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

UMBC’s JCET researchers discover new wrinkle in the role of clouds in climate change

Clouds continue to be one of the greatest sources of uncertainty in climate change models. At night, clouds keep Earth warm by preventing heat from escaping. During the day, most clouds cool Earth by keeping some sunlight from reaching the surface. Understanding the balance of these opposite effects on a global scale, as clouds constantly form, move, and break up, is a major challenge to climate forecasting.

Jasper Lewis and Simone Lolli, scientists at UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, contributed to new research that reveals clouds’ effects on climate may be even more complex than previously understood. The study focuses on cirrus clouds, the wispy ribbons that float up to 20 km above Earth’s surface.

Cirrus clouds are known to contribute minimally, if at all, to cooling during the day because they are so thin. Lewis and Lolli’s study was the first to show that cirrus clouds can sometimes cool Earth during the day, depending on factors like the cloud’s thickness, height, and the temperature. “A cooling effect during daytime was something before known only in theory,” says Lolli, “but for the very first time we verified it with measurements.”

The study, led by the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California and in collaboration with UCLA, analyzed 2012 data collected by the NASA Micro Pulse Lidar Network (MPLNET) at Goddard Space Flight Center. The team’s previous work used data from NASA’s CALIPSO, an orbiting satellite.

“With the satellite you get many locations, but only one measurement per day,” said Lolli. “With ground-based instruments you can take measurements 24 hours per day.”

These measurement capabilities offer a huge advantage if you’re looking for variations between day and night. The copious data also allow the team to hypothesize how cirrus clouds affect climate differently across seasons and latitudes, which is critical to understanding global energy balance.

The research improved on previous work because Lewis designed new protocols to analyze the data, taking into account the huge size of cirrus clouds (up to hundreds of kilometers across) and their high elevation, which creates noise in the data.

Lolli’s task was to input the data into an existing model to determine whether the clouds were warming or cooling the atmosphere, a process known as “climate forcing.” Data input posed a major challenge, as the type of data MPLNET collected was not in a form the model could use. Lolli had to convert the data into something the model could accept, which required significant time, attention to detail, and, as Lolli puts it, a lot of math.

Recognizing the team’s innovative methodology and groundbreaking study results, the Naval Research Laboratory just honored Lewis and Lolli’s paper with the 2016 Alan Berman Research Publication Award. According to the award ceremony program, these competitive awards “not only honor individuals for superior scientific accomplishments in the field of naval research, but also seek to promote continued excellence in research and its documentation.”

For Lewis, the best part about receiving the award “is recognition of the significance of the work that you’ve done.” Lolli adds, “It’s very important, because it’s motivation for others to get going in this area of research.”

“Uncertainty about climate forcing is one of the big things that people don’t fully understand yet” in climate science, Lewis shares, “so this is a small step in the direction of moving that understanding a bit further.”

Read “Daytime cirrus cloud top-of-the-atmosphere radiative forcing properties at a midlatitude site and their global consequences“ in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society.

Image: NASA’s CALIPSO satellite, used to collect data for Lewis and Lolli’s previous work. Artist rendering from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

UMBC mathematician and novelist Manil Suri offers a cure for math anxiety on WYPR

“Yes, there’s no doubt about it,” says Manil Suri: Large numbers of Americans suffer from math anxiety.

Suri, professor of mathematics at UMBC, novelist, and opinion contributor to the New York Times, discussed why math anxiety arises and ways to counter it on WYPR’s On the Record.

The U.S. is ranked well below other developed nations in math proficiency among secondary students, but that doesn’t mean all students are failing, Suri says. “There will always be a cohort of students who are loving math, and there will be a cohort of students who are not that well engaged,” he says. “So let’s see how we can engage people. That’s the main thing.”

As a writer, Suri says his interactions with people in other fields, such as the arts and humanities, have helped him understand some of the problems leading to math anxiety. One of them is that students who don’t pick up math quickly are “told again and again that they are ‘arts people’ and not ‘math people,’ as if you can only do one or the other,” says Suri. “People absorb these stereotypes, and it becomes very hard to get around them.”

The way math is taught to young children, often revolving around tedious activities like times tables, may lead them to lose interest. Instead, he says, bring in fictional elements—weave math into a story. For example, he observed a class learning about infinity from a story about Rapunzel trying to get to an escape door.

It may sound like a leap to teach elementary students an abstract concept like infinity, but, Suri says, “That’s one of the questions that we all as human beings grapple with,” so it’s naturally of interest. In that classroom, Suri says, “These kids were owning the subject—they were given the tools to make math their own.”

Suri also suggests focusing more on process. “What were the steps that got you to that answer?” he asks. “Encourage people to think about different ways to approach a problem, and even if they are incorrect, get in tune with what that thought process is, and where it might fail and where it might succeed.”

Suri says that from what he’s seen, the Common Core education standards take a positive step in that direction.

Rather than constantly subjecting math lessons to the question, “When will I use this?” Suri argues that math should be experienced and enjoyed for its own sake, like the arts. One way he recommends doing that is by “getting rid of the calculations, which scare a lot of people, and really getting to the ideas.”

For example, if you start with a triangle, and sequentially add sides to it (square, pentagon, etc.), you eventually get to an infinitely-sided shape: a circle. That thought experiment has some serious math behind it, but it’s an idea that an elementary school student can visualize.

Technology can be great for visualizing math, but Suri argues that it’s a double-edged sword. “Math needs to have a component that’s reflective,” he says, and gadgets can encourage us to rush. “Where you are interacting with other people and learning from their mistakes, it can really change things,” he shares. One way communities are accomplishing that is by creating “math circles” as after school options for students.

“We need to get over the notion of math only being for nerds,” Suri says, and “make it a day-to-day activity like soccer practice.”

Listen to the entire interview, “How to Love Math” on WYPR.

 

 

 

 

 

UMBC Sondheim Scholar creates the Reach Initiative to support Baltimore teen girls in STEM

As a freshman Sondheim Scholar living in UMBC’s service-focused Shriver Living-Learning Community, Isabel Geisler had big plans. Geisler ’17, global studies, wanted to create a support program for local high school girls in STEM, and after two years of intensive research, planning, and partnership-building, she launched a pilot in 2015-16, all to prepare for the program’s official kick-off this year. Today, Geisler’s Reach Initiative includes 20 mentors serving 20 mentees, with a robust program structure to manage everything from fundraising to evaluating efficacy.

The Reach Initiative has three pillars: mentorship, research, and empowerment. Geisler observes that despite evidence of ongoing gender inequality, Americans often don’t like to admit that gender bias remains a major issue. She suggests that this can leave women unprepared to deal with discrimination, particularly in male-dominated areas like STEM. By “tackling these challenges head on” and giving young women training and information, she hopes to positively influence their education and career paths.

In their first semester of the year-long program, participating teens meet weekly with their mentors on campus, to “make them feel like they belong here,” at a major research university, says Geisler. Workshops teach the girls ways to advocate for themselves and respond to harassment. They also address core aspects of the college application process, like taking standardized tests and completing financial aid paperwork. Guest speakers, including current students in UMBC’s scholars programs, help the high schoolers imagine what their futures could look like.

In the second semester, participants tackle service-oriented independent research projects. Just like professional scientists, participants must create a project proposal and budget before getting to work. Geisler says at least half of the initiative’s overall budget funds the students’ research. A new grant the American Association of University Women just awarded to the Reach Initiative will primarily support these projects.

The initiative has partnered with a number of schools in Baltimore City, including Green Street Academy, Digital Harbor High School, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, and Patterson High School to recruit participants.

As Geisler prepares to graduate from UMBC this May and likely head to a Ph.D. program in sociology, she is taking steps to make sure the program is well-situated to continue after her departure. One group of initiative volunteers is already seeking approval to complete a long-term study of the girls’ success and retention rates in STEM, with an eye toward the future and a sense of long-term commitment.

Banner image: Students in the 2015-16 Reach Initiative pilot cohort. Photo provided by Isabel Geisler ’17.

Dawn Biehler spotlights link between urban pests and housing inequality

The last year has brought increased attention to mosquito-borne diseases, including the Zika virus, West Nile virus, and malaria. Dawn Biehler recently brought this discussion closer to home in a wide-ranging interview in Edge Effects about her work to better understand the prevalence of mosquitoes in low-income neighborhoods.

Biehler, an associate professor of geography and environmental systems, is leading the social science component of a major research project where she is examining the connections between mosquito ecology and social inequality in Baltimore. Her team is canvassing Baltimore neighborhoods to collect data on mosquito populations and residents’ contact with mosquitoes as part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study.

“We’re really talking about how social and ecological processes feed into one another and how we might study interventions into that system,” says Biehler. “I thought that it might also reveal more interesting things about human-environment interactions in a city where the housing market has been declining for a long time.”

When discussing the preliminary findings of the project, Biehler noted that it’s important to understand the historical context of neighborhood change in Baltimore.

“We can take this back probably over a hundred years in order to understand how Baltimore has been segregated by black versus white residents for decades,” says Biehler. “Some of the processes, including redlining that began in the 1930s, urban renewal that began in the 1960s, and highway construction that also began in the 1960s, have resulted in disinvestment—really massive disinvestment—in certain neighborhoods, almost all of them African American neighborhoods.”

Biehler also discussed the potential impact of climate change should Baltimore’s climate become similar to the Carolinas or Georgia, and she explained changes in public focus on different mosquito-borne diseases over time. But ultimately, Biehler says, when looking at Baltimore the biggest issue to focus on today is disinvestment in neighborhoods.

“The punchline here in terms of our results is that the neighborhoods that have this history of disinvestment have up to three times as many Aedes albopictus mosquitoes as do the upper-income neighborhoods that don’t have that history of disinvestment,” she says.

Biehler researches historical geography and environmental history of public health in U.S. cities, environmental justice, urban and feminist political ecology, housing, and human-animal interactions. She is author of Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (University of Washington Press). See this recent interview, in full, in Edge Effects.

Update: Dawn Biehler also spoke about pests and inequality on WYPR’s “On the Record” with Sheilah Kast on March 28, 2017. Listen to the full radio interview on Baltimore’s NPR station.

Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Expanded core facilities offer imaging and analysis services for UMBC and local start-ups

Dean Bill LaCourse, of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), has been working for 20 years to build up a set of core analysis and imaging facilities at UMBC, open to the full UMBC community, local startups, and other institutions in need of these research tools. The campus celebrated the realization of his vision on February 24 with the Core Crawl, a special event where dozens of guests toured four core facilities, guided by their managers.

The Keith R. Porter Imaging Facility (KPIF), Nano-Imaging Facility, Research Graphics, and Molecular Characterization and Analysis Complex (MCAC) each offer unique tools to support scientific research, from mass spectrometry to scientific animations. The facilities’ most recent addition is a state-of-the-art transmission electron microscope recently donated by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.

Tools like these “are all about the most fundamental aspect of science—observation,” says LaCourse, and they “leverage and extend our capabilities so we can look at everything from the atom to the ends of the universe.”

The four UMBC facilities are unique among similar facilities at other universities because their directors do much more than analyze experimental samples for researchers. “The leaders of these facilities really are your allies as you are trying to gain new knowledge,” says Karl Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC. “They bring their expertise to your problem and work with you to get somewhere you may not have known you could go.” He adds, “It’s not the newest and latest instrument that makes a facility successful—it’s the people who run it and work with you.”

Core-facilities-crawl17-2918

One of those people is Tagide deCarvalho, manager of the KPIF, who stressed the teaching and learning aspects of the facilities. “I’m really interested in helping people at all levels,” she shared, “from sample prep, to instrument training, to experimental design.”

Joshua Wilhide, M.S. ’10, chemistry, and manager of the MCAC, emphasized that the goals of the facilities extend beyond generating results researchers can publish. “We are a university—at the end of the day we have to look at how we’re teaching the next generation,” he shared, “be it graduate student or undergrad, we’re going to train you on any of the instruments so you not only understand what the analytical techniques are, you can actually run them.” Developing those skill sets early in their scientific careers can open up new and exciting opportunities for students who work in the labs.

As university-based facilities, the labs are also able to provide low rates for instrument time, which is particularly useful for local start-ups. Before making a major investment in expensive equipment, new companies can get advice from dedicated staff and determine what instrumentation they might need down the road.

Dean LaCourse is particularly excited that the four expanded core facilities will reach a broad range of users, within and beyond CNMS. “Now we have facilities that are customer-focused, client-focused. We’re here to service and facilitate the research enterprise in the most effective and efficient way possible,” said LaCourse. “It’s access for everybody.”

Banner image: Joshua Wilhide describes the instruments available at the MCAC; photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Michael Lane wins $40,000 in grants to conduct field work in central Greece

Michael Lane, an assistant professor of ancient studies, has been awarded $40,000 in grants from the Institute of Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP).

Lane and his co-investigator, Eleni Kountouri, Director of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, will use the grants to conduct field work around the Kopaic Basin in central Greece.

INSTAP awarded Lane and Kountouri $20,000 for the 2017 season and pledged another $20,000 for the 2018 season. In addition to an international group of specialists, Lane will bring nine UMBC undergraduates and a UMBC alumnus to assist him in his fieldwork in summer 2017.

“This news is fantastic. I hope to supplement INSTAP’s grant with grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society in the year ahead,” says Lane. “The pledge of money for 2018 assures that I will be able to complete the bridge to a more extensive landscape archaeology project to be realized from 2019 onward and involving more students in a field school.”

Professor Lane specializes in archaeological survey and excavation, anthropological theory in archaeology, Bronze Age economies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Mycenaean Greek and the Linear B script in which it was written. He teaches a variety of archaeology courses and Ancient Greek.

For the last several years, Lane has helped lead the Ancient studies study trip during spring break, which in recent years has visited Greece, Turkey, and Italy. The program will visit Spain next month.

To learn more about Professor Lane’s research, visit the Ancient Studies department website.

Image: Michael Lane conducts field work. Photo courtesy Michael Lane. 

UMBC students participate in 2017 National Campus Leaders Summit

A group of five UMBC students recently made the trip to Washington, D.C. to serve as leaders and collaborators during the 2017 National Campus Leaders Summit. The event, held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was centered around the themes of cultivating community and redefining civic engagement.

UMBC was consulted during the planning of the summit after David Hoffman, assistant director of student life for civic agency, Corrine Janet, coordinator of student life for leadership, and Emily Melluso ’17, interdisciplinary studies, made a connection with the summit’s principal organizer at last year’s Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement meeting.

The leadership summit was co-presented with Citizen University, and a description of the program provided by the Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that the event was designed to bring together students to explore how, “In these turbulent times, civic leadership and an understanding of history are more important than ever.” They note, “The Museum is pleased to collaborate with Citizen University and to welcome student leaders and change-makers from ten universities to dive deeply into the history of the Holocaust and explore its relevance for today’s college students.”

Jasir Qiydaar ’18, media and communication studies, is one of the UMBC students who attended the event. He became interested in it after participating in the Imagining America National Conference in Milwaukee last fall.

“I thought having another opportunity to discuss the social issues that affect so many of us with people from other institutions would be valuable,” Qiydaar explains.

The students participated in a two-hour guided tour of the museum and engaged in discussions about the fragility of democracy and the role of civic engagement during the Holocaust. They also examined how the social and psychological dynamics that influenced people’s decisions during the Holocaust can continue to be relevant in the world today.

Qiydaar says that the event served as a powerful learning experience and it provided important historical context for many contemporary issues.

“My key takeaway from the event was a reinforcement for the need for an intersectional approach to solving social problems. The atrocities of the Holocaust were an escalation of Jewish marginalization perpetuated by inaction while their rights were being violated. Today the same issues of ‘othering’ people who are different still exist, and it’s important to understand that this is largely allowed to continue through the inaction of people who aren’t personally affected by it. Collectively people have the power to combat this othering by speaking out against all oppression, especially when it doesn’t harm them personally.”

Qiydaar attended the summit along with Emily Melluso, Andrew Thompson ’19, gender and women’s studies, Hannah Aris ’18, chemical engineering, and Gerardo Herrera-Cortes ’19, visual arts. The other universities that participated in the summit include: Case Western University, Fort Hays State University, George Mason University, Mount St. Mary’s University, New York University, University of Florida, Valdosta State University, Weber State University, and Yale University.

Image: Students from ten universities attended the 2017 National Campus Leaders Summit. Photo courtesy of Corinne Janet. 

Book on the history of UMBC reflects its distinct campus culture of collaboration

When George La Noue started the process of writing a book about the history of UMBC, he had a specific vision in mind, and knew he couldn’t accomplish his goal without the insight of administrators, faculty, staff, and students across the university. In many ways, the process of writing Improbable Excellence: The Saga of UMBC reflects the highly collaborative nature of the campus community, which is rooted in its founding 50 years ago.

Researching such a young university can be difficult because the archives are literally being formed in the moment. However, when La Noue, research professor of public policy and political science, was teaching a constitutional law class one day, he noticed that students became highly engaged when the discussion pivoted to the history of UMBC in the context of higher education desegregation—when students began to see UMBC’s story in the context of a national story.

George La Noue holds his book Improbable Excellence at a reception for UMBC alumni in Annapolis.

Following the vibrant discussion, La Noue decided to create independent study research projects for a team of nine students to investigate different aspects of UMBC’s history. The topics ranged from the development of buildings on campus to the creation and growth of student organizations and academic departments.

“There is no course on UMBC history,” explains La Noue. “I couldn’t direct them to a source for where to begin, so they really had to learn what questions to ask throughout the research process.”

Many of the students who completed the independent studies that helped inform Improbable Excellence went on to graduate school and law school, and credit the intensive research experience for helping to jump-start their careers.

David Bennett ’11, political science, is now a health policy advisor for Senator John McCain. He focused on the development of the social sciences at UMBC for his research project.

“I had the opportunity…to sit down with the various chairs of those departments…some of them who have been here for many, many years to discuss what that department looked like back then and what it looks like now. It’s really quite astounding to see the determination of folks who were in their early thirties to form these departments to [become] what they are today,” explained Bennett at the Roots of Greatness luncheon during UMBC’s 50th anniversary.

Another student, Yasmin Karimian ’11, political science, indexed the book and now works at Amazon in contract law.

It took four years to write the book, which is 424 pages in length and contains 1300 footnotes. In addition to his students, La Noue credits several UMBC colleagues for help with conducting interviews and tracking down research materials, including Ed Orser, professor emeritus of American studies; Joe Tatarewicz, associate professor of history; Tom Beck, chief curator at the Albin O. Kuhn Library; and Lindsey Loeper, Albin O. Kuhn Library archivist.

“A number of people contributed such important work,” says La Noue. “The book was much better because of everyone’s participation. They went in depth in areas that I didn’t have insight or time.”

The book is now on sale in the UMBC Bookstore. Learn more about it in the UMBC Magazine article “Deep Roots.”

Header image: Cover of Improbable Excellence displayed at UMBC alumni reception in Annapolis. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

UMBC students develop Pulse Finder game to teach local kids about heart health

A team of UMBC students is on a mission to improve cardiovascular health education for kids. Maniraj Jeyaraju ’17, interdisciplinary studies, and Henry Wu ’17, biological sciences, who both have their eye on careers in medicine and health education, lead the team developing a game to engage local middle school students in conversations about heart health.

Jeyaraju approached Wu after class one day to suggest the partnership, and they began envisioning a mobile app that involved racing through arteries and veins and learning about the cardiovascular system along the way. Wu and Jeyaraju generated one level of an app they dubbed “Pulse Finder” with four other friends: William Guzman ’17, biological sciences; and Ryan Jose ’17, Chris Paul ’17, and Duy Tang ’17, who all study computer engineering.

After initial production and testing, they found the app was engaging, but it wasn’t practical for their project timeline or the right fit for their audience, requiring that each student have an internet-connected device. Maniraj and Wu shifted to developing Pulse Finder in a more traditional board game format, where players could build a circulatory system with tiles to make their way across a board, adding tiles as they demonstrated knowledge about cardiovascular health.

Pulse Finder team

The team refined their game based on informal feedback from kids at Baltimore’s Port Discovery and a Baltimore charter school. Wu and Jeyaraju then received an Undergraduate Research Award in spring 2016 to fund production of eight copies of the game in fall 2016.

Since then, the team has focused on testing and refinement, to make sure the game is simple and easy to play, engaging, and effective as a teaching tool. In November and December, the duo tested the game with adults at Sheperd’s Clinic in Baltimore. Jeyaraju shared that the game questions spurred discussion among the participants. “Participants really opened up about their own health conditions,” Wu added.

Now the team is undertaking the approval process to formally test the game with students at Afya Public Charter School, a health-focused middle school in Baltimore. They are hoping for the opportunity to work with teachers to implement a procedure similar to the one they used at the clinic. Students would complete pre- and post-surveys to gauge their learning from a trivia-based version of the game, a scenario-based version, and a lecture-based lesson covering the same content.

For both Jeyaraju and Wu, the game is an opportunity to take their passion for health education beyond their UMBC classrooms and into the community. They are excited to see what is most helpful for kids to become invested in their health in the long term.

“With heart disease, early prevention is critical,” Wu says. “Pulse Finder is a way to support younger people to help them maintain cardiovascular health later in life.”

Banner image: Pulse Finder board; photo by Maniraj Jeyaraju. Original board game artwork by William Guzman.

The team would like to thank their mentors for this project:
Stephen Freeland, director of interdisciplinary studies
Steven McAlpine, assistant director of interdisciplinary studies
Krystl Haerian ’99, graduate program director of health information technology

UMBC biologists explain a charming avian visitor to Maryland and why citizen science matters

The charismatic Red-breasted Nuthatch usually makes its home in Canadian forests, but this year it’s been spotted in large numbers as far south as Maryland. This phenomenon, known as an irruption, is well known in ornithology, but not well understood. In The Conversation, UMBC’s Sarah Luttrell and Archer Larned, Ph.D. candidates in biological sciences, describe the factors scientists believe may cause irruptions, and why citizen scientists are so important to learning more.

Irruptions often follow a boom-and-bust cycle of food sources, Luttrell and Larned explain.  In a phenomenon known as masting, a tree species may produce a larger than normal number of seeds across thousands of miles of its range. That abundance increases the prosperity of birds that rely on the tree’s seeds for food. Come winter, “the bird population has doubled, or even tripled, but the available habitat hasn’t,” Luttrell and Larned say, so the “extra” birds travel farther than usual away from their normal winter range, bringing birds like red-breasted nuthatches to the mid-Atlantic.

Archer Larned Sarah Luttrell

The cause of masting isn’t well understood, but it appears to be triggered by warm, dry weather in spring. Climate change may affect the frequency of masting events, and tracking irruptions may help scientists understand how climate change is affecting forest health.

While masting events may occur every few years, some food explosions happen on a longer timescale. For example, the spruce budworm emerges approximately every 20 years. “While budworms decimate spruce trees, birds gorge themselves on budworms,” causing a population boom that can lead to irruption. In response to a lemming population boom, Snowy Owls irrupted as far south as the Bahamas in 2013 – 2014.

Masting and irruptions are hard to predict, so the scientific community relies on citizen scientists to collect data about bird numbers and locations. “Citizen scientists are a crucial asset for studying irruptions,” write Luttrell and Larned.

By contributing to online databases such as Project FeederWatch, Christmas Bird Count, eBird, and Great Backyard Bird Count, “Novice and expert bird-watchers across large areas can accurately capture the extent and timing of bird movements.” Larned and Luttrell note that about 150 scientific papers have been written since 1997 based on data available from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s repository of citizen science bird data.

The next Great Backyard Bird Count will be held February 17 – 20, 2017. Anyone who enjoys watching birds, wants to inform scientific research, or would like to help solve the mystery of irruptions is invited to participate.

Read When birds go roaming: The mystery of avian irruptions in The Conversation.

Header image: Red-breasted Nuthatch. Photo by Heather Elaine Ritchie, CC BY-NC-ND.

 

Smithsonian hosts UMBC president for discussion on promoting diversity

At the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History on February 3, President Freeman Hrabowski called on stories from his childhood and UMBC today to share a forward-looking message on improving diversity in STEM fields as part of the museum’s “An Evening With…” series.

Marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a 12-year-old boy inspired Hrabowski to dream that “tomorrow could be different from today, and young people could be empowered to make that difference.” Pres. Hrabowski has spent his career in education turning that dream into action, focused in particular on creating a campus culture that supports students from all backgrounds.

Speaking candidly, Hrabowski shared his perspective that institutions need to “look in the mirror” and ask themselves tough questions to ensure they are continuously working to meet their ideals. In particular, he argued against “weed-out courses” and the mindset behind them, which results in high rates of students leaving STEM majors. Instead, he has found that “building community and getting away from a cutthroat approach” improve student success.

At UMBC, “community” means having a mutually supportive peer group and “nurturing environment.” That includes faculty and staff who are committed to “inclusive excellence” and are prepared to match students with new opportunities and the resources needed to achieve success, such as professors “who are willing to go beyond the classroom, to connect with students and to pull them into research,” Hrabowski said.

Emphasizing excellence, Hrabowski argued, does not suggest educators should expect students get everything right on the first try. “We have begun to rebel against even the word ‘smart,’” he argued. Instead, he prioritizes resilience and “grit,” while providing students with the resources and the learning environment they need to grow and achieve their goals.

As the event shifted to a discussion, attendees began sharing personal stories of supporting students on the path to success in STEM, and the challenges encountered along the way.

When a Prince George’s County middle school principal asked how to create a community focused on inclusive excellence at his school, Hrabowski emphasized, “Things don’t change completely overnight.” He advised, “It always helps to start with a small group of people who want to address the issue and then build from there.”

One parent of a UMBC student thanked Pres. Hrabowski for the approach UMBC has taken to student success, sharing, “My son is so excited about what he’s doing…Our home is like a science lab.”

A black researcher asked for advice on how to help new colleagues resist impostor syndrome and maintain their confidence outside of supportive communities like UMBC. Hrabowski responded that support from peers and more senior colleagues is essential, explaining, “There’s always a need for people who have experience to be there as a sounding board.” He suggested that researchers who have benefited from the support of colleagues and mentors in the past, and who have achieved success through resilience, “can elevate others by helping them continue to aspire to the next level.”

As the event came to a close, a 10-year-old girl asked Hrabowski why he thinks so few people are interested in science in the United States, and how she could become more engaged with science. “We have not understood the need to help our children and families understand first how exciting science can be and that anybody can do science and math,” he responded, “and we need more TV programs and activities where people see girls, boys, and people of all races doing science.”

He then shared with her opportunities at UMBC for kids to begin engaging with science, including a summer coding program for girls. Sharing his lifelong love of math, he asked her a word problem and requested an answer by email. “I don’t just want the answer,” he said. “I want you to tell me how you would explain it to somebody else.”

Their exchange recalled a powerful moment earlier in the program, when President Hrabowski summed up his core goal as an educator. “What we’re trying to do at UMBC,” he said, “is to teach young people of all races that they can change the world.”

Image: President Hrabowski with UMBC students and alumni at the National Museum of Natural History. Photo Sarah Hansen ’15.

Daniel Lobo’s research reveals power of computer models in disease treatment

Daniel Lobo has a knack for using artificial intelligence to solve biological puzzles, and his latest scientific paper is proof of concept that computer simulations can predict never-before-seen biological outcomes. The new article in Scientific Reports focuses on a model Lobo, assistant professor of biological sciences at UMBC, developed in collaboration with Michael Levin’s lab at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University.

Lobo’s model examines the development of pigment cells in frog embryos. He codified dozens of experiments on tadpole development and input the data into his program, which then “learned” how different drugs and proteins affect the growth of pigment cells in the frog. The model the computer discovered explained how certain combinations of treatments could induce cancer-like cell behaviors in tadpoles. Lobo envisions using the same process of teaching a computer to understand complex drug effects to predict, for example, the most effective drug treatment plans for individual cancer patients.

In the experiments, tadpoles either developed normally or were completely covered with invading pigment cells that had converted to a cancer-like state; there were no tadpoles with a mix of cancer-like and normal pigment cells. To test the predictive power of his model, Lobo wanted to determine if he could use it to find a combination of drugs that could generate a different outcome: an “in-between” tadpole, with some normal and some cancer-like pigment cells. Among 576 simulated experiments, the program identified only one specific combination of treatments that it predicted would produce that result.

Levin and Maria Lobikin, a past member of Levin’s lab, collaborated on the new paper to test the model’s prediction with real tadpoles, and it proved to be correct. Frog embryos given the specific cocktail that Lobo’s program identified (two drugs and a specific small strand of genetic material called an mRNA) developed into tadpoles that contained both normal areas without pigment cells and areas covered with invading cancer-like pigment cells.

Using traditional methods to identify the drug cocktail would have been much more costly and laborious, if it were possible at all. And it would have required a huge number of frog embryos and experiments. Alternatively, explains Lobo, “You can do a lot of cheap experiments inside a computer.” Plus, he says, “It only uses virtual frogs.”

Lobo hopes the method he used to create his new model can be put to work to find more effective treatments for human diseases, and his first target is cancer. The first—and by far most challenging—step is to generate a program with artificial intelligence that can learn from the data in published studies to create a model for the disease. Lobo’s lab is in the early stages of that process with cancer.

Once his program has used the data to generate a model, predicting a desired outcome should be straightforward, says Lobo. “You can simulate any drug, any intervention,” and in any combination, he explains, as long as the effects of any single intervention are understood. The ultimate goal, Lobo says, “is to find the best intervention or combination of interventions to get the person back to a normal state.”

His work may have started with frogs, but Lobo believes the predictive power of computer simulations has the potential to revolutionize human disease research and treatment. Focusing more intensive research on the specific interventions that computer simulations predict will be most effective would dramatically speed up the timeline for getting patients treatments that work.

Using artificial intelligence this way might also enable “very targeted, personalized medicine,” says Lobo. With human patients, doctors don’t have the luxury of hundreds of trials. “You may only have one chance, and it may be life or death,” he says. “You want to be sure the first treatment has the best chance of curing the disease.”

Read “Discovering novel phenotypes with automatically inferred dynamic models: a partial melanocyte conversion in Xenopus” in Scientific Reports.

Image: Daniel Lobo at UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

 

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