Four faculty members were honored with chancellor’s medals, and seven others were invested as named professors at the annual Convocation and Investiture celebration.

Festivities kick off on Friday, Sept. 6, with the T.H. Chan School of Medicine White Coat Ceremony, welcoming the new class of medical students into the medical community.

STAT News has selected three research teams from UMass Chan to compete in its 2024 STAT Madness competition. Members of the public are invited to vote for the best biomedical research from 2023. The first round of voting, which will narrow the field from 64 to 32, has begun.

These highly accomplished faculty members have been appointed to endowed chairs at UMass Chan Medical School: Dale L. Greiner, PhD; Danny G. Winder, PhD; Elinor K. Karlsson, PhD; Jeannette M. Wolfe, MD; J. Kevin Donahue, MD; and John E. Harris, MD, PhD’05.

Geneticist Kathleen Morrill has been named speaker for the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Class of 2023. She will address her class during UMass Chan’s 50th Commencement on June 4.

Kathleen Morrill, a PhD candidate in the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, has made national headlines for her research into behavioral traits of dogs.

A UMass Chan Medical School genetic study of more than 2,000 purebred and mixed-breed dogs, published in Science, shows that behavioral traits in dogs are not specific for breed. That means a golden retriever, for example, is only slightly more likely to be friendly than another breed.

In a new PNAs paper, Elinor Karlsson, PhD, said that by comparing genomes between species, scientists can “access the results of a natural experiment carried out on an unfathomable scale.”

A multidisciplinary team of scientists led by Elinor Karlsson, PhD, has captured biodiversity at a genetic level, according to a new study published in Nature.