Founded in 1966, UMBC has changed immensely over the years, evolving from a small regional campus to a nationally distinguished research university in a relatively short time. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the many kinds of Retrievers who have made us what we are today – an innovative and inclusive community like no other. 

As we celebrate Founder’s Day 2022 and our 56th fall semester, what could be more appropriate than a fun Retriever history quiz? (Don’t worry, we’re not grading you.)

And if you’re ready to take a really deep dive into UMBC history, take a look at our new timeline, rebuilt with lots of new photos and factoids to please any Retriever Believer.

Let’s see how you do!

How’d you do? We hope you enjoyed this spin through time at UMBC. Happy Founder’s Day!

This week, ModernThink’s Great Colleges to Work For program again recognized UMBC as a top institution nationwide in every measured category, from well-being and shared governance to mission and pride. UMBC is the only R1 university in the nation to achieve this honor, which is based on employee ratings.

“I believe we continue to receive this honor because of our commitment to the development and support of our employees,” says Valerie Thomas, UMBC’s chief human resources officer. “The past two years have been difficult for everyone, but we worked tirelessly together to determine how to best serve our students and how best to make changes in the way we work, focused on continuous improvement.”

Caring community

Published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Great Colleges to Work For ratings include 10 categories:

• Mission & Pride
• Job Satisfaction & Support
• Confidence in Senior Leadership
• Compensation & Benefits
• Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
• Shared Governance
• Professional Development
• Faculty Experience
• Faculty & Staff Well-Being
• Supervisor/Department Chair Effectiveness

“I am reminded every day of what makes UMBC a great place to work,” says Faculty Senate President Susan McDonough, associate professor of history and vice-chair of the University Steering Committee. 

“I have the privilege to work alongside university leaders and colleagues who care deeply about ideas and their impact on society. I have seen us grow and deepen our commitment to research and discovery as we transformed into an R1 university. And I have watched our students, faculty, and staff face innumerable challenges these past few years and meet them with the compassion, tenacity, and imagination that makes me excited and humbled to be part of this community,” says McDonough. “I look forward to working with Dr. Sheares Ashby, our faculty, and our entire community to keep building an even better UMBC.”

Leadership and partnership

This theme of excitement for UMBC’s future with President Sheares Ashby, who began her tenure at UMBC in August, is a common thread among UMBC leadership.

“UMBC encourages staff growth and development, while ensuring equity through their focus on inclusion,” says Desiree Stonesifer, president of UMBC’s Non-exempt Staff Senate and executive administrative assistant in financial services, emphasizing a core value long-shared by UMBC and President Sheares Ashby. “As we welcome our new president, we look forward to the new opportunities for growth and experiences while maintaining our strong sense of UMBC family.”

Jess Wyatt, president of UMBC’s Professional Staff Senate (PSS), chair of the University Steering Committee, and associate director of alumni engagement, notes, “While it’s exciting to see UMBC as a perennial addition to this list, it is even more exciting to see where we will go as we move into a new era of UMBC in partnership with President Sheares Ashby.”

This is UMBC’s 13th year of recognition and 11th year on the Great Colleges Honor Roll.

Ivan Erill, Professor of Biological Sciences, UMBC

After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, you might picture a virus as a nasty spiked ball – a mindless killer that gets into a cell and hijacks its machinery to create a gazillion copies of itself before bursting out. For many viruses, including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the “mindless killer” epithet is essentially true.

But there’s more to virus biology than meets the eye.

Take HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. HIV is a retrovirus that does not go directly on a killing spree when it enters a cell. Instead, it integrates itself into your chromosomes and chills, waiting for the right moment to command the cell to make copies of it and burst out to infect other immune cells and eventually cause AIDS.

Exactly what moment HIV is waiting for is still an area of active study. But research on other viruses has long hinted that these pathogens can be quite “thoughtful” about killing. Of course, viruses cannot think the way you and I do. But, as it turns out, evolution has endowed them with some pretty elaborate decision-making mechanisms. Some viruses, for instance, will choose to leave the cell they have been residing in if they detect DNA damage. Not even viruses, it appears, like to stay in a sinking ship.

My laboratory has been studying the molecular biology of bacteriophages, or phages for short, the viruses that infect bacteria, for over two decades. Recently, my colleagues and I have shown that phages can listen for key cellular signals to help them in their decision-making. Even worse, they can use the cell’s own “ears” to do the listening for them.

Escaping DNA damage

If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, phages are certainly your friends. Phages control bacterial populations in nature, and clinicians are increasingly using them to treat bacterial infections that do not respond to antibiotics.

The best studied phage, lambda, works a bit like HIV. Upon entering the bacterial cell, lambda decides whether to replicate and kill the cell outright, like most viruses do, or to integrate itself into the cell’s chromosome, as HIV does. If the latter, lambda harmlessly replicates with its host each time the bacteria divides. This video shows a lambda phage infecting E. coli.

But, like HIV, lambda is not just sitting idle. It uses a special protein called CI like a stethoscope to listen for signs of DNA damage within the bacterial cell. If the bacterium’s DNA gets compromised, that’s bad news for the lambda phage nested within it. Damaged DNA leads straight to evolution’s landfill because it’s useless for the phage that needs it to reproduce. So lambda turns on its replication genes, makes copies of itself and bursts out of the cell to look for more undamaged cells to infect.

Tapping the cell’s communication system

Some phages, instead of gathering intel with their own proteins, tap the infected cell’s very own DNA damage sensor: LexA.

Proteins like CI and LexA are transcription factors that turn genes on and off by binding to specific genetic patterns within the DNA instruction book that is the chromosome. Some phages like Coliphage 186 have figured out that they don’t need their own viral CI protein if they have a short DNA sequence in their chromosomes that bacterial LexA can bind to. Upon detecting DNA damage, LexA will activate the phage’s replicate-and-kill genes, essentially double-crossing the cell into committing suicide while allowing the phage to escape.

Scientists first reported CI’s role in phage decision-making in the 1980s and Coliphage 186’s counterintelligence trick in the late 1990s. Since then, there have been a few other reports of phages tapping bacterial communication systems. One example is phage phi29, which exploits its host’s transcription factor to detect when the bacterium is getting ready to generate a spore, or a kind of bacterial egg capable of surviving extreme environments. Phi29 instructs the cell to package its DNA into the spore, killing the budding bacteria once the spore germinates.

In our recently published research, my colleagues and I show that several groups of phages have independently evolved the ability to tap into yet another bacterial communication system: the CtrA protein. CtrA integrates multiple internal and external signals to set in motion different developmental processes in bacteria. Key among these is the production of bacterial appendages called flagella and pili. Turns out, these phages attach themselves to the pili and flagella of bacteria in order to infect them.

Our leading hypothesis is that phages use CtrA to guesstimate when there will be enough bacteria nearby sporting pili and flagella that they can readily infect. A pretty smart trick for a “mindless killer.”

These are not the only phages that make elaborate decisions – all without the benefit of even having a brain. Some phages that infect Bacillus bacteria produce a small molecule each time they infect a cell. The phages can sense this molecule and use it to count the number of phage infections taking place around them. Like alien invaders, this count helps decide when they should switch on their replicate-and-kill genes, killing only when hosts are relatively abundant. This way, the phages make sure that they never run out of hosts to infect and guarantee their own long-term survival.

Countering viral counterintelligence

You may be wondering why you should care about the counterintelligence ops run by bacterial viruses. While bacteria are very different from people, the viruses that infect them are not that different from the viruses that infect humans. Pretty much every single trick played by phages has later been shown to be used by human viruses. If a phage can tap bacterial communication lines, why wouldn’t a human virus tap yours?

So far, researchers don’t know what human viruses could be listening for if they hijack these lines, but plenty of options come to mind. I believe that, like phages, human viruses could potentially be able to count their numbers to strategize, detect cell growth and tissue formation and even monitor immune responses. For now, these possibilities are only speculation, but scientific investigation is underway.

Having viruses listening to your cells’ private conversations is not the rosiest of pictures, but it’s not without a silver lining. As intelligence agencies all around the world know well, counterintelligence works only when it’s covert. Once detected, the system can very easily be exploited to feed misinformation to your enemy. Similarly, I believe that future antiviral therapies may be able to combine conventional artillery, like antivirals that prevent viral replication, with information warfare trickery, such as making the virus believe the cell it is in belongs to a different tissue.

But, hush, don’t tell anybody. Viruses could be listening!

* * * * * *

Ivan Erill, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The 2022–23 U.S. News and World Report Best Colleges undergraduate rankings released this week illustrate why a record number of students chose to call UMBC home this fall. This year’s rankings show UMBC jumping an impressive 25 spots on the list of Best National Universities and appearing on several other prestigious lists, distinguishing the university’s achievements on a national stage. 

“Notable increases in UMBC’s six-year graduation rate, at a time when UMBC was also recognized as an Research 1 university, likely supported this jump,” says Constance A. Pierson ’90, M.A. ’92, associate vice provost for Institutional Research, Analysis and Decision Support. “We are particularly proud that the graduation rate trend is consistent for students of different economic backgrounds.”

This year UMBC ranks at #9 nationally for undergraduate teaching, joined in the top ten by such institutions as Brown, Princeton, and Dartmouth, and tied with the University of Notre Dame. UMBC also maintains its longstanding position on the list of the nation’s most innovative universities, tied at #10 with Johns Hopkins University. UMBC ranks #64 on the Top Public Universities list, #137 on the overall Top National Universities list, and #46 for undergraduate research and creative projects.

Student-centered education

At the core of this year’s rankings are students who already distinguish themselves as budding entrepreneurs, global citizens, advocates, and leaders. Farah Helal ’24, global studies and political science, began her term as University System of Maryland (USM) student regent on July 1, 2022. UMBC’s U.S. News ranking as one of the country’s Best Value Schools and universities with the least student debt speaks directly to the work Helal will be doing as part of her tenure: weighing in on topics like setting tuition and fee rates, approving new degree programs, and approving capital and operating budgets.

“UMBC is a meeting ground for students, faculty, and staff who want to be engaged in our communities every day, doing deep and creative work to solve problems and promote justice and inclusion,” says David Hoffman, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Life. 

In addition to the latest U.S. News rankings, Hoffman highlights that the 2022 College Rankings issue of The Washington Monthly names UMBC one of America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting. “I love that we have been recognized by Washington Monthly for our efforts in connection with voting, and I love knowing that voting is just the tip of the iceberg for us when it comes to our students’ engagement and impact.” 

Both teaching and research

The latest U.S. News rankings are primarily university-wide, but they also include recognition for a few specific undergraduate programs. UMBC is listed as a top-100 university this year for both computer science and engineering. Coming in at #86 for computer science, UMBC shares the rank with George Mason University, Texas Tech University, and Howard University. Ascending to #94 for engineering this year, UMBC is joined by Clemson University, George Washington University, and University of Delaware.

It’s essential to understand these rankings in the context of another important milestone, notes Keith J Bowman, dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT): UMBC’s recent Carnegie Classification as a doctoral university with very high research activity, popularly known as Research 1 (or R1). UMBC is now ranked as one of only 146 R1 institutions nationally, including 107 public and 39 private universities.

“UMBC’s designation as an R1 institution combined with increasing recognition for our engineering, computing and information systems programs has enabled us to recruit incredible faculty talent,” says Bowman. “Those faculty are attracted to UMBC for our potential to both advance their success as researchers and educators and our emphasis on inclusion as essential to excellence.”

Promoting diversity and innovation

UMBC’s recognition as one of the nation’s most innovative universities, alongside Johns Hopkins, goes hand-in-hand with recognition as a top university for ethnic diversity. The National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) have recently awarded UMBC over $15 million for programs specifically to support underrepresented STEM students—an area where UMBC is known as an innovative national model. 

The College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS) will receive $5.6 million over five years from the NIH to fund the Graduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement (G-RISE). This program will support graduate students from underrepresented groups in STEM with up to three years of funding and an array of training opportunities. The goal is to help participants select and prepare for a range of career paths in academia, industry, government, entrepreneurship, or beyond.

UMBC will expand its work boosting diversity in academia from Maryland to the national level through a new NSF INCLUDES Alliance: Re-Imagining STEM Equity Utilizing Postdoc Pathways (RISE UPP). The RISE UPP Alliance, anticipated to officially launch in fall 2022, is modeled after the AGEP PROMISE Academy, a high-impact initiative co-led by UMBC that supports faculty diversification in the biomedical sciences across USM institutions.

The university has also received support from a broad range of other groups and agencies to expand and replicate UMBC’s student success models. This includes $2.5 million from the Simons Foundation to create a Meyerhoff Scholars-like program within the public university system in New York, among other initiatives.

Vision of leadership

This commitment to diversity and inclusion can also be seen at the faculty and administrative leadership levels. Kimberly R. Moffitt, dean of UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) and professor of language, literacy, and culture, serves as the lead principal investigator for Breaking the M.O.L.D. UMBC, Morgan State University, and the University of Maryland, College Park are partnering in this $3 million initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a pipeline to higher ed leadership for diverse scholars in the arts and humanities.

Following through on “redefin[ing] excellence in higher education through an inclusive culture” is an essential part of what makes UMBC such a special and distinctive place, says UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby. “This is an extraordinary institution,” she recently told WYPR’s Tom Hall. She shares, “The university is true to the values and vision that it states.”

Erin Lavik, professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering at UMBC, is an innovator in developing nanoparticles to stop internal bleeding. She’s also hard at work on a very different challenge: building STEM workforce development programs that are more inclusive and equitable.

Lavik and Erika Fountain, assistant professor of psychology, will serve as 2022-23 Science & Technology Policy Fellows (STPF) with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in the prestigious program’s 50th class. 

“AAAS policy fellows have been demonstrating excellence in science policy for the past half-century—defining what it means to be a scientist and engineer in the policymaking realm,” said STPF Director Rashada Alexander. 

The 300 fellows chosen for the 2022-23 class will serve in a range of government offices, working to inform actionable, science-based policies. Lavik will be based in the Advanced Manufacturing Office of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, known as Manufacturing USA. Fountain will be hosted by the American Psychological Association (APA), serving as a Congressional Fellow.

The 2022-23 fellowship class is supported by variety of bodies including the U.S. Government, AAAS, partner societies, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, with an eye on both the value of this experience for participating fellows and the impact fellows will have throughout their careers.

Inclusive high-tech workforce

“With the CHIPS Act passing, I’ll be focusing on building workforce development programs that are equitable, inclusive, diverse, and accessible,” says Lavik.

“CHIPS” stands for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors—legislation that will provide nearly $53 billion to support semiconductor production in the U.S., supporting both research and high-tech jobs. The goal of CHIPS, the White House notes, is “to sustain U.S. leadership in the sciences and engineering as the engine for American innovation.” 

Lavik, who is also associate dean for research and faculty development in UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT), will play an important role at NIST in shaping the programs that will generate these high-tech jobs, maximizing their benefit. At the same time, she will learn about federal policymaking and implementation first-hand.

“Dr. Lavik has worked as both a researcher and as an associate dean elevating research and advancing faculty development. This combination has given her a broad insight into product development,” says COEIT Dean Keith J Bowman. “I am certain that expertise will serve her well in supporting advancement of our nation’s manufacturing enterprises. I know from direct experience that Manufacturing USA has changed how we think about and carry out manufacturing, and Dr. Lavik’s strategic and innovative mindset is a great match for this opportunity.”

Research-based youth justice policy

Fountain leads UMBC’s interdisciplinary Youth Justice Lab, which focuses on the intersection of adolescent development and the legal system, combining psychology, law, and policy. Her research focuses on how adolescents and their families navigate the justice system, with the goal of developing evidence-based youth justice policy. She and her team explore how youth experience legal decision making, court processes, and working with attorneys.

Fountain’s APA Congressional Fellowship is specifically designed for psychologists seeking unique public policy learning experiences to prepare them for careers connecting with and impacting the federal government. She has already provided scientific testimony to Maryland legislators considering changes to policies involving youth justice—from confidentiality of records to legal protections in youth interrogation—and looks forward to working at the federal level.

“This fellowship gives scientists an opportunity to learn about the policy process and ultimately inform work being done to create and implement policies,” says Fountain. “As someone who has been conducting research on youth justice and justice policy for years, I am thrilled to be able to step into this role and work directly with policy makers to inform policies that benefit youth and their families.”

“In awarding Dr. Fountain this fellowship, APA and AAAS have recognized the high quality and impact of her scholarship and policy work to date,” says Anne E. Brodsky, professor and chair of psychology. “Through this high-level experience, she’ll gain valuable expertise that will further advance her contributions to our mission: elevating our students and surrounding communities through important and socially relevant applied scholarship.”

This is a repost of an announcement by the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Please review the requirements/application instructions on the original post here.

Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science, UMBC

As statewide primaries continue through the summer, many Americans are beginning to think about which candidates they will support in the 2022 general election.

This decision-making process is fraught with difficulties, especially for inexperienced voters.

Voters must navigate angry, emotion-laden conversations about politics when trying to sort out whom to vote for. Americans are more likely than ever to view politics in moral terms, meaning their political conversations sometimes feel like epic battles between good and evil.

But political conversations are also shaped by, obviously, what Americans know – and, less obviously, what they think they know – about politics.

In recent research, I studied how Americans’ perceptions of their own political knowledge shape their political attitudes. My results show that many Americans think they know much more about politics than they really do.

Knowledge deficit, confidence surplus

Over the past five years, I have studied the phenomenon of what I call “political overconfidence.” My work, in tandem with other researchers’ studies, reveals the ways it thwarts democratic politics.

Political overconfidence can make people more defensive of factually wrong beliefs about politics. It also causes Americans to underestimate the political skill of their peers. And those who believe themselves to be political experts often dismiss the guidance of real experts.

Political overconfidence also interacts with political partisanship, making partisans less willing to listen to peers across the aisle.

The result is a breakdown in the ability to learn from one another about political issues and events.

A ‘reality check’ experiment

In my most recent study on the subject, I tried to find out what would happen when politically overconfident people found out they were mistaken about political facts.

To do this, I recruited a sample of Americans to participate in a survey experiment via the Lucid recruitment platform. In the experiment, some respondents were shown a series of statements that taught them to avoid common political falsehoods. For instance, one statement explained that while many people believe that Social Security will soon run out of money, the reality is less dire than it seems.

My hypothesis was that most people would learn from the statements, and become more wary of repeating common political falsehoods. However, as I have found in my previous studies, a problem quickly emerged.

The problem

First, I asked respondents a series of basic questions about American politics. This quiz included topics like which party controls the House of Representatives – the Democrats – and who the current Secretary of Energy is – Jennifer Granholm. Then, I asked them how well they thought they did on the quiz.

Many respondents who believed they were top performers were actually among those who scored the worst. Much akin to the results of a famous study by Dunning and Kruger, the poorest performers did not generally realize that they lagged behind their peers.

Of the 1,209 people who participated, around 70% were overconfident about their knowledge of politics. But this basic pattern was not the most worrying part of the results.

The overconfident respondents failed to change their attitudes in response to my warnings about political falsehoods. My investigation showed that they did read the statements, and could report details about what they said. But their attitudes toward falsehoods remained inflexible, likely because they – wrongly – considered themselves political experts.

But if I could make overconfident respondents more humble, would they actually take my warnings about political falsehoods to heart?

Poor self-assessment

My experiment sought to examine what happens when overconfident people are told their political knowledge is lacking. To do this, I randomly assigned respondents to receive one of three experimental treatments after taking the political knowledge quiz. These were as follows:

1. Respondents received statements teaching them to avoid political falsehoods.
2. Respondents did not receive the statements.
3. Respondents received both the statements and a “reality check” treatment. The reality check showed how respondents fared on the political quiz they took at the beginning of the survey. Along with their raw score, the report showed how respondents ranked among 1,000 of their peers.

For example, respondents who thought they had aced the quiz might have learned that they got one out of five questions right, and that they scored worse than 82% of their peers. For many overconfident respondents, this “reality check” treatment brought them down to earth. They reported much less overconfidence on average when I followed up with them.

Finally, I asked all the respondents in the study to report their levels of skepticism toward five statements. These statements are all common political falsehoods. One statement, for example, asserted that violent crime had risen over the prior decade – it hadn’t. Another claimed the U.S. spent 18% of the federal budget on foreign aid – the real number was less than 1%.

I expected most respondents who had received my cautionary statements to become more skeptical of these misinformed statements. On average, they did. But did overconfident respondents learn this lesson too?

Reality check: Mission accomplished

The results of the study showed that overconfident respondents began to take political falsehoods seriously only if they had experienced my “reality check” treatment first.

While overconfident respondents in other conditions showed no reaction, the humbling nature of the “reality check,” when they realized how wrong they had been, led overconfident participants in that condition to revise their beliefs. They increased their skepticism of political falsehoods by a statistically significant margin.

Overall, this “reality check” experiment was a success. But it reveals that outside of the experiment, political overconfidence stands in the way of many Americans’ ability to accurately perceive political reality.

The problem of political overconfidence

What, if anything, can be done about the widespread phenomenon of political overconfidence?

While my research cannot determine whether political overconfidence is increasing over time, it makes intuitive sense that this problem would be growing in importance in an era of online political discourse. In the online realm, it is often difficult to appraise the credibility of anonymous users. This means that false claims are easily spread by uninformed people who merely sound confident.

To combat this problem, social media companies and opinion leaders could seek ways to promote discourse that emphasizes humility and self-correction. Because confident, mistaken self-expression can easily drown out more credible voices in the online realm, social media apps could consider promoting humility by reminding posters to reconsider the “stance,” or assertiveness, of their posts.

While this may seem far-fetched, recent developments show that small nudges can lead to powerful shifts in social media users’ online behavior.

For example, Twitter’s recent inclusion of a pop-up message that asks would-be posters of news articles to “read before tweeting” caused users to rethink their willingness to share potentially misleading content.

A gentle reminder to avoid posting bold claims without evidence is just one possible way that social media companies could encourage good online behavior. With another election season soon upon us, such a corrective is urgently needed.

Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Anupam Joshi, a professor focused on both high-impact computing research and expanding access to computer science and cybersecurity education, has been named a 2022–23 American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow.

Joshi is the Oros Family Professor and chair of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC and director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity. He will spend the coming academic year with University System of Maryland (USM) leaders, shadowing both USM Chancellor Jay A. Perman and Bruce Jarrell, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). 

UMBC has a strong history of leaders participating in the ACE Fellows program, an intensive mentorship program that has prepared faculty, staff, and administrators for senior positions in college and university leadership since it began in 1965. More than 80 percent of the program’s 2,500 past Fellows have gone on to serve as chief executive officers, chief academic officers, other cabinet-level positions, or deans following their fellowship.

“The ACE Fellows program embodies ACE’s goal of enriching the capacity of agile leaders to problem-solve and innovate, and it fuels the expansion of a talented and diverse higher education leadership pipeline,” said ACE President Ted Mitchell. “Fellows continue to excel in prominent leadership roles, and the potential of this new cohort to bring strong leadership to institutions across America greatly excites me.”

Focus on innovating institutions

Following a rigorous application process, ACE selected 46 Fellows this year from colleges and universities across the United States. Throughout the year, these Fellows will observe and work with senior leaders at their host institution, attend decision-making meetings, and focus on issues of interest. They will also conduct projects of pressing concern for their home institutions, with the goal of returning after their fellowship year prepared to guide positive change.

“I am thrilled and honored to be mentored by two stalwarts of higher education in Chancellor Perman and President Jarrell,” Joshi says. “I look forward to learning from these leaders and working together to make a difference for the students in USM universities. I thank President Emeritus Hrabowski, President Sheares Ashby, and Provost Rous at UMBC for nominating me for this opportunity and their support.”

Leadership trajectory

Joshi obtained a B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 1989, and a master’s and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He has published more than 275 technical papers, has been granted nine patents and obtained research support from a variety of federal and industrial sources. In 2014 he was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE.

As chair, Joshi leads one of UMBC’s largest departments. There he has overseen a near doubling of student enrollment at the graduate level and a 50% growth rate at the undergraduate level, accompanied by an increase in student body diversity. 

He has worked with partners in the UMBC Office of Institutional Advancement to raise funds supporting research from such industry partners as Northrop Grumman, GE, and Cisco. As a result of these efforts and collaboration with Jack Suess, UMBC’s chief information officer and vice president of information technology, the state recently announced the creation of a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing at UMBC. 

Joshi directs the Center for Cybersecurity, which brings together scholarship and research in cybersecurity from computer science, information systems, social sciences, humanities, public policy, and natural sciences. In this role, he serves on the Maryland Cybersecurity Council. 

Additionally, Joshi directs UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, a joint effort between the Center for Cybersecurity and UMBC’s Center for Women in Technology. This program is focused on supporting a diverse next generation of leaders in cybersecurity and computing.

At the conclusion of the fellowship year, Joshi will return to these leadership roles with new knowledge and skills to expand UMBC’s work in innovative ways, supported by a network of emerging and longstanding university leaders across the nation.

This UMBC News story draws from an USM press release (8/31/2022). Learn more about ACE through stories on UMBC’s prior fellows, such as Tim Nohe, visual arts; Kate Tracy M.A. ‘01, Ph.D. ‘03, psychology; Sarah Shin, education; and Anne Brodsky, psychology, among others. UMBC President Emeritus Freeman Hrabowski currently serves as the inaugural ACE Centennial Fellow.

Tens of millions of people live in areas that are at risk for flooding due to climate change, sea level rise, and melting of glaciers. UMBC’s Vandana Janeja is leading a team of researchers using data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and polar science to analyze enormous volumes of climate data, and Arctic and Antarctic observations in ways that could help populations prepare for and respond to these risks.

Janeja, professor and chair of information systems, is the principal investigator on the five-year, $13 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea program. With support from the grant, Janeja is directing iHARP, the NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions.

“The research we’re doing in iHARP will help us understand global drivers of sea level rise and its impacts. This work will look at complex dynamics in the polar regions, evaluating heterogeneous data and connections between climate processes. This will help us get to more certain assessments, to drive the science responding to climate change,” she explains.

Data science meets climate science

Climate scientists rely on data that are incredibly challenging to disentangle. AI offers solutions for analyzing these large datasets, providing sophisticated models that make the best use of the available data.

“Researchers in iHARP are already looking at ice sheets in the Arctic and the Antarctic, including labeling of ice layer images. They are examining anomalous trends in ice thickness and creating new algorithms for understanding which factors are causing which types of changes in such a dynamic environment,” explains Janeja.

The iHARP researchers will reduce uncertainties in projecting sea level rise by combining physics-driven modeling, machine learning techniques, and data analysis. The results of the work will inform policymaking to address national and global priorities related to the climate crisis. 

The team will also investigate novel data science techniques that can be applied to other disciplines encountering challenges related to complex data.

Tackling challenges together

An interdisciplinary team has been assembled to move forward this important collaboration. Janeja is working with co-PIs Jianwu Wang, associate professor of information systems at UMBC; Mathieu Morlighem at Dartmouth College; Shashi Shekhar at the University of Minnesota; and researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Project collaborators in education, government, and industry across the country include additional researchers and collaborators at the above universities as well as University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Northern Texas, Amherst College, University of Texas at Austin, NASA Universities Space Research Association, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NVIDIA, IBM, and Amazon.

The grant also involves dozens of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and will support educational and outreach activities, with an eye toward workforce development. This includes programming for K-12 and college students, and lectures and training opportunities for data science and domain science professionals. Students will work alongside partners including NASA, Amazon, and IBM, and will have internship opportunities with federal and industry partners.

“This major multi-institutional NSF award reflects so much hard work and ingenuity. National programs like iHARP, with its focus on some of the great challenges our society is facing, add to UMBC’s growing reputation for innovation and excellence in public impact research,” says Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC.

Impact of multidisciplinary teams 

The solutions that are developed through this work will have applications beyond environmental issues. The team’s research may impact the future of medicine, computer vision, responsible AI , and remote sensing. And students working on the project will become the next generation of experts addressing these global issues.

“The College is experiencing extraordinary research growth. This is made possible by both the development of multidisciplinary teams and our increased focus on leadership development,” says Keith J Bowman, dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. “This project team, and others recently funded or pending, benefit from the tremendous faculty talent we have recruited in the last several years.”

In addition to Janeja and Wang, the UMBC team also includes Aryya Gangopadhyay, professor; Karen Chen, assistant professor; and Osman Gani, assistant professor, all in information systems, as well as Don Engel, associate vice president for research development and assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering.

Editor’s note: This story is an update of a prior version published on September 28, 2021.

As UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby looked out at the crowd of eager first-year students during Tuesday’s Convocation ceremony to open the academic year, she reinforced the importance of marking this formative chapter. And with well over 2,100 new first-year students, and record numbers of graduate and international students, this is a new chapter for UMBC’s largest incoming class yet. 

“In an increasingly competitive college admissions landscape characterized by a declining pool of high school graduates and increasing costs of attendance, UMBC’s ability to continue to attract a strong and talented first-year class speaks to, among many things, our reputation as an institution that offers an exceptional collegiate experience that is affordable,” says Yvette Mozie-Ross ’88, UMBC’s vice provost for enrollment management and planning. This includes in-demand programs at both UMBC’s main campus and the Universities at Shady Grove in Montgomery County.

In addition to a record number of new first-year students, UMBC enrolled over 3,300 graduate students for fall 2022, marking an impressive 500-plus increase over last year’s fall enrollment. 

Welcoming the incoming class

Veronica Goonan, an incoming first-year student, knew once she visited campus that she had found her place. “I had an incredible opportunity to tour campus with the [mock trial] team in the fall of my senior year, and that’s when I began to know that my place was here,” she said. “I could feel the innovation and excellence that UMBC boasts.”

One of the biggest goals in the first few weeks of the new academic year is to ensure students have opportunities to get to know the campus and begin learning about the possibilities available to them throughout their academic career. 

“In the Division of Student Affairs, we take the role of welcoming and holding space for our students seriously. Those first few days and weeks are about making sure that we are doing all we can to help them carve out their own path while they are here,” says Jen Dress, associate director of campus life. 

A robust Welcome Week full of fun and engaging events is an important part of this experience. When new students moved in last Saturday, they were treated to some of UMBC’s favorite traditions. Once the boxes were unpacked, the beds were made, and the posters of (insert cool band here) were hung, students and their families made their way to Erickson Field. 

If new Retrievers didn’t know the school colors before, they certainly did now. Swag tables, information tables, and goodie tables lined the field, all decked out in UMBC’s signature black and gold. Even the animals in the petting zoo got the memo.

Once families said their goodbyes and maybe a few students and parents teared up got something in their eye, celebrations continued with Playfair and the annual fireworks display. New Retrievers played “getting to know you” games to break the ice and capped off the night with a spectacular fireworks show. 

A place for everyone

Incoming transfer student Luther Daigle, mechanical engineering, summed up the feeling hearing about UMBC versus coming to UMBC by saying, “It wasn’t until I toured the campus and I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging that I knew I wanted to continue my academic career at UMBC.” And that feeling has carried through the start of his first semester.

This sense of belonging extends to UMBC’s rapidly growing population of international students. As of the end of August, over 2,200 international students were enrolled for the 2022 – 2023 academic year. 

“As UMBC’s international reputation continues to grow, more students from around the world choose to join our campus community,” says David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education. “We are very pleased to welcome the largest number of international students in UMBC’s history.”

Jok Thon, an incoming graduate student studying entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership, is the first student from South Sudan to enroll at UMBC and he was buoyed by the diversity represented in the community he’d be joining. 

Addressing his peers at the annual Fall Opening Meeting, Thon said, “We have an incredibly diverse and creative campus community. We have such an opportunity to learn from this global village…maybe we should even think of it as our responsibility as global citizens to learn from each other during our time at UMBC.” 

During Convocation, 2022 Presidential Teaching Award recipient Tamra Mendelson echoed the importance of this saying, “Inclusive to me means that we not only value, we require a diversity of backgrounds to make the world a better place. It’s the only way we will achieve a more accurately educated, environmentally conscious civil society.”

Students at the center

While students may think faculty and staff are the backbone of their educational career, their educators and advisors would argue it’s the opposite—students themselves are at the core of UMBC. 

“If there was an equation to describe UMBC, our students would be the essential term. We are committed to providing each of our outstanding students with a first-class education and the support needed to achieve success, whether that means meeting with the CNMS success coach, participating in programs at The Learning Collaboratory, or working one-on-one with a faculty mentor,” said William R. LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). “Inclusive excellence is more than just words—it is our mission.”

LaCourse himself knows the importance of connecting with students on a foundational level. In the spring, you can find him co-teaching CHEM 100: The Chemical World to non-chemistry majors.

Keith J Bowman, dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT), points to the essential role that student leaders play in reaching out to and connecting with new students, and helping them feel welcome and connected.

“All summer I have been hearing from student org leaders from our college,” says Bowman. “Their enthusiasm to engage with current and new members is very exciting.”

Among the new students Dean Kimberly Moffitt welcomed to UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) this year are several Shriver Peaceworker Fellows, who gathered on campus on August 1 to kick off their fellowship. These Returned Peace Corps Volunteers pursue graduate degrees in a range of fields (such as teaching and applied sociology) while also working with community partner organizations to address diverse social needs, and actively reflecting on their learning and engagement experiences.

This multifaceted approach exemplifies how work in the classroom, hands-on learning, community engagement, and service connect to form the unique UMBC student experience.