By Richard Forno, Principal Lecturer,Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC

Twitter’s former security chief, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2022, accusing the microblogging platform company of serious security failings. The accusations amplified the ongoing drama of Twitter’s potential sale to Elon Musk.

Zatko spent decades as an ethical hacker, private researcher, government adviser and executive at some of the most prominent internet companies and government offices. He is practically a legend in the cybersecurity industry. Because of his reputation, when he speaks, people and governments normally listen – which underscores the seriousness of his complaint against Twitter.

As a former cybersecurity industry practitioner and current cybersecurity researcher, I believe that Zatko’s most damning accusations center around Twitter’s alleged failure to have a solid cybersecurity plan to protect user data, deploy internal controls to guard against insider threats and ensure the company’s systems were current and properly updated.

Zatko also alleged that Twitter executives were less than forthcoming about cybersecurity incidents on the platform when briefing both regulators and the company’s board of directors. He claimed that Twitter prioritized user growth over reducing spam and other unwanted content that poisoned the platform and detracted from the user experience. His complaint also expressed concerns about the company’s business practices.

Alleged security failures

Zatko’s allegations paint a disturbing picture of not only the state of Twitter’s cybersecurity as a social media platform, but also the security consciousness of Twitter as a company. Both points are relevant given Twitter’s position in global communications and the ongoing struggle against online extremism and disinformation.

Perhaps the most significant of Zatko’s allegations is his claim that nearly half of Twitter’s employees have direct access to user data and Twitter’s source code. Time-tested cybersecurity practices don’t allow so many people with this level of “root” or “privileged” permission to access sensitive systems and data. If true, this means that Twitter could be ripe for exploitation either from within or by outside adversaries assisted by people on the inside who may not have been properly vetted.

Zatko also alleges that Twitter’s data centers may not be as secure, resilient or reliable as the company claims. He estimated that nearly half of Twitter’s 500,000 servers around the world lack basic security controls such as running up-to-date and vendor-supported software or encrypting the user data stored on them. He also noted that the company’s lack of a robust business continuity plan means that should several of its data centers fail due to a cyber incident or other disaster, it could lead to an “existential company ending event.”

These are just some of the claims made in Zatko’s complaint. If his allegations are true, Twitter has failed Cybersecurity 101.

Concerns over foreign government interference

Zatko’s allegations might also present a national security concern. Twitter has been used to spread disinformation and propaganda in recent years during global events like the pandemic and national elections.

For example, Zatko’s report stated that the Indian government forced Twitter to hire government agents, who would have access to vast amounts of Twitter’s sensitive data. In response, India’s at-times hostile neighbor Pakistan accused India of trying to infiltrate the security system of Twitter “in an effort to curb fundamental freedoms.”

Given Twitter’s global footprint as a communications platform, other nations such as Russia and China could require the company to hire its own government agents as a condition of allowing the company to operate in their country. Zatko’s allegations about Twitter’s internal security raise the possibility of criminals, activists, hostile governments or their supporters seeking to exploit Twitter’s systems and user data by recruiting or blackmailing its employees may well present a national security concern.

Worse, Twitter’s own information about its users, their interests and who they follow and interact with on the platform could facilitate targeting for disinformation campaigns, blackmail or other nefarious purposes. Such foreign targeting of prominent companies and their employees has been a major counterintelligence worry in the national security community for decades.

Fallout

Whatever the outcome of Zatko’s complaint in Congress, the SEC or other federal agencies, it already is part of Musk’s latest legal filings as he tries to back out of his purchase of Twitter.

Ideally, in light of these disclosures, Twitter will take corrective action to improve the company’s cybersecurity systems and practices. A good first step the company could take is reviewing and limiting who has root access to its systems, source code and user data to the minimum number necessary. The company should also ensure that its production systems are kept current and that it is effectively prepared to contend with any type of emergency situation without significantly disrupting its global operations.

From a broader perspective, Zatko’s complaint underscores the critical and sometimes uncomfortable role cybersecurity plays in modern organizations. Cybersecurity professionals like Zatko understand that no company or government agency likes publicity for cybersecurity problems. They tend to think long and hard about whether and how to raise cybersecurity concerns like these – and what the potential ramifications might be. In this case, Zatko says his disclosures reflect “the job he was hired to do” as head of security for a social media platform that he says “is critical to democracy.”

For companies like Twitter, bad cybersecurity news often results in a public relations nightmare that could affect share price and their standing in the marketplace, not to mention attract the interest of regulators and lawmakers. For governments, such revelations can lead to a lack of trust in the institutions created to serve society, in addition to potentially creating distracting political noise.

Unfortunately, how cybersecurity problems are discovered, disclosed and handled remains a difficult and sometimes controversial process, with no easy solution both for cybersecurity professionals and today’s organizations.

Richard Forno, Principal Lecturer in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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

Two researchers from The Hilltop Institute at UMBC just received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to investigate hospital price transparency. With the nearly $300,000 award funded by the Build and Broaden initiative, Morgan Henderson, principal data scientist and affiliate professor of economics, and Morgane Mouslim, policy analyst, will collect and synthesize prices for common health services now being posted by hospitals in response to a 2021 federal mandate intended to help patients “shop” for lower-priced care. Henderson and Mouslim will use the data to study hospital pricing behavior, and they will also make the data available to other researchers.

Hospital care is a major driver of spiraling health care costs and this work has the potential to refocus the conversation among policymakers, practitioners, and consumers. It’s also just one of Hilltop’s numerous high-impact research projects from a nearly 30-year history at UMBC. A hallmark of that research is partnership.

Collaboration from day one

Hilltop launched at UMBC in 1994, in partnership with the Maryland Department of Health. One of Hilltop’s first tasks was to design HealthChoice, the state’s Medicaid managed care program that now serves more than 1.7 million Marylanders. 

More than a quarter of a century later, the partnership has grown to advance access to high-quality health care by providing Maryland policymakers and state agencies with the information they need to make well-informed, evidence-based decisions about health care delivery and financing. 

This collaborative work has garnered Hilltop national recognition as a model public university-state agency partnership. State officials and university researchers from across the country turn to Hilltop for advice on forming productive partnerships. Hilltop is also a founding member of a national network of partnerships representing 27 states that are a leading force in advancing sophisticated analytics to inform state health policy.

Advancing Medicaid

Hilltop pairs novel problem-solving and big data to address pressing issues related to access to health care and the delivery and financing of services. A major piece of this involves working with the Maryland Department of Health to advance the health of Marylanders with low incomes and disabilities in the Medicaid program. Hilltop’s interagency agreement with the Department for policy analysis and analytical support for the Medicaid program—renewed annually since 1994—topped $10 million in 2022. 

Hilltop maintains an extensive data repository to house Maryland Medicaid data. Using this data, Hilltop calculates the fixed monthly payments the state pays to health plans for each of its members participating in HealthChoice, totaling more than $7 billion in 2022. The repository also houses Maryland hospital discharge data, Medicare data, nursing home assessment data, data on commercially insured individuals, and more. Hilltop is building interactive data dashboards and visualizations that the Department can use daily to guide decision-making on programs and services.

“Hilltop has expanded and solidified its role as a vital resource for high-quality data analytics for Maryland’s Medicaid program,” says Cynthia H. Woodcock, executive director of Hilltop and an adjunct professor at UMBC’s Erickson School of Aging Studies.

Tools for the health system 

In addition to its Medicaid-related work, Hilltop has developed a series of innovative analytical tools that are supporting Maryland’s state-of-the-art health care system, called the Total Cost of Care Model.

Maryland hospitals use Hilltop’s web-based tool to report community benefit activities and expenditures. The tool streamlines data collection and enables statewide longitudinal analysis of community benefit data. The findings inform efforts to improve population health under the Total Cost of Care Model. 

Hilltop launched the Hilltop Pre-AH Model to help identify patients in the Maryland Primary Care Program—part of Maryland’s Total Cost of Care Model—who would benefit most from intensive primary care coordination, which can help to prevent unnecessary hospitalizations. Innovations like these are designed to simultaneously improve the health care patients receive and decrease unnecessary costs to the health care system.

Rapid response to COVID-19

Thanks to its strong relationships with the Department of Health and other state agencies, when the coronavirus pandemic began, Hilltop was able to quickly respond to requests for data on COVID-19 testing, hospitalizations, and vaccinations. They also provided daily support to the Department on implementing data-informed emergency measures and guidance for health care providers. 

Now in the third year of the pandemic, Hilltop continues to support the state with COVID-related analytics to inform a wide range of infrastructure and service needs. Hilltop researchers also expanded the groundbreaking Pre-AH Model to predict a patient’s risk of being hospitalized for COVID-19, funded by a COVID-19 Accelerated Translational Incubator Pilot (ATIP). 

Public health impact

Hilltop continues to address long-standing critical public health concerns, from HIV to tobacco use to the opioid epidemic.

Hilltop is a member of the Maryland HIV Medicaid Affinity Group and the Greater Baltimore HIV Health Services Planning Committee and provides technical support and analytics for HIV services offered to Medicaid participants.

In collaboration with the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, Hilltop researchers quantified the financial impact of tobacco use on Mississippi’s Medicaid program and estimated the economic impact on the state budget and hospitals if the state were to expand Medicaid as the Affordable Care Act allows. 

With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Hilltop and twelve other states’ university partners are assessing the quality of opioid use disorder treatment and its outcomes for Medicaid participants. 

Another project includes researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University. This study examines the effect of new Medicaid programs in Maryland and Virginia that increase access to the full continuum of addiction treatment services, seeking to reduce overdose deaths.

Hilltop’s visionary work continues to set the bar for health care data analytics. It illustrates how the emerging field of data science can tangibly improve health care access and affordability and can reshape the understanding of the social determinants of health. 

Woodcock reflects, “The Hilltop Institute epitomizes the spirit of UMBC’s mission to integrate teaching, research and engaged scholarship, and service to benefit communities in Maryland and beyond.”

A new collaboration between scientists in the U.S. and Brazil hopes to increase our ability to predict how biological communities may change in a warming world. The researchers will investigate differences in biodiversity in tropical and temperate streams to better understand the differences between organisms in these ecosystems. The National Science Foundation has supported the project with a three-year, $500,000 seed award.

Biodiversity is under threat from shifts in temperature, weather patterns, and habitat availability worldwide, says Chris Swan, co-lead on the project and professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC. “Scientists like myself study what regulates the number of species that you see and the combination of species that you see, and why they occur the way that they do,” Swan says. “Those patterns are changing due to global change.”

The new study will focus on functional diversity, a concept that looks at species’ traits and the roles they fill in the ecosystem, rather than just the number of different species present. For example, in a forest, there might be a large number of bird species, but if they all eat seeds, there’s low functional diversity. Functional diversity would be higher if, among the same number of species, some ate seeds, others ate insects, and others ate small rodents.

“What is the functional response in terms of biodiversity to this global change? That’s what we’re studying,” Swan says. The results could help scientists make predictions about how species in temperate climates might adapt to rising temperatures.

Big questions, small organisms

The study will include researchers from UMBC, Virginia Tech, and University of California-Riverside in the U.S., and São Paulo State University and São Carlos State in Brazil. Streams near São Paulo, Brazil, and Blacksburg, Virginia, will represent tropical and temperate climates, respectively. The team will collect data from each stream monthly for a year.

They’ll manually measure the number of invertebrate species and how many of each species are present. Invertebrates they are likely to find include a wide variety of insects, worms, and crustaceans (such as crayfish). The team will also record traits of each individual, like its size and whether it was collected from the streambed, swimming in the water channel, or flying in the air above the stream.

On top of data on all the organisms, the researchers will also record information about the stream environment, like acidity, temperature, and the presence of nutrients like nitrogen, plus the streambed material (rock or sand, for example), the stream’s sun exposure, and more.

They will intentionally include large and small streams, too. The size of the stream “has practical implications,” Swan says, because in addition to small streams making up 60 percent of all river miles, “if you change a landscape, say by development, you are more likely to flatten a small stream than a large stream. So they are disproportionately under threat.”

Tropical trend

Some differences between species in tropical versus temperate streams are known. For example, tropical organisms tend to be smaller and have shorter life cycles. Their populations also tend to be smaller. This means local populations disappear through random effects more often in tropical ecosystems, creating space for other species to fill their functional roles.

The new study will produce a much larger data set than previously existed, to further clarify some of these differences between temperate and tropical stream ecosystems and possibly discover new ones. 

One of the collaborators, Kurt Anderson at UC-Riverside, focuses on modeling ecological data. The team will “use the parameters that we estimate from the field data to tune his models,” Swan says, “so we can make predictions and test our hypotheses about what could happen in the future.” One hypothesis might be that as the world warms, organisms in temperate streams could start to take on traits more common in the tropics.

Biodiversity is the key to success

Beyond the research, the collaboration also presents unique opportunities for international education. The U.S. and Brazilian faculty leads will offer a joint online course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, where they will read and analyze academic papers related to the study. “We realized that learning, teaching, and discussion styles are not the same in the two countries,” Swan says, so this class will give students and faculty alike the chance to navigate new ways of interacting along with discovering new science.

One core point Swan will emphasize with his students is the importance of biodiversity on a global scale. In ecology, the presence of a wide variety of organism types and the functions that they perform is called the “portfolio effect.” Just like a diverse financial portfolio, a diverse biological “portfolio” of species is less likely to suffer heavy losses across the board as conditions change—something is bound to adapt and survive. Also, “if you have more species, then you have more niches filled,” Swan says, “so resources are being used more efficiently.”

“Variety in life is the whole kit and caboodle,” Swan says. “If you didn’t have variety, nothing would be able to adapt. There would be no adaptation to change.” 

With ample biodiversity, though, adaptation to change is much more likely. But what that looks like—which species will adapt successfully or will be most at risk—is still unknown. Starting with tiny organisms in streams, Swan and colleagues are working to help figure that out.

UMBC students are known for the strength of their diversity: not just in their personal backgrounds, but in the breadth of their academic interests and professional goals. 

Accordingly, Retrievers’ summer 2022 internships spanned a vast array of subjects and disciplines, from history to mechanical engineering, and working in fields ranging from groundwater all the way up to outer space.

The four UMBC students profiled below vividly embody this wide spectrum, but they all have two things in common. Each completed their internship before starting their junior year, and each has the same advice to new students: Visit the Career Center sooner rather than later.

“It is never too early to start,” agreed Christine Routzahn, the Career Center’s director. “Internships offer students an opportunity to gain experience, build their career readiness skills, and develop professional connections that can help them succeed in competitive career paths and graduate programs.”

Up and Away

“I found the Career Center’s resources really helpful in crafting and perfecting my resume,” said Madelyn Pollack ’24, a history major with public history and Judaic studies minors in the Honors College and Humanities Scholars programs whose internship was at—of all places—NASA. 

“I had an interest in space,” Pollack explained, “But when I applied, I wasn’t expecting a call back—I wasn’t expecting to get to do this.”

It turned out that her internship’s responsibilities included a rich variety of opportunities to apply her passion for history: Pollack had a seat at the table in publishing meetings, she got to research and publish key moments of aerospace-related history on the space agency’s official social media outlets, and she was even able to create a research-based presentation on orbital debris and public opinion.

Pollack said that taking an internship early in her college career helped her further focus her academic interests and refine her idea of what kind of historian she wants to be. 

“As a history major, I didn’t have an idea of a specific focus I wanted to take” within the field, she said. But, “if you ask me now what my dream job is, I would say if a job opens up [at NASA] in the next three years or so, it would be really nice to be a historian over there.”

Pollack already has a start on that goal: Based on her success as a summer intern, NASA recently hired her as a continuing intern part-time starting this fall.

First Things First

Ian Nana ’24, mechanical engineering, said one of the biggest misconceptions his fellow students seem to have is that there’s no point in doing an internship until you know exactly what your academic and professional goals are.

“I definitely recommend to any new student: Even if you’re not sure exactly what you want to do, go to the Career Center your freshman year,” said Nana. “You might try one internship and be like, ‘Okay, I like this—I might do this.’ Or, ‘I don’t like this.’”

Even if it’s the latter, Nana said, just having that first experience on your resume makes you a much better candidate for the next internship or job opportunity.

“When I came [to UMBC] for my first semester, I went to the Career Center,” Nana said. And although he didn’t immediately see exactly what he was looking for, he reminded himself that an internship that strengthens general work skills can be just as valuable as field-specific experience, so he applied for a broad spectrum of internships.

“When I applied to other ones, even though they weren’t related to engineering, they showed teamwork. They showed collaboration—how I deal with people,” Nana said. “College is great, but what [employers also] want is experience, because that’s really what is going to make you valuable.”

Nana also encourages students to start looking for opportunities where he did: at UMBC’s Fall Career and Internship Fair. This year, the fair—held on Sept. 21—will host 140 organizations, many of whom are seeking a wide spectrum of summer 2023 interns, from first-year undergraduates to advanced graduate students.

Routzahn highly recommends that all students participate in upcoming Career Center events and activate and upload their resumes to Handshake,UMBC’s new job and internship platform. Top employers are posting incredible internships, part-time, and full-time jobs daily. 

Nana, who worked this summer as an engineering intern at Intralox—a global firm that specializes in designing and creating computer-controlled conveyor-belt systems—should know: Though he had to overcome steep technical challenges, including learning a whole new programming language, his success speaks for itself.

“My manager told me to definitely come back,” he said. “When you see your skills actually being applied and you do something and it works, that’s the best feeling.”

All in the Details

Alexander Bauserman ’24, history, echoed his fellow 2022 interns’ recommendation to visit the Career Center early, often, and with an open mind.

“I would say go as soon as you have the opportunity,” Bauserman said. Even if there’s not an obviously perfect alignment between a given internship opening and your major, he added, “The value of these internships is that sometimes they offer unexpected skills.”

Bauserman spoke from recent experience: He was able to tap into a longstanding personal interest, strengthen his core skills, and develop new ones in his virtual internship at the Maryland Pesticide Education Network, which gathers and disseminates information on the harmful effects of various pesticides and advocates for organic and other alternative agricultural land uses.

“I’m actually a history major, and even though this [internship was] environmental, I actually had an interest in environmental science in my high school years,” he said.

That passion served him well as he dove into the highly detail-intensive work of reformatting environmental science abstracts, checking links on the organization’s website, and learning how to leverage search engine optimization.

“They’ve all been new skills that I’ve gained, because I didn’t really work in any of these areas directly before, but they’re very useful, and I’ve been able to add them to my resume, so I’m very pleased with that,” Bauserman said.

Learning While Doing

Terra Miley ’25, chemical engineering, definitely didn’t waste any time looking for internships: She started as a first-year student. “I’d definitely heard from upperclassmen about how helpful the Career Center is,” she said. “Once you make your first appointment, you realize how helpful it is.”

Miley interned at Potomac Photonics, Inc., a digital and micro-manufacturing firm based at the UMBC Technology Center, “basically learning how to do everything.”

“I was doing a digital workspace for the company, so I was able to get exposed to a lot of different projects and machines and pretty much all of the work they do,” she said.

Miley added that the internship also boosted her confidence that her academic journey—she’s on a bio-technology/bio-engineering track—is the right one for her.

“A lot of the parts that [Potomac Photonics] made were for medical companies, which is kind of what I want to get into. And it made me realize: I am definitely interested in that.”

So interested, in fact, that she’s already made an appointment with the Career Center to get set up with an internship for next summer. “I wanted to try to get an actual research opportunity for next summer and they gave me a giant list of opportunities … that I can look at,” Miley said.

Such resources, Miley said, make the Career Center ”super helpful.”

Routzahn said student success stories such as Miley’s, Bauserman’s, Nana’s, and Pollack’s are happily the norm at UMBC. 

“Most employers use internships as a recruiting tool to find their future full-time employees,” she noted, adding that “55 percent of our recent graduates who were employed at graduation indicated that they accepted full-time offers with an organization that they interned or worked for while at UMBC.”

It can take more than 10 years and a billion dollars to get one new drug approved, and less than 10 percent of drugs succeed in clinical trials. Part of the problem is that common techniques used to study drug candidates, such as simple cell cultures and mouse models, don’t accurately represent how a drug will behave in the human body, says Chengpeng Chen, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

The low success rate motivated Chen to pursue development of more realistic models of human organs, starting with the liver. The hope is that researchers will one day use these models early in the drug development process to rule out drug candidates that are doomed to fail later on. That way, companies can quickly divert resources to projects with more promise. A new five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institute for General Medical Science will support Chen’s interdisciplinary work.

Chen learned about the concept of “organs-on-a-chip” during his postdoctoral research. These 2D, usually plastic devices use tiny amounts of liquid in tiny tubes to imitate organ function. He was hooked on the idea of creating miniature, realistic models of human systems. In addition to supporting drug development studies, such systems can increase understanding of many diseases, without the ethical issues that accompany using animal or human subjects.

Recreating the liver—in miniature

Chen’s first goal is to perfect his liver model, which goes a step beyond an organ-on-a-chip. Instead of a 2D mimic in plastic tubes, “We’re mimicking everything—the cell types, the architecture, and also the 3D microenvironment of the cells,” he says. Ultimately, he hopes to expand to other organs, but the liver is an important place to start, he says. The liver is involved in the metabolism of many drugs, and liver diseases are common.

Other models have recreated single cell types in the liver, but if successful, Chen’s will be the first to include all four major cell types interacting with each other the way they do inside the body.

“We can recreate the architecture of the real tissue, so when we put the cell types together, we think they will show total liver function,” Chen says. “But if we want to study them separately, we can separate them easily.”

While this might sound like the beginning of a quest to grow artificial organs for transplant, “We’re not there yet,” Chen says. He and his group will create “miniaturized liver functional units” that represent all the functionality of the liver on a tiny scale, mainly for biomedical research purposes. While a complete liver contains about 500 billion cells, each model will have approximately 2 million cells and be about the size of a typical thumbtack.

The goal is to create a model that researchers anywhere can replicate. “We want to make this technology standardized and modular,” Chen says, “so that anyone can build the model like Legos.”

Metabolism monitoring

Once Chen’s team optimizes the model, Chen is interested in looking at how the extracellular matrix—the material in between cells that binds them together and helps shuttle material from cell to cell—influences activity inside the cell, and how it changes during the course of disease.

A disease known as liver fibrosis induces changes in the extracellular matrix (ECM), stiffening and thickening the liver. Some researchers have looked at how the ECM affects various functions within liver cells, but not at how it may drive metabolic processes. That’s what Chen’s team will look at first with the new model, which should give more comprehensive results than looking at single cell types alone.

They’ll investigate how ECM changes affect essential metabolic pathways like energy production, construction of lipids and amino acids, and oxidative stress. Then they’ll conduct an untargeted sweep of all metabolites in the cell, measuring whether and how they are affected by ECM changes.

Shared facilities on campus administered by the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, such as the Keith Porter Imaging Facility and Molecular Characterization and Analysis Complex, will make the work possible.

Fighting fatal diseases

In the long term, “the ultimate biological goal is to find new therapies for fibrosis diseases,” Chen says. “New knowledge is needed. We’re starting with the liver in this project, because liver fibrosis is one of the most prevalent fibroses. And it’s fatal.”

Liver fibrosis is similar to cardiovascular diseases where tissue thickens, Chen explains. Earlier, “We initiated blood vessel studies, because in cardiovascular diseases, the blood vessels are stiffer. It’s called sclerosis, but it is very similar to fibrosis,” he says. “They both have extracellular matrix microstructure changes.”

There are other diseases that involve ECM changes, too. “If we can figure out how those changes cause disease,” Chen says, “it’s not just a fundamental science question, but also has biomedical applications.”

Interdisciplinary effort

Some may be surprised that Chen is in the chemistry and biochemistry department, given the biological and even engineering nature of his work. Chen is part of a new generation of scientists that doesn’t hesitate to forge connections across disciplines.

“I really don’t see a boundary for chemistry work,” Chen says. With the new grant, he plans to add at least two new graduate students to the group, who will receive training in a wide range of techniques and disciplines.

Whether developing technologies to generate new models, measuring biological functions in tissues, or studying the roles of individual metabolites in chemical pathways, Chen’s work puts him at the frontier of scientific research and in position to have a significant public impact.

In fall 2016 the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence (DCCADV) approached Nkiru Nnawulezi for her help collecting data on the experiences of domestic violence survivors in Washington D.C. She was eager to lend her expertise. 

“As a community psychologist, it is a dream come true to be able to do a study that community partners initiated, said they wanted, asked for, and would meet a particular need in the community,” says Nnawulezi.

Nnawulezi is an associate professor of psychology at UMBC and affiliate faculty at the Yale School of Public Health. Her research examines the factors that enhance equity in housing for domestic violence survivors, including survivors of color; queer and trans survivors; and those who are low-income, unhoused, experiencing addiction, living with HIV, or experiencing severe mental health conditions. 

She knew her first task for this major project would be to connect with community partners across D.C. to together identify the most pressing needs of local domestic violence survivors. 

Identifying the right question

Nnawulezi was already well-connected with a network of experts in her field, as associate editor of the Journal of Family Violence and on the editorial board of Community Psychology in the Global Perspective. She also serves as a research and evaluation advisor to the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence and Ujima: The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community.

To begin this project she convened four round table discussions with scholars, service providers, and legal experts. This included participants from American University’s Washington College of Law Domestic Violence Clinic; Catholic University’s Columbus Community Legal Services and Families and the Law Clinic; George Mason University; Georgetown Law’s Domestic Violence Clinic; GW Law’s Family Justice Litigation Clinic; and Howard University’s Interpersonal Violence Prevention Program.

The meetings revealed housing as the most pressing issue facing survivors of domestic violence in Washington, D.C. The Virginia Williams Family Resource Center (VWFRC) serves as the central point of intake for families experiencing housing instability in the District. But many survivors seeking housing assistance through the center were not being housed. Understanding why and how this was happening became the purpose of the study.

Designing a community-based study

With a research question in mind and a research community established, Nnawulezi and Liz Odongo, DCCADV director of grants and programs, co-founded the Domestic Violence Action Research Collective (DVARC). To support this work, the collective received funding from the Center for Victim Research, through the Office for Victims of Crime within the U.S. Department of Justice. 

“DVARC gathers victimization researchers, advocates, and practitioners to design and conduct community-based research and evaluation studies to enhance survivors’ safety, build their power, and support policy and practice within multiple systems across the city,” says Nnawulezi.

The collective’s first task would be to better understand the VWFRC’s screening process, including the questions the center used to assess whether violence was the primary cause of current homelessness and survivors’ perceptions of the screening process. Next, they would determine how the screening process influenced survivors’ future decision making and experiences with housing support.

Over a period of a year, the research team connected with 779 clients seeking housing assistance and identified 291 of that group as having experienced domestic violence. Of that group, 101 agreed to participate in the research study. The final sample that participated in an in-depth confidential interview included 41 survivors. All were survivors between the ages of 24 and 52, and they were primarily Black, heterosexual, cisgender women. 

Survivor experiences

The team’s data show that domestic violence survivors reported numerous systemic and cultural barriers to access safe, affordable, and equitable housing in Washington, D.C. Of the 41 women, only 4 received immediate crisis housing assistance from the VWFRC, despite significant need. 

Survivors desired to be treated with more respect by staff, and get housing resource support that aligned with their individual needs. Instead, many women described treatment by staff as unfair or dismissive. A few reported bias incidents based on their race and class that made it increasingly challenging to ask for and receive services. Others reported not receiving services regardless of need, or having to return to the VWFRC an average of 2-5 times to attempt to become eligible for services. 

Staff were also not consistent in asking about or responding to safety concerns that survivors disclosed, participants reported. Some shared that they had experienced economic, verbal, and mental abuse, but because they had not experienced physical abuse they were not considered survivors. And some respondents who received assistance reported not having access to the additional financial resources needed to move. 

Making lasting change

The DVARC recommends that the District continue to fund sustainable community-based systems of support that are survivor-centered and trauma-informed, and that address the challenges already identified. To determine next steps, the DCCADV also convened an advisory group with survivors from the study to further review the preliminary data and provide recommendations for future advocacy and research studies.

“I believe that it is possible for us to have a city where survivors are treated justly and fairly,” says Nnawulezi. “I love being able to think at the systems level about what needs to shift to improve people’s lives. It’s an incredible opportunity to be a part of this group, in the city that I love, working with people that I love, and working to improve the lives of people that I am deeply committed to.”

Dear Colleagues,

We are saddened to learn of the recent transition of Dr. Alan Sorkin who served as chair of the Department of Economics for 31 years. Dr. Sorkin passed away on Friday, August 19, 2022 at home surrounded by his family after a long battle with an illness. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones and we know that many UMBC community members will mourn his loss. 

Dr. Sorkin joined the UMBC Economics Department in 1974 upon completing his undergraduate and doctorate in Economics at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to UMBC, he also spent two years with the Brookings Institution and five years with the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. Under his leadership, the UMBC Economics Department more than doubled the number of faculty and student majors. The Department also introduced its Financial Economics B.S. and its M.A. in Economic Policy Analysis. He retired from UMBC and became Professor Emeritus in 2006.

His scholarly expertise focused on global public health but he also published innovative monographs in other areas of applied economics. He published twelve books and eight co-edited volumes. In addition to his books on health economics, the titles of his other books include Monetary and Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles in the Modern Era, Economic Aspects of Natural Hazards, Education, Unemployment and Economic Growth, and The Urban American Indian. His numerous contributions were recognized with the Heritage Award by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in 2019. 

After his retirement in 2006, Alan still returned regularly to the UMBC campus to visit and lunch with faculty colleagues up until the 2020 pandemic.  Economics Department Chair David Mitch recalls that during his visits Alan would frequently inquire about current department issues. Among his numerous non-academic interests, Alan was an avid coin collector. His presence will certainly be missed.  

A visitation will be held at Schimunek Funeral Home, 9705 Belair Rd, Nottingham, MD on Friday, August 26, 2022 from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM. Another brief visitation will be held Saturday, August 27, 2022 from 9 AM to 9:30 AM at St. Michael Lutheran Church Perry Hall, 9534 Belair Road, Nottingham, MD 21236. Funeral services will begin at 9:30 AM, followed by interment at Highview Memorial Gardens, 3433 Fallston Rd, Fallston, MD 21047. The website for the funeral home is Schimunek Funeral Home | Funeral & Cremation (dignitymemorial.com).
 
Contributions may be made in his memory to Harford County Public Library Harford County Public Library (hcplonline.org) or to Fallston Volunteer Fire and Ambulance Company Donations – Fallston Fire Company (fvfac.org).

Kimberly R. Moffitt, Dean

College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Like bacteria, fungi can cause disease inside your body and on your skin, or even grow on medical equipment like catheter tubing and wound dressings. Many fungal diseases are treatable with antifungal medications, but drug resistance is a growing problem. With a new four-year, $1.3 million grant from NIH, Jeffrey Gardner and his students will be looking for new ways to target disease-causing fungi.

Typically, drugs that treat fungal disease prevent the fungus from making its cell wall, which either kills the fungus outright or weakens it enough that the immune system can finish it off. But that method is highly susceptible to developing resistance.

“But what if you had an external attack on the fungus? What if there were enzymes that actively degraded the fungal cell wall, which is not going to generate resistance easily?” asks Gardner, associate professor of biological sciences. “Our goal is to find enzymes that effectively break down the fungal cell wall, that can be used as a treatment in parallel with cell wall synthesis blockers, or on their own.”

Homing in on the right enzyme

With the new support from NIH, Gardner’s lab will investigate hundreds of bacterial enzymes to figure out which best target Aspergillus fungus, a group of common disease-causing mold species. Previous work from other groups has found particular bacterial species that slow down fungal growth. Gardner’s team will start by looking at every gene and protein in these bacteria to figure out “which genes are turned on, and which proteins are made, while the bacteria are degrading and eating the fungus,” he explains.

Gardner expects that should whittle down the candidate list from about 4,000 genes to a few hundred. “How do we figure out which ones of those couple hundred actually matter? That’s where our genetic system comes in,” he says. The team will generate bacterial strains that lack a functional version of each of the candidate genes and see which strains are less efficient at eating the fungus.

That process should further narrow the list of genes to a few dozen, Gardner says. Then, they’ll produce strains that are missing different combinations of the candidate genes. When they find a combination that can’t survive at all on fungus alone, they’ll be confident the genes knocked out in that strain are the ones necessary to eat the fungus. Finally, they’ll run biochemistry experiments to determine the function and mechanism of each enzyme.

From one to a billion

This kind of brute-force methodology, involving hundreds of unique strains of bacteria, highlights the advantages of working with species that multiply incredibly fast. “That’s the power of microbiology—you can go from a single cell to an overnight culture with a billion cells,” Gardner says. “You can do many, many experiments at a scale and at a speed that really isn’t possible with, say, a fly or a mouse system.”

The culmination of the project will be “identifying the enzymes, knowing what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and how well they’re doing it,” Gardner says.

The power of microbes

As a microbial researcher who cares about “interesting bits of biology that have no medical relevance at all,” Gardner says he never imagined he would receive an NIH grant to pursue work with clear biomedical implications. But as his research at UMBC over the last decade has progressed, he’s realized his work can transcend typical disciplinary boundaries. “I think that’s the exciting part, and the power of microbial systems, that you have that latitude,” Gardner says.

His first major grant from the Department of Energy focused on bacteria’s role in biofuel production. A second project funded by the National Science Foundation looks at how bacteria contribute to the carbon cycle by breaking down dead matter on the forest floor. And now, with funding from NIH, his group will look at how bacteria can help fight fungal disease. 

“If you can find an interesting bug, with some interesting physiology, the types of questions can really span major different areas,” Gardner says.

The techniques often remain the same, though. “Our wheelhouse is genetics, systems biology, and physiology,” Gardner says. In the new project, “We’re leveraging an established pipeline to work on a problem that is a step away from what we have traditionally done. We’ve got lots of tools and tricks for working with the bacteria.” 

The wide range of methods used in Gardner’s lab means that his group offers great training opportunities for students. With the new grant, Gardner is looking forward to adding two new Ph.D. students and several undergraduate researchers to his team. 

Essential support

Gardner knows, from personal experience, the importance of research training and mentorship along a scientist’s full career path, including in his time at UMBC. Before applying for this current grant, he took advantage of a program offered by UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences specifically for people seeking major NIH grants. The program, orchestrated by Phyllis Robinson, professor of biological sciences, included workshops, critique partners, and mentoring. “That was absolutely essential for my success,” Gardner says. 

Moving forward, if the project goes well and Gardner is able to secure a second round of funding in a few years, he says the next questions will be, “How do we engineer the enzymes to be more potent? How do we make them do their job of killing fungi better?” The lab could even ask which combination of enzymes would target a specific fungus most effectively, or provide the broadest protection against many fungal species.

But for now, they’ll focus on nailing down the basics, he says. “We need to find out who’s there and what they’re doing first.”

Ever since humans could first observe sunspots about 400 years ago, we’ve been using them to try to define the solar cycle. Approximately every 11 years, solar activity such as sunspots and solar flares ebbs and flows, causing changes to weather patterns on Earth and occasionally threatening telecommunications. Predicting these changes reliably could help everyone from farmers to the military.  

Traditionally, scientists have used the concept of a “solar minimum,” when solar activity is reduced, to mark the beginning of each cycle. But the “solar minimum” framework is somewhat arbitrary and imprecise, explains Robert Leamon, research scientist at the Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER), a UMBC partnership with NASA.

Leamon led new research showing that a “solar clock” based on the sun’s magnetic field, rather than the presence or absence of sunspots, can precisely describe and predict many key changes throughout the solar cycle. The new framework offers a significant improvement over the traditional sunspot method, because it can predict surges in dangerous solar flares or changing weather trends years in advance.

Specifically, the new research, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, shows that the solar cycle operates as a distinct sequence of events. Notable, and sometimes abrupt, changes occur at each one-fifth of a cycle. That’s true regardless of the exact length of a given cycle, which can vary by several months to a year. In a nod to music enthusiasts, Leamon and colleagues call it a “circle of fifths.”

Finding the landmarks

The new paper by Leamon, Scott McIntosh, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Alan Title, at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, builds on work by Leamon, McIntosh, and Daniel Marsh, also at NCAR, published in 2020. That paper demonstrated the existence of a solar cycle phenomenon the research team dubbed “the terminator.” 

The sun’s magnetic field changes direction each solar cycle, but there is overlap between consecutive cycles. The sun’s magnetic field is sometimes called the polar field, because it either points to one of the sun’s poles or the other. A terminator marks when the previous cycle’s polar field has completely disappeared from the sun’s surface, and is quickly followed by a dramatic rise in solar activity.

The new paper points to additional landmarks along the journey through a full solar cycle from terminator to terminator. These landmarks are clearer and more consistent than using sunspots as a guide to cycle length. For example, “The max number of sunspots doesn’t quite align with when the polar field reverses, but the polar field reversal happens at exactly one-fifth of the cycle going from terminator to terminator,” Leamon says.

At two-fifths of a cycle, dark areas called “polar coronal holes” re-form at the sun’s poles. At three-fifths of a cycle, the last X-flare, a class of very large and potentially dangerous solar flares, occurs. At four-fifths, sunspots are at a minimum—but this landmark is less consistent. And then the sun passes through another terminator, after which solar activity rapidly picks up again. Other phenomena, such as UV emissions, also line up nicely on the fifths.

Symptoms and causes

The team picked out patterns in data collected daily by two ground-based observatories. The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, Canada has measured solar radio flux, which serves as a useful proxy for solar activity, daily since 1947. The Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University has collected daily measurements of magnetic fields on the sun’s surface since 1975. 

Once the team noticed the changes that occur at exactly one-fifth of a cycle, they asked, “How many different solar things can we look at? And then we realized they all overlap on this same set of fifths,” Leamon says. Different parameters shift at different points on the cycle, but “everything is tied to these five landmarks.”

This new theory of a solar clock changes the focus from sunspots to shifts in magnetic field. “It’s almost like symptoms and causes,” Leamon says. While sunspots are an important symptom, the magnetic field is the underlying cause driving the solar cycle.

The longest threads

This shift in framework improves researchers’ ability to predict events in the solar cycle more precisely and further in advance, which gives people like satellite operators time to make preparations as needed based on predicted solar activity. Once observatories detect an initial polar field reversal, the precise length of the first fifth of the cycle is set. That means the timing of the other fifths (and their associated events) is a simple matter of multiplication.

The new framework also puts tighter bounds on the period within the cycle when severe flares are expected, which is useful information for people on Earth. Rather than a gradual shift from minimum to maximum activity, the period from terminator to about three-fifths of a cycle seems to be the peak period for flares, with a rapid drop-off after that point until the next terminator. The current cycle began after a terminator in December 2021, and the new framework predicts the last major flares should occur in mid-2027. 

Leamon points to a quote by physicist Richard Feynman to explain the value of a theory like this one, that accounts for many variables within a system. “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry,” Feynman said. Leamon and colleagues’ new theory is an example of one of these long threads—precisely predicting many aspects of the solar cycle with a single, simple parameter, and making it easier for humans to be ready for changes driven by the sun.  

The commonly-told histories of the American Civil War don’t usually include any Asian stories, although Asian Americans were certainly engaged with the war to end slavery.

“Thomas Sylvanus (aka Ching Lee, Ye Way Lee, Ah Yee Way), was born in Hong Kong, brought as an orphaned child to America for schooling in 1852, but was enslaved in Baltimore,” says Irene Chan, an associate professor of visual arts at UMBC. “He ran away at age 16 to join the Union Army and served all the war years. His story, along with many 19th-century Chinese in America, has been forgotten.”

Chan’s new six-part intermedia work, “The Thomas Project,” is devoted to telling Sylvanus’ story in many mediums: fabric silkscreens, paper lithography, drawing, hand lettering, embroidery, and book arts, and debuts in August as part of SPARK: New Light at The Peale in downtown Baltimore. 

SPARK, an annual group exhibition of works by faculty, staff, alumni, and students at UMBC and Towson University curated by Catherine Borg, returns for its fifth edition August 13-September 25. SPARK: New Light features work from 24 artists, and opens concurrently with the Founder’s Day Grand Reopening of The Peale, a celebration of the completion of extensive renovations to the historic facility. Each of the annual SPARK exhibits has been made possible through a partnership with PNC Bank, which also helped secure the venue.

Community spark

The Peale, the first museum building in the United States, was established in Baltimore in 1814 by the artist Rembrandt Peale. Over the course of its nearly 200 years, The Peale has seen many incarnations before landing on its current role as a center devoted to celebrating the unique history of Baltimore, and telling the stories of the city’s people and buildings. 

“The Peale is Baltimore’s community museum,” says Chan. “I have had the Peale space in mind throughout the development of ‘The Thomas Project,’ and this exhibit uses the unique architectural features of the room to tell part of Thomas’ story, starting with living his early American life in Baltimore.”

Chris Peregoy ’81, M.F.A. ’99, a photographer who manages the photo and print facilities for the Visual Arts department, also incorporated The Peale’s architecture into “Time Capsules,” his new work for SPARK: New Light. 

“Working with The Peale, I placed pinhole cameras on windowsills in east, south and west facing windows for six weeks in May and June,” Peregoy says. “The results capture the streak of the sun and the accumulated light that had fallen on the scene during the long exposure.”

In all, 24 artists are exhibiting new work in SPARK: New Light. UMBC contributors include Chan and Peregoy as well as Lynn Cazabon, Adam Droneberg, M.F.A. ’22, Kathy Marmor (with Penny Rheingans), Lisa Moren (with Tsvetan Bachvaroff, Dan Deacon, and Woody Lissauer), Timothy Nohe, Corrie Francis Parks, Foster Reynolds-Santiago, M.F.A. ’22, and current IMDA graduate students Ahlam Khamis and Fahmida Hossain. 

Hossain’s video work, “Touch,”  focuses on the artist touching different objects in the context of urban life in her hometown, Dhaka, expressing the yearning for physical contact with loved ones and her friends.

“I am always curious about touching objects around me and feeling their textures, but the recent pandemic made us fearful of handling things,” says Hossain. “This work represents my visualization of the human brain, which is a subconscious world where we can have different personalities and experiences, like the changing abstract shapes in my video.”

Participating artists from Towson University include Mark Burchick, Grace Doyle, Carrie Fucile, Alexandra Garove, Danielle Hawk, Jinyoung Koh, Diane Kuthy, Jenee Mateer, Kat Navarro, Sookkyung Park, Lynn Tomlinson, and J. Yablonsky.

Sparking creativity

Additional events will include an artist reception on the evening of September 7, and a cameraless photography workshop by Peregoy on the afternoon of September 11. 

The exhibition will draw to a close with a series of projected artworks by visual arts associate professor Kelley Bell, M.F.A. ’06, and performances by the Towson Percussion Ensemble, the UMBC Percussion Ensemble (a group featuring UMBC faculty and alumni), and the Umbilicus percussion ensemble over the weekend of September 23–25.

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SPARK: New Light opens August 13 and will run through September 25, 2022.  Opening festivities run from 10 a.m.–4 p.m. on August 13. Tickets are free of charge, and masks will be required to attend. Learn more at the UMBC Arts & Culture Calendar or by following The Peale.