“UMBC is proud to be part of this important collaboration, applying scientific innovation in aquaculture to offer a healthy source of food for our local communities,” said UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski.
Six finalists pitched creative business ideas to a panel of judges during UMBC’s fifth annual Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition (CBIC), held on April 25, 2018 in the new UMBC Event Center. The business ideas ranged from online tools and apps to products with medical applications.
Yonathan Zohar, professor and chair of marine biotechnology, explains that the two UMBC teams’ research “makes the point of how you can use advanced approaches and strategies of biotechnology to open some of the major bottlenecks in the aquaculture industry.”
“It may only be a matter of time until [deadly strains of the herpes virus] reach U.S. coastal bays,” Colleen Burge writes. That means finding a way to prevent massive oyster die-offs, which have already happened in other parts of the world, is important to save the species—and Burge is on the task.
“Your collaborative work empowers people like me to help improve the human condition. You need to know that your work is critically important,” shared UMB President Jay Perman.
“The leaders of these facilities really are your allies as you are trying to gain new knowledge,” says Karl Steiner. “They bring their expertise to your problem and work with you to get somewhere you may not have known you could go.”
At 19th annual symposium, 331 students learned from workshops and received insightful feedback on their research projects from cricket behavior to breast cancer to biodegradable polymers.
The technology is a huge advance over the previous vaccine, which required injection into each fish individually. “If this works,” Vikram Vakharia says, “it opens the door to use this technique with other pathogens.”
The way genes and proteins function together in the brain is “not as cut and dried as we thought,” Olivia Spicer says. “It’s more like a web of things interacting.”
Fresh fish would “become accessible to millions of landlubbers who must now have their fish shipped in from afar, deep-frozen,” writes Geoff Carr, of Yoni Zohar’s revolutionary fish farming technology. “The upshot is a closed system that can be set up anywhere, generates no pollution and can be kept disease-free.”
Oliva Spicer transfers to UMBC to follow her passion for marine biotechnology and conducts groundbreaking research at home and abroad.
Baltimore’s history as the first U.S. city to be illuminated by gas lamps has inspired Light City Baltimore, a new festival in the Inner Harbor, March 28-April 3, with 1.5 miles of glowing public artworks, free music, a free UMBC hospitality space, and a six-day innovation conference, Light City U.
