All posts by: Sarah Hansen, M.S. '15

UMBC’s Rickesh Patel determines how mantis shrimp find their way home

Mantis shrimps have earned fame for their powerful punching limbs, incredibly unusual eyes, and vivid exoskeletons. And, it turns out, they’re also really good at finding their way home. Through a series of painstaking experiments with these often-uncooperative creatures, Rickesh Patel has produced new findings on mantis shrimp navigation, published today in Current Biology.

Patel, a Ph.D. candidate in biological sciences at UMBC, found that the species of mantis shrimp he investigated relies on the sun, patterns in polarized light, and internal cues—in that order—to navigate directly back to their non-descript burrows. These straight-line returns often follow forays that meander and zig zag as the shrimp looks for a meal or a mate. The ability to get home quickly comes in handy when seeking shelter in the presence of a predator, or a perceived one, as Patel noted on his first research fieldwork expedition.

After his first year at UMBC, Patel traveled with Tom Cronin’s lab to Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef to collect mantis shrimps for study. “As soon as they notice you, they’ll turn around and zip straight to some sort of shelter,” Patel says. Like a true scientist, “That got me wondering how they go about finding their way home.”

Neogonodactylus oerstedii, the mantis shrimp species that Rickesh Patel used in his study. Photo by Rickesh Patel. — *Neogonodactylus oerstedii*, the mantis shrimp species that Rickesh Patel used in his study. Photo by Rickesh Patel.

A crucial starting point

Scientists have written a great deal on navigation in other species—primarily bees, ants, and mice—but Patel’s is the first work on navigation in mantis shrimp.

First, Patel had to find a behavior he could work with to test ideas about how mantis shrimp navigate. So he created a small arena with an artificial shrimp burrow buried in sand. He placed the shrimp in the arena, and to his delight, the mantis shrimp was happy to occupy the small section of PVC pipe. Then he placed a piece of food at a distance from the burrow. He watched as the shrimp left its burrow, meandered until it found the food, and then returned to its burrow in a fairly straight line.

From those initial observations, Patel hypothesized that mantis shrimp use a process called path integration to find their way home. In other words, they are somehow able to track both their distance and direction from their burrow.

“That was probably the most exciting part of the experiments for me, because I knew I had a really robust behavior that I could work with,” Patel says. “Everything I did really extended from that initial point.”

A mantis shrimp in its burrow — Can you find the mantis shrimp in its burrow? Photo by Rickesh Patel.

Sunshine surprise

After that first discovery, the challenging work began, to figure out what cues the animals were using to determine the path home.

Patel built eight much larger arenas, each about 1.5 meters in diameter, to run his experiments. The first question he asked was whether the shrimp were using internal or external cues to go home.

To test that, Patel created a setup that rotated the animal 180 degrees as it retrieved the food. If the shrimp was using external cues to remember its distance and direction from home, it would still head in the right direction. If it was using internal cues, based on the orientation of its own body, it would head in the opposite direction. In the first round of trials, the animals consistently headed in the exact opposite direction.

“That was really cool, but it didn’t make a lot of sense,” Patel says, “because an internal compass is going to be a lot less accurate than something that is tied to the environment.” Then it hit him: “We just happened to have a really overcast week when I did these experiments, so I waited until we had a clear day, and then every time, they went right back home.”

Rickesh Patel with the arenas he built to conduct his experiments. Photo by Natalie Roberts.

Putting together the puzzle

Patel realized that his experiment perfectly demonstrated the hierarchy of cues used by the animals. They used external cues first, but when those weren’t available, they used internal cues.

That was the beginning of a long series of creative experiments that further teased out how these animals navigate. When Patel used a mirror to trick the animals into thinking the sun was coming from the opposite direction, they went the wrong way. This indicated they use the sun as a primary cue. When it was cloudy but not totally dark, they used polarization patterns in light, which are still detectable when it’s overcast. And when the sky was completely covered, they reverted to their internal navigation system.

A varied skill set

For Patel, creating the experimental arenas—essentially, the shrimp obstacle course—was almost as fun as getting the results. “That’s something I really enjoy—building things, creating things,” he shares. Patel studied art and biology as an undergraduate at California State University, Long Beach. “I think those skills lent me a hand in designing my experiments.”

Other skills Patel needed were patience and perseverance. “The animals will only behave maybe once a day, so if you scare the animal, you’ve lost that day,” he says.

For example, one of the experiments involved putting the animals on a track that pulled them to a new position, and seeing where they headed from there. “If the track is too jerky or goes too fast, they get scared and just don’t behave,” Patel says. “So I had to design the experiment so that it was so gentle they didn’t realize they were being moved.”

New questions

All of Patel’s patience has paid off with new findings that open up an array of future questions to answer. While path integration is well-documented in other species, mantis shrimp are the first to demonstrate the technique underwater. Looking up at the sky through water is a very different view than doing so through air, so Patel is curious how the animals’ process is different from other species.

Patel is also ultimately interested in the neural basis of navigation behavior, but “before you can investigate what’s happening in the brain, you have to understand what the animal’s doing,” he says. “So that’s why I really focused on the behavior work, to figure out what the animal is doing and what kind of stimuli are appropriate to show the animal that we can use to investigate its neurology.”

So far, other work has demonstrated that a brain region called the central complex has uncanny similarities between insects and mantis shrimps. This is especially interesting considering how far apart bees and shrimp are on the tree of life. The central complex is known to contribute to navigation in bees, so Patel is intrigued to learn more about its function in mantis shrimp. Alice Chou, another graduate student in the Cronin lab, is also investigating the brain structures of mantis shrimp.

Ricky Patel, Natalie Roberts, and Alice Chou on a hike in a cypress swamp. — Ricky Patel (rear), Natalie Roberts (center), and Alice Chou (foreground) on a hike after the 2019 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting in Tampa, FL. Photo by Alice Chou.

UMBC to Europe

Other scientists in the U. S. and around the world are also interested in this work. Patel’s research, like other work in his mentor’s lab, is supported by the Air Force. They would like to know more about how animals use polarized light for navigation, on land and underwater, in hopes of imitating it in human-made systems.

Patel will have the chance to work on some of these questions as he continues his research career at Lund University in Sweden as a postdoctoral fellow, starting this summer. Right now, he’s thankful for the experience he’s had at UMBC, from that first summer through his dissertation research.

Patel says he benefited from being the mentee of Tom Cronin, professor of biological sciences and a pre-eminent scholar of mantis shrimp vision. “Tom has been great in that he’s given me complete freedom to approach any question I want to, while also being happy to offer advice when asked,” Patel says. “That combination has helped me grow into my own as a researcher.”

With this initial paper and more on the way, Patel has made the most of that freedom. His next chapter is sure to be one of further discovery.

Banner image: A peacock mantis shrimp. Photo by Bernard Dupont, shared under CC BY-SA 2.0

UMBC’s Tagide deCarvalho wins Olympus Image of the Year contest with striking portrait of a “water bear”

UMBC’s Tagide deCarvalho has won the 2019 Olympus Image of the Year Global Life Science Light Microscopy Award, Americas division. The award recognizes the “very best in life science imaging worldwide,” according to Olympus.

deCarvalho’s winning image features a tardigrade, a microscopic animal that can withstand conditions that would kill almost any other living thing. Extreme pressures and temperatures, lack of air and water, exposure to radiation—none can destroy the resilient little tardigrade, also known as a “water bear.”

Bringing tiny creatures to life

Tardigrades are mostly colorless, so deCarvalho, director of UMBC’s Keith Porter Imaging Facility (KPIF), uses fluorescent stains to bring them to life.

“I’m able to produce so much color in my images by using multiple fluorescent stains and capitalizing on the natural fluorescence of the samples,” she says. “I’m excited about this image because the fluorescent dyes I used allow you to see the tardigrade digestive tract, including the mouthparts and stomach filled with food.”

Tagide deCarvalho’s winning image of tardigrade.

The featured tardigrade came from a sample deCarvalho used in the Microscopy and Imaging Techniques class that she teaches in the KPIF. “Students remarked that observing these cute little guys was one of their favorite parts of the class,” she says.

To create the winning image from this tardigrade, deCarvalho used the new super-resolution confocal microscope in the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building.

Sharing fascinating microorganisms

deCarvalho enjoys combining her interests in art and biology to make beautiful microscope images. One of her other projects involved making 13 images of microorganisms collected on campus by students. The collection has been made into a beautiful poster titled “Campus Microcosmos.”

As for the winning tardigrade, “I knew the moment I saw this colorful specimen that it was going to be a remarkable image,” deCarvalho says. “I love sharing the fascinating things I see in the microscope with other people.”

Banner image: Tagide deCarvalho works on Campus Microcosmos in the Keith Porter Imaging Facility. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC researchers offer knowledge, innovation during the time of COVID-19

At a time when information and misinformation are coming at us from all directions, and everyone is looking for answers, UMBC researchers are stepping up. They’re working hard to answer pressing questions about COVID-19 and sharing their expertise to help the public stay healthy and make informed decisions. By taking time to share their knowledge with local, national, and global communities, UMBC researchers are fulfilling our critical mission as a public university.

Lucy Wilson, professor of emergency health systems and an infectious disease expert, has been speaking regularly with leading national news outlets. She’s offered sobering analysis of what to expect in the days and weeks ahead, as well as practical advice to help people limit coronavirus exposure, like removing rings and switching to glasses from contacts.

Photo by Carl Mikoy. Used under CC BY 2.0

As the number of cases in Washington, D.C., began to surge in mid-March, Wilson offered a reminder about the impact of social distancing. “Whatever numbers [of COVID-19 cases] we are seeing today reflect the transmission that was occurring one to two weeks ago,” Wilson told The Washington Post. “We shouldn’t be surprised by numbers continuing to increase, and we also shouldn’t discredit the effect of social distancing until we’ve given it time to take effect.”

Wilson has also talked about the importance of protecting the nation’s healthcare workers in The New York Times and the need to ramp up testing, also in the Post.

Dispelling rumors, sharing truths

Other faculty members are writing their own articles to help the public better understand issues in the news. Jeffrey Gardner, associate professor of biological sciences, explained “Why vodka won’t protect you from coronavirus, and four other things to know about hand sanitizer” in The Conversation. The article has been viewed more than 275,000 times across 44 different publishers. Almost overnight it has become the third most popular UMBC-authored article of all time in The Conversation.

Katherine Seley-Radtke, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, addressed whether the drug chloroquine is safe to use against COVID-19 in “5 questions answered about a promising, problematic and unproven use for an antimalarial drug.” The article, which calls on her seven years of research on coronaviruses and her career as a medicinal chemist, has been viewed more than 233,000 times across 49 publishers. It is UMBC’s all-time fifth-most-read Conversation article.

Katherine Seley-Radtke, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and president of the International Society for Antiviral Research.

Both Radtke’s and Gardner’s articles give readers useful and accessible information they can apply today.

Other UMBC experts are helping the public understand COVID-19’s effects on our communities, and how people can better support each other. John Fritz, associate vice president for instructional technology, has contributed to the conversation around the rapid transition from in-person to online learning. In the Baltimore Sun, he called the shift “a big step for a university like ours,” requiring flexibility and creativity. He also noted the importance of focusing on the needs of students who might not yet have access to the tools they need for distance learning.

Charissa Cheah, professor of psychology, is leading a new NSF-funded research project addressing how Chinese-American communities are experiencing discrimination related to COVID-19, and how they are coping. “The negative impact of infectious diseases on psychological health is understudied but highly significant,” Cheah says. Shimei Pan, assistant professor of information systems, will lead the study’s analysis of outbreak-related social media.

Charissa Cheah at the professional fellows luncheon 2020. — Charissa Cheah. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Alumni focused on vaccine development, testing

UMBC alumni have taken lead roles in the record-paced development of a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. Kizzmekia Corbett ’08, M16, biological sciences, has led a team working on the vaccine at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She and her teammates, including Olubukola Abiona ‘17, M25, biochemistry and molecular biology, received the genetic sequence of the virus early this year and developed a potential vaccine within two months.

They’ve since passed their findings to Darian Cash ’02, M10, chemistry, at the biotech company Moderna. Moderna is already administering phase I clinical trials with volunteers in Washington state.

On top of her research, Corbett has also been actively discussing her work with the media, including The New York Times, NPR, and Bloomberg News.

Kizzmekia Corbett (center front) with her NIAID research team. Photo courtesy Kizzmekia Corbett.

Corbett, Abiona, and Cash thank the Meyerhoff Scholars program for helping them get to where they are as researchers, and to handle the intense pressures of the moment. “The Meyerhoff program not only showed me the Ph.D. pathway, but also provided mentorship and guidance to make it achievable,” Cash says. “Now, I use the skills the program taught me, such as public speaking and critical thinking, in my role as a scientist at Moderna.”

Corbett and Abiona draw on UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski’s consistent exhortation to “Focus, focus, focus,” Corbett says. “The UMBC connection and the training we received there, for both of us, has been instrumental in how we are operating right now,” she adds.

By bringing their expertise to bear in solving the COVID-19 crisis, these researchers are helping the United States and the world move through this uncharted territory.

Banner image: Chemical reactions sketched on a fume hood in Katherine Seley-Radtke’s laboratory. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

International team led by UMBC identifies new bird species in the South Pacific

In the 1930s, famed biologist Ernst Mayr became the first to study Pacific Robins. Based on his observations of the robins and other birds on Australia and its outlying islands, he developed foundational concepts that continue to inform the study of evolution. He took copious notes on the birds’ physical characteristics, behaviors, and habitats. Always, he described the robin populations as a single species, albeit with significant variation from island to island. Ernst Mayr made lasting contributions to evolutionary biology—but like most scientists, he wasn’t right about everything.

Bold new claims

Anna Kearns is a former UMBC postdoctoral fellow now at the Smithsonian Institution’s Conservation Biology Institute. With her UMBC postdoc advisor Kevin Omland and other colleagues, she has conducted new investigations into the relationships among Pacific Robins on various islands using many of the same bird specimens Mayr himself used. The difference is, “He would have mainly been just using his eyes” to compare specimens, Kearns says. She and her colleagues have had the advantage of major advances in technology since Mayr’s time.

Kearns has built on Mayr’s work by using techniques like DNA sequencing and spectrophotometry, which quantitatively compares the hue, brightness, and saturation of feathers. She has come to a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between, say, a robin on Fiji and one on the Solomon Islands. As a result of this research, Kearns and colleagues from UMBC, the Australian National Wildlife Collection, Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History are making bold new claims about the relationships between these birds. In a 2015 paper in Conservation Genetics, Kearns demonstrated that robins living on Norfolk Island, directly east of mainland Australia, are a distinct species from the rest. A new paper in the Journal of Avian Biology published this month indicates two more unique species—one that inhabits the Solomon and Bougainville Islands, and another that lives on Fiji, Vanuatu, and Samoa.

Preserving biodiversity

The new work demonstrates just how much is still unknown about avian biodiversity. “Even in this well-studied group of birds, that’s been a textbook example since 1942, we did not really know what the units of biodiversity were,” says Omland, professor of biological sciences at UMBC, and senior author on the new paper.

Understanding those “units of biodiversity” is critical for conservation. When all the Pacific Robins and mainland Australia’s Scarlet Robin were considered a single species (a single unit of biodiversity), the loss of the birds on one or two islands would be unfortunate, but not necessarily very impactful. If those birds were actually the only remaining members of a unique species, however, the same loss becomes catastrophic. “What Anna’s work is showing is that the bird populations on these islands have very distinctive traits,” Omland adds, “so just knowing what the biodiversity is that we want to conserve is super important.”

Unpredictable patterns

The team’s work indicates that all the Pacific Robins are descended from an ancestral Australian population where males were brightly-colored and females were dull-colored. But as small groups of robins colonized the outlying islands, the population on each island took its own evolutionary path. Today, some island groups still maintain the bright male and dull female pattern, but on other islands both sexes have evolved bright coloration. On other islands, both sexes have evolved dull coloration.

“When you look at the genetics, you find two distinct lineages” leading from the common ancestor to all the island populations that exist today, Kearns says. “So that means these patterns have evolved independently multiple times.” Kearns and Omland think the changes have more to do with random forces than evolutionary adaptation. “If we flipped two coins, this is about what we’d expect,” Omland says. For example, the pattern an island’s population ended up with could depend on the color of the individuals that happened to get blown onto that island initially. Also, in a very small population, the random way genes are redistributed from generation to generation can have a significant impact—as much of an effect or more than natural selection.

Detective work

Kearns and Omland are both excited to have the opportunity to suggest names for the new species they’ve identified. Kearns suggests “Mayr’s Robin” for the Fiji/Vanuatu/Samoa population, in honor of Ernst Mayr’s pioneering study of these birds.

But their contribution to ornithology is more than a name. “Because these birds are all on very small isolated islands, and Pacific birds are often on many, many, many isolated islands, collecting is very difficult. So there haven’t actually been that many comprehensive studies,” Kearns says. Revealing the complexity of the relationships among these robins adds much-needed information to the field. It also raises the prospect that other birds—especially those on islands—might have undergone similar, as-yet-unstudied, evolutionary processes. The work is a unique blend of past and present. “You really wouldn’t be able to do this study without using these old collections,” Kearns says. At the same time, discovering the new species also wouldn’t have been possible without modern techniques. “It’s kind of like detective work in a way,” Kearns says. “I feel like there’s just so much more we need to know about it. But we feel like we have made a big step forward.” Banner image: Kevin Omland (rear) goes birdwatching at UMBC’s Library Pond with a group of his students. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC Alumnae Racing to Develop Coronavirus Vaccine

Kizzmekia Corbett ’08, M16, biological sciences, says it feels like she’s “living in a constant adrenaline rush.” Maybe that’s because she and her team at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have been working around the clock for weeks. They’re racing to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus faster than it can race across the globe.

“To be living in this moment where I have the opportunity to work on something that has imminent global importance…it’s just a surreal moment for me,” Corbett says.

Despite it feeling surreal, the advances Corbett and her team are making are very real, and they’re setting records. “We are making better progress than I could have ever hoped for,” she says. After three months of studies in test tubes and in animals, the vaccine her team developed is about to enter a phase I clinical trial, a crucial hurdle on the way to FDA approval.

“Focus, focus, focus”

Corbett says her experience as a Meyerhoff Scholar at UMBC helped prepare her and another core team member, post-baccalaureate researcher Olubukola Abiona ‘17, M25, biochemistry and molecular biology, for a moment like this. “Discipline is one of the biggest things that Meyerhoff taught us,” Corbett says. “And it matters—a lot—in these instances of being pulled in multiple directions and really trying to understand what the priorities are.”

Corbett, who came to UMBC from North Carolina, and Abiona, who attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County, also draw on UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski’s consistent exhortation to “Focus, focus, focus,” Corbett says. “The UMBC connection and the training we received there, for both of us, has been instrumental in how we are operating right now,” she adds.

Kizzmekia Corbett, Ph.D. ’08, M16 (@UMBCBiology) talks about her work at @NIH to develop a #coronavirus vaccine. https://t.co/LMt4xEHe1U

— UMBC (@UMBC) February 24, 2020

A couple of years ago, Corbett and Abiona were the only members of their team. It’s since grown, but their relationship remains special. “Essentially we started out being the team alone, and as a result, there is this level of trust and understanding that we have with each other,” Corbett says. “It’s extremely rewarding to watch someone exponentially grow into a scientist in the course of a few years,” Corbett reflects. “I think next to getting data, mentoring young scientists is the most exciting and rewarding part of what I do here.”

As an African American woman in STEM, Corbett says she has also experienced people thinking she’s only there because of diversity initiatives. “That’s been a cloud around my movement in science,” she shares. So, she says, “showing up, particularly in a moment like this, and setting a standard about what people from different backgrounds can contribute” is just as important as mentoring the next generation of scientists.

“Hopefully we will open people’s eyes to the credibility of people who look like us as real scientists.”

Setting the standard

While that message is always in the back of their minds, right now, Corbett and Abiona are deeply focused on the work at hand. “For me, I’m very interested in looking ahead to the kinds of data we’ll get from human trials,” Corbett says. “Yes, we have tons of data that will support this vaccine being a fruitful one and a protective one, but it’s always just a hypothesis until we get some real human data.”

Read about Corbett and Abiona’s work in the New York Times.

If the phase I trials are successful, that will be a huge step toward an FDA-approved vaccine for the coronavirus—and also set a new benchmark for future disease outbreaks.

“I’m really excited about fulfilling this proof-of-concept for pandemic preparedness, where we can literally go from receiving the genetic sequence of a virus all the way through to a vaccine clinical trial in less than three months,” Corbett says. “I think that’s somewhat of an unprecedented standard to set, and I’m looking forward to helping to standardize it. I hope that it will get even shorter.”

UMBC’s Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg recognized for 40-year career advancing cancer immunotherapy

After 41 years at UMBC, Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg, professor emerita of biological sciences, retired in August 2018 and moved to Utah to enjoy the mountains with her spouse. But she couldn’t stay away from her research and mentoring for long. “I just can’t quit it,” Rosenberg says. “I realized I really did not want to stop.”

That attitude is emblematic of Rosenberg’s dedication to the field of cancer immunotherapy—using the human immune system to fight cancer. It also reflects her commitment to the next generation of researchers. Now, she has been recognized by the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) as a Distinguished Fellow, a very small, international group of scientists known for their deep and lasting contributions to immunology.

“This honor correctly recognizes Sue as a leader in the field of cancer immunotherapy and her early insight that the immune system could be made to target cancer cells more effectively,” says Philip Farabaugh, professor and chair of biological sciences. “It was exciting for me, over the last 20 years, to watch how her lab homed in on this target.”

Part of the reason for Rosenberg’s unabated enthusiasm is that “right now the whole cancer immunotherapy field is at such an exciting stage,” she says. Rosenberg started on this work in the 1970s, and at that time, “nobody thought that the immune system would have any efficacy against cancer.” But in just the last 10 years, a lot has changed. Major advances have led to immunotherapies being used successfully with real patients.

“My generation of researchers in cancer immunology really set the groundwork to enable the type of advances that we’re seeing now in the clinic,” Rosenberg says. “For the people who’ve been in this field a long time, it’s very rewarding.”

Students at the center

For Rosenberg, the success of her research and the success of her students have always been inextricably linked. “The students are the ones that made the success possible,” she says.

Lucas Horn, Ph.D. ’17, biological sciences, was one of Rosenberg’s final UMBC graduates and is currently a postdoc at the National Cancer Institute. “The lab environment really was a synergistic blend of ideas from all the students and Sue,” he reflects. “The open flow of ideas was often crucial in solving complicated problems, but also helped the students to develop the confidence to suggest ideas and control the direction of their projects.”

Rosenberg equally valued all members of the lab. “I always felt like an important part of the team,” says Lydia Grmai ’11, M19, biochemistry and molecular biology, who participated in undergraduate research with Rosenberg. Rosenberg’s high expectations of her students “gave us the chance to rise to the occasion,” Grmai adds. “She taught me how to really take ownership of a research project, which was instrumental as I began to envision and plan my career as an independent scientist.”

Grmai gives her experience in Rosenberg’s lab, and especially the frequent opportunity to travel to conferences, credit for her rapid advancement through graduate school at the New York University School of Medicine and to her current role as a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University.

“Science communication and professional networking remain two of the most valuable skills in my research career,” Grmai says, “and getting to hone these skills as an undergrad accelerated my growth that much more once I got to grad school.”

The ideal combination

Rosenberg is grateful for the UMBC environment that emphasizes both research and education. That’s why she made UMBC her home for her 41-year professorial career. Many immunology labs are located in medical schools, research institutes, or hospitals , outside of undergraduate academic settings, but Rosenberg knew that connecting with undergraduate students would be a significant part of her career.

“It was really a combination of the quality and enthusiasm of the students, and being in an environment where I could both be involved with student activities and do research,” she reflects. “The undergrads drive the intellectual atmosphere of the lab as much as the grads and the postdocs do. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have had undergraduates in my lab who have just been dynamite people.”

Despite her long-term commitment to her field, and significant contributions to immunotherapy research, Rosenberg remains humble. “I was shocked by the company I’m keeping as a Distinguished Fellow,” she says. “I think UMBC is in very good company. It feels good to be right up there with some of the other major players.”

Rosenberg held the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair for Biological Sciences at UMBC for many years, which provided significant financial support that allowed her to send students to conferences and otherwise enhance the lab’s impact. That experience, and the generally supportive environment at UMBC, are top of mind for Rosenberg. “I never would have gotten this award if it hadn’t been for UMBC,” she says. “That’s absolutely true—providing the resources, the support, the students…I’m very grateful to UMBC.”

Driven by her endless curiosity and inspired by her time at UMBC, Rosenberg is involved in research, writing grants, and graduate education at the University of Utah School of Medicine. With the next big breakthrough in cancer immunotherapy right around the corner, she says, “I just can’t bring myself to quit.”

Banner image: Sue Rosenberg opens the super-cold sample storage. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Teaching among trees: Field research project grows UMBC partnership with community colleges

When Caitlin Beckjord stepped onto campus for the first time as a UMBC student in fall 2019, she felt energized and prepared to succeed, thanks to a unique, new summer program on urban forestry.

Earlier in the summer, six Howard Community College (HCC) students, including Beckjord, participated in the Baltimore Forest Patches Summer Research Collaboration. This unique pilot project between UMBC and HCC is designed to expand research opportunities for community college students, provide important data on urban forests, and ease students’ transition to UMBC. It also serves to build and strengthen the kinds of relationships that were forged between UMBC and HCC faculty during the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative (t-STEM).

During the provost-funded pilot, HCC students enrolled in research courses instructed by HCC faculty Will Gretes and Cheryl Campo. Then they participated in fieldwork under the mentorship of UMBC faculty and graduate students. Once they learned about research design and forest ecology in the classroom, they headed outdoors to work in patches of green space across Baltimore City. During their fieldwork, they participated in a practicum course through UMBC’s Shriver Center to help them reflect on their experience.

The students are encouraged to return to this forest project for multiple summers, developing more expertise and taking more responsibility each time. Those who transfer to UMBC come in already engaged in a research project and connected to members of the campus community.

“It’s a great example of the relationships we’re building with the community colleges,” says Sarah Jewett, director of transfer innovations in research and practice. “What I love about this program is that it utilizes curricular infrastructure that’s in place at the community colleges, and networks and research expertise here at UMBC. We’re really drawing on the assets at both institutions to make this work.” In particular, Howard Community College’s Dean of Science, Engineering, and Technology Patti Turner was an instrumental partner who made the pilot possible and continues to collaborate with UMBC on a variety of projects.

At home in the forest

The experience opened students’ eyes to the life of an urban forest. After learning about what species they might find, the students took inventory of the plants present and their abundance in forest patches across Baltimore City. Carol Frimpong, who is studying life science and computer science at HCC, became particularly interested in fungi and bacteria along the way.

“This introduced me to environmental microbiology,” she says. “I didn’t realize there was a subfield of microbiology that focuses on the environment. So I hope to go into more of that.”

For Laura Wortman, the experience has changed her relationship with nature. “I feel like I know more about the forest,” she shares, “and I feel more at home there now that I know different trees and groundcovers.”

Matthew Baker, professor of geography and environmental systems (GES) at UMBC, mentored the students in the program. “Hearing these stories is the best part of my job,” he says. “Most professors get involved in the work that they do because they want to see others be inspired the way they were. It’s really rewarding to listen to students who have found something they enjoyed in this experience.”

Connections across campuses

The program created opportunities for faculty, graduate student mentors, and participating students to build meaningful relationships with one another. For Beatriz Shobe, who is in the GES Ph.D. program at UMBC, the program confirmed her interest in teaching and fieldwork. “I found that teaching in an interactive, hands-on way is a good skill to have that can be beneficial for both traditional classroom teaching as well as community outreach and engagement,” Shobe says.

Shobe’s teaching resonated with Wortman. “Just hearing Beatriz talk about her research was really interesting, because I’d never talked to someone in a casual context before about their research,” Wortman says. “She told us what had gone wrong with her research, and how that changed the entire trajectory of the project.” She explains, “I learned all this stuff that you wouldn’t hear from someone just presenting on their paper, and that was really enlightening.”

As a result of participating in the program, Wortman is now interested in transferring to UMBC to pursue a combined bachelor’s/master’s degree in GES.

Caitlin Beckjord ‘22, geography and environmental systems, already knew she was passionate about research when she joined the program, and it helped her make connections at UMBC. “Meeting with Dr. Baker and Dr. Jewett allowed me to ask questions about UMBC’s classes and opportunities, and get more in-depth campus tours where I was introduced to several other UMBC professors, students, and advisors,” she shares.

This fall, Beckjord transferred to UMBC, and the experience continues to offer benefits. “Learning how to identify trees and ground cover and work with soils has put me at an advantage in my forest ecology class at UMBC,” she says. Beckjord also has a built-in community on campus; she connects with students and faculty she met during the program on a daily basis.

Commitment to conservation

In addition impacting the students and educators involved, this program also contributes to scientists’ understanding of urban forests, through the data the students collect.

Baker has been working for the last seven years “to study urban forest patches and understand their composition, their structure, how they’re managed, and how these factors will affect their future,” he says. “We work to provide information to the public through Baltimore Green Space so that they can inform forest stewards and local community members,” such as private landowners whose property includes forest patches. “At the same time, we’ve been asking questions about urban forest patches in general, and developing techniques for studying them and mapping them in concert with the USDA Forest Service.”

This work is important because urban green space and cohabitation of humans with wildlife are critical to modern environmental conservation. Sometimes the research manifests as big findings about the makeup of urban woods and how to preserve or restore them. At other times, the results are more personal.

As they were gathering important scientific data and learning about research methods, the students in this program also enjoyed the chance to connect with nature in their daily lives. Growing evidence suggests this kind of experience is critical for our physical and mental health, and for growing the next generation’s commitment to conservation.

“I often go on walks, and there is this one beautiful tree I always sit under, but I never knew what it was before this summer,” Frimpong shares. “But then I looked at it recently and I realized it was a red maple.” She’s also learned the names of local birds and, with her new interest in fungi, mushrooms. Growing thoughtful, she shares, “It’s good to know them by name.”

Banner image: A scene from Patapsco Valley State Park in Baltimore County. Photo by Matthew Beziat, used under C C BY-NC 2.0.

All other photos are courtesy of Caitlin Beckjord.

UMBC researchers find many countries will not meet ambitious forest restoration goals without support

The U.N. and other international organizations agree that forest restoration is a critical part of the collective global effort to combat climate change, reduce extinctions, and improve the lives of people in rural communities. Dozens of nations have pledged to restore 230 million hectares of forest so far as part of projects such as the Bonn Challenge and REDD+. The Bonn Challenge goal is to restore 350 million hectares by 2030.

The leaders behind this work agree that ambitious goals are important if humanity is going to avoid the worst effects of climate change. However, a new paper in Conservation Letters has generated the first comprehensive data set that describes how countries are doing so far—and it’s not looking good. The paper looked at 62 countries that have made restoration commitments, and reports that 54 percent of the Bonn Challenge’s goal area for 2020 has not yet been pledged. It then digs into the data to understand why some countries are doing better than others, and what could help those that are struggling.

Maggie Holland in the Amazon region of Ecuador, where she have conducted forest conservation research for the past decade. Photo courtesy Maggie Holland.

Aiming high

The authors found that most of the gap between goals and reality exists in the global South, a group of nations generally south of the equator previously referred to as developing countries. These are also the countries that pledged to restore the greatest amounts of land, the paper reports. For example, Rwanda pledged to restore 81 percent of its total land area, and Burundi pledged 79 percent. One-third of the countries pledged greater than 10 percent of their total area, which would require significant shifts in land use and food production.

The authors hypothesize multiple reasons for the large pledges from global South countries. “It could be that global South countries are more aware of the risks they face from climate change, and are therefore more interested in doing something about it,” says Matthew Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC and lead author on the paper. “They also generally have lower labor and land costs, making it easier for them to do restoration.” On the other hand, they could be trying to access more dollars from international donor organizations to reach these aspirational goals, or could have underestimated the challenges of restoration at that scale.

Maggie Holland in the Amazon region of Ecuador, where she has conducted forest conservation research for the past decade. Photo courtesy Maggie Holland.

The paper also attempted to predict which countries would have the greatest difficulty meeting their goals based on a dozen factors the team analyzed, such as population growth, government corruption, and previous deforestation rates.

Justin Drew ’20, computer science, and a co-author on the paper, compiled the data for all 12 factors by writing computer code to pull quantitative information from public international databases. He also scoured the internet for information on individual countries’ progress. Drew collected reliable information on the 12 factors for all 62 countries making restoration commitments, and progress information for 12 of them. “When we asked how they did based on these twelve factors, we found they did about as well as we expected,” says Fagan. Countries with the lowest combined score considering all the implementation factors tended to be farther from meeting their goals.

Local engagement

But all is not lost. “We’ve identified countries that need help” to achieve their ambitious environmental goals, says Fagan. “It’s clear that there’s a whole set of countries that are facing headwinds, and if we expect them to be able to accomplish their goals, then the international community needs to support them.”

Increased financial aid is important, but so are other means of support. That might mean providing technical tools and training to help governments and local communities make informed decisions about restoration efforts. Above all, it means listening to local communities’ needs and working in collaboration to create solutions.

“Restoration efforts have a better chance of achieving sustained improvement when local communities have a voice early in the process, feel empowered to participate actively throughout, and can experience direct and long-term benefits from these efforts,” says Maggie Holland. She is an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC and a co-author on the paper.

Maggie Holland (center, rear) interviews a group of farmers in the Amazon about the forests on their properties. Photo courtesy Maggie Holland.

In one location, the best solution might be planting trees on agricultural land, such as shade-grown coffee. Other places, it might be tree plantations, reclaiming agricultural land for forest, or thinning existing forests to prevent fires.

“Different efforts will yield different benefits for mitigating climate change, for helping people, for restoring ecosystem health and conserving biodiversity,” Holland says. She suggests that more social science research on the results of different strategies is needed to deploy them most effectively.

There are other, less direct, efforts that can also have a huge effect on forests. “Even if countries haven’t necessarily made big strides in restoration, in some cases they’re making big policy changes that will hopefully result in restoration in the longer term,” Fagan says. For example, bringing electricity to more rural communities reduces the need for fuel wood and charcoal. That reduces forest loss while also improving human health by removing smoke from homes.

Investing in the foundation

Ultimately, the researchers argue that while it may sound good to pledge huge areas of land, that might not be the best strategy to reach the goals of combating climate change, improving people’s lives, and protecting species from extinction. If countries feel pressured to meet their ambitious goals, they might employ the easiest restoration strategies, such as thinning forest. The U.S., for example, has already met its goal of 15 million hectares, and the vast majority of it was through this method. That may have some beneficial effects, like decreasing the chance of forest fires, but it’s not the same as planting trees on agricultural land or shifting land use patterns.

Maggie Holland runs a focus group with farmers in Ecuador. Photo courtesy Maggie Holland.

In addition to supporting countries in need, “I think the wealthier countries need to get on this bandwagon and do more themselves as well,” Fagan says. Ambitious, but realistic, and locally appropriate goals are the best way to succeed, Fagan and Holland agree.

Overall, Fagan is “guardedly optimistic.” “There’s a lot of potential and a lot of interesting policy work going on. I believe, though, that there’s a time to build your castles in the air, and now it’s time to put foundations under them. We’re underinvesting in the foundations, and we need to spend more international aid money on helping countries figure out how to meet these commitments,” he says.

“I’d like to hope that this article helps generate more support for that kind of work,” Fagan shares, “because I think it is possible to make this kind of change.”

Banner image: Maggie Holland (far left) and Lee Blaney (second from right), associate professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, about to plant trees at a coffee plantation in Costa Rica with a group of UMBC students. Photo courtesy Maggie Holland.

UMBC’s Pelton and Daniel are developing light-driven chips to enable super-fast computing

By combining their expertise in physics and chemistry, Matt Pelton and Marie-Christine Daniel are working toward the next big leap in computing. Both are engaged in photonics research, which is “the idea of using light—photons—to do information processing instead of using electrons like you do in electronics,” explains Pelton, associate professor of physics at UMBC.

Using light rather than electrons, as in fiber-optic telecommunication cables, is “faster, and you can send a lot more information,” Pelton says. However, no computer today runs exclusively on photons. “The huge pipeline of data coming down optical fibers all has to be converted to an electrical signal and then distributed to all the different processors in the computer. That’s the big power and time bottleneck,” Pelton says.

“If you could do as much of the function of the computer chip as possible using photons instead of electrons, then you would be able to use less power and do things more efficiently,” he says. “So there’s a big push to try to bring photonics down to the single chip scale.”

That’s where this interdisciplinary duo comes in. They’re working to develop a unique combination of existing chemical structures to enable photon-driven computer functionality even in the computer’s most fundamental building blocks. A new three-year grant from the National Science Foundation will enable Pelton and Daniel to make faster progress on their project and involve more students.

A new kind of switch

Daniel and Pelton’s novel technique depends on being able to reliably create very specific chemical structures. By binding two types of known structures in a particular arrangement, they can create a kind of on-off switch.

At its most basic level, a computer is just a lot of these switches. Whether they use ones and zeros, light and dark, or something else, the pattern of the switches encodes information. The new kind of switch that Daniel and Pelton are devising is different from what computers use now, because it relies on photons rather than electrons.

The light-driven structures Daniel and Pelton are working to build are made of quantum dots and metal nanoparticles. Quantum dots are tiny crystals only about 20 atoms in diameter. They’re made of semiconductor elements, similar to the silicon that powers electronics, and they can be designed to emit certain wavelengths (colors) of light. They’re even used in some televisions. The metal nanoparticles are larger, usually a few thousand atoms in diameter. They also appear as different colors based on the light they reflect and absorb, but they don’t emit their own light.

Through computer simulations, Pelton and Ph.D. student Vijin Veetil have demonstrated that by binding two rod-shaped nanoparticles (“nanorods”) and a quantum dot together in a specific way, their interaction can produce a structure that allows light to pass straight through both the dot and particle, when it would normally be scattered. Transmitting the light creates a transparent state rather than an opaque one. That switch from transparent to opaque, which can be controlled by an external beam of light, is exactly the kind of switch that could encode information in a computer.

Getting it just right

For this to work, Pelton and Daniel need to successfully construct molecular structures consisting of a single quantum dot stuck between two nanorods.

“It needs to be that configuration,” says Daniel, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who is bringing on chemistry Ph.D. student Chanda Lowrance to help her tackle this project. “The quantum dot alone, or the nanoparticles alone, will not induce the transparency effect.”

And just any quantum dot bound to any nanoparticle is not sufficient. They need to have specific sizes and shapes, so that the wavelength of light that the quantum dot absorbs, and the wavelength that the nanoparticle scatters, are very similar, Daniel explains. Then, “they can interact very efficiently and create that transparency.”

“That’s essentially the goal of this project—to take these structures from a cartoon to something we can actually make,” Daniel says. “And making this is not easy.” If Daniel, Pelton, and their students can do it, though, they’ll be setting the stage for a revolution in computing.

From random to reliable

Previous research has shown that it’s fairly straightforward to get the nanoparticles and dots to clump together in groups. “But we need to get just one of them. And we don’t want it to bind just anywhere. It has to be right there,” Pelton says. “That’s the big challenge.”

A procedure that allows metal particles and dots to bind together randomly does result in a very small number of structures in the desired configuration. When scientists tested those lucky few for the transparency effect, they matched results predicted by Pelton’s simulations, proving this technique can work.

Now, the challenge is producing a larger number of these structures. “When we’re synthesizing these things, we don’t want just a few of them to be the right structure; we want the majority of them to be the right structure,” Pelton says. “We need the ability to make them in much larger numbers, in order to be able to optimize them.”

This is what the team is working on now. Their goal is that “by the end of the project we’ll have shown that we can make these things reliably, in larger numbers, and that we can use them as an on-off switch,” Pelton says.

The power of teamwork

“I didn’t know if this was going to work when we started,” Pelton says. But considering their progress so far, and the impact this new funding will have on accelerating their work, today Daniel and Pelton are optimistic about the future of light-based computing and other applications for their joint research.

While the work poses significant challenges, “of course it’s a big opportunity, too,” Pelton says. In addition to the duo’s goal to create light-driven computer chips, there could be other scenarios where it would be beneficial to combine nanoparticles. Different configurations could generate new and useful physical and chemical properties for all kinds of applications.

Daniel and Pelton recognize the importance of their collaboration for the success of this work. Pelton’s theoretical and simulation expertise as well as his ability to do single-particle measurements, and Daniel’s in-depth knowledge of the chemistry and ability to find a way to make specific structures, have all been critical.

“This is not something that any physicist or chemist could do alone,” Daniel reflects. “It takes both.”

Banner image: Matt Pelton (right) and Haixu Leng, Ph.D. ’19, physics. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Preparing for impact: Four new UMBC grads share what drives their research

It’s 3 a.m., and Cindy Chelius rolls out of the pull-out couch in the grad student lounge. Time to check on her fungi. For this experiment, measurements must be taken every four hours for forty hours. Thankfully, the undergraduates she mentors took the day shift. Tonight, as the lead on the project, it’s her turn.
“I think it just makes you feel like you really earned it when those results come back,” Chelius says. She has earned it—on December 18, she’ll walk across the stage to receive her Ph.D. in chemical and biochemical engineering from UMBC. The signaling pathways of fungi might seem like niche research, but fungal species are commonly used in industry as tiny, living factories. They can produce substances found in an array of products, including medications.

Cindy Chelius, Ph.D. ’19 (third from left) with her advisor Mark Marten (far left) and the rest of their lab group. Photo courtesy Cindy Chelius.

After graduation, Chelius will take her skills to Bristol-Myers Squibb’s upstream processing development team in Devens, Massachusetts. She’ll help the company improve the ways they use organisms to produce therapeutic compounds.
Chelius’s UMBC experience has prepared her well for a research career in ways that go beyond a successful dissertation. Encouraged by her Ph.D. advisor, Mark Marten, professor and chair of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, Chelius learned how to use bioreactors. “These industry positions really like someone coming in with that working knowledge,” she explains.

Chelius also took advantage of the Biochemical Regulatory Certification program at UMBC, organized by Tony Moreira, vice provost for academic affairs. It’s a four-course series including training in FDA regulations and good manufacturing practices, local lab tours, and more. “I think it really helped with my job interviews, because I was able to understand the acronyms they were talking about and reference the literature on these topics,” Chelius says.
She’s also expanded her cultural awareness by being active in a dynamic, diverse department with students and faculty from across the U.S. and the world. By participating in department intramural basketball and soccer teams and other departmental social events, “I definitely learned a lot more about different cultures and opinions,” Chelius shares. “Everyone comes from different places here, and it’s been awesome.”

Cindy Chelius, Ph.D. ’19, fourth from left, with her intramural soccer team. The team includes members of the labs of Mark Marten and Lee Blaney (third from right). Photo courtesy Cindy Chelius.

Freedom to explore

Miranda Marvel, who is graduating with her Ph.D. in marine and estuarine environmental sciences, studied zebrafish development at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology with Yonathan Zohar, professor and chair of marine biotechnology. Her research focused on the role of a fish hormone, revealing that it plays important roles in feeding and reproduction. Understanding both processes is critical to optimize the aquaculture industry. After she defended her thesis in August, Marvel assumed a new post as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where she continues to study zebrafish development.
“Yoni encourages independent thinking and gave me the freedom to come up with my own experiments and be the leader on their execution,” Marvel says. “Ten-Tsao Wong was also always willing to drop whatever he was doing to help me.” Wong was a postdoctoral fellow when Marvel joined the lab, but later transitioned to assistant professor of marine biotechnology at UMBC.

Miranda Marvel, Ph.D. '19, center in front row, with the IMET REEF program participants. Photo courtesy Miranda Marvel. — Miranda Marvel, Ph.D. ’19, center in front row, with the IMET REEF program participants. Photo courtesy Miranda Marvel.

Like Chelius, Marvel also took advantage of opportunities to receive training beyond her research. She participated in the Ratcliffe Environmental Entrepreneurship Fellowship (REEF), which offers training in business skills. “The skills you learn—like networking, public speaking, and making an elevator pitch—can be applied anywhere,” Marvel says.
As a result of the program, Marvel developed SensorFish, a line of fish bred to change color when they first experience common stressors, and took third place in UMBC’s 2018 Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition. The color change allows people to take action quickly to keep their fish healthy, even before symptoms may be apparent.

Miranda Marvel, Ph.D. '19, gives her pitch at the 2018 Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition. Photo courtesy Miranda Marvel. — Miranda Marvel, Ph.D. ’19, gives her pitch at the 2018 Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition. Photo courtesy Miranda Marvel.

When she arrived at UMBC, Marvel says she was quiet and shy. But the REEF training and supportive university environment changed that. “Seeing how helpful and friendly everyone was during my time here really helped me come out of my shell,” she says. “I attribute that to the collaborative nature of UMBC and IMET, and especially the researchers’ willingness to support young scientists.”

Creating positive change

Naqiya Ghulamali ‘19, psychology, has also been transformed by her research and service-learning experiences, which she sees as going hand in hand. Her research with Bronwyn Hunter, assistant professor of psychology at UMBC, focused on factors that influence the experience of re-entering society after incarceration. In an internship at the International Rescue Committee, Ghulamali says, “I got to work directly with clients on their paths to self-sufficiency during resettlement.”
As a result of these experiences, Ghulamali shares, “I am pursuing careers where I can apply my skills and knowledge to create positive social change.”

Naqiya Ghulamali '19, psychology, during her internship at the International Rescue Committee. Photo courtesy Naqiya Ghulamali. — Naqiya Ghulamali ’19, psychology, during her internship at the International Rescue Committee. Photo courtesy Naqiya Ghulamali.

UMBC mentors like Hunter and Ghulamali’s academic advisor Nkiru Nnawulezi, assistant professor of psychology, have influenced her future path. “They supported me and encouraged me to pursue my goals,” Ghulamali says. “Dr. Hunter and the graduate students in the lab helped me with projects and conference presentations, and generally created an environment conducive to critical thinking.”
Leaders of UMBC’s Alternative Spring Break and the STRiVE program, a five-day leadership retreat organized by the UMBC Center for Democracy and Civic Life, also shaped Ghulamali’s UMBC experience, and her future. “I’m grateful for how they’ve contributed to my sense of my own civic agency,” she shares.
As a member of the Honors College and a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar, Ghulamali not only met mentors and established her career path, but also forged friendships “with others deeply invested in public service,” she says.

The power of an open door

Ryan Oliver ’19, biological sciences, also met life-changing mentors at UMBC. After struggling with addiction for almost four years at a college in another state, he took a year off to begin recovery with family in Maryland. When he was ready to return to college, Oliver chose UMBC because of what he had heard about the rigorous academics and supportive atmosphere.
It was a good choice for Oliver. This December, he will graduate with a 4.0 GPA. Next fall, he’s headed to his first-choice graduate school, Hebrew University in Israel.
Oliver’s master’s degree will focus on neuroscience using bees as a model organism. This builds on research he completed with UMBC’s Fernando Vonhoff, assistant professor of biological sciences, for which he received an Undergraduate Research Award. That project explored environmental factors that affect how fruit flies respond to alcohol exposure, and whether or not they become addicted.

Ryan Oliver '19, rear, green shirt, with members of Fernando Vonhoff's lab. The lab members include undergraduates, graduate students, and a high school student. The UMBC students affiliate with programs such as STEM BUILD, LSAMP, MARC U*STAR, and the Meyerhoff Scholars. Photo courtesy Fernando Vonhoff. — Ryan Oliver ’19, rear, green shirt, with members of Fernando Vonhoff’s lab. The lab members include undergraduates, graduate students, and a high school student. The UMBC students affiliate with programs such as STEM BUILD, LSAMP, MARC U*STAR, and the Meyerhoff Scholars. Photo courtesy Fernando Vonhoff.

The connection between his personal experience and academic research is no accident. “I would say my history has opened the door into neuroscience for me,” Oliver shares.
When he came to UMBC, Oliver knew he wanted to pursue undergraduate research, so he started knocking on doors. The first open office door he came to belonged to Vonhoff, who welcomed him in for an impromptu meeting. “By the end of that first conversation, he told me I could develop any project I wanted, and he would support me,” Oliver recalls. “I think him letting me do that is what really sparked so much enthusiasm and dedication on my part.”
During his time at UMBC, Oliver traveled to University of Chicago to present his research at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. Oliver is drafting the manuscript for a scientific paper on which he will be the first author.

Ryan Oliver presents his research at UMBC's Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day 2019. Photo courtesy of Fernando Vonhoff. — Ryan Oliver presents his research at UMBC’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day 2019. Photo courtesy of Fernando Vonhoff.

Regarding his identity as a person in recovery, “I’ve been able to create more opportunities by being open about it than if I had hidden it. And I don’t think most people realize that,” Oliver says. “I think it needs to be destigmatized, and hopefully I’m doing my part in that by being as open as I can so that other people can get help, be embraced, and be given a chance in the real world.”
“My message would be that UMBC is a place that encourages and enables success through connection with and discovery of a real, personal identity,” he shares.
As they move beyond UMBC, Chelius, Marvel, Ghulamali, and Oliver all remain driven to contribute to positive change in their communities through their research. They also hope to carry forward the support they found at UMBC as mentors to a future generation of researchers.

Banner image: Ryan Oliver, second from left in back, with Fernando Vonhoff, third from right in back, and members of the lab in summer 2019. Oliver served as a mentor to members of the UMBC STEM BUILD program. Photo courtesy Fernando Vonhoff.

UMBC’s Lisa Kelly receives NSF grant to develop a safer, greener chemical production method

At some point in its development, every drug, high-tech piece of clothing, and synthetic building material was touched by a chemist. However, getting the atoms attached to each other in just the right way to treat infection, keep you dry in the woods, or construct your home often requires extreme measures. Harsh chemicals and dangerous byproducts from those manufacturing processes have the potential to cause environmental damage and impact the health of lab workers.

Lisa Kelly, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC, is developing techniques to make some of those same chemicals in much safer ways. The National Science Foundation has funded her with $450,000 for three years to further this work, which also has biomedical applications.

“The approach that we propose will induce chemical reactions that would otherwise need a lot of harsh reagents and organic solvents, and just a lot of nasty stuff,” Kelly says. “This is a greener route.”

Radical reactions

The technique Kelly is using can be very helpful for inducing the formation of strong chemical bonds between two molecules, when their interaction would typically be much weaker.

The first step is to chemically attach a special compound to one of the two molecules you want to connect. Shining UV light on the compound causes it to release a single atom with a negative electric charge, called a radical. Because it is charged, that atom will react strongly with molecules around it. In this case, the radical initiates the formation of a strong bond between the two molecules you want to connect. The only byproduct of the reaction is carbon dioxide, and it can be carried out in water, so it’s much safer than existing methods.

This process can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, you can induce strong bonds between a drug and its target to better understand the drug’s mechanism. This essentially freezes their fleeting interaction in time, giving a scientist the chance to observe it.

“It’s a photochemical tool to be able to visualize where the drug actually bound,” Kelly says. “That lets you say, ‘This drug is so powerful because it binds here and this one is less powerful because it binds here.’” That kind of insight could lead to more effective pharmaceuticals.

This technique can also be used in a more general biological context, to better understand how an enzyme and its target protein interact. And it could increase the efficiency and safety of generating polymers—long chains of molecules—used in various industries, like adhesives or flame retardants. It could also be used to add molecules to surfaces to give them desirable properties.

Adding to the biological toolbox

With the NSF funding, Kelly’s lab will look at how efficiently different compounds can create radicals, and what kinds of reactions the radicals are best at initiating. She’s hoping that their findings will be useful for researchers in a range of fields, including medicine. “They could take the information that we’ve disseminated and then use it in their bigger biological toolbox,” Kelly says.

Kelly is also involved with a startup in Utah using a similar technique to create a natural alternative to the metal stents that treat heart disease. Staining the artery with the special compounds and then exposing them to light creates a rigid structure that avoids the need for a traditional stent. The product is currently undergoing FDA approval.

“We’re able to give guidance to the drug discovery companies based on our insight into the chemical mechanisms,” Kelly says. “That’s what’s really exciting to me: We can actually come up with practical information to help guide better drugs and structural biology tools.”

Creating opportunities for students

Kelly is also excited about how her new funding will impact UMBC students. “Part of the grant support is not just doing the lab work, but also disseminating it, so my team and I can travel to present the work at national conferences,” she says. “It’s really important to me to be able to bring graduate students with me when I go to meetings and have them share the same sort of networking opportunities that I benefited from.”

Kelly has cultivated rich connections within the photochemistry community, a field she chose intentionally. “It struck me as a way to be able to do everything that I was interested in without having to be this or this or that,” she says. “It was a multidisciplinary, practical field that’s served me well in my career.” And now, she’s introducing UMBC graduate students to this unique field and how scientists can bridge multiple disciplines to impact society.

As a photochemist, “It’s not good enough for me to make something and show that it does something cool,” Kelly says. “I want to map out all the driving forces that control it, and when I understand that, then I can make the process happen better.”

Banner image: Lisa Kelly, right, Ryan Grant, center, and Gabriella Pozza work with the laser setup in Kelly’s lab. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Team led by UMBC’s Mehdi Benna is the first to map a planet’s global wind patterns, and they weren’t Earth’s

Today, a paper published in Science documents for the first time the global wind circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere of a planet, 120 to 300 kilometers above the surface. The findings are based on local observations, rather than indirect measurements, unlike many prior measurements taken on Earth’s upper atmosphere. But it didn’t happen on Earth: it happened on Mars. On top of that, all the data came from an instrument and a spacecraft that weren’t originally designed to collect wind measurements.

In 2016, Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment. They wanted to see if parts of the instrument that were normally stationary could “swing back and forth like a windshield wiper fast enough,” to enable the tool to gather a new kind of data.

Initially, the MAVEN project team was reluctant to implement the modifications Benna and his colleagues requested. After all, MAVEN and NGIMS had been orbiting Mars since 2013, and they were working quite well collecting information about the composition of the Mars atmosphere. Why put all that at risk? Benna and his colleagues argued that this project would collect new kinds of data that could shape our understanding of the upper atmosphere on Mars, inform similar studies on Earth, and help us better understand planetary climate.

Benna, a planetary scientist operating out of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center with the UMBC Center for Space Sciences Technology (CSST), came up with the windshield-wiper idea while brainstorming how to create an instrument that could collect information about global circulation patterns in Earth’s upper atmosphere. It occurred to him that, together, MAVEN and NGIMS could do the same thing on Mars—and they were already in space.

With some persistence and a lot of preliminary analyses, Benna and his colleagues convinced the MAVEN mission leadership to give their idea a try, after Lockheed Martin, the spacecraft manufacturer, determined the modifications might be possible without damaging the satellite. “It’s a clever reengineering in flight of how to operate the spacecraft and the instrument,” Benna says. “And by doing both—the spacecraft doing something it was not designed to and the instrument doing something it was not designed to do—we made the wind measurements possible.”

Ripple effect

The new paper was completed in collaboration with Yuni Lee, also of UMBC’s CSST, and colleagues from the University of Michigan, George Mason University, and NASA. It is based on data collected two days per month for two years from 2016 to 2018. Some results were expected, and others were big surprises. “The refreshing thing is that the patterns that we observed in the upper atmosphere match globally what one would predict from models,” says Benna. “The physics works.”

Overall, the average circulation patterns from season to season were very stable on Mars. This is like saying that on the East Coast of the United States, throughout the year, weather systems generally flow from the West to the East in a predictable way.

One surprise came when the team analyzed the shorter-term variability of winds in the upper atmosphere, which was greater than anticipated. “On Mars, the average circulation is steady, but if you take a snapshot at any given time, the winds are highly variable,” Benna says. More work is needed to determine why these contrasting patterns exist.

A second surprise was that the wind hundreds of kilometers above the planet’s surface still contained information about landforms below, like mountains, canyons, and basins. As the air mass flows over those features, “it creates waves—ripple effects—that flow up to the upper atmosphere” and can be detected by MAVEN and NGIMS, Benna explains. “On Earth, we see the same kind of waves, but not at such high altitudes. That was the big surprise, that these can go up to 280 kilometers high.”

Benna and colleagues have two hypotheses for why the waves, called “orthographic waves,” last so long unchanged. For one, the atmosphere on Mars is much thinner than it is on Earth, so the waves can travel farther unimpeded, like ripples traveling farther in water than in molasses. Also, the average difference between geographic peaks and valleys is much greater on Mars than it is on Earth. It’s not uncommon for mountains to be 20 kilometers tall on Mars, whereas Mt. Everest is not quite nine kilometers tall, and most terrestrial mountains are much shorter.

“The topography of Mars is driving this in a more pronounced way than it is on Earth,” Benna says.

Forging ahead

Continuing to analyze the data from this study may help scientists figure out whether the same basic processes are in action on Earth’s upper atmosphere. Ironically, “We had to go take these measurements on Mars to eventually understand the same phenomenon on Earth,” Benna says. “Ultimately the results will help us understand the climate of Mars. What is its state and how is it evolving?”

But the team isn’t satisfied with the current data set. “We want to keep measuring. We have two years of data, but we’re not stopping there,” Benna says. Even with the data set they already have, “We have many years of modeling and analysis ahead of us.” It’s a trove of information that can be examined in ways not yet imagined, to learn even more about how planets work.

Banner image: The MAVEN spacecraft orbits Mars (artist’s concept), courtesy of NASA.