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

UMBC expands offerings at The Universities at Shady Grove to grow Maryland’s STEM workforce

UMBC students like Jackelyn Flores are increasingly taking advantage of high-impact programs at The Universities at Shady Grove (USG), a Montgomery County campus UMBC shares with eight other Maryland public universities. Opportunities for her and other UMBC-Shady Grove students are expanding even further today with the opening of a new Biomedical Sciences and Engineering (BSE) Education Facility on the popular campus.

Flores ’21 is one of the first students to pursue UMBC’s new degree in translational life sciences technology (TSLT), launched at Shady Grove this fall. Fascinated by biotechnology, she completed her associate’s degree in the field at Montgomery College (MC) while working full-time in the cell therapy department at Lonza, a biotech company near Frederick, Maryland. She’s now enhancing her biomedical sciences knowledge and lab skills through the UMBC program, in a region with particularly high demand for biotech professionals.

Access to state-of-the-art science

At USG, UMBC offers both the new TLST bachelor’s degree and a master’s of professional studies in biotechnology that relaunched exclusively at USG last year. Three new teaching labs in the BSE will greatly increase opportunities for students in these programs to develop their skills with state-of-the-art lab equipment, from liquid chromatography to bioreactors to high-end microscopes.

“Because it’s top-notch equipment, this is what they’ll see when they go work at a biotech company,” says Annica Wayman ’99, mechanical engineering, M6, associate dean for Shady Grove affairs in UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). “They’ll be more prepared for those jobs because they’ll already be familiar with the equipment.”

The fact that many disciplines will offer courses in the building will also help students prepare for the workforce. “This building symbolizes an opportunity to bring the disciplines together to address societal problems,” Wayman says, “and to discover how they can work together to address the biggest challenges.”

Wayman hopes the building will be a resource for companies in the area, whether that means project-based courses where students tackle real industry needs, or startups renting time on the equipment for their own projects. These connections would benefit students, too, who will get the chance to work more closely with biotech professionals while completing their degrees.

Blazing a trail in student training

The path that Jackelyn Flores took from Montgomery College to UMBC is one purposefully designed through a collaboration between the two institutions. “CNMS is a trailblazer in keeping our education programs up to date with the rapid pace of science and technology development, and in making sure students have the skills the biotech industry needs now,” Wayman says. “We also work closely with MC so the program pairs well with their very hands-on biotech program. We created this program to build on that.”

As she prepared to transfer from MC to UMBC, Flores found a supportive community that gave her the information and resources she needed to be successful. “UMBC offered plenty of open house sessions where I was able to meet directly with UMBC staff who answered all of my questions, and UMBC staff maintained active communication throughout the application process,” she says. “It was extremely reassuring to know that the school cared and was offering so much help.”

“The program at Montgomery College did an amazing job in helping me develop the lab skills necessary for the industry,” Flores says. “The TLST program is enhancing my lab and critical thinking skills while also reinforcing my knowledge of the biomedical industry.”

Growing Maryland’s STEM workforce

UMBC plans to continue to grow its already robust STEM presence at USG. Beyond offering TLST at the undergraduate level, UMBC offers graduate programs in biotechnology, cybersecurity, data science, geographic information systems, and technical management. Additional STEM programs matching the needs of local employers are on the horizon. Complementing all of these are popular programs in psychology, social work, political science, and history.

“One of the goals of CNMS and UMBC being at Shady Grove is to contribute to workforce development for the state, particularly in STEM,” Wayman says, “The new building provides USG and UMBC the opportunity to greatly expand training students and develop the workforce in high-demand STEM careers.”

It’s working for Flores. “The BSE will open doors for students to network and become involved in the industry while establishing critical connections,” she says, like the one she has with Lonza. “I can’t wait to see what the rest of the TLST program has to offer.”

Banner image: The entryway to the new Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Facility at The Universities at Shady Grove. The new space will facilitate growth in STEM programs offered by UMBC and other institutions at USG. Photo courtesy Universities at Shady Grove.

UMBC spotlights the power of collaboration and community in opening of new science building, GRIT-X talks

During the height of UMBC Homecoming festivities on October 12, the university community and supporters from across Maryland gathered to celebrate the opening of UMBC’s Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building (ILSB). “With the addition of this incredible, world-class facility, the state of Maryland will continue to lead the way,” Governor Larry Hogan told the crowd, speaking from behind a festive ribbon twisted in the form of a double helix . “And UMBC will continue to push the boundaries, achieve significant breakthroughs, and shine as a national and global leader in innovation.”

Vision for the future

When thinking about how this building came to be, Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, sees convergence—people and ideas coming together from different directions to create something new and meaningful—as the central concept.

“Already there are research teams working in this building on such complex issues as age-related disease, environmental degradation, and health disparities,” he notes. Why these topics? Solutions to our most complex challenges “are found through a convergence of talent and effort,” bringing together the perspectives of people from different fields and backgrounds, he shared at the opening event. This is what the new building is designed to achieve.

The ILSB is a physical space where people from all over UMBC converge to learn and discover, and it was developed with that goal in mind. “This was a shared effort,” LaCourse said. “This building belongs to everybody on this campus.”

But the benefits of the building will extend far beyond those who study, experiment, and collaborate inside it. “The vision is that we prepare the citizens of this state for the workforce, so everybody has a better life,” shared UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski. “This building will lead to so many people in science, in engineering, and in medicine, saving lives. And it’s that vision I want everyone to think about.”

Alumni leaders reflect

In addition to Governor Hogan, several local and state leaders, who are also UMBC alumni, joined in to celebrate what the new building represents: UMBC’s investment in inclusive, problem-oriented, team-based approaches to teaching and research that will also support economic and workforce development in the state.

Baltimore County Executive John “Johnny O.” Olszewski, Ph.D. ’17, public policy, lauded the numerous and diverse UMBC graduates who go on to own local STEM-oriented businesses and employ other Marylanders. “UMBC is a special place, and I couldn’t be prouder to have a degree from this incredible institution,” he added.

Maryland Speaker of the House Adrienne Jones ’76, psychology, also expressed her appreciation for UMBC. “UMBC is really setting the bar high in terms of science, and I commend you for what you continue to do,” she shared. “I’m proud to be an alumna.”

Alumni delegates Mark Chang ’99, psychology, and Charles Sydnor III ’00, policy sciences, also attended. Senate President Mike Miller gave remarks, as did Ken Skrzesz, executive director of the Maryland Arts Council, which supported the construction of the ILSB’s public art installation.

Environment for growth

Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the ILSB opened for building tours and hands-on, family-friendly science activities in the teaching labs, including making slime and using microscopes. The building also hosted an active learning demonstration in a tech-enabled classroom and UMBC’s fourth annual GRIT-X talks.

Nine GRIT-X speakers shared their stories of discovery, creativity, collaboration, and perseverance with a standing-room-only crowd in the ILSB. They included two alumni, six faculty members, and one graduate student, representing all three UMBC colleges.

Crystal Watkins-Johannson ’95, M3, biological sciences, reflected on how her experience at UMBC shaped her future. Today, she combines her expertise in neuroscience with her passion for education and patient care as director of the memory clinic in the Sheppard Pratt Health System and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

“I’d always felt like I was different, but when I came to UMBC for the accepted Meyerhoff Scholars weekend, everyone around me had accomplished just as much as I had,” Watkins-Johannson shared. “It really inspired me that I was going to have an environment that would allow me to grow, think about new ideas, and propel me to the next step.”

Today, she uses the grit she internalized at UMBC to help her patients with memory loss. “I’m able to help other people look at memory loss and persevere through it,” she says.

Empowering experiences

Fellow alumnus Premal Shah ’98, biochemistry and molecular biology, earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Caltech, and then launched a career as a socially-conscious entrepreneur. In 2018, he co-founded Citizen, a company that helps people access their healthcare data for free. The goal is to improve health outcomes by empowering people to take a more active role in their healthcare.

Like Watkins-Johannson, Shah’s UMBC experience was pivotal in his development. “I want to emphasize that I’ve been fortunate enough to have very good people in my life,” he shared at GRIT-X. “People who have taken an interest in me, people who have cared about me, people who’ve shown me the difference between right and wrong—and therefore I’ve been able to achieve what I have in my career.”

Other speakers included Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences; Tinoosh Mohsenin, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering; Lisa Moren, professor of visual arts; Mustafa Al-Adhami, Ph.D. ’20, mechanical engineering; Greg Szeto, assistant professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering; Carolyn Forestiere, associate professor of political science; and Yonathan Zohar, professor of marine biotechnology. Their talks covered a range of topics including the value of study abroad experiences, sustainable aquaculture, artificial intelligence, and the need for diversity among scientists.

At the ribbon-cutting, President Hrabowski reflected on the broad and impactful work members of the UMBC community have already accomplished, and which the ILSB will continue to support for current and future Retrievers.

Whether it’s changing the world through research or training the next generation, “When you have a great goal, it’s important to build a large and diverse community,” to work toward that goal, Hrabowski said. “This building is really teaching us the power of convergence.”

Banner image: Supporters gather outside the ILSB in advance of the ribbon-cutting ceremony. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC unless otherwise noted.

UMBC receives $2.8M from NSF for master’s program to prepare a diverse environmental science workforce

An interdisciplinary team of UMBC professors has received $2.8 million from the National Science Foundation to create a new master’s program focused on developing a more diverse environmental science workforce. The program, called the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in Ecology and Evolution (ICARE), is funded by a highly competitive NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) grant.

Student projects through the program will focus on environmental issues faced by the Baltimore Harbor and the surrounding region. To ensure students are developing research projects with tangible impacts, they will collaborate with partners in all levels of government as well as non-profit and community organizations focused on the environment.

Tamra Mendelson at a research field site. Photo courtesy Tamra Mendelson.

The ICARE NRT also creates new opportunities to build a more diverse environmental workforce. “The primary mission of UMBC is inclusive excellence, and our NRT applies that mission to the environmental sciences,” says Tamra Mendelson, professor of biological sciences and the lead on the project. “Our main objectives are to bring a diversity of backgrounds to the environmental workforce and to improve the way that scientific research is applied to environmental problems.”

Baltimore in focus

UMBC is known for its links to Baltimore City, and ICARE’s deliberate focus on the Baltimore Harbor and its surroundings builds on that connection. “The students’ thesis projects need to be tied directly to solving problems in the Baltimore Harbor, which is in the spirit of what UMBC does,” says Chris Swan, professor of geography and environmental systems.

Lee Blaney and Daniel Ocasio ’17, chemical engineering, working in UMBC’s Engineering Building.

The challenges the region is facing reflect environmental challenges the country and planet are facing on a larger scale, from shifting weather patterns, to air pollution and heat island effects, to water quality concerns.

“The health of the Baltimore Harbor is improving, and I am hopeful that the work of ICARE will bolster ongoing efforts to make the Baltimore Harbor a model for the whole country,” says Lee Blaney, associate professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering. “It is my hope that the research focus on the Baltimore Harbor will set up ICARE and UMBC to make lasting, sustainable, and positive impacts in our city.”

Colleen Burge in her lab at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology.

For faculty who live in the city, the new program is personal. “As a UMBC employee who lives in Baltimore and works at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, I am especially looking forward to the opportunity to train students who can impact the quality of the environment in Baltimore,” shares Colleen Burge, assistant professor of marine biotechnology. “I’m extremely hopeful that this program will attract local students who will be trained to be the next generation of scientists in their communities.”

From left to right: Postdoc Sarah Stellwagen, Ph.D. student Tyler Brown, assistant professor Mercedes Burns, and two undergraduate students check out a harvestman, a type of arachnid related to spiders, in a research lab in the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building (ILSB).

“As part of developing the ICARE NRT proposal, we identified a number of stakeholders in and around Baltimore City that have a strong interest in better understanding and improving the community,” adds Mercedes Burns, assistant professor of biological sciences, “and since I live in the city, I consider myself a beneficiary, too.”

Many of UMBC’s students come from the region, so this program is also an opportunity for them to make a difference to a resource that is at the center of city life, both literally and figuratively. “Baltimore’s harbor is really integral to the fabric of the city,” says Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences, “the same way that the Chesapeake Bay is embedded in the culture of the state of Maryland.”

Direct career development

The unique structure of the program will create opportunities that students might not find in a more traditional master’s program. “We provide a degree program that allows students to get real-world experience in environmental problems, by partnering with government agencies, nonprofits, industry, and community stakeholders,” shares Mendelson.

Students are required to have someone from outside UMBC—in fact, outside any academic institution—on their master’s thesis committee. In that way, “The program is a catalyst for partnerships,” Swan says.

Maggie Holland, associate professor of geography and environmental systems, agrees. “We have been able to involve partner organizations working actively in the city from the very beginning of our planning for this program,” she says. “It’s thrilling to think that we can continue to deepen those collaborations and extend the network over the next several years. Their involvement is part of what will help us to innovate and adapt graduate student training as we move forward.”

Two researchers in conversation in a lab

Maggie Holland (right) and Chris Swan in an ILSB lab.

The environment needs everyone

Creating a master’s program that serves as a direct pathway to environmental careers, and funding students to participate (which is rare in master’s programs), opens the door to a wider range of people who want to pursue this line of work, but who may not be in a position to commit to a five-plus year Ph.D. program or an unfunded master’s degree.

“I’m excited to help diversify environmental science through this program,” shares Burns, “as I think the perspectives of people of color are desperately needed in this field.”

“Big picture, the planet is being challenged in huge ways. So it’s totally a situation of needing all hands on deck,” Omland says. “We think this is a really good way to help broaden the kinds of people who are able to make contributions to basic research and applied action. Ultimately, some of these people might end up working for environmental non-profits, on the policy end, or in other capacities.”

Kevin Omland and Sheridan Danquah ’20, biological sciences.

This program builds on successes UMBC has had in diversifying other fields. “UMBC has done a singularly outstanding job preparing underrepresented students for careers in the biomedical sciences,” Mendelson says. “We’re thrilled to apply these best practices to the environmental sciences and tackle some of the biggest problems facing our city, nation, and planet.”

Now, everyone involved is excited to get to work designing new courses, cultivating partnerships, and, overall, making a difference in Baltimore and beyond. In short, “We’re super jazzed about this,” says Swan. “It’s something we can be really proud of.”

Banner image: Mercedes Burns (left), Maggie Holland (center), and Chris Swan are all part of the ICARE NRT project. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC unless otherwise noted.

New UMBC study shows powerful effects of road salt and urban infrastructure on waterways

Increasing development worldwide, driven by urbanization and a growing human population, is having significant effects on our waterways. Baltimore is no exception to this trend. Because of its location on the Chesapeake Bay and its proximity to the Patapsco and Gwynns Falls rivers, Baltimore, like many coastal urban areas, has an outsize effect on water quality in the region.

Matthew Baker, professor of geography and environmental systems, has just published new results in Water Resources Research on the relationship between urbanization and water chemistry in Baltimore. At a basic level, his findings were not surprising: as urbanization increases, water chemistry changes in a way that diminishes biodiversity in streams and threatens human health. However, when he looked a little deeper, Baker says, “We found it was more complex than we thought.”

Going to extremes

Baker, Matt Schley ‘13, environmental science, and their industry colleague Joseph Sexton used two 30-year data sets to tease out the complex relationship between urbanization and water chemistry.

One data set included maps of impervious surface within 12 local watersheds developed annually from satellite images collected from 1985 to 2015. Using the annual information, the authors were able to track urbanization in each watershed through time.

Baker and his collaborators compared that information with another 30-year data set collected by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources that measured the monthly specific conductivity in the same dozen watersheds. Conductivity is a proxy for the amount of dissolved solids in the water, because most dissolve as conductive ions.

The team wasn’t surprised to find that as impervious surfaces expanded, more dissolved material ended up in streams and rivers. Instead of rainwater soaking into the ground and being filtered by plants, it would flow quickly into waterways, picking up contaminants from asphalt and concrete along the way. However, that wasn’t the full story.

“What really ticks up is the variability,” says Baker. In the watersheds that urbanized the most during the study period, short-term changes in water chemistry became much more extreme.

This is one clue as to why aquatic organisms may be struggling. “Because unlike invertebrates such as worms, snails, and crustaceans, many aquatic insects are adapted to a very narrow range of water chemistry,” Baker says, “they’re not able to withstand the erratic changes.”

A big villain

The researcher’s findings pointed to a particular culprit: road salt. Wintertime conductivity values spiked in more urbanized watersheds, and the spikes were markedly worse in years with extreme winter weather events, when more road salt was applied.

“When watersheds become increasingly connected to streams through storm sewers, road salting and other kinds of salt accumulation have a much more immediate and more extreme impact,” says Baker. And for highly developed areas with a lot of impervious cover, the impact lasts, because it accumulates through time.

“Once you get above a certain level of development, you start to see the signal of a particular winter event show up in a stream and then echo for up to a year,” Baker explains. When an area surpasses around 12 percent impervious cover, he notes, sensitive insects are almost totally eliminated—insects that are essential for an ecosystem to thrive.

“We definitely have to lower the amount of road salt we’ve been applying, and we’re seeing some signs of that now,” Baker says, pointing to recent changes in the way the Maryland State Highway Administration preps for winter storms. “The problem is, many others have yet to adjust,” such as local jurisdictions and private landowners, he adds.

Even with less than five percent impervious cover—a relatively small amount of development—Baker’s results show there’s still a chemical signal in the water that may be enough to harm sensitive species. Only at higher levels of development, where the road salt effect is more pronounced, do hardier species also suffer.

“So road salt is a big villain here, but it’s the big villain of getting rid of more tolerant organisms,” Baker says. “There’s something else contributing to the elimination of sensitive organisms from dilute waters.”

Baker says weathering infrastructure, such as concrete culverts, may be to blame. “We need to pay closer attention to the materials we’re using in and on infrastructure,” he says, “because it’s the constant leaching of those materials that seems closely associated with species loss at lower levels of development.”

Doing things differently

The winter spikes also suggest that the way data is collected to study water chemistry and its effects on aquatic life may be inadequate.

Invertebrate and water chemistry data tend to be collected together in the spring. According to the long-term data set, streams that were saltier in the spring were also saltier in winter, but a small change in spring conductivity translated to a huge change in winter concentrations. So, Baker says, “Measuring water quality in the spring is a misleading way of appreciating how bad it can be at other times of the year.”

Overall, “monitoring efforts need to be expanded,” says Schley, who today is a hydrologist for the U.S. National Park Service—a career path he credits in part to his experience working with Baker on this research. “The results of the study suggest that more continuous monitoring efforts would be a welcome change,” particularly if data were collected across a broad range of locations, he says. “Understanding trends in stream chemistry on a site-by-site basis would allow for more effective management of our critical stream ecosystems.”

Although there are certainly challenges ahead for documenting and mitigating the detrimental effects of urbanization on waterways, the new results provide powerful information that policymakers can use to inform their decisions affecting the environment, such as salt usage and regulating new development.

Baker and his colleagues are currently working on describing relationships between salts and aquatic life in greater detail to make the potential consequences of policy decisions clearer. They hope to inspire more scientifically-informed policies and planning throughout the region.

Image: Matthew Baker; photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Sander Goossens determines structure of Mercury’s core as part of NASA team

UMBC’s Sander Goossens designed and implemented code that’s helping NASA scientists better understand the evolution of planets, starting with Mercury.

He’s part of a research team applying sophisticated new computer programs to data collected by NASA’s MESSENGER mission, which orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015. They’ve “put together a self-consistent model of the interior of Mercury,” including its inner core, outer core, mantle, and other layers, explains Goossens, associate research scientist at UMBC’s Center for Space Science and Technology.

The study initially sought to confirm scientists’ understanding of Mercury’s gravity and spin. Instruments on the MESSENGER satellite detected variations in the planet’s density as they passed over its surface, to better understand its gravity. By tracking MESSENGER’s location compared to the planet’s surface, the scientists were also able to precisely locate its poles, which determine the axis along which the planet rotates.

Instruments on Earth had suggested measurements for Mercury’s spin state—the combination of how long it takes the planet to rotate on its axis (how long each day is on the planet), and the orientation of that axis. The Earth-based measurements confirmed that the relationship between Mercury’s angles of rotation and orbit were very close to an equilibrium state, but couldn’t say for sure if the planet’s spin was exactly in equilbrium. So when Goossens and his team’s new analysis of the MESSENGER data showed that the planet is exactly in the equilibrium state, “We thought, ‘Wow, this is really good!'”, Goossens says. “To be able to confirm it really is in that state was pretty exciting.”

Taking it further

Confirming Mercury’s spin and gravity opened up an opportunity to take the study to the next level. Goossens says that the team decided to “interpret the data to see if there was anything we could say about the planet’s deep interior that people hadn’t been able to say before, because the measurements weren’t good enough.”

To do that, Goossens had to design new code to analyze the data in a fresh way and get at the underlying core structure of Mercury. The team was particularly curious to know how much molten metal was in the planet’s core, which contributes to its magnetic field and influences how it spins.

“We had to use information from different disciplines to do this, then put that all together into a computer program,” Goossens explains.

Before this study, scientists already knew that Mercury’s core occupied 85 percent of the planet’s total volume, and that the core was at least partly molten metal, as opposed to solid. The new analysis determined that the core was about 52 percent solid. Earth’s core is only about one-third solid.

Data makes the difference

Learning more about Mercury “gives you a clue about the evolution of the planet,” Goossens says. Much of the study of outer space is limited by the data we are able to collect on planets, other bodies, and events that happen extraordinarily far from Earth. So adding just one more set of observations can powerfully inform future work.

This project is also special to Goossens because of his connection to MESSENGER. He joined the NASA team in 2011, just as the MESSENGER mission was embarking on its journey to Mercury. “We have a long history of working with the MESSENGER data,” he says.

Goossens is now excited for future work that builds on previous research and takes advantage of the new findings and the new code. For example, the method has been applied to Mars before, and in fact some of the efforts of Goossens’ team were based on that work. Now, Goossens would love to see the method applied to new, more accurate Mars data coming in from the InSight lander, a mission currently on the surface of Mars.

“Getting clues to Mercury’s structure will help people modeling the evolution of planets,” Goossens says. “It will give them better constraints to test their models and see what kind of predictions they can now make.”

Banner image: An artist’s depiction of the MESSENGER spacecraft approaching Mercury. Credit: NASA.

National Institute on Aging funds UMBC’s Erin Green to investigate how cells do “quality control” as we age

As we get older, our body systems just don’t work quite like they used to. Why this happens is still somewhat murky. Erin Green, assistant professor of biological sciences, has just received a two-year, $500,000 exploratory grant from the National Institute on Aging to help unravel one piece of the aging puzzle.

Green and her team study how adding a small group of atoms called a methyl group—three hydrogen atoms bound to a carbon atom—to certain proteins affects how the cell functions. The new grant will allow her to focus on a specific protein, an enzyme called Set6, that adds methyl groups to other proteins. Based on preliminary data, Green believes Set6 adds methyl groups to proteins involved in the body’s ability to do “quality control” when it produces proteins.

When a protein is made, it starts as a string of building blocks called amino acids. Then, with the help of a set of enzymes, the protein folds into a three-dimensional shape that allows it to do its job. Usually, the folding process goes off without a hitch. And if there is a problem, usually a misfolded protein is quickly destroyed by the cell. But as we age, proteins are misfolded more often, at the same time that the mechanisms for protein destruction start to fail. That means more problem proteins build up in the cell. In severe cases, this can lead to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

A lot to learn

Green’s team conducts its research in budding yeast. Yeast is a valuable study organism because it’s one of the simplest eukaryotes, a type of organism whose cells have the same fundamental characteristics as human cells. They’re easy to work with, and they still have enough in common with humans to provide useful information.

“Genetic and biochemical manipulation in yeast is all very easy and available,” Green says. “We can combine information from many different tests to get a much more comprehensive look at the molecular role of these proteins in a faster, easier, cheaper way.” Some of those tests will be conducted by Green’s collaborators at Stanford University in California and the Van Andel Institute in Michigan.

Set6, the methyl group-adding enzyme that’s the focus of the new grant, is in a group of enzymes called the SMYD family. There are two SMYD proteins in yeast and five in humans. One of the yeast proteins has been studied extensively by Green’s group and others, but little is known about Set6.

Deepika Jaiswal, a postdoc in Green’s lab, has been studying Set6 since 2016. “I started working on Set6 when there was no strong information about what it does in the cell,” she says. It is her work that has started to reveal the role of Set6. “It has been a long journey, but it’s satisfying to see it going in the right direction.”

“Because Set6 is so closely linked to the same family of enzymes in humans, we thought we could take advantage of the fact that there’s still a lot to learn,” Green adds, “and hopefully break open a broader understanding in the field of what its role is, especially in the context of protein quality control.”

Uncharted territory

Green will employ several techniques to gain a better understanding of the role Set6 plays in protein quality control. She wants to find out exactly which other proteins it adds methyl groups to, and also learn more about when in the protein production process Set6 is adding the methyl groups. Initial data suggest that it’s very early in the protein production and folding process.

Since much of what she’ll be exploring is uncharted territory with Set6, Green expects occasional setbacks. However, she’s optimistic that the endeavor will provide valuable insights into the role of Set6. The results could eventually have implications for pharmaceutical development, particularly for the SMYD family of enzymes. Today, companies are exploring possible targets for therapies without fully understanding their functions. Knowing more about proteins like Set6 could point them toward new targets, or help them avoid heading down dead ends.

“It may not work exactly how we think, but I think at the end we’ll learn something about this particular enzyme family,” Green says, “and uncover more of its biological role in the protein quality control pathway.”

Banner image: Erin Green in the lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Minjoung Kyoung to help develop first 4D map of a cell’s metabolic pathways

Scientists understand many of the body’s processes, like breaking down sugars and generating energy for the cell, pretty well. They know what chemical reactions are involved, what molecules they produce, and in what order everything happens. Complex maps even exist of how the different processes interact with one another. There’s a problem, though: the maps are two-dimensional, and cells are three-dimensional. Add the element of time, and you’re up to four dimensions.

Minjoung Kyoung, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has never been satisfied with 2D maps of 4D processes. “I’ve always been interested in how proteins are working in the real system, in real time, in real action,” she says.

To address the limits of current understanding, Kyoung and her graduate student, Erin Kennedy, ordered parts to build an innovative type of microscope, found in just a few labs around the world. This new tool gave them the rare ability to look at entire living cells at exquisite resolution, as they change in real time. Finally, they could move forward with constructing a 4D map of cellular metabolic pathways.

Kyoung’s preliminary results with the new instrument are promising. Now, with a five-year, $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, she’s poised to make serious breakthroughs in how we understand the functional relationship between metabolic pathways. Her first targets will include essential basic processes like glucose metabolism (sugar breakdown) and cellular respiration (energy production for the cell, which relies on glucose). Both are fundamental to diseases like diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

Anticipating disease

One thing Kyoung’s early results suggested is that the enzymes important for breaking down glucose and for generating energy are physically close together in the cell—but only when both pathways are functioning normally. “So when they are functionally linked, they are spatially related,” Kyoung says. Her continuing research will try to determine how and why that happens, by looking very carefully at what’s going on in whole cells at various time points and under different cellular conditions.

Kyoung also finds the glucose pathway itself to be fascinating. It takes place in the cytoplasm, the watery fluid that fills cells. But somehow, the enzymes required to break down glucose form dense clusters, which Kyoung has dubbed “condensates,” even though the clusters don’t have a formal boundary. “The fundamental mechanism for how these condensates are reversibly assembled and disassembled is one of the specific aims that we’re going to study,” Kyoung says.

The enzymes for the cellular energy pathway also cluster, but they are enclosed inside mitochondria, a structure surrounded by a membrane. A single cell can contain from zero to thousands of mitochondria, depending on the cell’s job. Kyoung explains, “Mitochondria are very important for various metabolic diseases—cancer, diabetes, obesity, and so on. How these mitochondria relate to glucose metabolism is the most important part. So, by understanding them, I truly believe that we can get much, much closer to understanding how these diseases are caused, thus promoting therapeutic intervention.”

“My dream is to be able to predict disease before symptoms occur,” she shares. “That would be the best.”

Ready for a challenge

Getting to the point of recognizing disease before symptoms are apparent won’t be easy. The imaging techniques Kyoung, Kennedy, new graduate student Tao Zhang, and UMBC collaborator Songon An, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, are employing are so new, and so difficult, Kyoung anticipates many challenges.

“There is no previous data whatsoever. There is no technical approach whatsoever. There is no approach to data analysis whatsoever,” says Kyoung. She describes being at this cutting edge as both exciting and intimidating. To even successfully collect useful data, “many things have to go right,” Kyoung says.

To see what they want to see inside the cells, such as a particular enzyme, Kyoung’s team will need to tag it with a fluorescent protein, a process that is successful in 50 to 60 percent of cells. That’s not a problem when you use a conventional microscope, because you can see lots of cells at once. But the microscope that enables observing living cells with the resolution Kyoung needs can only see a few cells at a time. So finding the tagged cells has been the first challenge.

After the images are collected, a complex mathematical process called “deconvolution” removes the distortion that the microscope’s light beam itself generates in the images. That takes several hours for a single cell. And then they can actually analyze the images to see which enzymes are where, when. This process takes several days for one cell. Only at that point do they know if the experiment worked.

And, “Because no one has done this type of research before, we have to figure out how we are going to validate our results, too,” Kyoung says. “There is no precedent.” Despite all these challenges, Kyoung is excited to get to work. She believes the kinds of relationships they’ve started to see between glucose metabolism and mitochondria are only the tip of the iceberg as far as spatial relationships between metabolic pathways in the cell.

“Just a start”

“This is just a start. So far we have focused on these two metabolic pathways, but I believe this phenomenon is not limited to just these two,” Kyoung says. “So I envision that this will be the beginning for a big 4D map of all the metabolic networks.”

Kyoung and her team have significant funding from NIH to support their work, the microscope they need to do it, a healthy sense of optimism, and a commitment to helping answer some of the fundamental questions surrounding emerging epidemics like cancers, diabetes and obesity. With the key elements in place, they are bound to make breakthroughs that move the needle on tackling some of today’s most challenging diseases.

Banner image: Minjoung Kyoung and her UMBC lab group. From left to right: Keynon Bell, Minjoung Kyoung, Erin Kennedy, Manuel Huerta-Alvarado, and Tao Zhang. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Top 9 Features of the New ILSB Not to Miss

Since its groundbreaking two years ago, the UMBC community has watched the new Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building rise next to The Commons. Students and faculty wondered what it would look like on the inside, and what it would be like to study, take classes, do research, or just hang out in the new space.

Well, the time has come! As the ILSB opens its doors for the fall semester, Retrievers are eagerly trying to figure out how the ILSB will fit into their routines. Grabbing a seat in the atrium for a quick break with friends before class? Conducting experiments in an open lab with floor-to-ceiling windows? Learning about any number of topics in classrooms designed from the ground up for active learning? Taking your lunch to a patio adjacent to the green roof? However you use the ILSB, here are nine features you shouldn’t miss:

1) Stunning staircases

Science isn’t just what happens inside the ILSB, it’s built into the building itself. Two staircases in the building exemplify the designers’ dedication to detail: this bright orange spiral staircase has an uncanny resemblance to a DNA helix, don’t you think? And the stairs in the building’s atrium are cantilevered to appear to float in thin air—reminding us all that anything is possible.

Group talk in front of red stairs in ILSB building

2) Sundial

As you ascend the stairs or peer over the building’s inner balconies, don’t be nervous about the spot of red light slowly migrating across the floor. It’s not a laser experiment gone rogue—it’s a sundial. On the solstice, it traces a special line on the floor. Old and new technologies come together in the ILSB, reminding us all that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

3) Green roof

There’s life bursting from every corner of this building, including UMBC’s fifth green roof. Green roofs provide insulation that reduces heating and cooling energy requirements, plus they help purify the air and water. Unfortunately, the roof is off limits to games of ultimate frisbee or other activities, but the adjacent patio is a great spot to enjoy lunch or just take a breather between classes.

4) Environmental systems lab

This lab allows researchers to get their hands dirty conducting environmental experiments in a way never before possible at UMBC. A controlled trial looking at how insects respond to different water chemistry? Sure. An experiment to determine how plants respond to different temperatures? Go for it. Risk of contaminating molecular experiments that could be ruined by a stray speck of dirt? Nada. Have fun, ecologists!

5) Innovative classrooms

People work at desks in ILSB with student in lab coat helping out

UMBC is consistently ranked in the top 10 nationally for undergraduate teaching for many reasons. One of them is our commitment to teaching in an active-learning and flipped-classroom format. This is when students first encounter material traditionally presented in lectures at home via readings or short instructor-produced videos. That way, class time is saved for team-based problem solving. Implementing this practice has often meant completely revamping core classes such as introductory biology and chemistry. The ILSB adds to UMBC’s capacity to offer this kind of educational experience.

6) Art installation

It’s a bird! It’s a neuron! It’s…whatever you want it to be. Volkan Alkanoglu’s brightly-colored artwork INFLIGHT, which seemingly floats from three large walls in the ILSB’s atrium, is striking no matter how you look at it. But did you know the artist carefully incorporated elements from UMBC research into the design, from brain cells to flying orioles? Now that’s interdisciplinary. What do you see?

Three people talk on steps in ILSB building

7) Multi-user all-gender restrooms

Although UMBC is currently in the middle of remodeling many of the restrooms on campus for all-gender use, the ILSB is the first building at UMBC designed with all-gender multi-use in mind from the beginning. These restrooms pave the way for a more inclusive and convenient bathroom experience for our students, faculty, and staff of all gender identities. Learn more about the university’s plan for the addition of all-gender restrooms on campus.

8) Etched windows

Look closely at the windows—what do you see? The pattern etched on the glass, created especially for UMBC, was designed to symbolize reeds and grasses on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The “fritting,” as it’s called, serves to deter bird strikes and reduces the energy required for heating and cooling. It’s a subtle way to honor our unique location and continue to protect it.

9) Brick pathway

As further homage to UMBC’s geography, the curving brick pathway around the ILSB imitates a stream that once flowed across campus (it now runs underground), and all the plants you see are native to the region. So take a stroll, or simply sit on a bench and take it all in, from buzzing pollinators to bright flowers.

*****

All photos, including header, by Marlayna Demond ’11.

Open spaces nurture open minds in UMBC’s new Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building

This fall, hundreds of Retrievers will set foot in UMBC’s new Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building for the first time. They may be inspired by the vibrant art installation, find a quiet nook to study, or work together in research labs with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking pocket gardens and curving pathways. The new facility offers features that set it apart as a space for learning, and set up students and faculty for transformative moments of discovery.

“New things will brew”

Each research floor in the ILSB is connected along its entire length and bounded by glass on all sides. Inside the labs, benches are configurable so that instrumentation can go in and out as needed. Neon-colored glass surfaces double as marker boards for quick sketches of lab protocols, equations, or encouraging doodles. Just outside the lab are spaces, overlooking an airy atrium, where graduate students can write and undergraduates can meet with mentors.

It’s a research environment that looks toward the future. These shared, open spaces are designed to help anyone who enters sense that they have a role to play in addressing big challenges, discovering more about the world, and developing the next generation of scientists.

“The ILSB provides an unprecedented opportunity to have researchers who are intellectually next to each other also be physically next to each other,” shares Greg Szeto, assistant professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering (CBEE). “When you share a kitchenette with a biologist, a chemist, an engineer and somebody from public policy, it’s inevitable that new things will brew.”

Szeto is part of the new Translational Center for Age-Related Disease and Disparities (TCARD²), an initiative made possible by the ILSB. The initiative is led by Chuck Bieberich, professor of biological sciences, and also includes faculty from CBEE and psychology. Bieberich’s lab focuses on cancer biology, especially prostate cancer, while Szeto works on cancer therapies that leverage the immune system. “When we bring our two approaches together, hopefully it will lead to new research, new papers, new grants,” and new cancer treatments, Szeto says.

On top of the collaborative advantage, the ILSB offers all the equipment labs need in one place. Szeto’s students were already collaborating with biologists, but that used to mean carrying samples to instruments in other buildings. Not anymore. “Now everything is going to be in the ILSB,” Szeto says. “Being able to centralize the operation both intellectually and logistically is so critical.”

Bringing the outside in

Faculty in the new Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in Ecology and Evolution (ICARE²) are also taking up residence in the ILSB. Tamra Mendelson, professor of biological sciences, and Chris Swan, professor of geography and environmental systems (GES) co-lead the initiative. It also includes faculty in CBEE and marine biotechnology.

“The collaboration is designed to bring together evolutionary biologists, ecologists, conservationists, social scientists, and engineers,” says Swan. “We want to build a powerful network of people to collaborate on training graduate students, solving environmental problems relevant to Baltimore, and building out UMBC’s focus on ecology.” The ILSB will offer ICARE² researchers the opportunity to work in a shared space for the first time.

A new, state-of-the-art environmental science lab in the ILSB will also open up the possibilities for these researchers. It’s a space “devoted to environmental work,” which often means, “It’s dirty!” Swan says. The lab will enable larger-scale controlled experiments that can be hard to manage in the field and that would be incompatible with a lab focused on molecular work, where the slightest bit of stray DNA could ruin an experiment.

“A total game-changer”

Chris Hawn, assistant professor of GES, is excited to move to the ILSB because of the doors it will open for their environmental research. Hawn runs chemical analyses on spiderwebs to measure local air quality. They are collaborating with an advocacy group for houseless people that will train them to collect webs in spaces where they are living to send to Hawn for analysis. The goal is that they can use the findings to advocate locally for their health and make the best possible choices about where to stay.

Hawn also studies how pollutants in waterways are passed through the food chain from small aquatic insects, to spiders, to birds.

The ILSB “is a total game-changer for me,” Hawn says. With the instrumentation available at the ILSB, “There are protocols where I can get ‘level unlocked.’ It just opens things up for me and my students.”

Hawn is the first researcher assigned to their floor of the new building. They note, “I’m excited to make the space my own, but also excited that it will be a shared space very soon. It will be interesting to see how we can work together.”

Even if they aren’t working together directly, having other researchers nearby is a good thing, Hawn adds. “Working simultaneously and having people around you is important, especially for graduate students who are spending a lot of their time in the lab.”

Coming to life

Sarah Leupen, senior lecturer in biological sciences, has been looking forward to teaching in the ILSB—and not just because it’s a new space, but because it’s a new kind of space. Even the building’s largest learning spaces are designed to help students connect with each other and the material in an engaged, intimate, collaborative way.

One of Leupen’s favorite rooms is filled with small round tables that seat six students. Screens and whiteboards appear all around the room and there is plenty of open space. “It’s this kind of flipped classroom that makes possible truly active learning, the kind of teaching that is most well-supported by research.”

Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, which administers the building, is thrilled to see it come to life. “For me, it’s been a decade of planning, design and construction to create this building that can serve the needs of our community in essential ways.”

“The process really epitomized the ethos of UMBC, involving the input and collaboration of so many people across the university,” he shares. “To see it evolve from a germ of an idea to the magnificent building we see today is a tribute to UMBC’s strength in the life sciences and commitment to student and faculty success.”

Banner image: Undergraduate researchers outside the TCARD²lab. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Wind, solar, and…flutter? UMBC’s Justin Webster is using math to move this emerging tech forward

When Justin Webster sees a flag rippling in the breeze, he thinks about equations. Webster, assistant professor of mathematics, studies “flutter”—a physical phenomenon caused by interactions between a fluid, such as air or water, and a flexible structure, such as a flag, a sail, or even an airplane wing. A small group of engineers and mathematicians has been working for years on how to extract usable energy from fluttering objects as an alternative means of energy production. Now, they have a chance to take flutter technology to the next level.

“There’s no such thing as free energy, but there are lots of situations where there’s ambient energy available,” like a flapping flag, Webster says. “You just have to find an efficient mechanism for turning it into meaningful, useful energy.”

Currently, prototypes exist for doing just that. You start with a narrow flap of material 50 to 100 cm long and coated with piezoelastic material, which can convert mechanical energy (like flapping) into electrical energy. Next, you attach the flap to a pole in a field that tends to get a lot of wind, and voilá, you can generate electric current. If you can efficiently store that energy, you could potentially help power homes and businesses in remote locales, such as the desert or mountains, which also tend to be windy, Webster says.

Moving the needle

In their current form, these devices are far from optimal. Part of the challenge is that “the mathematical models that we currently have don’t make predictions that are consistent with what engineers see during experiments,” Webster explains.

Without accurate predictions, it can take many experimental attempts to make progress—and the experiments are often difficult and costly to carry out. With a more accurate model, not only would progress be faster, but more research groups might take up this work.

A new grant from the National Science Foundation will help Webster, Jason Howell at Carnegie Mellon University, and Earl Dowell at Duke University move their field closer to making efficient, fluttering energy-harvesters a reality.

Webster is an applied mathematician, Howell is a computational mathematician, and Dowell is an engineer and one of the world’s leading experts on flutter. Over the next three years, they will work together to refine existing mathematical models of “flag” flutter and produce new models that more accurately reflect what engineers like Dowell actually see in their experiments.

Their new model will need to include elements such as wind speed, how many times an object flaps per second, and how much energy is stored in an hour. Each element must be represented in the model by its own equation, and all those individual equations must somehow be connected to each other mathematically. To succeed, it will take analytical acuity plus a degree of finesse.

Webster’s goal is a more accurate model that will help engineers ask and answer questions about the materials used to collect energy from flutter. What is the best size and shape for the flaps? What should they be made of? How should the piezoelastic material be arranged on the flap to optimally capture the energy? “All of these are open—and very difficult—questions,” he says.

Problem-solving from every angle

It’s actually fairly unusual for applied mathematicians and engineers to work directly together in this way. Webster explains, “We’re often working on the same problems, but typically from different angles.”

The opportunity to move the renewable energy field forward through collaboration is what drew him to this project. By learning each others’ languages and debating approaches to tackling such a complex problem, he’s confident their research will achieve more than would be possible for a math or engineering team alone. “There’s a myriad of interesting and challenging problems here, as we’re learning from each other every day,” says Webster of his collaboration.

The team will also benefit from the fresh perspectives of student researchers. “I’m excited that the students in my project, as well as other projects in the department recently funded by NSF, can get involved in some really interesting and difficult mathematics,” Webster shares.

So, while charging your cell phone with the streamers on your bicycle may be a ways off, Webster, his colleagues, and his students are hoping to get us one step closer.

Banner Image: Justin Webster. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

NASA and DoE fund UMBC’s Zhibo Zhang to pursue ambitious atmospheric research

Recently, both the Department of Energy (DoE) and NASA awarded Zhibo Zhang, associate professor of physics, significant grants to pursue projects in atmospheric science.

Zhang’s lab has established itself as a powerhouse at UMBC since his arrival in 2011. The lab published groundbreaking findings such as the discovery that dust from the Sahara Desert provides critical nutrients to the Amazon Rainforest in Geophysical Research Letters, and the surprising result that smoke from African wildfires may have a cooling effect on climate by reflecting sunlight back into space in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Zhang’s Aerosol, Cloud, Radiation, Observation, and Simulation (ACROS) research group focuses on how small particles in the atmosphere—such as dust, smoke, and other pollutants—interact with clouds and sunlight. His team’s end goal is to better understand how the particles affect global climate and use that information to improve climate models, so we have the best information possible to plan ahead for climate resilience.

Clouds up close

The DoE has awarded Zhang’s group $600,000 over three years to improve how climate models incorporate the effect of clouds. “DoE is very interested in how climate change will influence U.S. and global energy consumption,” Zhang says, and having accurate climate models is critical to that effort. The UMBC project is one of 27 atmospheric research projects the DoE funded with a total of $13 million.

Scientists model the global climate as a grid, with each grid square being 100 to 200 kilometers on a side. “We have all the equations to model the whole system based on these discrete grid boxes and how they interact with each other, but what happens on a more granular level, below that grid size, our models can’t say,” Zhang explains. “That’s 200 km—from here almost to New York—and what happens inside this grid box can be very important.”

“Our whole study is to investigate the sub-grid scale—how clouds change from about 5 to 100 kilometers,” Zhang says. The team plans to analyze data collected by ground-based instruments and research aircraft at the DoE’s site on the Azores islands, about 1500 km west of Portugal, to help “check the model’s assumptions and improve them using observational data.”

The team will investigate, for the first time at high resolution, how the total water content of clouds varies. They’ll also look at the number of individual droplets within grid squares that are measurable from airborne sensors flying near the ground-based instruments. The researchers will also track environmental factors within the grid squares, such as wind, humidity, and the overall density of airborne particles.

Several members of Zhang’s team are involved in the project, including Olivia Norman ‘21, physics. “We’re depending on her to solve some really tough equations,” Zhang says, “and she’s doing very well.”

Externally, Zhang is collaborating with David Mechem, professor of geography and atmospheric science at the University of Kansas, for this project. “We have a very strong team. We complement each other,” Zhang says. “Also, we’ve been thinking about this problem independently—they from the modeling side and us from the observation side—for a long time.”

Dusting off climate models

The NASA-funded project will analyze data collected from instruments on aircraft and NASA’s orbiting CALIPSO and MODIS satellites to better understand whether dust in the atmosphere warms or cools the planet overall. Combining information from the different data sources “is like putting a puzzle together,” Zhang says. “Each one provides one piece of the puzzle, so when you put them together you get the larger picture.”

Considerable research has looked at how dust interacts with light in the visible spectrum—light waves that humans can see. Those findings suggest that dust has a slight cooling effect. “What hasn’t been studied in detail is the warming effect of the dust,” Zhang says. It can absorb some of the radiation reflecting off the Earth’s surface—specifically, the infrared radiation with longer wavelengths. “It’s basically a greenhouse effect of the dust.”

Qianqian Song, a Ph.D. student in Zhang’s research group, has led some of the first work looking at the warming effect of dust when it interacts with long-wave infrared radiation. “In our study we found the long-wave warming effect could cancel 30 percent of the cooling effect in the Atlantic region during summer,” she says.

Climate models are valuable, but only as good as the assumptions they make. “You can look at the data and you see discrepancies between the climate models and the observations,” says graduate student Kylie Hoffman. “Some of it we can explain, and some of it we can’t. Identifying the discrepancies and being able to modify the climate models to be more accurate down the road is very important.”

Currently, the effect of infrared radiation is completely absent from models, because so little is known. But, “If our research shows the infrared radiation effects of dust are important, then we can add this effect into climate models,” Zhang says. “Actually, dust is going to change a lot in the future as the climate changes, so it’s important to consider the more comprehensive effects of dust in climate models.”

Moving forward, graduate student Kevin Zheng will take the lead on this work. He’ll develop computer code that can process the years and years of data collected by CALIPSO and MODIS and determine the altitude, thickness, and other properties of dust in the atmosphere, which can be used to determine how much radiation it blocks or lets pass through. In the end, he says, “We’ll have a global map of the dust’s infrared radiation properties in different locations at different times.”

Chamara Rajapakshe, another Ph.D. student in the lab, emphasizes that the team plans to share its data to support work in other labs around the world. “Everything is archived and available to any scientist,” Rajapakshe says—including not only the raw data, but also the tools for processing it. “That will benefit a lot of other research groups.” The Zhang lab is making it possible for researchers everywhere to help communities tackle the uncertainties of climate change—starting with better climate models.

Banner image: Clockwise from lower left: Qianqian Song, Chamara Rajapakshe, Kevin Zheng, Zhibo Zhang, Olivia Norman. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Stephen Freeland receives Trotter Prize for pioneering origins-of-life research

This spring, Stephen Freeland, director of individualized studies and associate professor of biological sciences, received the Texas A&M Trotter Prize in Information, Complexity, and Inference, an endowed lecture series seeking to reveal connections between science and religion. He traveled to Texas A&M University in April to deliver two talks about his research on the origins of life.

From Freeland’s perspective, the prize creates a space to “honor and debate about where evolution intersects with deeper, multi-dimensional concepts about the purpose of us being here, or what science is telling us about our place in the universe.” While not structured as a formal debate, the prize is given to two winners each year with contrasting views, and they present their talks at the same event.

Freeland’s research has always centered on how and why living things evolved a system of genetic coding, which has taken him from biology to astrobiology and has inevitably led him to grapple with one of the big questions many people ask themselves: “Where do we come from?”

Freeland said he was proud to add UMBC to the list of winners’ institutions, which in the prize’s 17 years has included many renowned bastions of scholarship in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and Cornell.

Specifically, Freeland said he was thrilled to follow in the footsteps of previous winners and scientific giants, such as Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader in the Human Genome Project, and Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. “These are people whose names have influenced profoundly my career and thinking,” Freeland says, “and I respect them highly.”

Asking the right question

In his talk, Freeland called on his own research and standard evolutionary theory to argue that information flows from the environment into organisms, resulting in an organism storing information about its environment in its DNA. That makes sense in the context of natural selection: organisms that are more suited to their surroundings (in other words, whose genetic material stores more information about the environment) will be more likely to survive and reproduce, creating more organisms with the same helpful traits.

“That was a very useful point to counter the fundamental claim from intelligent design that evolution requires a degree of complexity that is different from anything science knows how to explain,” Freeland says. “No it doesn’t—organisms absorb information from the environment. That’s what we’ve been saying for 150 years.”

Intelligent design (ID) is a theory outside mainstream science claiming organisms that are strikingly well-tuned to their environment or lifestyle could not have arisen by natural processes alone. Thinking deeply about ID over the last several years has led Freeland to appreciate its usefulness as a foil for evolution.

“Thinking about why my own education and research cause me to disagree with ID’s claims has given me clarity about how that applies to the origin of life,” he says, “and this same deeper thinking has helped advance my own research, and examine how it does or, in some cases, does not, align with current scientific paradigms.”

One of the most popular paradigms in the origin-of-life field, the “RNA World Hypothesis,” posits that RNA, a slightly different form of genetic material that is present alongside DNA in all organisms, arose before the first living things and eventually made life possible. Based on this hypothesis, many researchers are currently struggling to determine how RNA could have come to exist before life.

However, after a great deal of study, including contemplating the claims of ID, Freeland thinks, “We should be looking for what chemicals information from the environment is flowing into, pre-RNA. What is this curious molecule that preceded RNA, that may look nothing like it? Are we asking the wrong question if we’re trying to make RNA’s existence before the first living things plausible?”

Seeing the truth

Freeland took the stage this year as the orthodox scientist of the winning pair, because he espouses the traditional scientific view of evolution and natural selection. So, the fact that he is also a committed Christian may have taken some listeners by surprise. In fact, efforts at the intersection of science and religion have been a core part of Freeland’s work for decades.

In March, he helped organize UMBC’s events sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science focused on the intersection of science and religion. He also serves on the advisory board for Biologos, an organization seeking to show Christians that science, and specifically evolution, need not conflict with their worldview. In addition, he has spoken internationally and taught courses on the topic at UMBC for many years, and is excited this summer for the first time to work directly with a Muslim youth organization on an environmental stewardship project, in collaboration with individualized studies instructor Tabassum Majid ’10, interdisciplinary studies, M.A. ’18, management of aging studies.

As a scientist and a Christian, Freeland explains that in his worldview, truth extends beyond science, to frameworks such as spirituality and religion. Science and religion influence each other over time, and they are not mutually exclusive, he says.

“There are worldviews that shape what we believe, and it’s not clear to me that it’s science that drives those worldviews. Science sometimes catches up to that worldview by saying yes, when we measure by science we do find that truth.” And sometimes, “changing worldviews will revolutionize what truths science is capable of seeing.”

Banner image: Steve Freeland accepts the Trotter Prize. Photo credit: Texas A&M University College of Science.