All posts by: UMBC News Staff

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, takes your questions.

The powerful connection between research and teaching has been a foundation to UMBC’s success. Why is this vital link so important to the university community? What makes this relationship special at UMBC?

– Richard Byrne ’86, English

When I talk with students and parents, or with donors, or with legislators about the uniqueness of UMBC, I invariably address the relationship between research and teaching at the university.

People often want to know why research universities expect their faculty to teach fewer courses than faculty at comprehensive institutions or community colleges. Parents often want to know if research faculty actually work with students, and what advantages there are for undergraduates who attend a research university. Even graduate students want to know: If I come to UMBC for a Ph.D. program, will I have not just the skills but the connections to get the job I want in the academy or in a company or a government agency?

This is what I say to them. First, there is the larger aspect of the research university. Faculty who do research – at a research university, or at a fine liberal arts college – are constantly asking good questions. They read the most up-to-date literature in their fields, and they are able to talk comfortably about the most interesting trends in these fields.

The students of these professors have the benefit of being pulled into fascinating conversations about this work. And as a result, students learn how to ask good questions, how to tackle problems, how to work collaboratively in interpreting data or in understanding the problems that we face in our society. We are creating new knowledge that can help in solving a variety of problems.

What makes the experience at UMBC special is that we are an institution that prides itself on undergraduate research as well as our strengths in graduate research. Undergraduate students get to work side by side with faculty in science labs, or with teams in the social sciences, or on projects in the humanities and the arts.

And whether they are undergraduates or graduates, UMBC students have the opportunity to think about their future in research – and how they can use those skills. They are important skills for those who seek academic positions, and also for those who seek positions at companies such as T. Rowe Price, or jobs at the Social Security Administration. That is the connection between the research and the teaching.

Our research faculty is strong at UMBC. From our beginnings, you had a number of faculty members doing first-rate research with students. I remember talking with Michael Hooker, my predecessor as president, about the fact that we had a number of excellent research faculty here. The problem was that many of our students were not able to take advantage of the high quality of research going on.

So we needed to recruit students who could take advantage of what our research faculty had to offer. But we also needed to look at the environment here. We started programs like the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. We used analytics to understand who was succeeding and who was not and to make changes. This gave us the foundation that we could build on. Because you must have students doing well academically in their course work in order to talk about having students involved in research activities.

We have moved to a different place now. In the 1980s, the average student at UMBC was not involved in research. Today you find that thousands of our students are engaged in research. This is happening across disciplines – from our two undergraduate research journals to students working in labs and publishing in academic journals. It’s a very different environment.

Mike Summers, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is one of our most noted researchers. He just became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. That is an immense achievement. But he is also a powerful mentor and teacher. In fact, one of his former students, Victoria D’Souza ’02, Ph.D., biochemistry and molecular biology, recently became a full professor at Harvard University.

This is just one example of this very important key to our success in developing the relationship between research and teaching across the disciplines. We have a large number of our research faculty who are also strong mentors and advisers to students in their research and in their careers. Those qualities in our faculty are why we send such a high percentage of our undergraduates to graduate school, and it is why so many of our graduate students go on to successful careers.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, visit Ask the President.

* Listening to Robert Burchard, emeritus professor of biology, talk about launching a research lab in the earliest days of the university, with basic equipment at UMBC and the use of more specialized equipment at USDA labs in Beltsville: “The most important thing in my toolkit was a microscope,” he said. “I was asking interesting questions. I adapted.”

* Talking with Marilyn Demorest, emerita professor of psychology, who was delighted by a question about UMBC students. “We had the thrill of working with some really fine undergraduates,” she said, “who self-selected into our research teams and laboratories.”

* Sharing a table with Phillip Sokolove (who took his Ph.D. at Harvard University) at UMBC’s annual commencement dinner, and watching the emeritus professor of biology beam with pride as UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III introduced Victoria D’Souza ’02, Ph.D., biochemistry and molecular biology as the first UMBC alumna to be tenured at Harvard University.

* Hearing Walter Sherwin and Jay Freyman – emeritus professors of ancient studies – talk about their collaboration with students and staff in 1969 on a musical (Keep the Peace, Baby) based on their joint translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. “The play was funny as all get out,” says Freyman, recalling that Myrrhina’s seduction of her husband Cinesias to entice him to commit to making peace was done as a striptease.

* Talking with Joan Korenman, emerita professor of English and women’s studies, and founder of the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT). “When I think of what was important to me during my career at UMBC,” she told me. “Women’s studies and information technology, The necessity I felt to combine those. At many universities, I don’t think I could have worked in those areas and done what I did. It says something about UMBC that they were open to all of this.”

* Sitting with Willie Lamousé-Smith, emeritus professor of Africana studies, as he spun stories about academic governance past and present. Lamousé-Smith was tremendously eloquent about the difficult road one must traverse to achieve knowledge: “If you want to put the discipline of learning into yourself, or into somebody, you have to cultivate asceticism in yourself. That is what I try to put into my students. Self-cultivated asceticism. So you can focus and do the work. And that is uncomfortable.”

I invite you to tell us your story at Retriever Stories (retrieverstories.umbc.edu) and I also invite you to return to campus to participate in the 50^th Anniversary celebration September 16-19, 2016. See page six of this issue for a full guide to the weekend’s festivities – and check out our 50^th anniversary website (50.umbc.edu) for all the events associated with this milestone event.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Diana Zeiger ’01, biochemistry is an editor and writer for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She is also a published poet. UMBC Magazine asked her to reflect on the areas in which her two passions overlap.

A poet and a scientist walk into a bar. Sounds like the setup for a terrible joke, doesn’t it?

I can tell you, however, that they’d actually have a lot in common.

Exploring these commonalities has been at the center of my professional life. I took a bachelor’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, where my main interest was poetry. After graduating, I worked as an editor at a small poetry press for a few years. I enjoyed my job but eventually began to find it increasingly unfulfilling.

As a child, I was interested in science but set that interest aside as an undergraduate. So I attended UMBC to start on the path to medical school, but the opportunity to do undergraduate research led me to switch directions and pursue a doctorate in oral and craniofacial sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. (Think of it as a Ph.D. from a dental school.)

Even though I chose to pursue a career in science, my interest in writing never disappeared. In fact, my love of research somewhat naturally led me to seek out what the two disciplines share in common.

One thing poetry and science have in common is a love of questions. Specifically, both ask small questions that explore larger, deeper issues.

Take one of the most famous questions in modern poetry: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” The narrator of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” isn’t simply pondering his choice of snack. This timid fellow is contemplating the loss of his youth and the inevitable decline of his vitality and questioning whether he is capable of expanding his ever-diminishing world. Similarly, when a biochemist asks whether a particular molecule interrupts a given signaling pathway, the impact of the answer may be as large as: “Can this drug stop the progression of cancer?” Both poetry and science embrace small questions to unlock grander concepts.

Precision is another shared quality of poetry and science. Poetry is nothing if not economical; when writing poetry in forms as exacting as a sonnet or a villanelle, not a syllable can be wasted. Each word must be chosen carefully for qualities of sound and its meaning. Precision is equally essential to any scientific endeavor. Instruments must be used with meticulous care, quantities measured exactly, and actions performed and recorded in such a way that they can be perfectly duplicated. Without precision in the laboratory, science could not advance.

Once I completed my introductory science classes and began performing more advanced research, I became aware of another parallel between poetry and science less obvious to those people outside the laboratory: both disciplines require interpretation.

As early as middle school, students are taught that poems can be appreciated in multiple ways, and that the words and phrases comprising them can have layers of meaning. The language of a poem may be melodious and tell an interesting story, but there is often more to learn by digging a little deeper. Enjoyment of poems can be enhanced by knowing – or even investigating – a poet’s biography or a poem’s historical context. Efforts to identify the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets has led to seemingly endless hours of debate, yet this investigation has also enriched our knowledge about – and deepened our appreciation of – these extraordinary poems.

Debate is also an important part of doing science, though this aspect is not something taught in most schools at an early stage. In primary and secondary schools, the main thrust of science education is learning facts. Even laboratory classes typically center around tried-and-true experiments where in which the aim is to achieve preordained results. However, this early education is merely intended to lay a foundation, as I found out when I embarked upon my own research career.

Professional researchers gather all the available knowledge on a topic and then interpret it to generate new hypotheses. Once tested, the new information yielded must then be interpreted again in order to evaluate the validity of the hypothesis. Facts are an indispensable part of science, but pursuing the meaning of these facts within the context of what is already known is what truly enables us to move science forward.

Neuroscience researchers have used poetry as a tool to explore how the brain processes language and sounds; the composition of poetry has also been studied in an attempt to discover the source of creativity itself. Conversely, thanks to their complex, often abstract use of words, poems about scientists and science reveal facets of their subjects that the straightforward language of essays and encyclopedias cannot do. Ultimately, it seems that science and poetry not only have a great deal in common, they also can serve to illuminate the best aspects of each other.