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

NSF grants UMBC and community college partners $1.4M to innovate science education

UMBC has received a new five-year, $1.4 million grant to further expand the university’s tradition of innovative undergraduate teaching and strong partnerships with community colleges to support the success of students from all backgrounds. The Improving Undergraduate Science Education (IUSE) grant from the National Science Foundation will focus on teaching and learning in biology, following similar work on the chemistry curriculum in 2016 and 2017.

At the center of this work will be close collaboration with area partners Howard Community College, Anne Arundel Community College, Community College of Baltimore County, and Montgomery College.

The first aim of the grant focuses on aligning curriculum in biology across all the partner institutions to improve the transfer student experience.

It’s about “getting faculty in the same room to talk about how biology is taught,” says Laura Ott, executive director for IUSE and director of the College of Natural and Mathematical Science’s Science Education Research Unit.

Faculty from all partner institutions will meet regularly to discuss course content and potential differences in class size, assessment methods, facilities, or teaching techniques that could impact the student experience. They’ll outline ways to either limit those differences or to better prepare students to anticipate them and feel confident in knowing how to handle them.

Biology by the numbers

The grant’s second goal creates the NEXUS Institute in Quantitative Biology, which builds on work by UMBC faculty to develop, implement, and evaluate biology teaching modules that incorporate quantitative reasoning skills. That work found that some students gained more from the modules than others. Transfer students in particular seemed to have more trouble applying their math skills to biology.

With this finding in mind, faculty from the partner institutions will work together throughout the year “to come up with a common set of modules to be used in the four core biology courses, so everyone is getting the same exposure, no matter what point they enter UMBC,” says biology professor Jeff Leips, one of the IUSE leads. The materials that are developed will be made completely public, so other institutions can utilize them as well. Instructors will also receive guidance on how to use the modules in their courses.

“The idea is that over five years we’ll develop a whole warehouse, a repertoire of these modules that people can mix and match to align with the cultures of their departments,” says Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at UMBC.“The modules are a tool to get people to talk, to give them something to think about,” he adds, “so they can build fruitful collaborations across their unique institutions founded in their shared commitment to student success.”

For Leips, helping biology students develop their quantitative reasoning skills  “is exciting, because it’s necessary.” As science continues to become more quantitative, gaining the relevant skills is imperative to students’ long-term success. “You can’t get away with being a researcher or a medical practitioner without understanding quantitative applications,” he says. “There’s a societal need.”

Sharing skills

The third goal for the grant is to support faculty development. UMBC offers a certificate for instructors who want to embrace active learning and inquiry-based teaching practices. Under IUSE, Linda Hodges, director of UMBC’s Faculty Development Center, will work to make a similar certificate available to instructors from all the partner institutions.

“Cohesive, steady engagement” and “practice, feedback, and reflection” are known to encourage lasting change among teachers, explains Hodges, which, in turn, “is linked to improved student learning.”

Supporting educators in this way will also help them develop a sense of community and share their own knowledge of best practices with one another—as Dean LaCourse describes, “to take the best of everything we do and bring it together.” This work with faculty could also broaden the reach of the project, as that community of educators goes on to publish about successful, new techniques for teaching biology.

The new IUSE grant marks the third successful UMBC-community college partnership to improve the educational experience and learning outcomes for transfer students in the sciences. At their core, these partnerships “are about building relationships, better communication, and building a community that benefits the students, the faculty, and the institutions,” LaCourse says. “My students are your students, and your students are my students,” he adds. “The idea is to make a bigger tent, and not work as two institutions, but as one.”

Image: Weihong Lin (second from left), associate professor of biological sciences, works with her students in the lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC and community colleges collaborate to boost transfer student success in STEM

UMBC welcomes a large number of students from community colleges every semester, including in STEM majors. To better support these students, UMBC partnered with Anne Arundel Community College, Community College of Baltimore County, Howard Community College, and Montgomery College to develop and implement the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative (t-STEM). This initiative was sponsored by the Provost’s office and initially funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Too often, efforts in higher education to support transfer students are grounded in a “deficit model,” focusing on assumed needs or gaps, says Sarah Jewett, executive director of t-STEM at UMBC. She sees things differently.

“I was really interested in looking at transfer from an asset-based perspective,” Jewett says. “Transfer students bring so many experiences and talents to this campus, just like every other student, and I think those strengths need to be recognized and tapped.”

When looking at factors that challenge transfer student success, Jewett suggests, “Rather than asking, ‘What do you not have?’ we should be asking, ‘What are we not doing?’” Figuring out the best plan forward depended on important collaborative work from the Office of Undergraduate Education, Off-Campus Student Services, the Office for Academic and Pre-Professional Advising, and the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, all of which sponsored important outcomes of the Initiative, and helped to develop key processes, resources, and services.

Strong foundations

An asset-based approach opened the door to forming strong relationships between UMBC and partner community colleges. “The whole t-STEM project was really about building foundational relationships between students, colleagues, and institutions,” explains Jewett. “That was our initial goal in all of this—to build those relationships in ways that felt real to people.”

Working collaboratively within and across institutions, t-STEM provided access to customized advising, peer networks, and a range of resources for transfer students both before and after their transition. With the support of staff from the Division of Information Technology and Common Vision, the team was able to create and deliver an online library of instructional resources, interactive tools, animated videos, and student/faculty testimonials.

That collaborative approach made it possible to pilot solutions to longstanding problems, like aligning curricula across campuses. Could a student who successfully completed courses at a community college smoothly move forward in the next level of those subjects at UMBC?  If not, how could partner institutions work together to better support that transition?

A great quintet

With support from Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and professor of chemistry at UMBC, faculty from UMBC and partner community colleges began by examining introductory chemistry.

Rather than simply check if topics listed on a UMBC syllabus were also listed on community college syllabi, teams of instructors engaged in meaningful conversation around all aspects of teaching and learning introductory chemistry. Partners from all five institutions published their results in the Journal of Chemical Education, providing a model for other institutions to follow.

“The chemistry curriculum alignment was groundbreaking, as everything was evaluated for alignment: curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, course policies, facilities,” says Patti Turner ’74, biological sciences, and professor of anatomy and physiology at Howard Community College.

“The process played out like a great quintet,” adds Margaret Latimer, vice president and provost at Montgomery College. “Each of the five colleges was heard and the faculty developed a rhythm as they worked together to ensure that students would be successful and meet expected standards.”

Both UMBC and the community colleges made changes to help ensure the success of transfer students in chemistry. For example, students were advised to take introductory course sequences at the same institution in order to avoid missing key course content. Additionally, participating faculty at the community colleges began including a few multiple-choice questions on their tests to better prepare students for assessments in large classes at UMBC, and UMBC faculty added open-response questions.

Ongoing growth

For faculty, “The project has enabled us to create long-standing relationships that make working on other projects seamless,” says Turner. “Because we worked really hard on building those relationships, and didn’t rush them, they’re still around, and they’re being leveraged for new opportunities,” adds Jewett.

“UMBC is in a unique position to support transfer students because of our foundation in inclusive excellence,” says Jewett. “The attention to transfer students has really grown in my time here,” she adds, but as UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski is known to say, “Success is never final.”

In that spirit, the current focus of UMBC and our community college partners is leveraging the t-STEM partnership for new and innovative proposals to support transfer success across the disciplines. “We still have a lot of work to do,” Jewett says. “There’s always work to be done.”

Image: Students work together at UMBC’s CNMS Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment (CASTLE). Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Third annual UMBC GRIT-X talks highlight thought-provoking ideas, experiences, and discoveries

Artists, scientists, and social change agents from across UMBC presented the third annual GRIT-X talks on October 13, sharing their ideas and perspectives on stage in UMBC’s Dance Cube. “All our talks gave a different facet, a different beam of light, on what we do at UMBC,” said Vice President for Research Karl Steiner, who spearheaded the event.

The value of stories

Documentary filmmaker Richard Chisolm ’82, interdisciplinary studies, explained how many documentaries and reality television shows today are tightly scripted and controlled, and how, in contrast, he uses an in-the-moment style of filmmaking to produce films that honestly represent a microcosm of the larger story.

Through films like Cafeteria Man, focused on school food reform, and Gun Show, about an artist who makes sculptures of assault weapons out of found objects, Chisolm gives viewers an entry point into thorny issues. Each topic he tackles is a “huge iceberg, the tip of which is an hour documentary,” Chisolm says. “The noblest thing to do is to tell stories in a way that the tip of the iceberg represents the iceberg fairly.”

Manil Suri, mathematics, emphasized in his talk that storytelling can benefit disciplines beyond literature and film. “Stories underlie so much of what we do, including math and other STEM subjects,” he said.

Suri weaves together his passions for storytelling and math on a daily basis: He teaches a course with Michele Osherow, English, about the relationship between math and the humanities, and he’s written a novel, The Godfather of Numbers, that is a sort of creation story for mathematics. He’s using excerpts from it in his math classes this fall.

Suri also urges people who are less keen on mathematics to broaden their perspective of what math is. “Math is about more than calculations,” he says. “It’s about ideas, and ideas, such as infinity, can be enjoyed by everyone.”

Nicole King, American studies, enjoys listening to and learning from others’ stories, with a focus on residents of Baltimore City. After an accident totaled her Corolla in 2010, King decided to go carless, which, she says, removed a barrier to her truly listening to Baltimore. Through taking the bus and more closely connecting with Baltimore in other ways, King shared, “I started to really see the beauty—that cacophony of voices and sounds—that make a city a city.”

King’s research seeks to understand how Baltimore residents are responding to change across the city, with a particular focus on public markets like Lexington Market, and arts districts like Station North. Through that work, “I found listening, really listening, has been the most important, but also the most difficult, method I have used in my research,” she said. She creates opportunities for her students to “show up and listen” through immersive class projects.

Listening to her students has helped shape her teaching and research, too. “Give students the agency to shape projects,” she recommends. “They have good ideas and should be taken seriously.”

Doing things differently

Deborah Thompson Eisenberg ’91, political science, is a professor of law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, where she directs the Center for Dispute Resolution. She was motivated to pursue a law career because, she explained, “When our democracy encounters crisis, lawyers and the judiciary tend to step in to give voice to the powerless, enforce our laws and our Constitutional rights, and protect the most vulnerable.” However, over time, she reflected, “I’ve come to believe that if lawyers and judges truly want to foster a culture of conflict resolution, we need more than the power of the rule of law.”

Eisenberg began to focus on alternatives to traditional litigation: mediation and restorative justice practices, teaching our youth to “talk it out to work it out,” and teaching our politicians “to use consensus-building policies.” Conflict is inevitable and has been intensifying, Eisenberg argued, but “we can transform our culture of conflict to a culture of conflict resolution if we use all of our superpowers,” combining the rule of law, alternative dispute resolution, community connections, and education.

Disney’s Princess Tiana may not be a superhero, but, as the first black Disney princess, she is larger than life in the eyes of many young girls of color. Kimberly Moffitt, associate professor of language, literacy, and culture and Africana studies, discussed how Tiana broke the mold of the traditional Disney princess with her entrepreneurial, ambitious spirit in The Princess and the Frog. “Princess Tiana pushes the bounds of the princess trope and says, ‘No more. We can do this differently,’” Moffitt said.

However, Moffitt explained, Tiana is also an example of the “glass cliff,” a phenomenon in business where companies are more likely to hire women and people of color to leadership roles when those companies are in times of crisis and the risk of failure is highest. When Tiana came out in 2009, Disney hadn’t had a new princess-style protagonist since Mulan in 1998, and the brand was faltering. The Princess and the Frog didn’t achieve box office success itself, but, Moffitt argued, “Tiana created space for the next three princesses,” who all were more independent than their predecessors: Rapunzel in Tangled, Merida in Brave, and Moana in Moana. “Tiana was a catalyst to shift our perception of what a princess could look like—in skin tone as well as her actions.”

Eric Dyer ’95, professor of visual arts, shifts our perception of what moving pictures can be by reimagining the zoetrope, one of the original forms of motion picture. Zoetropes use a series of snapshots in a spinning cylinder to trick the mind into seeing a moving scene. “As an artist, I pick up the tactile and interactive zoetrope where it was abandoned 120 years ago,” Dyer said, “and continuously reinvent it to make films, interactive animated sculptures, and immersive installations.”

At GRIT-X, Dyer demonstrated his work for the audience and, for the first time, shared the story behind each piece. Attendees enjoyed frolicking onions and peppers and reflected on Dyer’s exploration of the industrial heydays of the U.S. and China. “Thank you for sharing this performance storytelling experience with me today,” Dyer shared as he closed. “There’s something very human about it that isn’t possible either virtually or remotely.”

Shifting the culture

Diane Bell McKoy ’73, social work and sociology, is the CEO of Associated Black Charities of Maryland. She used her GRIT-X talk as an opportunity to share a powerful personal story of seeking treatment for depression in a broken mental healthcare system. Systems in place in the United States, she argued, perpetuate stigma and fail to support a sense of self-worth for people of color, and she is working to change them.

McKoy’s work has a particular focus on closing the racial wealth gap. If wealth continues to accrue at current rates, it would take a black family 228 years to accrue as much wealth as a white family, McKoy said, and it would take a Latino family 84 years. McKoy encouraged attendees to “look at the world through a new lens” and be willing to question current systems, from employment to education to healthcare.

Shawn Bediako, psychology, is also interested in changing perceptions around race, with a focus on health and science. “Ideas about race can become inscribed in our minds if they’re repeated often enough,” he said at GRIT-X, using the example that many people seem to believe, incorrectly, that sickle cell disease is exclusive to black people.

Bediako went on to explain how race is a complex legal, social, and cultural construct that impacts people’s lives in dramatic ways. But he also shared that he has hope this can change, and that UMBC can develop leaders who will impact the way we think about race. “I feel confident that an institution like ours, with a commitment to inclusive excellence at all levels of the arts, humanities, and sciences,” he said, “can help…change this inscription and hopefully shift this paradigm.”

To close the program, Kavita Krishnaswamy ’07, computer science and mathematics, Ph.D. ’19, computer science, shared her work developing solutions to assist people with disabilities and mobility challenges. Krishnaswamy, who has spinal muscular atrophy, gave her presentation via a telepresence device that allows her to navigate the world from her home in Columbia, Maryland.

Krishnaswamy is the recipient of the Google Lime Scholarship, was named a Microsoft Fellow, and was included among the Baltimore Sun’s “25 Women to Watch.” She is currently working on projects including a bed that allows people with mobility challenges to adjust their position along many different axes of movement, and a robot to enable people who previously could not use the bathroom unassisted to do so independently.

“We have a lot of problems in the world, and I really feel that robotics can solve many of those problems,” Krishnaswamy said. “So in that way we can really promote social progress and elevate the global living standards. That, in turn, can increase the quality of life for people with disabilities, seniors, and their families.”

One of her closing remarks echoed the sentiments of others at GRIT-X. “Even though our perspectives are many and diverse, our vision is one,” she concluded. Whether dismantling stigma, finding new ways to connect students with intimidating subjects, or changing how we think about conflict, all the speakers emphasized how the UMBC community can reach together to improve the world of tomorrow.

Banner image: Manil Suri, mathematics, at GRIT-X. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.
Explore video of all GRIT-X talks on the Research at UMBC website. 

UMBC researchers develop new method to address deep-seated biases in science, starting with birds

New UMBC research is helping dismantle gender and publication biases in science. A team of researchers working across disciplines has developed a new statistical technique to understand similarity, rather than difference, in the natural world. With this new technique, they’ve determined that among Eastern Bluebirds the structure of songs female birds sing is statistically indistinguishable from songs males sing.

Awareness of female birdsong is growing worldwide, thanks in part to a breakthrough paper by Karan Odom, Ph.D. ’16, biological sciences, but it’s still understood as a trait found primarily in tropical birds. Evangeline Rose, a current Ph.D. student in the same lab and first author on a new paper in Animal Behavior, wanted to look at song in a temperate species.

During Rose’s fieldwork, “I was finding that the females were singing, to me, what sounded just like male songs,” she says. “So we started thinking about equality, and equivalence, and how to test for it.” On the advice of her advisor, Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences, she reached out to Thomas Mathew, professor of statistics, who has expertise in statistical equivalence.

Challenging a paradigm

Working together, the team modified a statistical method used in generic drug testing to meet their needs for ecology and animal behavior studies. The existing test helps determine whether generic and brand name drugs are “statistically equivalent,” meaning they are similar enough to be prescribed safely for the same purpose. The new modification will allow scientists in other fields to test for equivalence. Before, researchers could only report they did not find a significant difference—a very different statement than saying two things are conclusively equivalent.

“We’re really hoping this new method is going to address some issues with what kinds of data get published,” Rose says. “The most important thing about being a good scientist is to be unbiased. And the whole tradition of testing for difference really leads to incredible biases in scientists,” Omland says. He adds, “There’s a whole realm of things in nature that we find interesting and important because of their similarity.”

For example, in addition to similarities in songs between the sexes in birds, researchers could use the new test to ask if two species use the same type of habitat, respond the same way to predators, or consume the same food sources. Answers to those questions could fill long-standing knowledge gaps, or even inform conservation efforts.

“This test is really broadly applicable,” says Rose, “and we’re hoping to introduce it more to the ecology and evolution field.”

A new approach

One advantage of the new method is it accounts for unequal sample sizes. In a medical study, researchers can carefully control the size of treatment and control groups. In other fields, from ecology, to engineering, to agriculture, that’s often not possible. The new test also allows researchers to determine the equivalence of several traits simultaneously, Mathew explains. For example, in this study, the authors found that the male and female birds’ songs were statistically equivalent across five different characteristics, such as duration of each song and the range of pitches the birds produced.

Rather than testing whether two things are exactly equal, the team was looking for a way to determine if two things were “close enough,” given a defined allowable margin of difference. Because of that added layer, “There are additional challenges here,” Mathew says.

“Even though this methodology is out there, it hasn’t been applied—even in statistics—with this kind of data. That’s why I was very excited when they brought this project to me,” Mathew says. Rose adds, “It ended up being a really great partnership to look at these questions that hadn’t been asked before for female song, and we also ended up modifying this test in a really cool, new way.”

Changing science

As research on similarities grows, there is also a growing drive to remove the bias against publishing studies that do not find a significant difference, often termed a “negative result.” This paper “is part of an amazing drumbeat that’s building up in the scientific community,” Omland says. “There’s a broader problem with the scientific method that’s being increasingly acknowledged, and the test we’ve developed can at least play a small role, and I hope a big role, in addressing it.”

Rose, who plans to next investigate the function of female bluebird songs, says she will carry these new techniques with her as she moves through her research career. “I think in the future, I’ll be thinking about how equivalence can change the questions we’re asking, and I’ll always keep in mind that we have extra tools in the toolkit.”

Image: An Eastern Bluebird, Rose’s study organism, sits on a fence. Photo by Dolan Trout, used under CC 2.0.

UMBC’s Sebastian Deffner receives FQXi support for pioneering work to define laws of the universe

Sebastian Deffner plans to spend his career expanding on the work of physics giants to refine our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, from the inner workings of the tiniest cells to the dynamics of the largest cosmic phenomena. Deffner, an assistant professor of physics at UMBC, recently moved forward in this work through a pioneering paper in Physical Review X with CalTech collaborator Anthony Bartolotta, and now has a new grant to push the envelope even further.

As their paper describes, Deffner and Bartolotta have developed more accurate ways to determine how energy is used, released, and transformed in very small systems with very high energy, which had previously been poorly understood. Deffner’s new grant from the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) will enable him to further develop a new field of physics that focuses on energy and information processing.

The origin of intelligence

The FQXi sought research projects that would address the question of agency in the physical world. It’s common to think about actions as being caused by some external force—flipping a switch, pushing a lever—but those levers and switches “are all part of the same universe,” Deffner explains. “We don’t have any scientific idea that there could be something acting on the universe from the outside, which means that anything that happens within the universe actually arises from interaction of different parts of the universe. Nothing comes for free.”

“Now, if this is true, how does something like intelligence or agency actually arise from the very fundamental laws of physics that describe the universe?” he asks. To address that question, Deffner has turned to a new field of physics known as the thermodynamics of information. Classic thermodynamics considers how energy in the forms of heat and work is transformed in physical systems. But Deffner thinks there’s more to it.

Including information

“We don’t get a complete thermodynamic picture if we neglect information. If we only think about heat and work, we will always end up with statements that seem to violate the axioms of thermodynamics,” Deffner says. “Only if we include information processing, and understand what that actually means, do we get a complete thermodynamic picture.”

The idea is that writing and erasing information in a system involves energy, so evaluations of the overall energy in a system must consider information processing. Understanding energy and information processing is important for describing the universe, but it’s also important for more practical applications.

Scientists and engineers are working to develop the next generation of information storage, and it may take the form of “quantum memory”—systems that rely on quantum mechanics and the stability of extremely cold groups of atoms (near absolute zero) to store information.

“If you want to build a quantum memory out of these ultra-cold atoms,” Deffner explains, “you have to understand how information actually is written and how you can stabilize the information content of these systems.”

A universe in flux

Current theories, such as thermodynamics, work well when a system is in equilibrium. However, “if you look at the universe, it’s not in thermal equilibrium. It’s not even close,” Deffner says. For example, think of a star like our Sun constantly releasing heat and light through extremely high-energy reactions.

So, “What I want to do is to take stochastic thermodynamics that we’ve developed for small quantum systems and small biological systems, and apply these concepts and notions to cosmology to get a better understanding of the extremes of the universe,” Deffner says. He’ll be charting new territory in the extraordinarily complex math that describes, at a fundamental level, how the world works.

Following the dream

As his career progresses, Deffner hopes to help generate “a better, more concise understanding of the universe,” he says, “but for that we need a lot of bits and pieces, and almost nothing like this has been done yet.”

The Physical Review X paper took the first baby steps toward developing the basis to move forward with this work. Now, Deffner is off and running, but he recognizes the journey will be a marathon, not a sprint.

“We know which direction we’re going now, and we know which steps to take,” he says, “but we will not be able to describe the universe in 2020. If we’re lucky, that’s something for 2050.”

One thing Deffner does know is that he’s committed to the marathon. “If you don’t dream big, what are you going to do?” he asks. “Sometimes you have to take a risk and follow the dream.”

30th UMBC Alumni Awards celebrate leadership, service, and community

UMBC community members from the university’s first class to today kicked off Homecoming 2018 on October 4 with a celebration of UMBC Alumni Award winners. Held in the Earl and Danielle Linehan Concert Hall, the moving and memorable ceremony reflected the rich community that is UMBC and honored the tremendous achievements of eight exceptional awardees.

As the evening began, John Becker ’01, information systems, president of the UMBC Alumni Association, remarked, “The alumni and faculty we will recognize tonight truly capture the depth of the UMBC community.” President Freeman Hrabowski encouraged attendees to “listen, learn, and be inspired.”

Kimberly Ellison-Taylor ’93, information systems, received the 2018 Outstanding Alumna in Engineering and Information Technology Award. She bridges her knowledge in technology and finance as a global strategy director at Oracle. She is also the youngest person and first African-American woman to be elected as chair of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04, public policy, and vice president of institutional advancement, described Ellison-Taylor as “a visionary in her field” who can “see the future in the work that she does.” Still, he says, despite her success, “she’s never forgotten where she’s come from, and she’s made sure she’s opened pathways for others to have success that she’s modeled so well.”

Ellison-Taylor grew up in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. “Statistically, I shouldn’t be here,” she shared, but “UMBC provided a foundation of unparalleled opportunity. It empowered, enabled, equipped, and energized me to succeed.”

Through her participation in the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, Ellison-Taylor began paying it forward, supporting others in finding their paths. “Everyone deserves respect and dignity,” she said, “whether they’re the CEO or the janitor.”

Allan Kittleman ’81, political science, introduced Zainab Alkebsi ’09, political science, this year’s Rising Star Award recipient. Alkebsi serves as policy counsel for the National Association for the Deaf.

As a child, Alkebsi was frustrated by the lack of accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing people like herself. She recalled attending a movie and seeing everyone around her laughing while she couldn’t follow the dialogue. So, at 11 years old, “I resolved that I was going to go to law school and advocate for full, equal access,” she told the crowd through an interpreter. “Now, here I am—in the trenches of the battle to break down barriers to accessibility for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.”

Among her many achievements as an advocate, Alkebsi recently negotiated 100 percent captioning for in-flight entertainment on several major airlines. Now a mother, she imagines her daughter “boarding a flight and knowing the role her mother played in ensuring greater accessibility.”

Alkebsi thanked her UMBC professors for encouraging her personal and professional growth. She shared that she continues to give back to UMBC by presenting guest lectures focused on the Deaf community.

Kathleen Hoffman, mathematics, and David Mitch, economics, introduced Mark Doms ’86, mathematics and economics, the 2018 Outstanding Alumnus in Natural and Mathematical Sciences Award recipient. A leading economic policy expert, Doms served on the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve and as the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the Department of Commerce under the Obama administration, and worked at Japan’s largest investment bank.

“I couldn’t have gotten a better education anywhere else,” Doms shared, of his time at UMBC. His math classes taught him to analyze data appropriately, and his economics classes taught him “how to think about the world’s problems in a rigorous manner.”

In addition to a strong academic preparation, “UMBC instilled in me a sense of public service,” Doms said. His career has been primarily in the public sector, and he intends to teach at a public university when he returns to the United States from his current work in Europe.

Saira Khan ’09, English, is UMBC’s 2018 Outstanding Alumna in the Humanities. Chris Corbett, English, noted, “She has achieved more in just a few years than some aspiring journalists achieve in an entire career.”

Khan began her career as a freelancer for Dawn, an English-language publication in her native Pakistan, “moving seamlessly between two very complicated worlds,” Corbett said. Less than a decade later, she is now director of social media for The New Yorker.

Attending UMBC was “one of the best decisions I have made in my life,” Khan shared. “I left this place with relationships that I have carried with me for the last 10 years, and I know I will have them with me for the rest of my life. For that, I will be forever grateful.”

Mina Cheon, M.F.A. ’02, imaging and digital arts, also moves seamless between worlds, from Korea to New York City to UMBC. She says “artists are agents of change,” and they become leaders who “perform art projects in social spaces that matter.”

Her often-controversial art includes a series of political videos framed as art history lessons, which she placed on flash drives inside balloons and launched from South Korea over the border with North Korea. The South Korean president and first lady visited her most recent exhibition.

Cheon’s connection to the university has been long-lasting. She graduated from UMBC with her infant son in her arms, and now he is studying math at UMBC. “Thank you for being the leading, visionary STEAM research community where I grew abundantly and where my son will be nurtured to flourish in his academic track,” she shared.

Cheon also mentioned her gratitude for UMBC faculty and staff’s dedication to “shaping the future by empowering the artist in society.” Her nominator, Kathy O’Dell, visual arts, said simply, “Dr. Cheon is a treasure.”

Wanda Keyes Heard ’79, political science, the 2018 Outstanding Alumna in Social Sciences Award recipient, is the first female chief judge of the 8th Judicial Circuit. Keyes Heard holds this position following 19 years of service as a circuit court judge in Baltimore City. She has mentored dozens of UMBC students and fellow judges.

“UMBC helped prepare me to accomplish my professional goals,” she says, “to break through race and gender bias and barriers, because I was a woman headed into a field where people just didn’t look like me.”

Like other recipients, Keyes Heard also talked about relationships and community. “I embraced this campus, and it embraced me,” she said. She described UMBC as “not only my academic home, but my home away from home.” Many of her former classmates, who remain her close friends, attended the ceremony to cheer her achievement. “They’re here tonight,” Keyes Heard said, “because they are still my family after 40 years.”

Mimi Haw Dietrich ’70, American studies, received the 2018 Outstanding Alumna for Distinguished Service Award. As a founder of the “Fab Four” group (comprised of members of UMBC’s first four graduating classes), Dietrich remembers a time when UMBC included just three buildings.

“We planted the seeds for UMBC’s greatness many years ago just by believing in a new university,” she shared. She chose to attend because Albin O. Kuhn, UMBC’s first president, “promised that we would be pioneers.”

For UMBC’s 50th anniversary, Dietrich was one of the first to galvanize alumni to organize and participate in the celebrations. She continues to serve UMBC by organizing Fab Four events. She previously served on the Alumni Association Board of Directors and was named UMBC Volunteer of the Year in 1999 along with her husband, Bob Dietrich ’70, biological sciences.

Professionally, Dietrich has been dedicated to spreading her love of quilting and needlework as an educator for 50 years. She was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame in 2015 and named the Professional Quilter of the Year in 2013.

Mariajose Castellanos, chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, is the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Award recipient. Castellanos, a teaching faculty member, expressed gratitude that her department supported her when she “chose to pursue teaching and leadership through service,” rather than continue in research.

Jeremy Drew ’17, chemical engineering, reflected on the great impact of her work as an educator, for him and so many others. “She showed me the value of trying a problem I wasn’t sure how to solve,” said Drew. He continued,“Dr. C. cares about the well-being of her students, and adapts to each of their individual needs in order to bring them the most comprehensive education possible.”

Throughout the event, speaker after speaker reflected on meaningful friendships and strong bonds with mentors at UMBC—connections that have lasted over decades. President Hrabowski drew on this theme as he offered closing remarks. “The older I get, the more I realize there’s nothing more important than friends and family,” he said. “It is the notion of community through which we are all connected.”

Banner image: Wanda Keyes Heard ’79 speaks to a full Linehan Concert Hall. All images by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Annica Wayman M6, ’99, to launch translational science program at Shady Grove

For Annica Wayman M6, ’99, mechanical engineering, this fall marks a homecoming wrapped up in a new beginning. After eight years with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), building programs from the ground up to support research projects that address international development challenges such as global health, agriculture, food security, and renewable energy, Wayman is ready for a new chapter.

Wayman, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering with a bioengineering emphasis from Georgia Tech, sees parallels between what she did at USAID and her new role at UMBC as the College of Natural and Mathematical Science’s associate dean for Shady Grove affairs. In particular, a UMBC campaign t-shirt with “Transform Lives” in large, bold print caught her attention.

“That’s what I was doing at USAID,” Wayman says, “and that’s what I have a chance to do here through science and engineering.” As leader of the charge to launch UMBC’s new Translational Life Science Technology (TLST) undergraduate program at Shady Grove, “There’s still a theme of translating scientific discovery to solutions that transform society, so I’m able to do that, and I’m also transforming students’ lives so they can go on to do those things.”

Building a New Program

The brand-new TLST program, which is administered through the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), trains students in the work that happens “behind the scenes,” Wayman explains—between discoveries in basic science and fully-forged applications in practitioners’ hands, such as drugs or medical devices. Often, gaps in communication and a lack of translational science professionals prevent promising new therapies from ever getting past the earliest stages of development.

The TLST program hopes to change that by training people in the “in between” tasks, such as conducting animal studies and clinical trials, developing processes to scale up production of promising treatments, and learning how to make sure new products are the ones practitioners actually need to help patients.

Wayman will also lead a re-launch of the Master of Professional Studies degree in biotechnology at Shady Grove, which had previously been offered at main campus. Other new programs may follow.

Wayman says UMBC is well-suited to offer such programs at Shady Grove for several reasons, including the Rockville campus’ location in the heart of Montgomery County, where 75 percent of Maryland’s 2,300 life science companies have set up shop. In addition, “UMBC is not scared to take risks,” Wayman says, “and we look for those cutting-edge opportunities to be at the forefront of what careers and industry needs are out there, so that we can prepare students for what is to come and not just what’s already here.”

UMBC’s culture of inclusive excellence is also an asset. “You really need a diverse set of folks—not just diverse in disciplines, but also a diversity of thinking and ethnicity,” says Wayman, who is an alumna of the Meyerhoff (M6 cohort) and MARC Scholar programs. “UMBC has always been really good at fostering an equal playing field,” she adds, “so that all people feel like their voices matter and they can all equally achieve and work together.”

A Supportive Community

Wayman credits her own success in part to the supportive culture she experienced as an undergraduate. “When I was here, I felt that the Meyerhoff staff and the faculty just had such a caring approach,” she shares. In addition, “as an engineering class, we were great peer mentors to each other… Being an African-American female in engineering, I was looking to be sure I could get the support I would need and UMBC delivered greater than my expectations.”

On top of her strong STEM background, Wayman understands that the success of the scientific enterprise is driven by interdisciplinary collaboration. “From where I come from at USAID, that’s huge—we realize that understanding the technology alone is not sufficient to solve a development challenge. You have to understand the culture, the people, the political context, the history of the country.”

“UMBC is continuing to try to push the envelope into what’s the next wave of innovative education, not just in STEM but also blending it with the arts and humanities,” Wayman says, and she’s looking forward to being part of that push.

Learn more about UMBC’s new Translational Life Science Technology and Master of Professional Studies in Biotechnology programs.  

 

UMBC physicist Can Ataca developing quicker, cheaper way to create novel, one-atom-thick materials

Imagine a sheet that’s only one atom thick. It won’t keep you very warm, but single-atom-thick materials under development might soon do extraordinary things, like filter salt from water, collect and store solar energy, or protect you from a poisonous gas. These sheets are referred to as two-dimensional materials, and they’re Can Ataca’s specialty.

Ataca, a computational physicist at UMBC, and his collaborator Brenda Rubenstein, a physical chemist at Brown University, have just received a three-year National Science Foundation grant to develop new methods to speed up and reduce the cost of developing new 2D materials. Ataca and his lab members use supercomputers to model possible new 2D materials and predict their properties—magnetic, mechanical, electrical, optical, chemical, and more.

“We can predict the material’s properties before experimentalists can even synthesize it,” says Ataca.

That’s a good thing, because generating a single sample of one of these cutting-edge materials can cost up to $1 million and require highly advanced technical skills and equipment.

New tech, new methods

Modeling 2D materials is not entirely new. In the 1990s, researchers started with models that treated the chemical bonds between atoms like simple springs and completely ignored quantum mechanics, which become very important at small scales—like a one-atom-thick structure.

Why did those early models make assumptions that ignored quantum mechanics? Limited computing power was the culprit, but “even though these assumptions make life easier computationally, they come with lower accuracy,” Ataca explains.

Computers today are vastly more powerful than in the 1990s, and Ataca is taking advantage of that to develop more accurate methodology that accounts for quantum mechanics. Methods that incorporate quantum mechanics are currently available, but the new methodological framework Ataca’s lab is developing, called Quantum Monte Carlo, is an order of magnitude more accurate than existing quantum methods. Its results get extremely close to what experimental physicists would find in the lab with the real material.

The older methods are currently easier to implement because the computer code to run tests with them already exists: Enter a handful of parameters, click a button, and come back a day later to collect your results. The newer techniques that Ataca, Ph.D. students Daniel Wines and Gracie Chaney, and postdoctoral researcher Fatih Ersan are working to develop “are a much more hands-on process,” Ataca says. “In order to reach one result, you need to do around 100 different calculations, which require rigorous processing after each step.”

Next stop, applications

The current project is a proof-of-concept to show that the new methods work. “First, we are going to show the world that Quantum Monte Carlo is doing a better job. We’re trying to come up with a kind of recipe,” Ataca says. After that, they may collaborate with researchers seeking materials for specific applications.

Scientists who physically create these materials in their labs will rely on the results of models like Ataca’s to make major investment decisions in their labs, so it’s critical that the new method’s predictions can be trusted. To verify that results generated with the new code are accurate, the research team will compare them against existing experimental data for 2D materials.

“After we’ve done lots of this, and get the same results as the experiments, we are going to make these codes available to anyone,” Ataca says. He hopes that their work will eventually be used to create a wide variety of novel materials.

“With this methodology we can get the optimal properties of these materials with a very high accuracy,” Ataca explains, “so we can definitely say, ‘Hey, this material is good for photovoltaics [solar cells], that material is good for hydrogen generation, this material can bind this kind of poisonous gas.’”

By shortcutting the discovery process, the new methods could be a game-changer for developing not only 2D materials, but also any crystal structures or molecules.  As Ataca says, “This could be the beginning of a new computational era.”

Image: Can Ataca, second from left, meets with some of his students. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Rachel Brewster investigates cellular survival to improve the preservation of organs for transplant

Two years ago, developmental biologist Rachel Brewster embarked on a journey to learn more about how zebrafish embryos manage to survive for up to 50 hours without oxygen, with support from a Department of Defense Idea Discovery Grant. The ultimate goal was to develop new methods to preserve organs for transplant, allowing them to last longer and travel farther to those in need. NIH has now rewarded the noteworthy progress of Brewster’s research team with a $400,000, two-year Exploratory Research Award to continue the work.

When human cells are deprived of oxygen, their energy production drops dramatically—but demand for energy stays high. This leads to tissue damage and death, sometimes within only a few minutes. When zebrafish are faced with low-oxygen conditions, however, the amount of energy they demand also drops. “Even though the level of ATP [cellular energy] drops, it is met by an equivalent drop in ATP consumption,” Brewster explains. “It’s the equivalent of reaching a new status quo.”

Figuring out how zebrafish activate that shift has been central to the research team’s efforts. If the same pathway could be induced in human tissue, there is potential to significantly delay tissue deterioration.

Graduate students Jong Park and Tim Hufford and many undergraduates, including Austin Gabel ‘17, Bryanna Canales ‘19, Afia Osei-Ntansah ‘20, Darius McKoy ‘20, Nguyet Le ‘20, and Neil Tran ’20, have majorly contributed to the lab’s work so far. Brewster will continue to rely on their commitment to the project moving forward.

Clues from cancer

In collaboration with Young-Sam Lee at Johns Hopkins, Brewster found that when cells were deprived of oxygen, the amount of lactate in the cells quickly increased. Once thought to be nothing more than a byproduct of anaerobic energy production (often induced by intense exercise), some researchers have found that lactate “might be doing more than we thought,” Brewster says.

For example, in cancer cells, scientists have found that lactate stabilizes a protein called NDRG1. That induces blood vessels to grow toward the cells, delivering more oxygen and allowing them to multiply quickly even in low-oxygen environments.

Growing more cells takes a lot of energy. That’s the opposite of what Brewster is looking for, but still interesting. “We wondered if maybe cancer cells hijack this pathway,” Brewster says, “and if in normal cells the response…would be different but nevertheless adaptive.”

Brewster’s lab put the scientific process to work—conducting experiments, consulting existing research, and talking with fellow scientists—to help clarify the connection between lactate, NDRG1, and survival without oxygen.

Pieces of the puzzle

Brewster had an “epiphany moment” when she realized that the protein NDRG1 is found in the same cells that express a component of sodium-potassium pumps—structures that use large amounts of cellular energy. “Isn’t it intriguing,” she reflects, “that we were looking for a protein that may save energy, and we find it expressed in the exact same cells that have this super energy-demanding pump?”

Brewster explains that because these pumps are so energy-demanding, under long-term low-oxygen conditions many organisms degrade them to preserve energy. NDRG1 is generally found floating in the fluid inside cells, but when oxygen levels drop, it migrates to the cell membrane, where the pumps are embedded. Could it be part of the mechanism responsible for degrading the pumps?

Brewster’s lab took cells that didn’t produce NDRG1 and exposed them to an environment without oxygen to test that idea. “Much to our surprise and delight, we found that the pump was no longer degraded,” Brewster says. “So this is very exciting to us. It also opens up a whole series of other questions.”

Other scientists pointed out that if all NDRG1 did was degrade the pumps, the cell would eventually fill with water and burst open, so now the lab is wondering if NDRG1 does other things, too. For example, maybe it degrades other proteins embedded in the cell membrane that transport molecules in and out of the cell, such as water.

“In essence,” Brewster’s hypothesis goes, “NDRG1 renders the membrane impermeable. And of course, if the cell is to survive this, it would have to be able to reverse it.”

Next steps

Brewster’s collaborator at Harvard, Ryuji Morizane, has found that NDRG proteins are also found in human kidney organoids, and they appear to move to the cell membrane under low-oxygen conditions. So, “We’re left with the big question of why is this pathway protective in fish, and not in humans,” Brewster says. “And this is a very difficult question to answer.”

The lab’s goal is to learn enough about this pathway to harness it to improve organ transplant procedures and increase the number of lives saved by transplants.

Today, organs are preserved by making them very cold, which artificially slows down metabolism and the process of tissue degeneration for a few hours. However, that protocol may “bypass the NDRG response,” Brewster says. “If one could find a different way to prep the tissue, so that the response was triggered right before organ harvest, it could induce a protective state.”

“Maybe lactate is the molecule that triggers the response,” Brewster says. “Maybe it could be as simple as artificially modifying lactate levels before you harvest the organ, and that would do the job. But we don’t know if lactate does that yet.”

That’s what Brewster’s lab aims to find out next. With the new grant, they’ll explore what triggers NDRG to move to the cell membrane—lactate or another factor—and what mechanism degrades the pumps. “We want to know if lactate is that magic molecule that does it all,” Brewster says. “And if it isn’t lactate, we want to be searching for that other molecule.”

Even if they don’t find all the answers, each step in the research brings Brewster’s team closer to solving a cellular mystery and saving lives.

Image: Rachel Brewster in her lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

South Africa to Colorado: Summer research helps UMBC STEM BUILD students chart their course

For an undergraduate getting their start in science, traveling far from home for an immersive research experience can be transformational. Living and working in a completely new environment, with new colleagues, can be intimidating, but it also offers powerful opportunities for growth. Five STEM BUILD students from UMBC took that plunge this summer, and all made lasting memories that will inform their paths forward.

Chad Brown ’19, biological sciences, traveled to South Africa with a research team based at the University of Virginia. Before departing, he spent time on UVA’s campus getting to know his team, practicing key lab techniques, and learning about South African culture.

“Not only are you going to be working in a research lab, but you’re doing it in a setting you’ve never experienced before,” Brown said. “You have to be in the mindset for that—and that’s what they were helping us do.”

Once in Thohoyandou, South Africa, Brown measured the concentration of bacteria in water samples from homes in the region. His efforts contributed to a long-term study designed to detect whether water treatment interventions are reducing bacteria in the water and affecting children’s growth.

Brown entered UMBC planning to pursue medical school, “but I think South Africa kind of flipped the script,” he said. Now he’s more seriously considering a research career. Many factors led to the shift, “but South Africa has been the big one that made the difference.”

Victoria Baskerville ’19, biological sciences, and Kendra Kontchou ’19, biological sciences and psychology, both participated in the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy Internship. Kontchou’s project focused on understanding a molecular pathway in pseudomonas bacteria, which is resistant to some antibiotics and commonly found in hospitals. The ultimate goal is to find a way to shut down the pathway and kill the bacteria.

A BUILD summer program at UMBC last summer helped prepare Kontchou by exposing her to techniques like gel electrophoresis, which she carried out many times at UMB. Baskerville felt similarly prepared for her research experience, where she analyzed data from clinical trials comparing a brand name and generic drug for people suffering from anemia.

“I felt comfortable going into it because a lot of the things that I did…I actually was exposed to in the summer BUILD program,” Baskerville said. She loves the scientific process, because “you get to figure out new things all the time.”

Baskerville has been planning to pursue research since her freshman year at UMBC. As she’s gained more lab experience and confidence through the BUILD program, research has become more central to her career plans.

“I feel as if I have a leg-up,” Kontchou said. “BUILD has laid a path for us and guided us. They help us with our academics, and they motivate us to look for research and other opportunities.”

Amber Thompson ’20, biochemistry and math, spent the summer at Colorado State University. She studied a gene that controls whether yeast cells clump together or not, which has important applications in the biofuels industry.

Her research project ran into roadblocks that required repeating a lengthy set of experiments, but there was a silver lining. “Research is like a big jigsaw puzzle,” Thompson said. “At first, I could only focus on one piece at a time. The second time, I could follow the intricacies and piece it together. Rather than just following a procedure, it was more of an intellectual challenge. You can start to see that trail, that next jigsaw piece that needs to be put together.”

Gabriel Duran ’19, environmental science and biological sciences, knows that he wants to first be a scientist, and then use his political science minor to advocate for environmental policies that benefit indigenous and other marginalized communities.

Duran spent this summer at the Marine Biological Laboratories (MBL) at Woods Hole, MA. There, he analyzed the nitrogen content of water samples from Little Pond, a reservoir in Falmouth, MA. The town is transitioning from septic to sewer systems to help reduce nitrogen pollution in local waterways, which causes harmful algal blooms.

“It gave me a lot of experience with different lab techniques, analyzing data, scientific communication skills, and overall it was just a great experience,” he shared. “I was surrounded by people who are as passionate as I am about environmental science.”

Before this summer, Duran had never before been on a boat, and one of his favorite parts of his time at Woods Hole was embarking on a research vessel to conduct experiments at sea. Away from the light pollution of the cities on land, he saw his first shooting star.

Duran’s summer experience went so well that another researcher at MBL has invited him to spend next summer working on her project—in the Arctic. He was delighted to accept, and he looks forward to another season of scientific discovery.

Image: STEM BUILD students on UMBC’s Academic Row. From left to right: Gabriel Duran, Amber Thompson, Kendra Kontchou, Chad Brown. Photo by Tim Ford.

UMBC, NASA, and partners mount intensive Chesapeake Bay air-quality study

This summer, students and faculty from UMBC and three additional universities teamed up with NASA researchers and Maryland’s Department of the Environment to collect huge amounts of data that will provide a snapshot of air quality in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area and over the Chesapeake Bay. The study measures factors ranging from wind speed to ozone concentration.

“In trying to understand air quality near the coast, it’s critical to obtain measurements over the water and over the land simultaneously with as wide of a variety of instruments as possible,” says John Sullivan, Ph.D. ’15, atmospheric physics, and the lead NASA researcher on the project.

UMBC serves as the primary land-based site, and equipment placed on remote Hart Miller Island in the Bay collects data over water. “With two sites, you can begin to really answer questions pertaining to differences in air pollution and understand the mechanisms driving these differences,” Sullivan explains.

Ozone in the forecast

This summer’s work is an extension of the Ozone Water-Land Environmental Transition Study (OWLETS), dubbed OWLETS-2, and it is particularly focused on tracking the presence of ozone in coastal cities. Ozone in the upper atmosphere helps maintain Earth’s temperature and absorbs harmful UV rays.

However, near ground level, breathing in ozone causes inflammation in the respiratory system, which can be dangerous for young children, the elderly, and those with asthma or other respiratory conditions. Plants also take up ozone, which can reduce crop yields.

Chemical reactions between sunlight and emissions from vehicles and industry generate smog-like ozone episodes, so one would expect the highest concentrations at midday, when the sun is at its brightest. However, wind over the Bay changes that.

“The Bay breeze is like a wall that doesn’t allow normal west to east airflow to happen,” explains Ruben Delgado, assistant professor at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (a UMBC-NASA partnership) and the lead UMBC OWLETS-2 researcher. That means the midday ozone heading out to sea comes back in during the late afternoon, causing a spike just as local residents are heading home from work and school. Other factors, such as smoke blowing over the city from wildfires in the West, can also have a real impact.

Better understanding how these issues influence the presence of ozone in Baltimore can help improve air quality forecasts and protect sensitive populations from ozone’s ill effects. “The National Weather Service is interested in this kind of data, because it allows them to push their models to a new frontier,” Delgado explains.

Students step up

Working with Delgado are students from UMBC, Howard University, City University of New York, and Hampton University. The students and their home-institution faculty mentors are all members of the NOAA-funded Center for Earth System Sciences and Remote Sensing Technologies and Center for Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology.

Delgado finds mentoring these emerging researchers to be both personally rewarding and essential to the success of the project. “My favorite part of this project is giving the students hands-on experience,” Delgado says. “They get to contribute to the process from start to finish.”

Kat Ball ’21, chemical engineering, is one of those student researchers, and her experience has been transformative. “I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in meaningful scientific research so early on in my academic career,” she shares. “I’ve only just completed my freshman year, and will be one of the authors on the publications that result from all the data we received, which is something I thought I would only be dreaming about for quite some time.”

Ball learned that field and lab research differ in important ways. “Not everything is easy to deal with when you’re miles away from an actual lab where you have all of the necessary parts, chemicals, and even just clean water that you need to deal with problems that arise,” she says.

Working with much more experienced team members, Ball was intimidated at first, but soon felt at home on Hart Miller Island. “Hearing from people with such impressive qualifications that your input on the situation truly matters expanded the confidence I had in myself as a researcher,” she shares.

Paying it forward

John Sullivan, the lead NASA researcher, was once in Ball’s shoes, and now he’s paying it forward. “As I moved toward planning larger-scale campaigns, I knew that I wanted to involve UMBC any way I could,” he says. “It wasn’t until I got to NASA that I realized how much of a leg up I had coming from UMBC, as some of my classes were taught by leading researchers in the atmospheric physics community.”

Under Sullivan and Delgado’s leadership, the participating students all took a very active role in the research. “They have been busy taking LiDAR measurements, launching weather balloons, taking mobile samples of pollution, and outfitting research vessels,” Sullivan says. He adds, “There is something very rewarding about bringing together active and engaged researchers to make a difference in public health, and training the next generation of scientists along the way.”

UMBC’s Matthew Baker teams up with Chesapeake Conservancy to create detailed stream maps

Thousands of waterways, from major rivers like the Potomac and Susquehanna to tiny headwaters, flow through the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Many of them appear on official stream maps produced by the U.S. Geological Survey, but many others go unrecorded.

Because the official maps are incomplete, “if you base management and restoration goals on coarse stream maps, you’re going to miss a big part of the picture,” says Matthew Baker, professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).

Baker’s partnership with the non-profit Chesapeake Conservancy has been awarded $1.2 million from the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) to create a more accurate, updated map for the watershed by applying new stream mapping techniques.

The Chesapeake Bay Program is supporting accurate stream mapping to improve management and implementation of the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load—daily Bay pollution limits set by the U.S. EPA in 2010.

Small streams are often overlooked for restoration activities because they do not show up on the official maps, despite delivering large amounts of nutrient and sediment pollution to the Bay. Updated stream maps will help partners throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed prioritize restoration efforts and better understand how pollution enters the Bay’s tributaries.

Innovative approaches

This project follows a previous Chesapeake Bay Trust (CBT) award to Baker and his Chesapeake Conservancy colleagues to develop the methods necessary to carry out such a daunting task. With traditional methods, “You need skilled personnel doing very tedious, detail-oriented work over a long period of time,” says Baker. “We look forward to continuing to develop more automated, efficient and cost-effective ways.”

Now, Baker and his team get the chance to take on the challenge of using their new techniques to create the most detailed map of the region’s waterways to date, in a fraction of the time required by previous methods.

To identify previously unmapped stream channels, Baker and his team will analyze data from models of the terrain generated by light detection and ranging (LiDAR). This technology uses lasers emitted from aircraft to measure the relative height of Earth’s surface very precisely. But that’s just the beginning.

Baker’s team will remove inconsistencies and errors inherent to the LiDAR data, such as when the laser beam hits tree leaves or water surfaces instead of the ground. Then the team will find stream channels by creatively applying algorithms that interpret the terrain in the context of the surrounding landscape. The new maps may still not capture every single channel, but Baker hopes to get a lot closer while limiting false-positives.

Connecting the dots

“What the CBP was asking for was not just, ‘How do you find the channels?’, but, ‘How do you link them together in a connected network?’ And, ironically, that’s not a simple thing to do with this sort of detailed terrain information,” Baker says.

“For example, if a stream flows under a road, the road is interpreted as a kind of dam by conventional computer algorithms, even though our eyes and brain naturally connect the channel on either side,” Baker explains. Although such features are intuitive for people, computers need to be taught how to fill in those gaps accurately and appropriately.

Once the team develops a more complete map, they will still have one more crucial step to complete. “A big part of the project is to validate and check the map,” Baker says. “If the stream map isn’t reliable and no one believes it, then it’s not very useful. So that’s what we’re going to spend a lot of time doing.”

He estimates that about two-thirds of the time spent on the six-year project will focus on quality control. “With Chesapeake Conservancy’s assistance and expertise, we will compare the results of the new automated techniques with data collected from aerial imagery or on the ground at sites around the watershed.”

“Chesapeake Conservancy is a great partner in this context,” says Baker. “They’ve developed a lot of experience generating geographic datasets for the watershed.”

Conservation outcomes

Having a complete, reliable map is essential for protecting waterways. “If we want to understand how what we do on the landscape influences stream integrity and downstream health in places like the Chesapeake Bay,” Baker says, “then being able to map the connections between human activities on the land and the circulatory water system that delivers their effects to the Bay is paramount.”

Streams not visible on current official maps have already proven extremely important in research. Early evidence that vegetation alongside streams could reduce discharges of harmful pollutants into the Bay came from research on streams that weren’t on the best USGS maps at the time, Baker notes.

For now, the USGS has identified developing high-resolution stream maps as a national goal, and Baker hopes to contribute to that effort. The updated, verified map will enhance management and protection within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and the methods Baker and the Chesapeake Conservancy have developed have the potential to improve stream mapping—and to better protect waterways—across the nation and the world.

Image: Matthew Baker at UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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