The Walls & Ceilings website reported that Super Stud Building Products has donated cold-formed steel framing system materials for a study being conducted by Assistant Professor Kara Peterman of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Peterman’s study, which will be conducted throughout the summer, will explore the structural response of cold-formed steel stud assemblies to partial bearing conditions (i.e., not fully bearing on a concrete slab). Peterman was recently recognized for her work with cold-formed steel framing when she won the prominent 2018 Norman Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Feature writer Scott Merzbach reported in the Daily Hampshire Gazette that a transformative water-treatment discovery by doctoral student Julie Bliss Mullen of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department is the basis for a promising startup company named Aclarity LLC, a UMass Amherst spinoff that is developing technology to remove contaminants from water in a cost-effective way. Mullen and Barrett Mully, a UMass Amherst MBA student, founded Aclarity in 2017 and won $26,000 last year from the Innovation Challenge, an entrepreneurship contest run by Berthiaume Center at the Isenberg School of Management.