UMBC is featured in the Baltimore Sun‘s latest education section as a leading university in breaking down barriers traditional in discipline-based liberal arts education. CAHSS Dean Scott Casper highlights UMBC’s strengths in liberal arts and interdisciplinary education in the article and advocates for the value in studying both STEM and liberal arts subjects.

“The two areas of education are inseparable. The skills and knowledge gained through classes in arts and humanities transcends the choice of major,” explains Casper. “Strong liberal arts education is at the core of UMBC, emphasized and valued across all disciplines and embodied in the almost two years of general education requirements. No matter what students major in, they still need to communicate well, write well, and think creatively about the challenges they’ll face in the future.”

Dean Casper also notes that UMBC has changed some of its institutional teaching practices to reflect what students will confront when they enter the workforce after graduation. The emphasis has been placed more on seminar style courses that promote interaction and collaboration as opposed to lecture-based teaching.

“For the rest of their lives, they will not be in large halls listening to someone lecture,” he explains. “We’re more mindful now of how our students learn and how well they learn.”

Read the full article “Ask Margit: Overcoming barriers and bottlenecks in focused-based education” in the Baltimore Sun. 

At a moment when the increasing threat of the Zika virus has brought renewed attention to environmental health issues, UMBC researchers are working on an extensive study to determine whether a neighborhood having more mosquitoes translates to a greater risk of disease transmission.

The UMBC research team led by Dawn Biehler, associate professor of geography and environmental systems, has spent several months canvassing Baltimore neighborhoods to collect data on mosquito populations and residents’ contact with mosquitoes as part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. They will use their research findings to draw up a set of evidence-based policy recommendations for better mosquito control to improve public health.

A March 18 article in The Washington Post highlighted this research and some of its findings.

“We see cases where there’s persistent trash and abandoned buildings, and it just creates this surface where there are lots of small bodies of water, which are just great for this mosquito,” Biehler told the Post.

She explained that she has found that many residents are concerned about the city picking up trash only once a week, but a lessening of the tax base due to population decline can lead to eroded city services. “It’s not just the city’s fault,” Biehler said. “There are bigger issues here.”

Project findings will be applied to improving mosquito control and awarding grants from the National Science Foundation to communities that have developed promising mosquito abatement strategies. The research project was also recently featured in The Baltimore Sun. Read both articles below.

Why diseases like Zika could unfairly target America’s poor (The Washington Post) 
Study shows poorer neighborhoods have more mosquitoes (The Baltimore Sun)