Honors College alum, Christie Smith, runs UMBC's College JUMP program and is looking for mentors to serve in the program in the fall. Read more below and contact Christie if you're interested!

As you all work to solidify your schedules for next semester, consider this exciting opportunity to serve Baltimore’s refugee community! Refugee Youth Project’s College JUMP (Journey Upward Mentoring Program) matches 11th and 12th grade refugee students with university student mentors who meet with them weekly to guide them through the college exploration, application, and preparation process. (Hours are very flexible!) We also bring students and mentors together once a month for a fun college-related activity (campus tours, sports games, trivia nights, etc.) We’re currently looking for mentors for the 2016-2017 school year. Join our team and empower a student to pursue higher education! For more information, contact Christie Smith at csmith24@umbc.edu.

Shawn Bediako, Associate Professor, Psychology, Honors College Faculty Fellow

Over the past 10 years at UMBC, Shawn Bediako has been a leader in the advancement of mentorship and professional development for faculty members and their academic careers.

Bediako’s professional accomplishments have been fundamental in supporting the academic career advancement of other UMBC faculty members. He has mentored a wide range of faculty and postdoctoral scholars at UMBC and beyond. Most recently, in collaboration with other campus faculty, Bediako created the UMBC Summer Writing Accountability Group (SWAG) to help participants maintain their work/life balance and increase their research and writing productivity within a supportive community environment. Over the course of 19 weeks, a total of 60 faculty, administrators, and instructional staff collectively logged more than 1,800 hours of writing time toward advancing their manuscripts, book chapters, and monographs.

Through his passion for cultivating a career that aligns personal values with professional goals, Bediako has used his experiences to help UMBC faculty balance their work and life by teaching techniques that optimize efficiency so that they find greater fulfillment as scholars and researchers.

Bediako is a leader in the field of community health psychology and is internationally known for his research on the clinical implications of sickle cell disease stigma and its impact on health-related outcomes. His honors include, among others, the Innovator in Academic Hemoglobinopathies Research Career Development Award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the Champion Award from the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. He also is a member of the UMBC Executive Committee on the Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement of Underrepresented Minority Faculty and one of the founders of the UMBC Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity.

Bediako received a B.S. from the University of Central Arkansas and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stony Brook University.

Name: Linda Wiratan

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: UMBC Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

Position Title: Research Assistant

Major(s)/Minor(s): B.S. Biochemistry & Molecular Biology; Honors College

Expected Graduation Year: May 2019

Briefly describe your internship, co-op,  or research opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

I am a member of Dr. Ptaszek's organic chemistry research group (at the UMBC Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry), whose focus is on the development of hydroporphyrins (chlorins and bacteriochlorins) for a wide variety of optical and photochemical applications, particularly photodynamic therapy (PDT). PDT is a prospective cancer therapy that involves the use of a photosensitizer (light-activated probe) to localize within and kill cancer cells through the formation of toxic species. Hydroporphyrins are relatives of the familiar compounds heme and chlorophyll, and their properties can be tuned to give them potential to become PDT probes.

My daily responsibilities are carrying out experiments pertaining to my specific research project, which examines the dependence of specific hydroporphyrin properties on solvent polarity. I typically measure absorbance and emission scans for a variety of hydroporphyrins in different solvents, analyzing the data. I look for correlations between solvent polarity and quantum yields of singlet oxygen and fluorescence.

The greater goal of my research is to help identify characteristics of hydroporphyrins that may contribute to the development of PDT probes that are more selective and sensitive in cellular environments. While measuring and graphing data may not seem like much in terms of demanding lab work, it can be very time consuming and requires meticulous tracking of volumes and careful protection of solutions from ambient light. I'm happy that my hard work paid off, though; I am an author in a paper being submitted for publishing right now, and I'm waiting on the acceptance of an abstract I submitted in order to present in the ACS National Meeting this fall!

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

I was actually a senior in Centennial High School when I obtained this research position. I was a student in Biotechnology Academy, a two-year G/T biotechnology career preparation program offered by the HCPSS Applications and Research Laboratory. Through this program I learned fundamental biological/chemical research and laboratory skills that allowed me, in my second year, the opportunity to find a position in a real scientific research lab. Among the options I had, I was most interested in Dr. Ptaszek's lab because I had no real knowledge of organic chemistry research and it sounded interesting. Dr. Ptaszek accepted me in October 2014 and I have been a lab member ever since.

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

I enjoy the challenge! As a freshman with almost no background in organic chemistry or quantum mechanics, it has been an intense journey to bring myself up to speed on the fundamentals of these topics, along with familiarity of the past few decades of hydroporphyrin research. It is immensely satisfying when I am able to explain to myself in minute detail why certain observations are the way they are, and it is even more rewarding when I am able to discuss my research with professionals in organic chemistry fields. There is still a great deal of information that I have not yet been able to understand, so it is also a humbling experience to admit that this challenge will be one I cannot master anytime soon.

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

I hope that the greatest contribution of my work will be to the improvement of photodynamic therapy and related "light-utilizing" cancer therapies, which have the potential to be minimally-invasive and non-toxic treatment options. One way to improve PDT probe specificity is to develop ones with behaviors sensitive to certain intra-cellular regions; this is what I am trying to address with solvent polarity dependence, as a cell has regions of differing polarities. The international interest in the advancement of PDT probes has grown steadily over time, so research in this field really has an impact on prospects for tightly regulated therapies in the future.

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

To a student (shout out to all the freshmen doing research!) interested in doing research but with little background knowledge of the topic the research lab focuses on: it can be done! There is a lot of implicit personal accountability for being able to understand what the research is, how and why it is being done, but it is far less of a burden if you are genuinely interested in the research instead of just adding a "professional experience" to a resume. Have confidence in yourself and know that you can only go so far as you are willing to try.

Kate Brown, a professor of history, and Honors College Faculty Fellow, has received a prestigious research fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and is one of just 33 scholars nationwide recognized for their significant scholarship in humanities and social sciences as part of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program.

Brown was selected from a nomination process that entailed three levels of review and began with the Corporation seeking recommendations from more than 600 leaders from universities, think tanks, publishers, and nonprofit organizations nationwide. Fellows were selected based on originality, promise, and impact of their research, and each fellow will receive up to $200,000 in research support.

Brown’s proposal, titled, “Chernobyl’s Pale: Health, Controversy, and Science in Determining the Contours of Nuclear Disaster,” is a two-year study that is a continuation of her American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship to study the long-term effects of low doses of radiation on human health in the context of the Chernobyl disaster nearly three decades ago. Brown will use the fellowship to conduct a large scale investigation to historically analyze three decades of medical research on Chernobyl.

This year’s Carnegie Fellows class will conduct research aimed at addressing some of the world’s most pressing and urgent challenges, and the program supports established and emerging scholars, journalists, and authors whose work informs leaders in science, law, technology, business, and public policy.

“I’m hopeful that this fellowship will help bring greater visibility and support to the high-level scholarship that exists in the humanities and social sciences not only nationwide, but also here at UMBC,” Brown says. “I’m extremely grateful to my colleagues for their support during this process and to President Hrabowski for his nomination for this fellowship.”

“Our founder, Andrew Carnegie, charged Carnegie Corporation with the task of creating, advancing, and diffusing knowledge in order to enlighten American society and strengthen our democracy,” Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian said in a news release announcing this year’s fellows. “This outstanding new cohort of 33 Carnegie Fellows is a result of that mandate.”

Brown is an award-winning author of A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard, 2004), Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013), and Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places not yet Forgotten (University of Chicago, 2015). She received the 2015 University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship/Research/Creative Activity. 

The anticipated result of each Carnegie Fellowship is the publication of a book or major study.

Susan Hockfield, president emerita of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), chaired the panel of jurors responsible for reviewing this year’s proposals, and noted that, “the large number of truly outstanding proposals makes the jury’s task difficult, but it also renews our confidence that social science and humanistic perspectives will- and must- contribute to designing solutions to today’s most complex challenges.”

For news coverage of the announcement, see below:

Image: Kate Brown. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.