As UML students, three young women worked together on U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan’s congressional campaign. Now that they’ve graduated, they’re working for her full time – alongside four other UMass Lowell alumni.

As a young woman in Burma, Ardeth Thawnghmung became a “pig broker,” helping neighbors get their pigs butchered in exchange for money and meat. Now the chairwoman of the Political Science Department, Prof. Thawnghmung studies how people in her native country cope with poverty.

Sixty-two percent of all millennials – Americans ages 18 to 37 – surveyed by the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion said they disapprove of Trump’s job performance and only 37 percent said they view the president favorably. The independent, nonpartisan poll of 1,000 adults, which has a margin of error of 3.4 percent, was conducted prior to the government shutdown.

Assistant Prof. Angélica Durán Martínez studies the politics of drug trafficking violence in Colombia and Mexico. She hopes her findings will inform public policy on illegal drugs.