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Featured Items

UMOP 42: Historical reflections in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of UMass Linguistics

UMOP 42: Papers in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of UMass Linguistics

SNAP Workers: Working People & SNAP Benefits in Massachusetts

Kerrissey, Jasmine; Meyers, Nathan

Established by the Food Stamp Act in 1964, SNAP is the country’s largest anti-hunger program. SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, provides food assistance to low-income families. The program serves over 41 million people, or 12.3% of U.S. residents. Massachusetts has a higher SNAP rate than the U.S, with 16% of the Massachusetts population receiving SNAP. This report examines workers in Massachusetts who live in households that receive SNAP benefits. The analyses use data from the American Community Survey (ACS), a representative survey administered by the Census Bureau. The report examines the most recent and comprehensive available ACS data, 2019-2023. See the methodological appendix for details.

2025-11-24

Recent Submissions

Open Access
Accelerating Fokker-Planck Simulations by Substituting the Moment Closure with a GPU-Native Deep Neural Network
(2025-12-02) Roohi, Ehsan; Mahdavi, Amirmehran
Particle-based Fokker-Planck (FP) models represent a high-fidelity method for simulating rarefied gas dynamics, but they suffer from a severe computational bottleneck: the “closure problem.” This step requires the expensive, cell-wise calculation of high-order moments and the solution of a 9 × 9 linear system at every simulation time step. This paper introduces a new computational methodology designed to eliminate this bottleneck by substituting the physics-based solver with a Deep Neural Network (DNN) surrogate deployed via a novel, high-performance strategy. Our workflow makes a critical distinction between a complex offline training phase (where a 16-256-256-256-256-9 DNN is trained) and a lightweight online inference phase. Crucially, for online deployment, we avoid all framework overhead and I/O bottlenecks by extracting the raw parameters (weights and biases) and executing the model’s forward pass as a simple, batched matrix-multiplication function written natively in CuPy, ensuring all operations remain on the GPU. We validate this approach through a rigorous, multi-stage test campaign. First, for 1D Couette flow, a model trained on a Knudsen number sweep (Kn ≈ 0.0015−0.3) demonstrates outstanding accuracy in both interpolations (Kn = 0.05 and Kn = 0.09) and significant extrapolation (Kn = 0.7). To test fundamental generalization, we deployed this 1D-trained model to the 2D cavity geometry. This test yielded excellent agreement for velocity and density structures but produced minor, localized errors in the temperature field, confirming that representative multi-dimensional data is required for full thermal accuracy. Consequently, a robust 2D cavity model, trained on a lid velocity sweep (50 m/s to 600 m/s), proves capable of extreme extrapolation, accurately predicting the complex, high-energy physics of a hyper-velocity 800 m/s case. The primary finding of this work is a fundamental shift in the computational paradigm for this method. Performance benchmarks show a 1.63x–1.73x speedup, but critically, a strong-scaling analysis proves this acceleration reaches the theoretical maximum predicted by Amdahl’s Law. This result provides a definitive insight: the GPU-native surrogate is, for all practical purposes, “infinitely fast” (zero-cost) relative to the remaining tasks, and the true computational bottleneck has been decisively shifted from the physics solver to the particle moment-gathering process itself.
Embargo
Transformative Encounters: Metamorphoses in Eastern and Central European Media
(2025-09) Edwards, Kate
Metamorphosis–the change of form–has enjoyed a long and ubiquitous existence, originating in ancient mythological and folkloric traditions, including premodern traditions of present-day Eastern and Central Europe. In such traditions, metamorphosis warns its audience of irresistible forces, nominally supernatural, whose arbitrary imposition could have irreversible repercussions. In recent centuries, metamorphosis has since been relegated to the genres of science fiction and fantasy; accordingly, critical thinking engaging with metamorphosis has been speculative and limited to the domains of idealist-materialist debate. “Transformative Encounters” contends that metamorphosis is owed a more complex understanding. To this end, “Transformative Encounters” takes up the motif of metamorphosis in Eastern and Central European media of the 20th and 21st century. It argues that the metamorphoses represented therein have philosophical, ecocritical, and political implications. As such, metamorphosis reprises its didactic function by indicating a shift from supernatural force to human imposition, particularly at the level of the state–a timely consideration, in light of an increasingly dehumanizing geopolitical landscape, and, under the global climate crisis, an increasingly fragile Earth.
Embargo
REGULATING THE FIRM: THREE ESSAYS ON THE INTENDED AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF HEALTH, SAFETY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION
(2025-09) Diana, Bridget
This dissertation studies how firms respond to health, safety, and environmental regulations, and how those responses reshape competitive dynamics, labor conditions, and distributional outcomes. Using case studies focused on poultry slaughter line speed and decarbonization policy, I analyze how regulation functions not only as a technical constraint but as a site of contestation over who bears the costs and benefits of shifting production practices. The first chapter uses synthetic control methodology to estimate the effects of three federal regulatory changes that increased maximum slaughter line speeds in poultry plants from 1990 to 2020. Drawing on firm-level financial data, I estimate how these changes affected profits, profit rates, and profit margins for five poultry firms. I find that deregulation did not consistently improve short-run profitability and, in one case, reduced it. The results, combined with information from firm annual reports, suggest that higher line speeds led to overproduction, falling prices, and decreased firm profitability. This challenges the dominant industry narrative that line speed limits act as a bottleneck to firm performance. The second chapter continues the analysis of line speed regulation and turns to its implications for labor. I argue that labor productivity can serve as a proxy both for rising physical demands on labor and an indicator of firm-level cost advantages. I construct a novel dataset linking the same regulatory events to changes in output per worker for the same five companies. The findings show that productivity gains were concentrated in specific firms and periods, reflecting variation in how companies respond to regulatory changes. The chapter highlights how line speed regulation makes the poultry industry an important case for studying the political economy of workplace risk. The third chapter (co-authored with Michael Ash and Jim Boyce) analyzes the distributional effects of decarbonization in the U.S. electricity sector. We model three climate policy objectives – carbon reduction alone, carbon plus air quality, and carbon plus equity – and find that a carbon-only approach can increase local air pollution and worsen exposure disparities. Adding air quality and equity goals reduces both overall exposure and exposure gaps at relatively low cost.
Embargo
Optimized Development of Housing Neighborhoods: Energy Efficiency and Thermal Comfort Potential of Residential Block Morphology in Harsh Climate Regions of United States
(2025-09) Darvish, Amiraslan
The escalating impacts of climate change have intensified extreme weather patterns, producing scorching summers and severe winters across many regions of the United States. These shifts not only drive higher building energy consumption but also degrade outdoor thermal comfort, undermining efforts to foster socially engaging neighborhood environments. This research responds to the pressing need to reconsider residential development by optimizing building morphology to balance energy efficiency and outdoor comfort. Although the vision of socially vibrant neighborhoods has long been pursued, harsh climates diminish outdoor livability while simultaneously straining indoor comfort and energy demand. To address this challenge, the study emphasizes the strategic application of building block forms, integrating advanced simulation and analytical tools—ENVI-met, DesignBuilder, BEopt™, and RayMan—to optimize both individual buildings and neighborhood-scale morphology. The thesis investigates the thermal and energy performance of various low-rise residential development patterns in both hot and cold U.S. climate regions, aiming to support indoor thermal comfort while also enhancing outdoor environmental quality for residents. The inquiry is structured around two central research questions: (1) To what extent can building development morphology improve thermal comfort and energy efficiency in low-rise residential buildings? (2) What specific morphological features contribute most to these improvements in harsh climates? To answer these, the study adopts a multi-method approach, including a review of literature on block morphology and thermal comfort standards, parametric analyses of building and block forms using DesignBuilder and BEopt™, field measurements for model validation, and case studies of neighborhood microclimates in hot and cold climates assessed with ENVI-met and RayMan. The ultimate goal is to propose a holistic framework for neighborhood design in diverse climates, advancing energy efficiency and thermal resilience at both the building and block levels. The findings offer practical insights into how morphology can be harnessed to enhance thermal comfort while reducing energy use, contributing meaningful guidance for architects, planners, developers, and policymakers. By combining simulation-based research with field validation, this thesis deepens understanding of the complex relationship between urban form, thermal comfort, and energy performance, providing a foundation for resilient and socially sustainable neighborhoods in the face of climate change.
Embargo
Varieties of Exile: Russian Activism and Emigration during the War in Ukraine
(2025-09) Daphnis, Nicole Marie
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians, possibly over a million, left their country. While many left for economic reasons—to avoid doing business under sanctions or because the companies they worked for relocated abroad—many others left due to ideological opposition to the war, increased persecution by the state, or fear of persecution. I ask how Russian political migrants during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine coped with their often-sudden exit from Russia, how and why they remain engaged in activist practices abroad, and how their collective identity is shaped by the context of their host countries. I argue that due to the conditions of wartime Russia, the precarity of migration, as well as the domestic political context of host countries, we cannot expect, as some scholars and analysts do, Russian political migrants to organize in the form of a classical social movement, or even in the ways that political migrants have previously been theorized about. Russian political migrants do not believe they have the capacity to overthrow Putin or end the war, nor do they lobby their host countries to apply pressure on Russia. Instead, continued political engagement is a matter of personal fulfilment, community building, and satisfying the compulsion to do something, even on a very small scale. Elucidating the subjectivity of these migrant Russians sheds light on how they understand themselves in relation to the state, how they resist its authoritarianism, and envision the political future for Russia. Doing so reveals how ordinary citizens dealt with the intense repression of the Russian regime prior to emigrating, as well as how they understand themselves and their own political agency in the post-Soviet periphery, spaces still grappling with the impacts of Russian and Soviet imperialism. This project is based on nine months of fieldwork in Armenia, Georgia, and Latvia from September 2022 to May 2023, during which I conducted in-depth interviews with 36 Russians from a variety of political and socio-economic backgrounds who emigrated from regions across Russia, as well as ethnographic observation of various protests and other political events in these field sites.

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