The whir of a stationary bike, the clank of weights, the swish of a basketball net, deep yoga breaths after more than a year of silence the UMass Amherst Recreation Center was again alive with the sound of students when it reopened with all COVID-19 safety procedures in place on March 17. Other Campus Recreation offerings are up and running as well, including intramural sports, the Curry Hicks Pool, and the Mullins Center tennis courts.
At the Rec Center, students are overjoyed to have a safe space to exercise on campus. “They have been dealing with the stress of school and the added stress of COVID, so they are very happy to have a place to blow off that steam and stay active,” says Justin Mantrana ’21, building supervisor for the Recreation Center. The center’s workout floor and cardio machines are open and fitness classes, including spin and yoga, are underway inside, outside, and virtually.
Millions of people worldwide were thrilled on February 18 when the robotic rover Perseverance touched down on Mars, 126 million miles from Earth. They held their breath as the complicated landing system, involving a parachute and a skycrane, deployed, and the rover settled gently on the Martian surface.
For UMass Amherst College of Engineering graduate Dragana Perkovic-Martin ’08PhD, watching the landing from her home office was a nerve-wracking experience. She and her team at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, were in charge of the landing radar for this NASA mission. “The whole sequence is executed fully automatically,” Dragana says, “And it takes 14 minutes for the radio signals from Mars to reach Earth. So there was nothing we could do at that point. You can only hope!” In fact, Dragana says, the seven years she spent working on the landing radar were more stressful than the seven minutes it took the landing gear to function. As she worked, she const
UMass Amherst student blazes an impressive, nontraditional path in cybersecurity
As a white-hat hacker, cybersecurity student Thao Trinh ’21 catches criminals and finds bugs
When she arrived as an international student at UMass Amherst, Thao Trinh ’21 recalls her excitement, anxiety, and deep desire to excel. As a first-year student from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2017, she aspired to study ethical computer hacking, known as white-hat hacking.
Four years later, supported in so many ways by the UMass community, she is in her final semester, having just completed the highly selective Cybersecurity Mentorship Pilot Program sponsored by the MassCyberCenter. This state program supports diversity and resiliency in the cybersecurity sector, and matched Trinh with a research expert at MIT’s elite Lincoln Laboratory.