In this email you will find UMBCworks postings for jobs and internships as well as other events hosted by UMBC Career Center. These positions, events and workshops are tailored just for you! Not sure where to start! Check out this video about being a forensic accountant!

Please note you MUST have your resume approved by a Career Center staff member to apply to postions posted in UMBCworks. To schedule an appointment, click on "Schedule Appointment" from the UMBCworks homepage or call 410-455-2216. 

We are located in Math/Psychology Room 201. Appointments can be made by calling 410-455-2216. We now haveonline scheduling too!

Please visit our website to find further information: careers.umbc.edu.

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Having trouble with our links? Please LOG IN directly to UMBCworks before clicking the links in this email.

Jobs New Internships and Jobs in Science!: Multiple Openings (09/10/18) (9301582) United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) - United States POSITION TYPE: Full-Time - Entry-Level, Full-Time - Experienced, Part-Time POSTING DATE: Sep 11, 2018 END DATE: Oct 11, 2018 Customer Service Parts Specialist - Pumps/Compressors (9301499) Cummins-Wagner Company, Inc. - Annapolis Junction, Maryland United States POSITION TYPE: Full-Time - Entry-Level, Full-Time - Experienced POSTING DATE: Sep 07, 2018 END DATE: Jan 04, 2019 Chemical Warehouse Specialist - Job Order 868508 (9301484) Mayor's Office of Employment Development - Baltimore, Maryland United States POSITION TYPE: Full-Time - Entry-Level, Full-Time - Experienced, Part-Time POSTING DATE: Sep 06, 2018 END DATE: Nov 06, 2018 Genesis Multiple Job Openings 9/6/2018 (9301487) Mayor's Office of Employment Development POSITION TYPE: Full-Time - Entry-Level, Part-Time POSTING DATE: Sep 06, 2018 END DATE: Sep 13, 2018 Research Nurse Coordinator (9300852) Spectrum Clinical Research - Multiple Locations POSITION TYPE: Full-Time - Entry-Level POSTING DATE: Sep 06, 2018 END DATE: Oct 31, 2018 Rewarding Healthcare Position as a Clinical Allergy Technician! We offer paid training! Spanish Bilingual Required (9301470) United Allergy Services - Multiple Locations POSITION TYPE: Full-Time - Entry-Level POSTING DATE: Sep 06, 2018 END DATE: Jan 03, 2019 Math or English Tutor (9301418) EMtutors LLC - Multiple Locations POSITION TYPE: Part-Time POSTING DATE: Sep 04, 2018 END DATE: Jan 01, 2019 STEAM Before-school Instructor (9301409) Practicalati - IDEA Labs Kids - Multiple Locations POSITION TYPE: Part-Time POSTING DATE: Sep 04, 2018 END DATE: Jan 01, 2019 Current Internships - Maryland Chapter of the Sierra Club (9301341) Business Consultant (9301167) Applied Predictive Technologies - Arlington, Virginia United States POSITION TYPE: Full-Time - Entry-Level POSTING DATE: Aug 23, 2018 END DATE: Oct 05, 2018 Business Consultant Summer Intern (9301170) Applied Predictive Technologies - Arlington, Virginia United States POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities POSTING DATE: Aug 23, 2018 END DATE: Oct 05, 2018

Workshops Upcoming Events: Resume Rescue ISCOM Presents Health IT Week: Monday Crash Course SESSION START: Sep 17, 2018, 12:00 PM SESSION END: Sep 17, 2018, 1:00 PM LOCATION: ITE 237 Accounting Club hosts Government Accountability Office SESSION START: Sep 17, 2018, 12:00 PM SESSION END: Sep 17, 2018, 1:00 PM L.I.V.E. ORISE Department of Defense Sponsors Virtual Career Fair SESSION START: Sep 19, 2018, 11:00 AM SESSION END: Sep 19, 2018, 3:00 PM LOCATION: Online ISCOM Presents Health IT Week: Career Panel SESSION START: Sep 21, 2018, 12:00 PM SESSION END: Sep 21, 2018, 1:00 PM LOCATION: ITE 237 Keys to Success: Networking/Personal Branding SESSION START: Sep 24, 2018, 12:00 PM SESSION END: Sep 24, 2018, 1:00 PM LOCATION: Commons 331 ISCOM Presents Health IT Week: Workshop SESSION START: Sep 24, 2018, 12:00 PM SESSION END: Sep 24, 2018, 1:00 PM LOCATION: ITE 237 Fall Career & Internship Fair SESSION START: Sep 26, 2018, 11:30 AM SESSION END: Sep 26, 2018, 3:30 PM LOCATION: RAC Woman of Color STEM Conference, Detroit MI SESSION START: Oct 11, 2018, 5:30 PM SESSION END: Oct 13, 2018, 7:00 PM

[This information was originally sent as an email from the Career Center. All job/internship postings can be found on UMBCworks.]

Gain a competitive advantage in your field!

Programming and problem-solving skills are musts for today’s college graduates!

Enroll in a special section of CMSC 201 Computer Science I that emphasizes programming topics applicable to the social and biological sciences and other majors. Sample topics include statistical analysis, working with large data sets, and data visualization using the popular Python programming language. You will also receive more individual attention in this smaller CMSC 201 section!

This section fulfills any major’s requirement for CMSC 201 and is open to all non-CS, non-engineering majors.

No programming experience is required. Click here for more details about this unique opportunity.

[Originally posted on the CSEE myUMBC Group]

Name:Ashley Batista

Internship, Co-op or Research Site:University Health Services/Office of Health Promotion

Position Title: Peer Health Educator

Major(s)/Minor(s):Biology/Africana Studies

Work Term:Fall 2017

Tell us about your internship, co-op, or research opportunity, including your day-to-day responsibilities.

As a peer, I work to reach out to the UMBC community through events, programs, and workshops to educate students regarding a variety of health issues. We work to provide students with information about sleep deprivation, alcohol and other drugs, sexual health and birth control, just to name a few topics. We teach common strategies to make better healthy decisions as well as bring awareness to the resources provided to them on and off campus.

Describe the process of obtaining your position. When did you hear of the position and submit your application?

I heard about this position through an email sent by the Internships & Employment Team in the Career Center stating that Peer Health Educators were wanted and that applications were being taken. I filled out the application and sent it in to my now supervisor by April 28th. One or two weeks later I was contacted in regards to making an interview appointment. I went to the interview and a couple weeks later, I received the "congratulations" email confirming my position for the upcoming year.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization?

I've enjoyed being able to educate students on critical health issues that are prevalent among college students and show them ways to better themselves and the UMBC community in the hopes of influencing lifelong healthy choices beyond their college years. I also enjoy being able to work with a supportive group of people who also believe in providing guidance within health.

How do you believe you have made an impact through your work?

I believe that I've been able to give students more of a choice when it comes to their autonomy over their health. We're so stuck in the everyday routine of school, work, internship, study, volunteer, etc. that we forget we have the choice to do something different and make healthy decisions for ourselves. We can make choices for the benefit of ourselves and for others.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

I would advise them to be diligent and persistent if they want to see results. I would also advise them to keep an open mind because these experiences may help shape whether or not this is a career area they want to be in.

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Want to be the next Intern of the Week?Make sure to fill out this form and stay tuned. New interns are announced every Friday!

[Interview originally posted on the Career Center's myUMBC Group.]

July 27, 2018 6.44am EDT

When you think about fearsome predators in the ocean, the first thing that pops into your mind is probably a shark. Sure, sharks are OK, with their sleek, menacing shape and their gaping jaws with rows of jagged teeth. But if you were a fish living on a coral reef or cruising along the shore over the sands of a tropical island, you would fear a far more terrifying predator.

Consider an armored, tank-like creature looking something like a lobster. Most are quite small, often tinier than your little finger, though some can be as long as your forearm. This animal doesn’t swim around like a shark; instead, it hides in the sand or in rocky holes in coral, searching the water above with constantly roving eyes. It can snatch prey right out of the water in a tiny fraction of a second.

And it accomplishes this feat without claws. Instead, it’s armed with a powerful pair of what scientists call “raptorial appendages” that end in a brutal hammer or a series of vicious, pointed spines. These prey-catching arms look somewhat like the front legs of a praying mantis, which gives these creatures their name – mantis shrimps.

They’re crustaceans – the group of hard-shelled animals that includes crabs, lobsters and shrimps. The strength of the mantis shrimps’ raptorial arms together with their amazing eyes make them perfect predators.

Massively powerful predators

Mantis shrimps’ raptorial appendages contain massive muscles that can extend them to their full length in hundredths of a second, producing strike forces that in some species can smash through the glass wall of an aquarium or instantly dismember a crab. These smashing attacks are so forceful they produce tiny bubbles in the water. When these cavitation bubbles collapse in a flash of light, they release additional energy onto the target. Boat propellers and turbine blades are often ruined by cavitation forces; mantis shrimps use them to crack the hard shells of their victims.

Other species, with spiny raptorial appendages, impale fish or shrimp with a vice-like grip that allows the mantis shrimp to drag them down into its burrow – often, in the blink of an eye.

Mantis shrimps – properly called stomatopod crustaceans – first appeared in the oceans about 400 million years ago, and have been evolving on their own route to perfection ever since. By now, they are only distantly related to any other living animal, including ones that arose from their crustacean ancestors. They’re so unusual that they seem to have arrived from another planet - in fact, vision scientist Mike Land jokingly calls them “shrimps from Mars.”

There are almost 500 known species of mantis shrimp. However, they stay well concealed in their rocky and sandy burrows, and only a few scientists study them, so there are probably many new mantis shrimps yet to be discovered. Almost all live in shallow, marine waters, and most inhabit the tropics.

Remarkable eyes of the mantis shrimp

Like all crustaceans (insects, too), mantis shrimps have compound eyes – think of the eyes of crabs, bees, or butterflies. Each eye has hundreds of separate facets, each of which is a single unit of the entire compound eye. But mantis shrimp eyes are far more specialized than all other compound eyes, in some ways more than any other eyes biologists have ever discovered.

For one thing, each eye is like three eyes squeezed into one. The three parts all look at the same point in space, much as our two separate eyes focus on the same scene. We use our two eyes to locate an object in space. Mantis shrimps can work out the distance to objects they’re looking at using a single eye.

Two eye parts, at the top and bottom of the eye, are probably involved in this distance vision. The third part is built from parallel rows of facets that run around the middle of the eye like a belt. Usually there are six rows, though a few species have only two. This part of the eye is called the “midband,” and it supports many special abilities.

Further, most mantis shrimps see ultraviolet light – part of the electromagnetic spectrumthat causes sunburn in you or me and that is invisible to our eyes. Mantis shrimps not only sense this light, but with their specialized midbands they even see separate colors of it.

This feature is on top of another set of color detectors that see the same visible light we’re used to – but in eight color channels as opposed to the three primary colors we see. Imagine trying to build a TV that looks right to a mantis shrimp. Besides the red, green, and blue colors that your TV uses to create a vivid picture, it would require pixels for violet, indigo, blue-green, orange and a deeper red than we can see.

And the midband can do even more. It can detect the polarization of light – where all the waves vibrate in the same plane. Our eyes cannot see this property of light. Mantis shrimps image things using it.

So putting together all its visual talents, when a mantis shrimp sees a fish, it’s in patterns of ultraviolet colors, eight primary regular colors and polarized light. Their eyes gather all this information and pass it on to the animal’s brain, so it can decide what to attack, when to attack it, how far away it is, and what it looks like in a dozen different ways. It’s hard for a human to even imagine the visual world of a mantis shrimp.

Letting down its defenses

With superpower vision coupled to explosive predatory arms, it seems like mantis shrimps would be invincible. But even these animals have their worries. Mantis shrimps can not only kill other animals, like fish, octopus or crabs. They can also kill each other. This raises a serious problem. Eventually, it’s time to reproduce – but how does a mantis shrimp know when another one it meets wants to mate rather than make a murderous assault?

Mantis shrimps have been forced to evolve ways to recognize when it’s safe to get intimate and to signal their own nonlethal intent. They use their special vision for this too. Mantis shrimps are often brightly colored, and they display patterns – invisible to us – in ultraviolet and polarized light. The complicated displays inform other members of their species, or of different ones, what they plan to do. If their plans include reproduction, and the viewer is of similar mind, then they can safely mate and initiate a new generation of their species.

So, yes – sharks are all right. But do they have bullet-like strikes? Do they have super-vision? Can they take down prey in milliseconds? It’s mantis shrimps that have these abilities, and they use them to become some of the world’s most impressive predators.

[Article originally appeared in "The Conversation." Click to view the original article.]

Funding basic research plays the long game for future payoffs

August 7, 2018 6.40am EDT

The Senate recently proposed to increase the research budgets of the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and NASA. While this is encouraging to the many scientists whose research is dependent on grants from these agencies, it comes at a time when scientific research is under increased scrutiny.

Questioning the merit of scientific research is certainly not new. In the 1970s and 1980s the Golden Fleece Awards were an ignominious honor bestowed by a U.S. senator on what he considered “wasteful” research. The majority of the ire was aimed at research thought to be “useless.”

But having no obvious immediate application doesn’t mean something will never be of use.

Perhaps the difficultly in justifying basic research is in part a branding problem. The goal of this type of work is to understand the fundamental principles of nature, and it spans the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Once these fundamental principles are understood, they can be applied to more translational research that can have direct benefits to patients or consumers.

But the benefits of basic research are often not instantly recognizable. Potential long-term payoffs – perhaps ones that haven’t even been imagined yet – won’t help consumers or patients now.

There are countless discoveries whose eventual impact would have been very difficult to predict when the research was in its infancy. Honors like the Golden Goose Award, presented every fall since 2012, combat the idea of basic research being “wasteful” or “useless” by underscoring that it’s actually the foundation for further scientific innovation. Given enough time and support, basic research can yield significant real-world benefits that were hard to predict in advance. Here are two examples of scientific curiosity paying substantial dividends decades after the initial discovery.

From glowing jellyfish to biomedical imaging

It was very unlikely that scientists were thinking of medical applications when in the 1950s they started studying why some jellyfish glow. Marine biologists discovered that the jellyfish Aequorea victoria was bioluminescent. What was unclear at the time was how this jellyfish produces its light, which is a vibrant green color.

Seven years later a group of researchers discovered that the living light from the jellyfish came from a single protein they called aequorin. Strangely, the light from the purified aequorin protein was blue, not green. After another eight years of work they found that a partner protein to aequorin, which they called green fluorescent protein (GFP), produced the vibrant green-colored light seen in the living jellyfish.

The question then became how did the two proteins work together to produce this light? It took another 10 years of work to get the answer. A series of papers published in the early 1970s characterized a small molecule called a chromophore that integrated into the GFP protein structure. The structure of GFP was discovered in the early 1990s, which further helped researchers understand how this protein created light in living cells.

The first time the GFP protein was produced in an organism other than a jellyfish was in 1992. Expressing GFP in the small worm C. elegans and the bacterium E. coli made them both glow a brilliant green color. This breakthrough, nearly 40 years after the initial jellyfish study, opened the door for using GFP as powerful tool for biomedical research. Today researchers use GFP to track protein interactions and movement in living cells, which is useful in the study of cancer and bacterial diseases. A current literature search in PubMed returns over 30,000 peer-reviewed published papers using the search term “green fluorescent protein.”

The impact of GFP has also been recognized with a Nobel Prize in 2008 and an inaugural Golden Goose Award in 2012.

From bacterial immunity to genome editing

A more recent example of how basic research is now driving incredible innovation can be found in the fields of synthetic biology and genome editing, thanks to what actually started out very humbly as the characterization of bacteria. In the late 1980s, researchers found that certain bacteria had short repeated regions in their genome, but they didn’t know their purpose. They called these DNA sequences Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats; you’ve probably heard its acronym nickname CRISPR. Work characterizing and cataloging bacteria that had these short repeated sequences continued for 20 years before researchers discovered proteins associated with the short DNA repeats. They called them CRISPR associated, or Cas, proteins.

One major advance happened in 2005 when researchers realized that CRISPR sequences found in bacterial genomes match DNA in phages, viruses that infect bacteria. A few more years later, scientists showed that the CRISPR-Cas system was a type of adaptive immunity that bacteria use to remember phage infection and prevent it from happening again. The Cas protein cuts invading phage’s DNA to stop infection. This discovery was groundbreaking; no one had known something as simple as a single-celled bacterium could have a sophisticated immune system.

And then in 2013, researchers realized this type of directed DNA cutting could be used to edit the genomes of other organisms, not just bacteria. The method was quickly adapted for use in yeast, worm, fruit fly, zebrafish, mouse, plant and human cells. Genome editing in this way will have far-reaching implications for everything from food production to stem cell therapies.

Thirty years after its discovery, the scope of CRISPR research is truly impressive; a current literature search in PubMed returns over 10,000 peer-reviewed published papers using the search term “CRISPR.” The technologies stemming from CRISPR have not won a Golden Goose Award or Nobel Prize yet, but some speculate it is only a matter of time.

Curiosity and patience yield dividends

Answering fundamental questions – Why do jellyfish glow? Why do bacterial genomes have short repeating DNA sequences? – can lead to innovation and tangible benefits in many aspects of everyday life. And a Golden Goose Award or Nobel Prize is not required to show that a discovery has translational application. An entrepreneurship study published in 2017 highlighted that more than 75 percent of research articles published are eventually referenced in at least one patent disclosure. This study showed a strong link between patent applications, ostensibly a quantitative metric of innovation, and basic research taking place at universities and government laboratories.

Real-world impacts stemming from basic research can take decades to unfold. If basic science is not supported and funded in the U.S., other countries will take over the innovation leadership role. Much like the goose that laid golden eggs, time and patience are required to get the most out of basic research.

[Article originally appeared in "The Conversation." Click to view the original article.]

Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) is looking for students and recent graduates to participate in research opportunities. Most of the ORISE opportunities are twelve month research opportunities, with the possibility to be renewed for additional twelve month research periods (5 years max). U.S. Citizenship is required to participate at the DoD installations.

 

To see all of their available opportunities, please visit: www.orau.org/dodprograms

 

You can sign up for their Talent Network to received alerts with new opportunities that match candidate interests:  https://stayconnected.orau.org/en-us/

Project Title & Project ID examples:

 

Chemical Eng. & Physical Science Research (BS&MS)               APHC-1911526380
Molecular Biology Research (BS)                                                 APHC-1637893744
Analytical Chemistry (MS/PhD)                                                    APHC-1817392923
Chemistry/Physics Research (MS/PhD Candidates)                      APHC-1768507089
Molecular-Based Testing (BS or MS)                                            APHC-1894785476
Data Analysis Research (MPH)                                                      APHC-1577623820
Public Health Data Research                                                           APHC-1012174837
Chemistry Research (BS Candidates)                                             APHC-1813938639
Lab Assistant Research (AA or BS Candidates)                             APHC-7074581681
Nanomaterial Research                                                                   USACE-EL-9004168835
Geochemistry (PhD)                                                                       USACE-EL-1829709278
Opportunity in Infectious Disease Research                                   MAMC-6702227045
Biomimetic Nanofibrous Scaffold Research (MS/PhD)                 N39467-027
Wound Infection Research (PhD)                                                   N39467-047
Battlefield Health and Trauma Fellowship (PhD)                          N39467-034
Combat Casualty Care Postdoctoral Research                                NAMRU-SA-1934167300
Concussion & Head Injury Research (BS - PhD)                           AARL-2029475795
Injury Biomechanics Researcher                                                    USAARL-5922256836
Defense Opportunity in Olfactory Science (MS -PhD)                  ECBC-8778949652
Synthetic Biology Research (BS Candidates)                                ECBC-1534316068
Inhalation Toxicology Postdoctoral Research                                MRICD-5749861507
Neuroprotection Research (BS Candidates)                                   MRICD-5519479992
Medicinal Countermeasures Postdoctoral Research                      MRICD-1440454992
Cyanide Countermeasures - Postdoctoral Research                       MRICD-1364081190
Cellular Responses to Toxic Chemicals (BS)                                MRICD-9215848906
Chemical Threat Countermeasures (BS Candidates)                     MRICD-2669633143
Chemical Threat Medical Countermeasures  (PHD)                      MRICD-1898138247
Military Cognitive Performance Research                                     USARIEM-3532383181
Program Analysis Research (BS/MS)                                            USARIEM-1857696418
Epidemiology-Population Health/Analysis (MPH/MS)                 NMCPHC-3487387313
Health Informatics Research (BS/MS)                                           NMCPHC-3346146432
Malaria Vaccine Postdoctoral Research                                         WRAIR-4937463993
Biochemistry Research (BS & MS Candidates)                             WRAIR-1259684897

 

About ORISE:
The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) connects the most talented and diverse students, recent graduates, faculty and educators to programs closely aligned with the interests of a variety of research facilities, including those managed for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and more than a dozen other federal agencies.

ORISE administers a broad range of internships, fellowships, and research experiences available primarily to those pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines, including undergraduate and graduate students, recent graduates, postdocs, and university faculty members. Programs are offered at DOE national laboratories and other federal agencies with research facilities located across the country as well as some locations outside the United States.