 

Waverley Street Foundation was launched by Apple founder Steve Jobs and is cochaired by his widow, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, and Apple Vice President for Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson, former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The foundation has committed to granting its entire $3-billion-plus endowment by 2035 to support climate solutions grounded in community needs. 

 

High Honors for Professors 

The UMass Boston faculty has claimed several prestigious honors recently, underscoring the caliber of research and scholarship being conducted at UMass Boston: 

In a historic first for the Department of Physics, Assistant Professorreceived a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The award grants Gharbi over $600,000 to advance his research on the mobility of living microorganisms, which could play a pivotal role in applications like the creation of micromotors and micromachines for biosensing, bioremediation, and disease treatment. 

Professor of Physics Christopher Fuchs has been named one of Vox’s 2023 Future Perfect 50, honoring his work as a pioneer of quantum physics. Vox’s annual list celebrates visionary change agents whose ideas can transform our future for the better. Fuchs is recognized for his co-development of QBism, a theory asserting that probabilities in quantum mechanics reflect observers’ expectations rather than objective reality, bridging the gap between consciousness and the physical world. 

English Professor John Fulton, director of the Creative WritingMFA Program, was one of 35 writers selected by the NationalEndowment for the Arts from an applicant pool of over 2,000submissions to receive a $25,000 FY 2024 Creative Writing Fellowship. The highly competitive fellowships are judged on the artistic excellence of submitted work; Fulton earned his for The Flounder and Other Stories, a Poets & Writers Page One New and Noteworthy Book selection. (Learn more in our Alumni and Faculty Bookshelf on page 11.) 

 

UMass Boston Hosts TEDx

“It was important to showcase extraordinary nonprofit leaders doing good work in this city at a great institution that shares those values.” 

—JOHN WERNER, organizer of more than 3,000 TED talks, on why he decided to host TEDxBoston’s Boston Leaders event on the UMass Boston campus in January. The 15 featured speakers—including Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and alumni Paul English ’87, G’89, H’19; Elisabeth Jackson ’00; and Imari Paris Jeffries ’97, G’99, G’03, PhD’23—lead service-oriented organizations whose missions range from local to global. To see recordings of the talks, visit www.youtube.com/c/TEDxBeaconStreet.