On a recent Friday, representatives of UMBC, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gathered in UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery and pledged to work together to diversify and advance environmental science.

CBEE faculty, Dr. Claire Welty, Professor of  Department of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering and Director of Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education, Drs. Lee Blaney, Upal Ghosh, Chris Hennigan, Brian Reed, Claire Welty, are also affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in the Environment (ICARE) are beneficiaries of successful collaborations between the three organizations. 

Read more via from UMBC NEWS "Working to diversify and advance environmental science, UMBC, USGS and EPA sign new agreement" Catherine Meyers, Published: May 5, 2023.

Jayashree Yalamanchili, PhD candidate, participated in the semi-final 3MT competition during the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools in Raleigh, NC. Her talk was titled "The fate of transition metals in phosphate-based acellular assays used to determine Particulate Matter (PM) reactivity". Jayashree is advised by Dr. Christopher Hennigan and Dr. Brian Reed.  

Jayashree won the GEARS 3MT conducted at UMBC in May 2021. She is the third doctoral student in the department to win the GEARS 3MT and the fourth GEARS 3MT winner to be advised by a faculty member in CBEE. 

3MT celebrates the exciting research conducted by Ph.D. students. Developed by The University of Queensland, the exercise cultivates students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills. The competition supports their capacity to effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

The iCARE NRT master’s degree is a 2-year interdisciplinary degree program with a dual mission of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice combined with research focused on improving the health of Baltimore Harbor as a socioecosystem. Students will be mentored by a UMBC faculty member and a non-academic scientist from a government agency, non-profit, or industry. That research team will be embedded in a larger stakeholder team, meaning that each student and their mentors will identify one or more community members (non-scientists) with a stake in the research to be engaged in the research from development to completion. 

 

Students will also be taking skills courses (community leadership, DEIJ, oral and written communication) and disciplinary courses appropriate to their research project.