Sebastian Deffner, associate professor of physics, attended “Quantum Science and Technology: Recent Advances and New Perspectives,” a workshop hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City from November 30 to December 2. Deffner was among only about 70 global experts invited to the workshop, and the guest list included numerous Nobel laureates.
“The leading experts in quantum science met in a unique place for a unique workshop to discuss the past, present, and future of quantum technologies,” Deffner says of the workshop.
For Deffner, it was an exciting and rare opportunity. The invitation recognizes his leadership role in developing the young field of quantum thermodynamics on an international scale. In 2019, he co-authored the first textbook focused on the subject, and his research group consistently contributes to the researchliterature.
Recordings of talks from the workshop are available here.
Members of UMBC’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) traveled to Norfolk, Virginia for their annual regional conference in November and came home with numerous awards.
The UMBC team defeated Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University to win the Tech Bowl competition, a Jeopardy-style game that tests teams’ knowledge of fundamental engineering principles. UMBC also claimed first through third place in the research poster presentation contest, which involved a 10-minute technical research talk followed by questions from the judges and audience.
The team relied on prior knowledge to excel in the Tech Bowl, only having decided to participate upon arriving at the conference. “It was really exciting getting so many questions right with our only practice being from our coursework,” shares UMBC NSBE chapter president Nelanne Bolima ’24, chemical engineering. “That just goes to show how well UMBC’s College of Engineering and IT prepares students to succeed.”
Daniel Williams gives his research presentation at the NSBE conference. (Image by Nelanne Bolima)
In addition to Bolima, the Tech Bowl team members included Kayla Magruder ’26, chemical engineering; Saleem Lawal ’25, computer science; and Daniel Williams ’24, computer science. Presentation winners were Williams (first), Bolima (second), and Christopher Appiah ’24, mechanical engineering (third). Keith Harmon, director of the UMBC Meyerhoff Scholars Program, serves as the chapter advisor.
“We are so proud of the UMBC NSBE Chapter,” Harmon shares. “They do tremendous work supporting UMBC STEM majors and offering service impacting youth in the Baltimore-Washington corridor.”
Students supporting students
NSBE is a completely student-run organization, creating leadership opportunities for hundreds of students across the country. UMBC’s NSBE chapter supports members through activities such as mentoring initiatives, conference preparation, networking opportunities, and leadership development programming. The chapter also focuses on community outreach, such as visiting high schools, collaborating with non-profits, and welcoming younger students to shadow the chapter’s board meetings.
Christopher Appiah gives his research presentation at the NSBE conference. (Image by Nelanne Bolima)
“I have benefitted from being a member of this team by gaining invaluable public speaking and collaboration skills,” Appiah shares. “I learned how to effectively present, detailing the broader impact of research I have done.” Appiah conducts research with Ankit Goel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Goel’s group works on complex applications of control theory in robotics and autonomous systems.
For Jaden Somerville ’25, mechanical engineering, “the competition not only improved my technical skills, but also taught me teamwork, problem-solving, and effective time management.”
In March 2024, the chapter will take its talents to the 50th annual NSBE convention in Atlanta, Georgia.
A simulation of the sky as viewed by AXIS in one 5 million-second exposure to deep space. This simulated image shows some of the earliest detected supermassive black holes. (Simulation by Stefano Marchesi)
After 18 months of intensive design work by a team of more than 100 scientists, which followed years of preliminary work and investment, in November the scientists and engineers on the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) science team took an important step toward delivering this next-generation space telescope. They became one of 10 teams to submit their formal project proposal to NASA, requesting nearly $1 billion in funding to further develop the design and build the telescope.
Adi Foord, assistant professor of physics, and Eileen Meyer, associate professor of physics, serve on the central AXIS leadership team, and Foord co-leads the sub-team focused on supermassive black hole evolution. If selected for production, AXIS will improve upon the highly successful,but aging, Chandra X-ray Observatory launched in 1999.
As an X-ray telescope, AXIS aligns with one of the established priorities laid out in NASA’s 2020 decadal survey. These surveys initiate a years-long competition to be the one major instrument eventually selected for launch to address one of the priorities.
A revolutionary x-ray telescope
Adi Foord co-leads the AXIS Supermassive Black Hole science working group. She is also the project’s communications and outreach lead. (Image courtesy of Foord)
“AXIS is going to revolutionize our understanding of supermassive black hole growth and evolution by detecting some of the earliest known supermassive black holes to date and tracking them across cosmic time,” Foord says. “AXIS will be the premiere high-angular-resolution X-ray mission of the 2030s, observing deeper into our universe than currently possible with existing X-ray telescopes.”
The lead investigator on the AXIS team is Chris Reynolds at University of Maryland, College Park, and the co-lead is Erin Kara at MIT. The team will know by fall 2024 if its proposal is one of two or three selected to move on to the next phase. After that, one proposal will eventually emerge the winner, and the selected team will build their satellite for launch in the early 2030s.
The team is optimistic about their prospects, given the strength of the proposal and the potential impact of the new satellite’s capabilities. AXIS’ “superb resolution means that it will be able to detect many new systems of interacting supermassive black holes,” Foord explains, such as pairs orbiting each other very closely and expected to merge. “We currently don’t know of too many of these systems, and AXIS is predicted to find hundreds to thousands of them.”
More than 110 academic researchers, industry pros, government officials and educators met at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) for the second annual Sustainable Aquaculture Systems Supporting Atlantic Salmon (SAS2) conference in October. The conference’s nine panel discussions (with more than 50 panelists), local field trips and tours, and social events gave stakeholders the opportunity to share progress and address remaining challenges to move the aquaculture industry forward.
Yonathan Zohar, professor of marine biotechnology at UMBC and IMET, leads the SAS2 consortium, which includes 32 co-investigators, 12 research institutions, and 11 industry partners, from around the U.S. and internationally.
Salmon is consumed more than any other fish in the U.S., but over 90 percent of it is imported at a value of $3.8 billion annually, Zohar shared in introductory remarks. People across sectors are interested in reducing this trade deficit and improving environmental sustainability of salmon aquaculture by eliminating the carbon footprint associated with transporting salmon from overseas. As a result, domestic salmon aquaculture is experiencing an investment boom, Zohar says. The investment is particularly strong for land-based aquaculture, which Zohar and colleagues are advancing at IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center (ARC).
“This is a stakeholder-driven program,” Zohar says. “Industry and academia are engaged in genuine brainstorming towards enabling salmon aquaculture in the U.S. to be a success story.”
University System of Maryland Chancellor Jay Perman shared that the SAS2 team’s efforts, from biotechnology to market strategies to workforce development and education, “are poised to change the face of food scarcity and food production the world over.”
Conference attendees gather in front of the Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology. (Image by Barry Freeman)
IMET, and the ARC in particular, are “a showcase of our best ideas, ideas that promise solutions to so many essential challenges—food security, environmental sustainability, economic resilience,” Perman shared. The SAS2 consortium is “research for the public good,” Perman added. “That’s our mission and this project is emblematic of that.”
Session topics at the conference included scientific and engineering challenges like waste remediation, water reuse, and managing the salmon life cycle in captivity. Other sessions discussed market research for salmon produced on land and examples of education programs that increase awareness of aquaculture careers.
Attendees also traveled to The Conservation Fund Freshwater Institute in West Virginia to see collaborative SAS2 research, visited Baltimore City Schools that incorporate aquaculture into the curriculum, toured the ARC, and heard from graduate students contributing to the research arm of SAS2.
“SAS2 is an amazing accomplishment—the best example of public-private partnership to solve problems for industry,” shares Steve Summerfelt, a conference panelist and the chief science officer at Superior Fresh, which raises land-based salmon and recycles the nutrient-rich wastewater to grow greens. “SAS2 is providing relevant and groundbreaking research with strong tech transfer to help land-based salmon farmers.”
Conference attendees took tours of the Aquaculture Research Center, the land-based salmon production facility at IMET led by Yonathan Zohar. (Image by Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17)
Enabling aquaculture innovation
Overall, the conference emphasized aquaculture’s important and growing role in worldwide food production.
“Land-based, sustainable production of seafood is critically important technology to meet the rapidly growing need for healthy seafood as a source of protein in diets worldwide,” Russell Hill, director of IMET, said. “A land-based approach has huge advantages for minimizing pollution in the coastal environment and taking pressure off wild fish populations—and all of this can be done through this resilient technology that’s also adaptable in the face of a changing planet.”
By bringing together people from across industries, the event created opportunities that will enable more breakthroughs.
“The lively engagement and productive brainstorming of all relevant sectors led to several innovative ideas and collaborations which will contribute in the short term to making Atlantic salmon farming in the U.S. and globally more environmentally responsible and economically feasible” concluded Zohar. “Everyone left inspired and excited about the opportunities being created by the SAS2 program for innovative and sustainable aquaculture.”
The shower was full of mantis shrimp. Bubblers burbled and the cranky crustaceans skulked in their tanks, looking for things to punch with their famously fast strikes. Complicated electronics for measuring brain activity stood sentinel beside the bed in the next room. And out on the balcony, Kathryn Feller, Ph.D. ’14, biological sciences, was wearing a respirator and gloves, working with nasty chemicals.
In other words, it was another day of fieldwork as a behavioral neuroscientist—a career Feller has embraced after a journey of self-exploration that took her to surgical operating theaters, drama summer camps, and a range of research institutions around the world. At UMBC, Feller found a robust research atmosphere, supportive lab mates, and a lifelong mentor. Now, as a professor and mentor herself, she’s able to exercise her natural creativity in a way she might never have predicted and play off her strengths from visual arts to handling sensitive scientific instruments.
Feller was in Malaga, Spain, living and working out of an attic apartment in her collaborator’s mother’s home. She was collecting data for her work at the University of Cambridge, where she was fulfilling a two-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship focused on a new line of research into mantis shrimp vision.
Mantis shrimp are famous for two things: their powerful punches and their vision. Humans have three types of cones in our eyes for seeing color. Mantis shrimp have 16. They can see UV light and polarized light, and there is still more to learn. Feller’s Ph.D. at UMBC in Thomas Cronin’s lab focused on vision in mantis shrimp larvae. At the time there was almost no work in that area.
“While studying the visual system, a lot of times I kept wondering: ‘There’s all these cool things that mantis shrimp eyes can do, but what are they actually using this for?’” Feller says. “What are the consequences of this in a behavioral context?”
Her Ph.D. opened up the field of larval mantis shrimp vision and took her down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. “If something interests me, I follow it, and—uh-oh—here’s something else I’m interested in,” Feller jokes. In the end, her thesis explored the visual system using umpteen different scientific techniques, each providing its own insights, she says. “It was like the whole package of describing mantis shrimp visual systems.”
The broad scientific foundation Feller obtained at UMBC set her up well for postdoctoral experiences that have taken her around the world, including stints studying butterflies in Japan, mouse brains in Minnesota, and insects in England. In fall 2020, she launched her own laboratory as an assistant professor of biology at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
Feller’s research interests now include new projects on the connections between vision and behavior and work on brain-machine interfaces, initially inspired by a student in one of her classes. That work helped spawn a brand-new course on cyborgs that she’s teaching with Union colleagues in English and computer science.
Things are going well.
“Life is awesome. It really is. You know, it has its ups and downs; it’s not like every day is a dreamboat—I live with a two-year-old,” Feller laughs. But “at this point, I’m just really jazzed about the research I’m doing.”
(Left) Feller is the only identifiable person in the mural on the first floor of the Biological Sciences Building at UMBC. Her swim cap covered in bright plastic flowers is unmistakable. (Image; Randianne Leyshon ’09/UMBC) (Right) Kate Feller, left, teaching a new course she co-developed with English and computer science colleagues at Union College on cyborgs. (Image by Paul Buckowski/Union College)
Into the limelight
Back in Malaga, Feller was getting lots of great data, “but also psychologically it was a bit difficult,” she says. She didn’t speak Spanish, and her hosts barely spoke English. “For six weeks, I was just alone in someone’s house, doing science.” And then came the email: an invitation to participate in FameLab, an international competition for scientists based out of the United Kingdom. Each participant had three minutes to explain a scientific concept using only their body and any props they could carry on the stage—no slides. Entries were judged on content, clarity, and charisma.
“I got this email, and I wrote my script in one night,” Feller says. The topic? Glittery camouflage structures in the eyes of mantis shrimp larvae. “When you’re in the field, you have a finite number of hours to do what you need to do, so you need to push yourself to the extreme—but you also need to take a break. And that was my break—just to sit down and poke fun at the ridiculousness of my life.”
She won her region in the U.K. and got to spend a weekend in Devonshire, England, with the other county winners, learning about science communication and refining her talk. The final performance was at the London Museum of Science.
“I didn’t win, but it was awesome,” Feller says. After that, she was hooked on science performance. Back in Cambridge, she pursued science stand-up comedy with a group called “The Variables.”
Research requires creativity
Feller’s affinity for performance didn’t come out of nowhere. As a teenager, she attended Camp Quin, a summer arts camp in the Finger Lakes region of New York. And despite a natural affinity for visual arts, she ended up focusing on drama at the camp. A skit she developed with other campers “was hilarious, and it was a hit, and from that I was like, ‘I really like this,’” Feller remembers.
As an undergraduate at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS), she participated in an improv comedy troupe and in her senior year, the Shakespeare club. In the summers, she served as a counselor at Camp Quin. Performance may have taken a backseat in her life for now, but Feller still finds that her communication skills and natural creative energy are huge benefits in her current role.
“As I’ve progressed as a scientist, I’ve learned how much imagination it takes to be a researcher,” Feller says. “And now that I’m a faculty member, I understand how much creativity you need to run an interesting class. I love that aspect—designing a new course is a super fun and creative process, and I find that my students respond quite well to the different ways of communicating I throw at them.”
Feller also applies her visual arts skills to creating research talks and class lectures. “The art of slide design is underrated,” she says. “I think that’s why I’ve been invited to give so many talks—not only do I have that performance element, but I understand the connection between hearing and seeing and information transfer.”
Feller (pink dress) is involved with a robotics laboratory at Union College. Her work has recently expanded into brain-machine interfaces after a student in one of her classes expressed enthusiasm for the topic—just one example of how her teaching continues to inform her research. (Image by Paul Buckowski/Union College) (Lower left) One of Feller’s digital designs. She has been hired to create logos for other labs and continues to make art as a hobby—ranging from using iridescent eye shadow to recreate beetle carapaces to shaping clay sculptures.
An “all-in” personality
Feller has always recognized her artistic side, but she wasn’t always encouraged to integrate it into her career plans. She was a good student, and her kindergarten teacher told her parents she would probably become a doctor. “I got that message my whole life,” Feller says.
It sunk in, and she started at HWS on the pre-med track. As an undergrad, she took an internship as a surgical assistant in a hospital. “There was a major clash with who I was as a person,” Feller says. “Literally, you are in a sterile environment. So while I was good at that job, it crushed me.”
But expectations die hard, and in her junior year, she was still looking at medical school. She decided she should do research to boost her chances. “Literally, it was just for my CV,” she says. Little did she know the experience would permanently shift her trajectory.
For this design, Feller incorporated the organisms studied in the UMBC biological sciences department for its annual, informal graduate student t-shirt.
Feller did some background research and requested a meeting with HWS biology assistant professor Kristy Kenyon, who studies development of the visual system in frogs and fruit flies, to pitch an honors project. As it turned out, her pitch was a little off the mark. “It was at least within the organ system that I worked,” Kenyon says. Yet, Kenyon decided to give her a chance.
Why? “Kate Feller is such a dynamic person,” Kenyon says. “She was such an all-in, live-life-to-the-fullest kind of person, that it was very easy for me to get excited about working on a project with her despite having never had her in a class. The energy, the creativity, the curiosity—those are three words I would use to describe that initial impression of Kate.”
Research in sight
Feller and Kenyon settled on a bat vision project, and it transformed Feller’s future. Kenyon gave her a crash course in what she needed to know, and Feller thrived. The project led to Feller’s first scientific publication, reporting the discovery of a type of UV-sensitive cell in bat eyes that is evolutionarily related to the same cells in mice.
“I loved it,” Feller says. “Just the idea of thinking about how a different creature sees, because I’m so visual—it just fit so well. It took me a while to realize why I found it so exciting, but then I was like, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”
And yet. After graduating with a double major in biology and environmental science, Feller took a position as an ophthalmology surgical assistant. She quickly soured on that, though, for the same reasons she had struggled with roles in sterile environments before. Her personal life brought her to Baltimore, and looking for new opportunities, she found Tom Cronin on a Google search.
She applied to other Ph.D. programs, but when she visited UMBC, “there was the pond, and all the grass, and meeting Tom, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is where I need to be.’”
A tight-knit group
Feller’s Ph.D. years spanned a special time in the Cronin lab. “It was an incredible group of people who formed a tight-knit community and helped each other grow into outstanding scientists,” says Megan Porter, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab during that time. Sometimes, that support involved tough love. An intervention conversation Porter had with Feller when she was experiencing a third-year slump helped get Feller’s Ph.D. back on track. The exchange helped Porter as well.
“It has helped me to be a better mentor to my students now, to have had that conversation first with a friend,” says Porter, who now is a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. “It’s an important conversation to have with any graduate student, as it isn’t the right path for everyone. There are many other careers out there for anyone who loves science.”
If Porter was the nurturing mother figure in the lab, Michael Bok, Ph.D. ’14, biological sciences, was the goofy uncle. Feller and Bok started the same year, and both needed to earn an advanced level of scuba certification to conduct fieldwork in Australia. Given the limited diving options in the mid-Atlantic, “we spent a total of 15 hours goofing around in a pretty uninspiring quarry, but it was worth it for the diving we got to do in Australia,” says Bok, who is now a researcher at Lund University in Sweden.
Feller and Bok conducted fieldwork at Lizard Island Research Station off the northeast coast of Australia for many months across five years. “Some of these stressful and intensive work experiences would probably strain some people’s friendship, but Kate and I seemed to always be quite happy with each other despite having pretty different personalities,” Bok says. “We were definitely kindred in our love for science, appreciation for being out in nature, and senses of humor.”
Feller came to love diving and did so with typical flair. “You could always tell where Kate was in the water,” Cronin says, because she always wore a brightly colored swim cap with plastic flowers stuck all over it. “It was very Kate because it made her look kind of silly but also very distinctive, because even underwater far away you could identify her.”
Dance parties and lost turtles
Alex Kingston, Ph.D. ’15, biological sciences, arrived in the lab after Porter, Bok, and Feller. “I really wouldn’t be where I am today without each of them,” she says.
Kingston, who today is an assistant professor at The University of Tulsa, was always very organized and on top of things, Cronin recalls—“very type A.” She kept the lab running smoothly as lab manager but wasn’t afraid to have fun. Feller and Kingston would have dance parties as a break from drafting scientific manuscripts. “It was hilarious when other people would come into the lab, not expecting us in the middle of the lab blaring music and dancing around,” Kingston remembers.
The group had other shared adventures, like caring for Scott, a box turtle who frequently escaped, necessitating a lab-wide search. And Feller took it as her role to decorate the lab. “In my lab today you can still see Kate stuff,” Cronin says. “She had a tendency of sticking stuff up there that didn’t want to come down again.”
Cronin’s approach to mentorship allowed each of his students to find their own way, with the level of support or independence that worked best for each of them. That means Cronin’s students have complete ownership of both their successes and their struggles and grow the confidence to face both once they leave UMBC.
“Tom was really hands off. However, he was so supportive,” Feller says. “Pretty much any time I came to him with an idea, he was like, ‘Cool, let’s do it.’ So it was that mix of, you’re steering the ship, but you don’t have to worry about resources.”
“Kate was not afraid to try anything— she was particularly inclined to do things her own way,” Cronin recalls. While she may have taken some time to find her footing, in the end, “she did really great work—really original and creative work.”
(Left) Current and former members of Tom Cronin’s research group have made it a tradition to reunite at professional conferences and take a “family photo.” From left to right: Kate Feller, Tom Cronin, Alex Kingston, Megan Porter, and Michael Bok in 2013. (Image courtesy of Tom Cronin) (Right) Feller contributed substantially to decorating Tom Cronin’s lab. One day she came home from a thrift shop with a gift for Cronin: this sketch of a cat, with the inscription, “Tom is tough. But he is your friend.” It was a perfect fit for an advisor who held high expectations along with offering generous support. It still hangs in the Cronin lab today.
Rigor, excitement, and resilience
Today, Feller is focused on furthering her research, engaging her students, and raising her family—her second child arrived this October. As a faculty member, Feller is maintaining old connections and forging new ones.
“Kate is really doing a fantastic job of creating and maintaining a network across different areas of science and education, in the research that she does but also in the way that she teaches and the way she facilitates those connections across institutions,” Kenyon, her mentor from HWS, says. For example, Kenyon is now collaborating with a colleague at Union because Feller connected them. And Kenyon is using a book in her courses that features the Cronin lab’s research— including some carried out by Feller.
“What I have thoroughly enjoyed is watching Kate progress at each step along the way, and find her passion, and be able to pursue something with such rigor, and excitement and resilience,” says Kenyon.
Illuminating the unknown
Whether creating art, performing on stage or in the classroom, working hard in the lab, or collecting specimens underwater, Feller is embracing each stage of her life and career with a zest that is uniquely hers. As Cronin puts it, “She was always Kate. She never started or stopped being Kate.”
“The thing that I love most is just trying to figure out how the world works,” Feller says. “I like to describe myself as an explorer. I am not a Magellan or a person on a ship looking to explore new places—I’m pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Where is the edge, and how can I shed light on the unknown?”
Feller is on the exploration of a lifetime, discovering new things about how brains work, transforming the lives of students, and doing it all in full color. As her research program takes off, her family grows, and her network broadens, her greatest adventures may be ahead of her.
A new study using data from the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET)instrument on the International Space Station has found evidence for nearby, young sources of cosmic ray electrons, contributing to a greater understanding of how the galaxy functions as a whole.
The study included more than seven million data points representing particles arriving at CALET’s detector since 2015, and CALET’s ability to detect electrons at the highest energies is unique. As a result, the data includes more electrons at high energies than any previous work. That makes the statistical analysis of the data more robust and lends support to the conclusion that there are one or more local sources of cosmic ray electrons.
“This is one of the primary things that CALET is made to look for,” says Nicholas Cannady, an assistant research scientist with UMBC’s Center for Space Sciences and Technology, a partnership with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and a leader on the study. With this paper, he adds, “We were really able to push into the realm where we have few events and start to look for things at the highest energies, which is exciting.”
A better understanding of the galaxy
Nicholas Cannady, the lead U.S. scientist on the new study, is excited that the CALET mission is bearing fruitful results. (Image courtesy of Cannady)
Current theory posits that the aftermath of supernovae (exploding stars), called supernova remnants, produce these high energy electrons, which are a specific type of cosmic ray. Electrons lose energy very quickly after leaving their source, so the rare electrons arriving at CALET with high energy are believed to originate in supernova remnants that are relatively nearby (on a cosmic scale), Cannady explains.
The study’s results are “a strong indicator that the paradigm that we have for understanding these high-energy electrons—that they come from supernova remnants and that they are accelerated the way that we think they are—is correct,” Cannady says. The findings “give insight into what’s going on in these supernova remnants, and offer a way to understand the galaxy and these sources in the galaxy better.”
CALET is a collaborative project built and operated by groups in Japan, Italy, and the United States, led by Shoji Torii. The lead contributors to this work in Japan are Torii, Yosui Akaike, and Holger Motz at Waseda University in Tokyo, and Louisiana State University is the lead institution in the U.S. The findings were published in Physical Review Letters.
New data lead to new cosmic ray sources
Previous work found that the number of electrons arriving at CALET decreased steadily as energy increased up to about 1 teravolt (TeV), or 1 trillion electron volts. The number of electrons arriving with even greater energy was extremely low. But in this study, CALET did not see the expected dropoff. Instead, the results suggest that the number of particles plateau, and then even increase, at the highest energies—all the way up to 10 TeV in a few cases.
Previous experiments could only measure particles up to about 4 TeV, so the highest energy event candidates above that in this study are a crucial new source of information about potential nearby sources of cosmic ray electrons. Cannady led the effort to individually analyze each of those events to confirm they represent a real signal, and a deeper dive into those events is forthcoming.
Addressing challenges
It’s difficult to distinguish between electrons and protons at high energies, and there are many more protons arriving than electrons, which poses challenges to an accurate analysis. To tell the particles apart, a program developed by the researchers analyzes how the particles break down when they hit the detector. Protons and electrons break down differently, so comparing the cascade of particles they create in that process can filter out the protons. However, at the highest energies, the differences between protons and electrons decrease, making it harder to accurately remove only the protons from the data.
To address this, Cannady led the CALET team’s effort to simulate the breakdown patterns of both protons and electrons coming from the exact direction each of the high-energy events arrived from. That increased the team’s ability to determine whether the events are electrons or protons as accurately as possible.
Based on that work, “We believe we are evaluating the likelihood of events being protons in a realistic fashion,” Cannady says. Enough presumed electrons remain in the dataset after that careful analysis to conclude there is a real signal.
An x-ray image of Cassiopeia A, an example of a young supernova remnant. (Image courtesy of NASA)
Pushing boundaries
T. Gregory Guzik, professor of physics at LSU and the U.S. CALET collaboration lead, is excited that further analysis of the data suggested that electrons coming from the three best candidates for nearby supernova remnants can explain the high-energy arrivals.
“These CALET observations open the tantalizing possibility that matter from a particular nearby supernova remnant can be measured at Earth,” Guzik shares. “Continued CALET measurement through the life of the International Space Station will help shed new light on the origin and transport of relativistic matter in our galaxy.”
For Cannady, “The most exciting part is seeing things at the highest energies. We have some candidates above 10 TeV—and if it is borne out that these are real electron events, it’s really a smoking gun for clear evidence of a nearby source,” he says. “This is essentially what CALET was put up to do, so it’s exciting to be working on this and to finally be getting results that are pushing the bounds of what we’ve seen before.”
No one had ever seen one virus latching onto another virus, until anomalous sequencing results sent a UMBC team down a rabbit hole leading to a first-of-its-kind discovery.
It’s known that some viruses, called satellites, depend not only on their host organism to complete their life cycle, but also on another virus, known as a “helper,” explainsIvan Erill, professor of biological sciences. The satellite virus needs the helper either to build its capsid, a protective shell that encloses the virus’s genetic material, or to help it replicate its DNA. These viral relationships require the satellite and the helper to be in proximity to each other at least temporarily, but there were no known cases of a satellite actually attaching itself to a helper—until now.
In a paper published in the Journal of the International Society of Microbial Ecology, a UMBC team and colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) describe the first observation of a satellite bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacterial cells) consistently attaching to a helper bacteriophage at its “neck”—where the capsid joins the tail of the virus.
In detailed electron microscopy images taken byTagide deCarvalho, assistant director of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences core facilities and first author on the new paper, 80 percent (40 out of 50) helpers had a satellite bound at the neck. Some of those that did not had remnant satellite tendrils present at the neck. Erill, senior author on the paper, describes them as appearing like “bite marks.”
“When I saw it, I was like, ‘I can’t believe this,’” deCarvalho says. “No one has ever seen a bacteriophage—or any other virus—attach to another virus.”
Tagide deCarvalho in the Keith R. Porter Imaging Facility. deCarvalho took advantage of the facility’s transmission electron microscope (TEM) to capture striking images of the satellite-helper virus system discussed in the new paper. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
A long-term virus relationship
After the initial observations, Elia Mascolo, a graduate student in Erill‘s research group and co-first author on the paper, analyzed the genomes of the satellite, helper, and host, which revealed further clues about this never-before-seen viral relationship. Most satellite viruses contain a gene that allows them to integrate into the host cell’s genetic material after they enter the cell. This allows the satellite to reproduce whenever a helper happens to enter the cell from then on. The host cell also copies the satellite’s DNA along with its own when it divides.
Ivan Erill co-leads the SEA-PHAGES program at UMBC. His research group focuses on bioinformatics. (Image by Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
A bacteriophage sample from WashU also contained a helper and a satellite. The WashU satellite has a gene for integration and does not directly attach to its helper, similar to previously observed satellite-helper systems.
However, the satellite in UMBC’s sample, named MiniFlayer by the students who isolated it, is the first known case of a satellite with no gene for integration. Because it can’t integrate into the host cell’s DNA, it must be near its helper—named MindFlayer—every time it enters a host cell if it is going to survive. Given that, although the team did not directly prove this explanation, “Attaching now made total sense,” Erill says, “because otherwise, how are you going to guarantee that you are going to enter into the cell at the same time?”
Additional bioinformatics analysis by Mascolo and Julia López-Pérez, another Ph.D. student working with Erill, revealed that MindFlayer and MiniFlayer have been co-evolving for a long time. “This satellite has been tuning in and optimizing its genome to be associated with the helper for, I would say, at least 100 million years,” Erill says, which suggests there may be many more cases of this kind of relationship waiting to be discovered.
Contamination or discovery?
This groundbreaking discovery could easily have been missed. The project started out as a typical semester in the SEA-PHAGES program—an investigative curriculum where undergraduates isolate bacteriophages from environmental samples, send them out for sequencing, and then use bioinformatics tools to analyze the results. When the sequencing lab at the University of Pittsburgh reported contamination in the sample from UMBC expected to contain the MindFlayer phage, the journey began.
Steven Caruso co-leads the SEA-PHAGES program at UMBC. He also conducts pedagogy research to improve science education. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
The sample included one large sequence: the phage they expected. “But instead of just finding that, we also found a small sequence, which didn’t map to anything we knew,” says Erill, who is also one of the leads for UMBC’s SEA-PHAGES program, called Phage Hunters, along withSteven Caruso, principal lecturer of biological sciences. Caruso ’94, Ph.D. ’02, biological sciences, ran the isolation again, sent it out for sequencing—and got identical results.
That’s when the team pulled in deCarvalho to get a visual of what was going on with the transmission electron microscope (TEM) at UMBC’s Keith R. Porter Imaging Facility (KPIF). Without the images, the discovery would have been impossible.
“Not everyone has a TEM at their disposal,” deCarvalho notes. But with the instruments at the KPIF, deCarvalho says, “I’m able to follow up on some of these observations and validate them with imaging. There’s elements of discovery we can only make using the TEM.”
The team’s discovery sets the stage for future work to figure out how the satellite attaches, how common this phenomenon is, and much more. “It’s possible that a lot of the bacteriophages that people thought were contaminated were actually these satellite-helper systems,” deCarvalho says. “So now, with this paper, people might be able to recognize more of these systems.”
Animals must constantly make the choice between using energy to gather information about their environment or to carry out goal-driven tasks. Animals use sensory input, including humans’ five senses and other senses like electromagnetics and echolocation, to make those decisions.
A new study published in Nature Machine Intelligencefinds that all 11 species the research team investigated—ranging from amoebas to humans—demonstrate similar patterns of movement. These results have implications for robotics, because robots must be programmed to make the same kinds of decisions animals do to move safely and efficiently through unpredictable environments.
The research team ran experiments with glass knifefish, and then analyzed data available in the scientific literature on 10 other species: humans, mice, bats, moles, three butterflies, cockroaches, and two amoebas. Every single species demonstrated the same pattern of decision making, which involved turning the information-gathering mode, called “explore,” on and off depending on how uncertain the animals were about their environment.
Kathleen Hoffman says the research team for this project “was one of the coolest interdisciplinary groups I’ve worked in.” (Image courtesy of Hoffman)
The mathematical strategy that best represented the animals’ behavior “is the trace of a covariance matrix—which I don’t think the fish is actually computing,” jokes Kathleen Hoffman, professor of mathematics and statistics and an author on the new paper.
Robots, too, must constantly interpret the sensory input they’re receiving and use that information to make decisions. Understanding how real animals tackle that process, even if they don’t know themselves, is useful for robotics, Hoffman explains, “because the robot actually can compute the trace of a covariance matrix.”
Interdisciplinary innovation advances robotics
Specifically, the paper’s results showed that an animal explores until its certainty about its environment decreases below a given threshold. Then it switches to using that information for tasks, which is called “exploit” mode. When uncertainty rises again, it goes back to exploring. This kind of mode-switching is called “triggered excitation.” It differs from a model called “persistent excitation,” which involves constant exploring.
Applications involving sensory processing, like robots, often use the persistent excitation model, so the team was surprised to discover that persistent excitation is not consistent with their observations and analysis. The team’s findings could have a significant impact in the field of sensory modeling.
The work for this paper required many areas of expertise, and the team included researchers in mathematics, engineering, and biology. Debojyoti Biswas, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, is the first author on the new paper, and the other authors include Hoffman and researchers at University of Minnesota, Cornell University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The project grew out of a conversation between Hoffman and John Guckenheimer, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Cornell. They invited the rest of the team members on board as their expertise was needed. From figuring out how to track the position of the knifefish in the experiments with extreme precision, to analyzing the data on other species, to interpreting the math in a way that made sense in a biological context, everyone had a role to play.
“This was one of the coolest interdisciplinary groups I’ve worked in,” Hoffman says. “I really don’t think that any one of us could have done it on our own.”
This clip of the knifefish in the team’s experiments shows how they switch between darting forward and back to “explore” their surroundings and “exploiting” that information to keep themselves in the middle. (Video courtesy of Debojyoti Biswas)
The remaining “head-scratcher”
The new paper has generated new questions as well as answers. “Here’s the head-scratcher,” Hoffman says: “What’s the mechanism that leads to this?” The team observed the same pattern in species as different as butterflies and moles, which use completely different senses. And they were able to deduce the pattern from published research that was originally undertaken to answer completely different questions.
Moving forward, some of the same team members, including Hoffman, plan to dig deeper into the mechanism behind this surprising pattern—and whether the mechanism is the same or different across species. “To me,” Hoffman says, “this is fundamental and really important.”
Hoffman is grateful to have been a part of the team. She took the opportunity to grow as a mathematician by contributing primarily to the project’s data analysis, when her focus is usually in mathematical modeling.
“I wanted to really push the limits of what I could do and make it broader. I wanted to develop skills that I didn’t have before,” she says. Overall, “I had fun. You never know what you’re going to be working on as an applied mathematician.”
A new study used a novel technique to assess types of habitat provided by oyster reefs across 12 tributaries in the Chesapeake Bay. Researchers from UMBC; the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB); and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) used underwater cameras to collect images of reef structure at approximately 50 sites in each tributary—a total geographic span of 134 miles. They also repeatedly sampled habitat in two of the tributaries in 2017, 2019, and 2021 to track change over time.
The study included sites in Maryland and Virginia with a wide range of salinities. The team observed restored and unrestored reefs, oyster sanctuaries, and harvested reefs. The results indicate that unharvested reefs and restored reefs had the most complex reef structures, including more surface area covered with oysters and greater reef height, meaning the height of the reef above the bay bottom. Complex reef structure tends to create richer habitat for oysters and other bay wildlife, such as fish and crustaceans. The role of salinity was more nuanced and depended on a reef’s restoration and harvest status.
“Managing harvest and managing restoration are two of the biggest tools that managers have,” says Allison Tracy, assistant professor of marine biotechnology at UMBC/UMB and lead author on the new study. “It’s interesting to see at this scale that we’re able to pick up important contributions to habitat patterns from harvest, restoration, and salinity together.”
The sites tracked over time all saw an overall upward trend in habitat scores over the years of the study, which is good news for the bay and people who depend on it. “Reefs that were unharvested and restored maintained a higher habitat score more consistently over that time period,” Tracy explains.
An example of a low-scoring oyster reef image.An example of a high-scoring reef image. (Images courtesy of Allison Tracy)
New technique addresses longstanding challenges
In the new study, published in Marine Ecology Progress Series, “we used underwater photography to solve two big challenges to understanding restoration success,” says Matthew Ogburn, senior scientist at SERC and senior author on the new paper. Previous studies have primarily focused on oysters themselves, rather than the habitat their reefs generate, and different monitoring techniques are not always comparable, he explains. Ogburn and Keira Heggie, another SERC scientist and co-author on the paper, previously published a paper outlining the new underwater camera technique.
“Using one simple method of assessing oyster reefs allowed us to survey a large number of sites efficiently and to make comparisons among all different types of oyster reefs,” Ogburn explains. “Our research supports the idea that oyster restoration results in more oysters but also more complex reefs that provide habitat for other species.”
While restoring reefs and designating some reefs as sanctuaries for oysters are important, “the solution is not to stop harvesting,” Tracy says. The authors note that harvested reefs still provide important, if different, habitat. For example, some species prefer sparser reefs.
“Those harvested reefs are still providing habitat,” Tracy says. “It’s not that habitat on harvested reefs is not important, they’re just contributing something different while also having economic importance.”
The best place for oyster reef research
Allison Tracy on Chesapeake Bay collecting data. She’s holding the frame the research team used to lower the underwater cameras down to each sampling site. (Photo courtesy of Allison Tracy)
Moving forward, the research team hopes to build on this work. Tracy and coauthors are working on a forthcoming paper that uses more-intensive sampling methods at a subset of the study sites to verify the results from the rapid assessment technique. The team would also like to find creative ways to collect more underwater data at each site to identify which other species are using the reefs—but right now that effort is limited by the camera’s battery life.
The authors would also like to find ways to use machine learning to analyze the images, making that process more efficient while retaining a human’s level of accuracy. To date, this application of machine learning has proven less accurate than human analysis—but that may change in the future.
For this study, co-author and dedicated SERC citizen scientist David Norman analyzed all the images to determine reef habitat scores. Having one person score all the images for surface cover and reef height improves consistency considerably, but computerized scoring could help achieve this consistency across multiple studies going ahead. SERC is also testing whether crowd-sourcing the image analysis could be an effective way to increase consistency and efficiency.
There is much work ahead, but the new study provides an important large-scale perspective on the relationships between management practices, environmental conditions, and reef habitat across the Chesapeake Bay.
With significant restoration efforts underway, a wide range of management practices in use, and strong engagement from conservation organizations, fisheries, state governments, and local citizens, Tracy is grateful to be conducting research on one of the largest estuary systems in the world, noting, “We’re really fortunate that Chesapeake Bay is such a great place to do this research.”
Jessica Novak is excited to be heading to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory next year—an aspiration she’s worked toward for years. (Image by Melissa Cormier, M.F.A. ’17/UMBC)
At UMBC, Novak studies how the bacterium Cellvibrio japonicus breaks down complex carbohydrates withJeffrey Gardner, associate professor of biological sciences. Unlike most other bacteria, C. japonicus can simultaneously break down a variety of sugar types, Novak explains, which makes it especially appealing for biofuels applications. At NREL, she plans to improve the understanding of how C. japonicus breaks down switchgrass, a bioenergy crop used to create bioethanol.
“The neat thing we’re going to look at is the rate Cellvibrio japonicus consumes different sugars that are in switchgrass, so that will help us better characterize its metabolic capabilities,” Novak says. NREL’s equipment and established protocols will be particularly helpful for that analysis, she adds.
Her time at NREL “will also train me in some of the biochemical analyses that I’m going to do back at UMBC,” she says. “I think the results we’re going to get from this fellowship will spark new ideas.”
Little steps toward big goals
The fellowship is an exciting step for Novak, who is a self-identified “planner.” Her interest in biofuels began in an undergraduate molecular genetics class at Salisbury University, where the professor talked about using algae as biofuels. “I knew eight years ago that I wanted to try out NREL,” she says, “and I’ve been taking little steps to make that happen.”
After finishing her bachelor’s, Novak worked at a company detecting biological threats in environmental samples. When she was ready to start her Ph.D., she connected with Gardner based on his research interests. She carefully selected an interdisciplinary thesis committee, which includes Brandon Knott, a chemical engineer at NREL. The DoE fellowship requires a co-mentor at the destination laboratory, and Knott will fill that role for Novak. Novak will also work with NREL scientists Violeta Sànchez and Alissa Bleem.
“I put so much time and effort into planning out my life and what I wanted to happen,” Novak says. “It’s just incredible that it’s starting to work out that way. I’m absolutely ecstatic. I cannot wait.”
At NREL’s Integrated Biorefinery Research Facility, NREL researchers and partners work on processes and technologies related to biofuels and other bio-based products. (Image courtesy of NREL)
Using bacteria to make things better
Novak’s trajectory hasn’t been a simple beeline to a career in biofuels. In Gardner’s lab, Novak has been studying a different bacterium that breaks down plastic alongside her work on C. japonicus. Those experiences ignited her interest in bioremediation—a process that uses organisms like plants or microbes to remove toxins from the environment.
Now, she says, “I’m really interested in how we can use bacteria to break down man-made errors,” both literally and figuratively. “They just evolve so quickly to adapt to our faults. I really love the idea of utilizing that to repair our environment.”
Novak’s current plan is to finish her Ph.D. by summer 2025, and then pursue a postdoc in industry focused on bioremediation.
A new turning point
Gardner has supported Novak’s goals along the way. “He is so supportive and so encouraging of us bettering ourselves,” Novak says. “I’ve expressed that appreciation to him, and he always says, ‘It’s my job to support you and help you be as prepared as you can be leaving here.’ He takes that to heart—he’s just been remarkable.”
Jeffrey Gardner prioritizes setting his students up for success after UMBC. (Image by Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
“I’m extremely proud of Jessie for winning this DOE fellowship,” Gardner shares. “She has done outstanding graduate work, and her time at NREL will not only advance her thesis research, but also help develop her professional network and provide opportunities for career mentoring. Additionally, the skills she brings back and shares with the lab will expand what we are able to do at UMBC.”
Novak expects her NREL fellowship to be another turning point in her career journey.
“I have loved what NREL does for a long time, so I am really hoping to meet some people there and see what they do on the industry side of research,” Novak says. “The fellowship gives me a chance to peek into that and progress my research at the same time, which will help me figure out what I want to do moving forward.”
Having a proper balance of proteins in our cells—the right kinds and the right number, depending on the cell type—is critical for optimal health. The proteins also need to avoid “misfolding”—contorting into shapes that prevent them from doing their jobs. It’s normal for proteins to misfold here and there, and there are mechanisms in cells to destroy aberrant proteins. But sometimes these systems fail. They also worsen as we age.
Protein misfolding “underlies a lot of diseases and aging,” says Erin Green, associate professor of biological sciences. In particular, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer’s can be tied to a buildup of misfolded proteins.
In Green’s lab, she and her students are studying cellular pathways that may help maintain the balance of healthy proteins in a cell, a state called “proteostasis.” A deeper understanding of how cells protect healthy proteins and get rid of damaged ones may eventually lead to improved treatments for diseases caused by protein misfolding.
Erin Green’s research group is leaning into a new area of research on how organisms maintain a healthy balance of functional proteins. (Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17/UMBC)
Building discovery on discovery
With the NIA support, Green’s group discovered that the enzyme Set6 is important for maintaining protein balance in cells of budding yeast, a model organism. Set6 and other proteins in the same family are closely related to human enzymes in the SMYD gene family. Set6 adds methyl groups, small molecules made up of three carbon atoms and a hydrogen atom, to the amino acid lysine in proteins. These methyl groups can affect how proteins function.
“All of the machinery in yeast is very similar to in humans, and we have lots of tools for genetic and molecular manipulation in yeast,” Green explains. “You can do the same things in human cells, but it works much more rapidly and is simplified in yeast.”
After identifying the relevant enzyme, the team found molecules they believe Set6 interacts with. Now they’d like to confirm the interactions they identified, and then explore how they are controlled and their functions—all of which is unknown.
“There’s not a single published paper on Set6. Our goal is to uncover what I think will be a new function for this set of enzymes,” Green says. “Then we can apply that knowledge to investigating whether or not any of the human proteins have a similar role in human cells.”
If there’s a match with a human enzyme, then that would open the door to further work seeking to “keep proteostasis intact longer, and potentially prevent conversion into a disease state,” Green says.
Left to right: Erin Green and graduate students Maki Negesse and Winny Sun hard at work in the Green lab. (Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17/UMBC)
Students lead the way
Luke Mason, a third-year Ph.D. student in Green’s lab, will take a leading role in the new project. He’ll be joined by a new graduate student supported by the NIH grant. “Set6 is upregulated under stressful conditions,” particularly a lack of nitrogen, Mason says. “I’m trying to figure out the specific interactions of Set6 and what it does.”
He has also found a home in Green’s lab. “It’s an environment that’s very conducive to teamwork,” Mason says. “People are always willing to share knowledge, skill sets, and really anything to help each other out.” That support is particularly valuable when knowledge about the enzymes they are investigating is still so limited, he adds.
Winny Sun, a Ph.D. student in her fourth year with Green’s lab, will be less directly involved in the new project, but her previous work on the related protein Set4 helped pave the way for this new direction. She studies Set4 under oxygen deprivation—a different kind of stress. Sun developed techniques for working with proteins that are only detectable under stress, and now Mason will apply them to the Set6 enzyme work.
Winny Sun (left) and Luke Mason are two of the graduate students who have contributed substantially to the Set6 research in Erin Green’s lab. (Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17/UMBC)
Nurturing research leaders
“Erin provides a lot of opportunities to grow as a scientist,” Sun says. One Green Lab member completed an internship at biotech firm Genentech and another traveled to France to work with a collaborator, Sun says, adding that she has had opportunities to present at NIH conferences.
Oluwaseun Kintunde’25, biological sciences, also appreciates working with Green. After her initial interview, she remembers thinking, “This is someone who I want to continue to mentor me, because she is so easy to talk to.” She has also received mentorship from the graduate students in the lab. “I can talk to Winny about anything,” Kintunde shares.
Green prioritizes mentoring her students, and works directly with both her graduate and undergraduate lab members. She knows a research career, whether in academia or industry, comes with successes alongside setbacks, so, she says, “The idea is to send them off into the world with the skill set that they need to deal with all the challenges they may face.”
Uncovering new biology
As the team forges ahead, the overall goal is to develop a molecular understanding of how Set6 contributes to proteostasis, Green says. That includes confirming what molecules it interacts with and exploring what biological pathways it may control. The group’s discovery of the enzyme’s response to stress is especially intriguing.
“There’s a ton of open questions, and I feel like there’s a lot of new biology to uncover there,” Green says. Given the SET family proteins’ implications for prevalent diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration, she adds, “If we can define at the molecular level how it’s working in yeast, there’s a lot of applications moving forward for broadening the research.”
Inioluwa Oluseyi has wanted to be a neurosurgeon as long as she can remember. She didn’t anticipate how much fly husbandry would play a role in her reaching her goal. In a fall 2022 genetics class with Fernando Vonhoff, “He talked about how his lab works on flies to answer questions related to neurological issues, so that just immediately clicked for me,” says Oluseyi, a biological sciences junior.
She talked to Vonhoff, an assistant professor of biological sciences, after class about opportunities. He gave her a tour of the lab the following week, and she started working with his research group soon thereafter. In the fall and spring, Oluseyi gained skills in fly husbandry, dissection, and common testing protocols.
Vonhoff was impressed with her progress, and it was clear that by summer Oluseyi would be ready to take on her own project. Vonhoff suggested she apply for research scholarships, including the new Thomas F. Roth Research Award.
Roth joined the UMBC faculty in 1972 and helped get the fledgling university off the ground. He was instrumental in forging the culture of collegiality in the biological sciences department that continues today. Roth passed away in 2021, and his sons Kurt and Peter Roth established the research award in his memory.
Oluseyi is an international student from Nigeria, and she was happy to learn that she was eligible for the Roth award. Many scholarships are limited to U.S. citizens or permanent residents. “I was so excited,” she recalls. “Finally, I had this opportunity to apply to.”
Inioluwa Oluseyi is thrilled to be pursuing biological research with Fernando Vonhoff and plans to pursue graduate work. (Image courtesy of Oluseyi)
Pushing her thinking
Oluseyi is the first recipient of the Thomas F. Roth Research Award. She also successfully applied for a UMBC Undergraduate Research Award (URA) for the 2023 – 2024 academic year based on her work in Vonhoff’s lab. Her URA proposal builds on her Roth-funded summer research and outlines experiments to study the behavioral responses of flies to pain, including whether experiencing pain changes their preference for plain versus ethanol-laced apple juice, or if it affects their mobility or feeding and mating patterns.
This summer, she bred the flies needed for her fall experiments. She also supported testing on flies with altered genes, for a project led by Ph.D. student Claudia Gualtieri, to learn how those genes are involved in various behaviors. “Ini has always been willing to go the extra mile,” Gualtieri says. “She was eager to learn despite challenges, and she did all of this while bringing a contagious smile into the lab,” Gualtieri says.
Oluseyi’s summer experiences funded by the Roth award “made me push my thinking,” she says, and may lead to changes in the project she proposed for her URA.
“I think I want to broaden my horizons,” Oluseyi says. “My research proposal was very much behavioral, but now I want to refine it and go deeper into the gene level.”
Growing relationships, setting goals
Spending so much time in the lab over the summer also afforded opportunities to enrich her relationships with labmates and think deeply about her future. “I branched out and talked to a lot of new people and learned what they were studying,” Oluseyi says. “That helped me to improve my scientific thinking.”
Her connection with Vonhoff also shifted. “Now we’ve talked more and connected in a different way,” Oluseyi says. “Before I saw him as my supervisor, but now I see him as a mentor—someone I can come to if I need anything.”
Fernando Vonhoff (right) and Abby Cruz ’17, biological sciences, discuss their research in Vonhoff’s laboratory. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Those conversations covered the immediate work in the lab as well as Oluseyi’s longer-term goals. Originally, she was planning on medical school. Now that she knows she enjoys research and has discussed her options with Vonhoff, Gualtieri, and others in the lab, the M.D./Ph.D. path toward life as a physician-scientist is appealing.
“Inioluwa is a living example of how access to research opportunities can be a transformative experience for growing young minds,” Vonhoff says. “From the beginning, it was obvious that Ini was driven by her intellectual curiosity and passion to make meaningful contributions to our society.”
A cool connection
The Roth award made these developments possible, but her connection to Roth extends beyond receiving support for her studies. In her spring 2023 cell biology class, around the time she was applying for the Roth award, Oluseyi was learning about coated pits—structures on a cell’s surface that help it take in large molecules. She also learned who discovered these pits: Thomas Roth.
Roth made the discovery as a graduate student under Keith R. Porter at Harvard University. Later in his career, Porter became a professor at UMBC, and UMBC’s Keith R. Porter Imaging Facility bears his name.
“When I found out about that, I told everybody—‘What we’re learning about is by this person!’” Oluseyi says. “It was so cool.”
Pursuing her dreams
Oluseyi’s research has not progressed as quickly as she hoped, mostly due to unexpected flooding in UMBC’s biology building last winter, but even the challenges became a learning experience. “My biggest takeaway from this summer is that research doesn’t always go as you want it to go,” she says. “But even if it changed, I liked what I did. I got to explore other things and learn more about flies in general.”
And the experience has paved the way for future work—which will certainly be full of both challenges and successes. “The Roth family’s generosity has made it possible for me to pursue my dreams,” Oluseyi says. “I’m looking forward to starting the URA project this semester.”
