The winning project on the Medford/Somerville campus was Mia Nixon’s “FlowGreen at Tufts," Kevin Cody and René LaPointe Jameson won with “Tufts Hydroponics Collaboration” on the Boston Health Sciences Campus and “Disposable Mask Recycling” by Juliette Nye received the Grafton campus funding.
Being able to cover live events, publish stories on research efforts on campus and writing up stories on COVID-19 updates and guidelines has been so rewarding as I’ve been able to learn about and report on so many different areas of campus.
ORLL is aware that there are many students who have not been able to find their communities yet. Vargas said that ORLL will be organizing ways for students to meet in advance of the selection process. She added that the events will be open to all students, since this concern may affect students in other class years as well.
Some restrictions, including those concerning fitness center use, dining services, student organization meetings and the stay-at-home order, were lifted. However, other restrictions, such as the 10-person gathering limit and testing frequency, will remain in place.
Three first-year students launched Tufts Jumbos for the Advancement of Minorities at the start of the semester, a student organization that aims to create connections between different minority groups at Tufts and beyond. The organization will also provide students with an established network of resources to help reach their academic potential and launch their post-college careers, according to the founders.
In addition to Pelosi, Fauci and Abrams, this year's Distinguished Speaker Series includes Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, conservative political commentator and former Republican politician Michael Steele and Obama White House staffer and co-host of Pod Save America Dan Pfeiffer.
The Office of Residential Life and Learning (ORLL) assigned incorrect lottery numbers to some students applying for 2021–22 on-campus housing earlier this month. Many of the numbers assigned incorrectly were not even compatible with students' class years.
Meeting on a biweekly basis, TCU Senate members Sarah Wiener, Sharif Hamidi and Mathew Peña will work closely with Jordan and Caggiano to best present the latest updates regarding COVID-19 to the Tufts community each week.
Student and faculty COVID-19 cases skyrocketed after students began returning to campus in mid-January. Though numbers are now dropping, the surge raised concerns about how well students are abiding by the guidelines put in place by the administration to limit the spread of COVID-19 on campus.
TCU Parliamentarian Taylor Lewis discussed the upcoming hearing against members of the Judiciary. The Senate is holding the hearing in response to allegations from four Tufts community members claiming that the TCU Judiciary exhibited bias in its handling of the Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine referendum last semester.
The current state of anti-racist work at Tufts was evaluated and areas of success that the university should build upon were identified. Additionally, opportunities for the university to improve its pursuit of becoming an anti-racist institution were brought forward.
The event featured keynote speaker Abi Williams, professor of the practice of international politics at The Fletcher School and director of the Institute for Global Leadership, and a speech from Tufts student René LaPointe Jameson. The event is part of a larger conversation about anti-racism at Tufts.
Other promises from Tufts include investing $10 to $25 million to climate change-related positive impact funds in the next five years and, to increase transparency, creating a dashboard that reports on the progress of the actions, according to the email.
“As our community confronts record-shattering opioid abuse, depression, and suicide, decriminalization represents a huge step forward for public health and criminal justice," a group of Somerville residents wrote in a letter to the City Council in support of the resolution.
“Pooled testing will provide Medford and Somerville with a reliable way to quickly and accurately detect early infection in students, teachers, and staff while costing only about one-third as much as individual testing," Sedore wrote in an email to the Daily.
TCU President Wiener discussed ongoing planning for Wellness Week, which is scheduled to take place during the week of March 22 when students would ordinarily be on spring break.
The potential presence of highly transmissible variants in the community is something the university remains conscious of. Caggiano and Jordan mentioned that the samples collected through surveillance testing and provided to the Broad Institute do not provide information as to whether an individual is infected with a variant.
The $100 million project works to understand and address the risks posed by zoonotic diseases, which are transmissible from animals to humans, that can spill over and cause epidemics.
At the center of that concern has been Tufts’ relationship with online program management providers, including Noodle and 2U. Both programs have been essential in assisting faculty and administrators to launch Tufts’ new online degree offerings.
“We will work with law enforcement to ensure the perpetrators are appropriately charged, and if they are members of our community, they will also be held to account through our disciplinary processes,” Monaco wrote in the email.
