City Lights

When civil engineering Prof. Tzuyang Yu and his wife first drove their Toyota Camry into Lowell in 2008, they marveled at the brick mill buildings, distinctive churches and tall chimneys and clock towers. “Immediately, I could tell this was a historical city,” Yu says.

But “historical” also meant aging. As the couple drove from the Lowell Connector onto the city’s streets, their car bounced across potholes. And when they crossed the old University Avenue truss bridge to North Campus, where Yu was starting his first job as an assistant professor, they shuddered—literally.

“You could actually see through the old steel bridge to the bottom of the river, and the bridge was shaking. And a few days later, I saw the corroded foundation, and I was very worried,” says Yu, who was familiar with such bridges from his days serving as an engineer in Taiwan’s army.

So, once he’d settled in, Yu approached then-City Engineer Lisa DeMeo ’83, ’94 and said, “Do you have any plans to bring that bridge back to grade?” The city indeed had a plan, and the bridge was ultimately replaced in 2014.

But that conversation was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between Yu, the city and his students. DeMeo and subsequent city engineers asked Yu for his expertise in evaluating roadways, sidewalks, bridges and buildings. “I jumped on it because I felt that was a way, as a local engineer, to have an impact on our community,” Yu says. The work also connected to his research.

When James Troup, deputy director of the city’s Department of Public Works, asked Yu to inspect five city-owned parking garages in 2013, Yu turned it into an assignment for students in his new graduate class, Inspection and Monitoring for Civil Infrastructure. He divided the students into five teams, and each team used ground-penetrating radar to examine the condition of the parking decks in one of the garages.

That was a decade ago, and the assignment to inspect historic or aging city and campus infrastructure is now an integral part of the class. Yu, who has won multiple federal grants for his research on bridge monitoring, teaches the students to use radar, sonar and camera-equipped drones in the process.

“Nothing’s better than giving students hands-on experiences, applying real-world technologies to solve real world problems.” -Tzuyang Yu

“It’s hard to explain the problems in civil engineering with PowerPoint presentations,” he says. “Nothing’s better than to give students hands-on experiences, applying real-world technologies to solve real-world problems.”

Yu’s class is just one example of all the ways in which Lowell serves not only as the university’s home, but its partner in faculty research and as a learning lab for students. Since the university’s origins as a place to train engineers, chemists and managers for the city’s textile mills—as well as teachers for its schools—that partnership has expanded.

Every year, hundreds of UMass Lowell students intern, do research, volunteer or engage in service-learning projects and classes in Lowell. With the announcement of the university’s plans to develop lab, business and retail spaces on what are now surface parking lots on East Campus, those experiential learning opportunities will only expand.

Students like recent English major and Honors College grad Autumn Kleiner ’22 describe those hands-on experiences as among the most valuable of their educational careers. She took the English Department’s service-learning internship class twice; her second internship, at Project LEARN, a Lowell nonprofit that provides K-12 students with extracurricular enrichment, turned into a part-time job—and then a full-time job upon graduation.

“I feel like I’m the poster child for the internship program, because this is exactly what an internship is supposed to do,” says Kleiner, now Project LEARN’s communications and grants specialist.

And she’s just one example.

From nursing students who volunteered at Lowell’s COVID-19 testing and vaccination clinics, to education majors presenting lessons in the Lowell Public Schools, to environmental science students doing outreach for energy efficiency programs in low-income neighborhoods, to music and psychology majors volunteering to teach in summer music camps for autistic children, UMass Lowell students are working in the community.

In late fall 2021, Barbara Greenwood ’05, director of financial education at Community Teamwork Inc. of Lowell, was looking for UML students who could help low-income residents file their taxes. She reached out to Accounting Department Chair Khondkar Karim about finding students for the IRS’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program, or VITA.

Karim and adjunct faculty member Edgar Carter quickly recruited three students who took IRS courses online over winter break to become VITA-certified and then helped taxpayers for 10 to 15 hours a week during winter 2022. The students received course credit for their work and a modest tuition scholarship from the Manning School of Business.

Management major Amy Bui was among them, and she plans to volunteer again this year. “I want to keep learning,” she says. “Each year, they have new tax laws, and I want to keep myself updated. I can benefit myself and also help other people.” She even got a job offer from an accounting firm.

This year, Karim and Carter plan to ramp up the service-learning program to a dozen or more students, especially accounting majors, for whom participation in VITA is a great résumé-builder, Karim says.

“Chancellor Julie Chen has talked about experiential learning, loud and clear,” Karim says. “What better way do students have to learn about taxes? It’s objective, it’s measurable, and we’re doing it through community outreach. Plus, it’s voluntary and free to taxpayers.”

Is Lowell an age-friendly city? That’s the question faculty and students in the Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences are trying to answer by evaluating parks, busy intersections and public transportation.

The Center for Population Health is doing an “Age-Friendly Lowell” study under a $300,000 grant from the Tufts Health Plan Foundation in partnership with city agencies, the Lowell Senior Center and the “Action Group,” a diverse group of about 20 older residents.

From the start of the project, the Action Group has been shaping the research questions and working in the field, says Public Health Assoc. Prof. Sabrina Noel, who co-directs the center with Nutrition Prof. Katherine Tucker and Dean of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Luis Falcón. Psychology Assoc. Prof. Andrew Hostetler is also a key member of the age-friendly research team.

“Ours is really community-engaged research,” Noel says. “It was designed to ensure that the voices of older adults in the community are heard in every element of the project.”

Kyle Fahey ’22 has been working on the study since he was a junior. Although he once contemplated a career in dietetics, the research convinced him to go on for a master’s in epidemiology and a Ph.D. so that he can do work that benefits entire populations. “The projects we do give the communities the tools they need to succeed on a larger level,” he says.

He enjoys crunching data—and values the senior Action Group. “It’s been great being able to learn more about the city of Lowell through working with all of the community members … and to know that the work we’re doing is directly, positively impacting each of their lives,” he says.

When a friend of Gianna Sandelli ’19, ’22 overdosed on opioids and died, she wanted to prevent more deaths. But first, she needed answers. “He kept saying, ‘I just want to stop,’” she says. “I thought, ‘Then why doesn’t he quit?’”

She worked her way through Middlesex Community College to become a licensed drug and alcohol counselor. Then she went on for a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in community social psychology at UMass Lowell while working full-time as an outreach specialist for Lowell House Addiction Treatment and Recovery, a nonprofit.

At Lowell House, Sandelli’s salary was paid in part by federal grants that faculty and staff at the university’s Center for Community Research and Engagement helped the city obtain, with the goal of reducing overdose deaths and diverting people from jail to treatment. Center Co-Director Robin Toof and Criminology Assoc. Prof. Wilson Palacios also serve as the city’s research and evaluation partners on the grants.

The first grants paid for police, EMTs and outreach workers to follow up at the site of every overdose to connect survivors with services, while also checking on and helping any children living with them.

Sandelli laughs when she recalls how much she hated her first research methods class at UML and the research paperwork she had to fill out at work. “I thought, ‘I don’t want to work with data; I don’t want to fill out encounter forms. I want to just do my job.’”

But as she saw how the research was helping Lowell’s Community Opioid Outreach Program (CO-OP) – which includes city agencies, Trinity EMS, the county sheriff’s office and health and mental health agencies—her attitude changed.

“We work predominantly with unhoused individuals and the highest-risk population in Lowell. The researchers taught us to look at data that would never have occurred to us, to show what success looks like with this population,” says Sandelli, now division director for outreach at Lowell House.

The UML team’s research has helped the city win new grants, including one for a Spanish-speaking outreach worker and a nurse who can provide on-the-spot wound care before people end up in the ER.

From 2016 – when fentanyl became widespread – to 2021, fatal overdoses in Lowell fell by 37 percent, and from 2018 to 2021, nonfatal overdoses dropped by 40 percent, according to the state Department of Public Health. “People on the streets want to work with us. They want to stay out of jail, they want to live a healthier life,” Sandelli says. “I hated that word ‘research’ before—but now I understand it and I love it.”

Assoc. Dean Fred Martin wants to get kids fired up about computer science. Under a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant, he’s doing exactly that in three medium-sized cities with diverse populations: Lowell and Methuen, Massachusetts, and Schenectady, New York.

“Computer science is a ticket to a well-paying job,” Martin says. “From an equity standpoint, we need to give all kids the opportunity to learn what computer science is, and that means bringing it from an elective or an after-school club into the curriculum.”

The CS Pathways grant, which is shared with a professor at SUNY-Albany, is training middle school teachers in the three districts to show students how to develop apps using Code.org’s free App Lab software. In Lowell, CS Pathways is integrated with the required eighth-grade civics curriculum. Students design apps to promote a social good, such as educating their peers about the dangers of vaping.

Senior computer science major Garima Jain jumped at the chance to work on the project with Martin, School of Education Ph.D. student Bernardo Feliciano and other undergraduate computer science students. The undergrads helped with the curriculum and visited classes in Lowell and Methuen to give lessons and demonstrate inquiry-based teaching methods.

Jain loves being a role model, especially for middle-school girls, since women are underrepresented in computer science. “I have seen a lot of girls not take this career path because of a lack of representation,” she says. “When I walked into the classroom, I asked if they were excited, and they all shouted that they were. It was so powerful: Now I was on the other side, being the teacher instead of the student and giving that representation.”

Last fall, Management Prof. Kimberly Merriman sat on a bench facing the Hamilton Canal at lunchtime a couple of times a week, filling out a research form with a description of every person using the canal-side trails and what they were doing: walking a dog, lingering in a tiny park or striding briskly for exercise.

Merriman, a Lowell resident, researches factors that contribute to “quality of place,” attracting people to live in certain communities—and that help communities become more attractive and livable. Now she’s looking at how the design and location of the brand-new Lowell Justice Center affect people who work there or come on court business.

The Justice Center, just across the road from “her” bench, is an example of environmentally friendly architecture and “biophilic” design, which incorporates natural elements including fresh air, natural light and views of the outdoors. The idea is that connecting people with nature can improve their well-being, even in a stressful environment like the court.

Merriman and her student research assistants will find out if it’s working. Step one: See if courthouse workers are getting outside and walking along the canals during their lunch breaks. Step two: Observe people inside the courthouse.

“If someone asked me, ‘Where in the country do you want to travel to study this?’ I’d say, ‘Right here!’” says Merriman, who lives a couple of blocks away in a repurposed mill building. “Lowell is one of the few urban centers where the walking trails are already here, the canals are already here, you have biophilic design inside the building, you can see outside—and then you can go out there.”

Sophomore public health major Thuy Nguyen observed the trails three or four days a week. She applied to work with Merriman because the professor’s research uses tools and methods that Nguyen is learning about in her public health informatics and technology classes.

Nguyen discovered that she loves the hands-on part of the research. The project has also deepened her appreciation for Lowell, which she didn’t visit much while growing up in neighboring Dracut, Massachusetts.

“I personally believe Lowell has a lot to offer. You just have to look into it,” she says.