UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences

11/04/2025

SPHHS had been busy at the Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, D.C.!

The group of graduate students, faculty, and staff are spending the week talking to folks about the school and our many graduate programs. 🎓 Our students have also shared their expertise with a handful of research presentations.

Make sure to swing by and say hi if you’re in the area! 👋

11/04/2025

Mariana Chilton, Professor of Practice in the Department of Nutrition, comments in a WWLP-TV news story about the Trump administration being ordered by two federal judges to continue to fund SNAP benefits. The ruling came a day before the U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to SNAP because it could no longer keep funding due to the government shutdown, now in its 31st day.

“I’m very glad that the people of Massachusetts and numerous states across the country are working to sue the federal government to ensure that these benefits get released tomorrow,” said Chilton. “And that’s as it should be, we should be taking legal action. And again, we should not have to be in this situation.”

Two federal judges have ordered the Trump Administration to continue to fund SNAP benefits, but it may take up to two weeks for families to receive their next payment.

10/31/2025

In her October message, Dean Anna Maria Siega-Riz highlights the many activities going on in the school - including the recent Philip W. Johnston Massachusetts Health Policy Forum on the impact of Medicaid cuts on Western Massachusetts, hosted and co-sponsored by the SPHHS.

Dean Siega-Riz provides her monthly newsletter message for October 2025.

10/30/2025

The APHA Annual Meeting & Expo brings together public health professionals and healthcare leaders from across the nation to discuss the most pressing challenges and opportunities in health equity, systems, and leadership.

We’re excited to share that the UMass Amherst School of Public Health & Health Sciences will be represented at the event! Stop by our booth to meet Lori Peterson, Executive Director of Professional Programs.

Discover how UMass’s online, public-health-grounded MHA is preparing healthcare professionals to lead with confidence, purpose, and impact.

📍 Visit the UMass SPHHS 1430 booth at APHA 2025 in Washington, D.C.
💻 Explore the MHA Program: https://bit.ly/UMassOnlineMHA

10/28/2025

Professor of Community Health Education Elizabeth Evans has received four grants totaling $17.9 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue her groundbreaking research that implemented and assessed medical treatment programs for incarcerated people with opioid use disorder, as well as develop a new program for HIV prevention and treatment.

“Jail settings offer opportunities for testing, prevention and treatment of both infectious disease and also opioid and other substance use disorders,” Evans says, “making jails a critical part of our public health system.”

Elizabeth Evans has received four awards from the NIH totaling $17.9 million to advance research tackling opioid overdose and HIV prevention and treatment.

10/24/2025

In ongoing efforts to pinpoint the best evidence-based ways to quit smoking, health policy researcher Jamie Hartmann-Boyce has turned her attention to a to***co-free product gaining in popularity across the country—oral ni****ne pouches. In the first Cochrane review on the topic, the evidence suggests that switching to oral ni****ne pouches from smoking reduces exposure to harmful substances, “which is what we would expect to find,” says Hartmann-Boyce, the study's senior author and an editor for Cochrane, the global health research nonprofit based in the United Kingdom.

“Other ni****ne products, like patches, gums, and ni****ne vapes, are definitely beneficial for helping people quit smoking,” says Hartmann-Boyce, a leader in to***co health policy and management in the U.S. “We knew that we weren’t going to have that many studies of pouches in this review when we published the first time, but we also know there are loads in the pipeline, and we hope to regularly update this as those new studies come out. We’ve given ourselves a platform to collect that data and integrate it quicker than we would have been able to before.”

Health policy and management researcher Jamie Hartmann-Boyce oversees Cochrane’s first evidence-based review of oral ni****ne pouches.

10/23/2025

Kinesiology's Amanda Paluch comments for Health on a new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that suggests a few mini-workouts spread throughout the day—called “exercise snacks”—could be enough to boost heart and muscle health.

New research finds that very short physical activity sessions spread throughout the day, called "exercise snacks," may boost heart and muscle health.

10/20/2025

A recent paper in Discover Mental Health reports on findings from Abigail Grimm's senior honor’s thesis at UMass Amherst. The study, co-authored by Professor Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson and Assistant Professor Krystal Kittle, examines the associations between bullying, social support, and mental health among transgender and gender‑diverse (TGD) adolescents.

“While many studies have addressed mental health, bullying, and social support among LGBTQ+ adolescent populations, few have differentiated the experience of TGD individuals. The differentiation between sexual and gender minorities is critical, particularly as current policy agendas seek to erase the existence and experience of transgender and gender diverse individuals,” notes Grimm, a 2024 public health sciences graduate and registered nurse who will enter the nurse practitioner program at the Yale School of Nursing in 2026.

Abigail Grimm ’24 leads a study examining the associations between bullying, social support, and mental health among transgender and gender‑diverse adolescents.

10/17/2025

Meet Ariel Scalise, a second-year doctoral student in the Health Policy and Management program. Ariel shares with us how she chose UMass SPHHS, and what she’s done since to support both the school and greater communities! Read more about Ariel here >> https://www.umass.edu/public-health-sciences/stories/student-profile-ariel-scalise

10/15/2025

Mark your calendars for the Philip W. Johnston Massachusetts Health Policy Forum on the “Impacts of Impending Medicaid Cuts on Western Massachusetts” being held on Tuesday, October 28, 2025, at UMass Amherst's Bromery Center for the Arts. This timely event, co-sponsored by SPHHS, will provide important context to how new federal legislation will affect the healthcare system throughout the region. Learn more and register at the link vv

The SPHHS is co-sponsoring the Philip W. Johnston Massachusetts Health Policy Forum, "Impacts of Medicaid Cuts in Western Massachusetts," on October 28, 2025.

10/10/2025

Nutrition's Zhenhua Liu is among the recipients of the 2025-26 Public Interest Technology (PIT) Faculty Fellowships. Fellows will receive seed funding to support research, scholarly writing or curriculum development on the theme of Responsible AI – how we create, use and manage AI responsibly to promote the common good and public interest.

Liu will lead a project originally inspired by a high-school student’s curiosity about AI’s accuracy and that seeks to explore how AI can be leveraged to provide accurate dietary recommendations for public health.

Zhenhua Liu is among the recipients of the 2025-26 Public Interest Technology (PIT) Faculty Fellowships.

10/08/2025

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Kinesiology's Wouter Hoogkamer, has received $490,000 from the U.S. National Science Foundation to define the primary mathematical components of running.

Led by Nathan Wycoff (Math & Statistics), with co-PIs Donghyun Kim (Computer & Information Sciences), Meghan Huber (Mechanical Engineering), and Hoogkamer, the team's goal is to "create digital twins of runners that link biomechanical and physiological measurements with advanced modeling to enable breakthroughs in robotics, performance footwear, and wearable exoskeletons for agile locomotion."

“Humans can do amazing things with their bodies, and we don’t really understand how they do it,” says Huber. “You can almost think of a humanoid robot as a model of our understanding of the human. It’s a good representation of how much, or sometimes how little, we know about humans.”

An interdisciplinary research team, including Kinesiology's Wouter Hoogkamer, received a $490,000 NSF grant to define the mathematical components of running.