Molly Mollica, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering who joined UMBC in August 2023, has been selected for an American Heart Association (AHA) Career Development Award, which will provide more than $200,000 to fund her research for the next three years.
Mollica studies the biomechanics of blood platelets, which play an essential role in healthy blood clotting, but can also contribute to the formation of blood clots that cause heart attacks and strokes. Bleeding and clotting have been shown to vary between males and females, but the reasons are not well understood. In her AHA-funded research, Mollica will investigate how platelets from males versus females, and from donors with varying hormone levels, respond to and generate mechanical forces. She hopes the information she uncovers will help doctors better understand healthy platelet function, design more inclusive health research, and develop better treatments.
“I’m honored to receive this award,” said Mollica. “We look forward to better understanding sex and hormone differences in platelet function. This research is important in providing tools to develop new preventative and curative therapeutics.”
On the first weekend of April, hundreds of chemical engineering students from across the Mid-Atlantic converged on the UMBC campus for two days of learning, networking, and friendly competition. They heard talks from academic and industry leaders, attended workshops and a career fair, competed in rounds of ChemE Jeopardy, mixed chemicals to power small cars along a track in the ChemE Car competition, and mingled over catered lunches, dinners, and cups of evening hot cocoa.
The activities were all part of the 2024 Mid-Atlantic Student Regional Conference of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)—hosted by the UMBC student chapter of the national group. Around 400 people attended the event, an increase from last year’s conference at Virginia Tech. Organizing the logistics, recruiting speakers and sponsors, securing rooms, and ordering thousands of plates worth of food presented a formidable challenge—one that the UMBC students tackled with aplomb.
Managing check-in. (Photo by Danielle Clark)Welcoming attendees. (Photo by Danielle Clark)Delivering pizza. (Photo by Julianna Falconer)
“I am feeling fantastic after the conference,” says Pavan Umashankar ’25, chemical engineering and biochemistry and molecular biology, who served as the chair of the conference organizing committee. “I am super proud of everyone’s commitment and dedication to make it a resounding success.”
“Truly, I could gush about the UMBC conference planning team all day,” says Alyssa Block, the membership associate of ChemE student programs for AIChE. “These students really are the future leaders of their profession and of AIChE: engaged, excited, collaborative, supportive of each other, and willing to lend a hand.”
A club on the upswing
Hosting an AIChE regional conference for the first time at UMBC marked a milestone for a student club that has seen increasing levels of engagement and success in recent years. While many college clubs across the country are in decline post-Covid, UMBC’s AIChE student chapter is on a clear upward trajectory. The club sent its first team to compete in ChemE Jeopardy at the spring 2019 AIChE regional meeting. Just three years later, the UMBC team won the national ChemE Jeopardy competition.
Neha Raikar, a senior lecturer in the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering (CBEE) and one of the advisors to the student AIChE chapter, remembers attending the 2019 meeting: “Back then, we wondered if we would ever be able to host a regional conference at UMBC,” she says. “We’ve achieved that goal.”
It was especially remarkable, she adds, to see some members of UMBC’s first ChemE Jeopardy and ChemE car teams return to this year’s conference as industry representatives.
The UMBC #1 Jeopardy team during a preliminary round. (Photo by Patch Hatley)The UMBC ChemE Car team celebrates a good run. (Photo by Patch Hatley)
“Planning for the conference was already a significant undertaking, and on top of that, many of our students participated, and excelled, in the competitions,” says Raikar. “Their achievements not only showcased their individual capabilities but also the strength of our club as a whole, which is growing and thriving.”
A winning formula
AIChE chapter members and their advisors ascribe the club’s success to the hard work and dedication of the students coupled with the support of the CBEE department, college, and university. Thirteen CBEE students formed the conference planning committee, which met regularly to ensure all conference planning efforts were on track. An additional 37 students and 14 faculty and staff also volunteered their time—as check-in staff, poster and presentation judges, and more. About 10 UMBC alumni actively participated in the conference, and others contributed to fundraising efforts, helping the organizing committee secure sponsorships from notable companies such as AstraZeneca, ExxonMobil, Advanced Thermal Batteries, and Astek Diagnostics and from the chemical engineering department of Columbia University.
An Dang ’24, chemical engineering, led the fundraising efforts. She gamely approached industry representatives at the UMBC career fair and made the pitch. “I’m not an extrovert, and being in these roles forced me to go out of my comfort zone,” she says.
“Securing sponsorships was vital for making the conference possible, and An did a remarkable job” says Mariajosé Castellanos, another CBEE faculty who advises the AIChE chapter. Castellanos also praised the management skills of conference planning committee chair Umashankar. “Despite his modesty, Pavan is a true mastermind in everything he does,” she says.
For their part, the students applauded the support of the CBEE department, especially the work of their two advisors, Raikar and Castellanos, and the event planning support of Andrea Miller, the CBEE graduate program coordinator.
UMBC AIChE chapter students and faculty advisors pose for a group photo after a successful conference. (Photo courtesy of Mariajosé Castellanos.)
The conference was both a marker of the club’s success and an opportunity for individual students to grow their skill sets.
“I have developed leadership and project management skills, which will be incredibly useful throughout my professional career,” says Umashankar.
Ben Welling ’25, chemical engineering, the leader of the UMBC ChemE car team, believes his experience with the competition helped him land internships. “I talked about it extensively with employers. They like leadership experience and it shows you are willing to do more than is required.”
Raikar sees a bright future for the student stars of this year’s conference and for the club as a whole. “I hope the conference will boost the club membership and participation of students in other AIChE activities,” she says. And, she adds, the conference shows that with support, “UMBC students can accomplish any task.”
An Dang ’24, chemical engineering, an international student from Vietnam, arrived at UMBC in 2021 as a transfer student from Montgomery College. When switching colleges, she also switched majors: from biology to chemical engineering. She quickly became involved in activities in the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering and this year helped the student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) pull together a major student conference for the first time.
Q: What drew you to UMBC?
A: I talked toMark Marten, the chair of the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering (CBEE), and I got the sense that the department is small and they really support their students. That caring environment is what I wanted. It’s also, honestly, an affordable option.
Q: Who were some of your mentors?
A: I’m working in the lab ofLee Blaney, one of the environmental engineering professors. He’s my research advisor and really helped me navigate the process of applying to grad school. In the fall, I’m going to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to pursue my Ph.D. AndNeha Raikar, a senior lecturer in the department, devotes so much of her time to making sure students are supported. She’s like a motherly figure for a lot of us.
An Dang (seated second from left) and other UMBC AIChE student chapter members with advisor Neha Raikar at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Orlando in November. (Photo courtesy of An Dang.)
Q:What clubs and activities were you involved in?
A: I was a CBEE student ambassador. We went to high schools and community colleges to advertise the department and answer student questions. I’m also involved in the AIChE student chapter. At first I was the service chair and I mostly helped with planning K-12 outreach events. This year, we hosted the AIChE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference and I was on the planning committee. I was in charge of corporate and university relations—I helped secure sponsors for the conference, and made sure we had funding.
Q: What were some of the skills you developed serving in these roles?
A: I’m not an extrovert, and being in these roles forced me to go out of my comfort zone. I learned how to speak professionally with people in higher positions, so they take me seriously, and maybe even want to give us money. The other big thing I realized is that no matter how well I prepare, sometimes things will go wrong, and that’s okay. We all need to give ourselves grace.
Q: How did it feel to host a big conference?
A: It was a lot of hard work! The student organizers spent a lot of time together, and we really got to know each other well and develop close relationships. There are only 28 people from the department in my graduating class, and many of them are in AIChE. When the conference went well, it felt great!
Volunteers, including An Dang (second from right) gather for a photo after the successful hosting of the AIChE Mid-Atlantic Student Regional Conference at UMBC. (Photo courtesy of An Dang)
Q: What other places did you find community at UMBC?
A: I am an international student, and I worked for International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS). I got to know some of the staff in the office really well. One problem that I ran into while I was here is that I lost my social security card. I had a lot of challenges getting a new one because there was a mix-up in the social security office with my middle and first name. ISSS helped me write a very good letter to justify my case, and I finally got my card. I’m very grateful that I got that help from them because it’s an important piece of documentation.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: I’m continuing in chemical engineering and plan to go to grad school to study catalysis engineering, which is studying how to speed up chemical reactions. I’d like to work in industry, particularly in the field of renewable energy. Anything that helps with the environment—that’s what I want to focus on.
Professor Lee Blaney, in the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering, received $750,000 in funding from the Department of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) to develop new ways to remove substances dubbed “forever chemicals” from water.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are used in products ranging from cleaning products and clothing to fire-fighting foam. They earned the nickname “forever chemicals” because of the way they persist in the environment. PFAS have been linked to decreased fertility in women, developmental effects in children, reduced immune function, and increased risk of cancer and obesity. The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced limitations on the amount of certain PFAS in drinking water.
Current technology such as activated carbon and anion-exchange resins can effectively remove the most common PFAS found in water, but do not perform well at removing short- and ultrashort-chain PFAS (which have fewer than eight carbon atoms in their chemical structure.)
The award from SERDP will fund Blaney’s work to develop materials called adsorbents specifically designed for treatment of these short-chain PFAS. Blaney’s colleagues on the project include Ke He, Ph.D. ’17, chemical and biochemical engineering, an assistant research scientist at UMBC, Wenqing Xu, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at Villanova University, and Jessica Ray, an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington.
This April 22, as the campus community celebrated Earth Day, the feel of spring’s natural reawakening was in the air. Birds chirped from newly leafed trees and students strolled in the bright sunshine. But the pleasant day belied a concerning trend: In Maryland and beyond, the balance of Earth’s life-supporting systems is shifting, driven in large part by the heat-trapping greenhouse gasses we humans send into the atmosphere. The Earth is getting hotter; weather patterns are changing; and ecosystems are under stress.
“Climate change is pressing us to adopt a more Earth-friendly lifestyle, to develop renewable energy,” says Özgür Çapraz, an associate professor in the department of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering at UMBC, who studies advanced battery technologies. Çapraz, who joined UMBC in fall 2023 from a faculty position at Oklahoma State University, was one of three recent faculty hires in the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) who all specialize in different aspects of sustainability and renewable energy-related research.
The three hires were part of a COEIT effort to build off recognized strength in the environmental domain, while expanding expertise in important areas such as energy, says Lee Blaney, a professor in the department of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering who chaired the search.
The other two hires are Alok Ghanekar, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering, who studies materials that can improve some solar energy harvesting systems, turn waste heat into electricity, and better cool buildings; and Rajasekhar Anguluri, an assistant professor in computer science and electrical engineering, who specializes in the math describing large, complex systems such as the power grid.
The energy conundrum
“Ever since I studied science in high school, I have been interested in energy,” says Ghanekar, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California prior to joining UMBC this spring semester. “Growing up in India, there were regular power outages every week. It is less of a problem now, but energy demand is still growing.”
Across the world, in many ways, energy consumption drives progress and improves people’s lives. But the burning of fossil fuels to produce much of that energy is increasing the concentration of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere. While the exact consequences of this change are uncertain, it’s clear the Earth is warming, and that trend is likely to put extreme pressures on societies in the decades to come.
To tap intermittent renewable energy sources, we also need to develop solutions for storing and distributing the energy. (Image by Sara Levine | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
A big shift toward clean and renewable sources of energy could be part of the solution. Each of the new hires’ research touches this goal in some ways. In Ghanekar’s case, he studies human-designed materials called metamaterials that, among other potential uses, might one day help significantly increase the amount of energy from the sun that we are able to efficiently turn into electricity.
Getting more energy from the sun could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but since the sun doesn’t always shine, we also need ways to store that energy (perhaps with new battery technologies, the expertise of Çapraz) and ways to share that energy on the power grid without disrupting its delicate balance (a challenge that Anguluri has explored).
As academic researchers, they operate at the frontiers of knowledge, asking and seeking to answer fundamental questions that could push the technology forward: How exactly do batteries with new chemistries work, for example, or why does a material degrade over time? Anguluri’s math expertise spans a range of engineering disciplines. He and Ghanekar have already talked about collaborating to mathematically model the behavior of Ghanekar’s metamaterials.
No scientific “Eureka!” moment or technical advance by itself is likely to be a panacea to a problem as complex as global warming, but these incremental steps do offer people more tools.
“As scholars, we like to think, to solve interesting problems,” says Anguluri, who was a postdoc at Arizona State University before arriving at UMBC this year. “As citizens of the world, we must also look at our values and make wise choices.”
Çapraz, Anguluri, and Ghanekar chat with community members at the Earth Day Community Day event celebrating UMBC environmental research.(Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Building on a long-standing commitment
Studying people’s impact on the Earth, and working to mitigate environmental harms, is nothing new for researchers at UMBC.
“Sustainability research is an area of strength in COEIT,” says Vandana Janeja, the associate dean for research and faculty development in COEIT. “Now there’s a new sense of urgency about it and our recent hires are a testament to that.”
“Climate change is an issue that so many of our students are tapped into,” adds Blaney. “They’re really worried about the impacts of climate change and want to do something to address this global challenge.”
As the new UMBC faculty launch research projects and expand their labs, there will be growing opportunities for interested students to learn about and join their important work. And that’s good news, because as the Earth Day festivities on campus showcased, safeguarding our shared home is a duty shared by all of us.
On April 19, more than 150 people gathered for the inaugural College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) Research Day. The event was an opportunity for faculty and students to showcase their research and forge interdisciplinary collaborations, including with potential industry partners in attendance. Close to 100 COEIT researchers presented work, either in talks during four concurrent morning sessions or in the afternoon poster session.
“We are asking you to see how you can get together and solve major societal problems,” said Anupam Joshi, acting dean of COEIT, in opening remarks.
To incentivize such collaboration, COEIT is offering funding to teams that propose projects involving researchers from two or more of the colleges’ departments.
“The day was very well attended and several folks made new connections across departments in COEIT,” said Vandana Janeja, the associate dean for research and faculty development in COEIT. “I am already seeing a lot of interest in the interdisciplinary proposals.”
For Tasnim Nishat Islam, a Ph.D student in computer engineering, the day was a great chance to share her work and engage with other researchers. Islam presented a poster about research she is conducting with Mohamed Younis, computer science and electrical engineering, investigating ways to measure mental stress. “I’ve already connected with others who study similar ideas,” she said.
Ramana Vinjamuri, associate professor in computer science and electrical engineering, recently received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support UMBC’s participation in a industry-university cooperative research center aiming to improve how we diagnose and treat people with conditions such as neurological disorders, brain injury, mental illness, limb loss, and paralysis. The center, called BRAIN (Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology), brings together partners from academia, industry, and the regulatory and clinical communities to develop safe, effective, and affordable personalized neurotechnologies.
The need for such technologies is driven by an increase in survivable trauma and an aging population, Vinjamuri says. However, several challenges are holding back progress, including costly equipment, lagging standards for verifying the safety, efficacy, and reliability of devices, and an undersupply of physicians and engineers trained in emerging technologies.
The BRAIN Center aims to tackle these challenges by bringing together experts in a wide range of topics, from neural, cognitive, and rehabilitation engineering to neurorobotics, neuromodulation, and ethical artificial intelligence. As an Industry–University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC), it emphasizes academic research conducted jointly with innovative industry partners, and UMBC’s location will facilitate cooperation with northeast-based biomedical companies.
“BRAIN will become a neurotechnology hub by creating a pipeline from discoveries to solutions, while helping students, scientists, and engineers solve one of the greatest unmet medical and healthcare needs of our time,” Vinjamuri says.
UMBC’s participation will expand the center’s research into new areas such as artificial intelligence, neural signal processing, cyber-human systems, human-centered computing, neural imaging and stimulation, and virtual/augmented/mixed reality. Other UMBC researchers who will contribute to the center’s activities include Tulay Adali, Nilanjan Banerjee, Fow-sen Choa, Don Engel, Seung-Jun Kim, and Charles Nicholas. BRAIN is the second I/UCRC at UMBC, joining the Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA), which recently received a second round of funding.
Over the weekend of April 6 – 7, the UMBC student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) will host the 2024 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference on campus. The event will feature workshops, research presentations, and a career fair with companies such as AstraZeneca and Astek Diagnostics and schools including Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, the University of Delaware, and Lehigh University. It will also feature the conferences’ two signature competitive events: Chemical Engineering Jeopardy and ChemE Car—a competition to build and operate a car powered and stopped by chemical reactions.
Organizers expect more than 350 attendees from more than 30 universities across the region. UMBC students are encouraged to register to attend, even if they aren’t chemical engineering majors. “As the premier student chemical engineering conference in the region, this event will offer great opportunities for networking, presenting research, landing internships and jobs, and general professional development,” says Terra Miley ’25, chemical engineering, who is serving as the communications chair for the student organizing committee.
Over two weeks at the end of January, six UMBC faculty woke up early to deliver lectures and lead workshops with students more than 9,000 miles away, in the small Asian nation of Brunei, located on the island of Borneo. The online talks were part of the Diversity in Cybersecurity, Brunei conference, organized jointly by Edah Hasnal, an advocate for gender diversity in the tech sector in Brunei, and Carolyn Seaman, director of the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) at UMBC.
The idea for the conference was born out of an internship that Hasnal completed with Seaman in the fall of 2021 through the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, a U.S. State Department-funded leadership development program. During the internship, which was conducted remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hasnal created a series of short videos highlighting tech workers in Brunei. She also worked with Seaman to propose a follow-up project that ultimately turned into the Diversity in Cybersecurity, Brunei conference.
The goal of the conference was to share cybersecurity concepts and career paths with women interested in the tech sector. Out of around 50 applicants, the organizers picked 10 women with varying backgrounds.
“We wanted to keep the conference relatively small, so that we could connect the participants with further opportunities,” Hasnal says. She says she was inspired by the stories of the women who attended, including a woman who worked as a cleaner while pursuing a tech education. Hasnal also says that Brunei is working to diversify its economy, and she sees the tech sector as a natural area of growth.
Seaman recruited speakers from across UMBC to join the conference virtually and share their cybersecurity knowledge with attendees. Karuna Joshi, information systems, Deborah Kariuki, education, Christine Mallinson, language, literacy, and culture, Vandana Janeja, information systems, and Sreedevi Sampath, information systems, gave talks on topics ranging from cloud computing security to AI deepfake detection.
On left, a slide introduces UMBC speaker Deborah Kariuki. On right, conference participants listen to a presentation. (Photos courtesy of Edah Hasnal)
“The great thing about having women trainers who come from different backgrounds was that it was both insightful and inspiring for us all,” Hasnal says.
It was wonderful to have CWIT’s reach extend so far through participation in the conference, Seaman says. “We’ve been dedicated to increasing gender parity in the tech industry, and we could see that many of the same issues and same goals we have are shared by people on the opposite side of the world.”
The American Physical Society, an influential professional society founded in 1899 to “advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics,” is highlighting the fusion research of UMBC’s Carlos Romero-Talamás at its largest annual meeting, held March 3 – 8 in Minneapolis this year. A short film showcasing Romero-Talamás and colleagues’ work on a relatively simple and cheap approach to fusion power will be broadcast on APS TV, a channel that plays on screens around the meeting venue, in selected local hotels on dedicated TV channels, on the virtual meeting platform, and on YouTube.
Fusion, which is the reaction that powers stars, releases enormous amounts of energy when light atomic nuclei combine to form heavier ones. Initiating, sustaining, and controlling the process in a way that allows humans to generate clean, safe, and near limitless commercial power has long been a goal in the physics community and beyond. The film, created by the international film and broadcasting company WebsEdge, brings viewers into the lab where Romero-Talamás, alongside colleagues and students from UMBC and the University of Maryland, College Park, are questing to bring this celestial energy down to Earth.
Romero-Talamás’s group is exploring a promising alternative to traditional fusion power approaches, using equipment that is smaller, cheaper, and more simple to operate. The group’s current experiments are going well, and they are working to attract public and private investment to build a next-generation machine that could be fitted to produce more power than it takes to run, a key milestone on the road to commercial fusion power.
“The APS March Meeting is an opportunity to connect and promote our research with the largest physics audience in the world,” Romero-Talamás says. The video aligns with the lab’s work to raise their visibility and attract additional students and researchers interested in fusion energy. “At the levels of effort that we will require for the next step in our quest for fusion energy, we will need to grow quickly,” Romero-Talamás says.
The positive environmental and health impacts of work led by Upal Ghosh, professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering at UMBC, was recently highlighted by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The agency showcased a low-cost technology that Ghosh and his colleagues developed to clean waterways contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a group of likely carcinogenic chemicals that were used in insulation, coolants, and electrical equipment for decades before being banned in the U.S. in 1979.
The chemicals are stable and persist in the environment, often accumulating in fish that live in contaminated waterways and posing a risk to humans who consume those fish. NIEHS funded Ghosh’s research into using activated carbon pellets to bind the chemicals in place at the bottom of the waterways. This prevents the PCBs from circulating through the aquatic food chain. In projects carried out in contaminated lakes, rivers, and harbors in Delaware, Maryland, and elsewhere, Ghosh’s team demonstrated that the technique could significantly reduce the concentration of PCBs in the water and in aquatic lifeforms. Importantly, the technique is also significantly cheaper than standard clean-up approaches, such as dredging and disposing of contaminated sediment.
In related work performed with Kevin Sowers, from the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, Ghosh’s team also developed a way to combine the activated carbon with microbes that break down PCBs, reducing their toxicity.
With NIEHS support, Ghosh has co-founded two companies—Sediment Solutions and RemBac—to commercialize the technology and deploy it at full-scale to clean up contaminated sites across the country, such as at Mirror Lake in Delaware.
“The technology brings together innovations in material science and biology,” says Ghosh. It’s an honor, he says, that the NIEHS, the leading agency in the country that funds research on public health and the environment, recognized “the real impact our research is having on improving public health.”
Curtis Menyuk, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC, has won the 2024 SPIE G.G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization. The award honors Menyuk’s pioneering work in the 1980’s developing equations to describe how light propagates through optical fibers, as well as his ongoing contributions to the fields of optics and photonics.
The fast and reliable internet we enjoy today would not be possible without the fundamental work that Menyuk and his colleagues performed decades ago. Modern global telecommunication systems are built on backbones of optical fiber, and the rate of information flow through the fibers is limited by physical phenomena that affect the way light spreads. Over time and distance, these phenomena can turn a crisp signal into indecipherable garbage, and so optical communication system engineers must account for them in their designs.
Menyuk developed equations that allow engineers to effectively model optical communication, most importantly by being the first equations to incorporate the effects of a property of light called its polarization. (Light travels as an oscillating electric field coupled to an oscillating magnetic field, and the direction of the electric field determines the polarization.)
One consequence of the equations was the realization that spinning optical fiber can minimize signal distortion.
“Curtis is a renowned pioneer in the field of optical communications, and over the years I witnessed the tremendous impact of his group’s work on the telecom industry, photonic technologies, and the field of optics in general,” says DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory physicist Michael Brodsky in a news story from SPIE announcing the award.
For his part, Menyuk credits much of the impact of his work to his successful collaborations with colleagues and students. “It’s what comes from working with good people,” he says.
