It may be cold outside, but competition was heating up in the pool last weekend as UMBC men’s and women’s swimming and diving dominated the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) 2021 Winter Championships. 

Capturing 15 out of 20 events, UMBC men’s swimming and diving took home first place in the meet. With a difference of 1,896 points, the Retrievers eclipsed runner-up Long Island University (LIU). 

“I could not be more pleased with how the team competed at the ECAC meet,” says head coach Matt Donovan. “We are in a tremendous position for this time of year and we are all excited for what is still to come.”

The UMBC women’s swimming and diving team earned the runner-up spot in last weekend’s competition, only narrowly missing the win to Columbia. Both of the ladies’ medley relay quartets took home golds in new meet record times. 

Swimming laps around the competition

Kai Wisner ‘22, mechanical engineering, was named Swimmer of the Meet, and head coach Donovan and staff received Coaching Staff of the Meet honors. 

“As a coaching staff, we presented this team with a lot of new training concepts this fall. It is truly impressive with how quickly they mastered these goals,” says Donovan.

Will Henrickson, ‘23, media & communication studies, earned Diver of the Meet accolades, as he triumphed on both the 1-meter and 3-meter boards. 

Niklas Weigelt ‘23, fine arts, set a new meet record in the 100 freestyle with a time of 43.87. A foursome from UMBC also locked down a new meet record with their 2:58.60 time in the 400 free relay. 

Jenna Gwinn ‘23, public health, captured first in both the 100 and 200 breastroke competitions. 

“I’m super excited and proud of how our team competed this past weekend. We’ve been pushing each other to bring out the best in one another and I believe we showed that,” says Weigelt.

Both teams return to the pool in January and you can follow all the action on Twitter.

Banner image: men’s and women’s swimming and diving celebrate their ECAC victories. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

“UMBC’s commitment to continue the Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity through the pandemic is one of the reasons I decided to come to UMBC,” says Mercedez Dunn, sociology, anthropology, and public health. Dunn is one of two fellows to join UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences through the high-impact program this fall.

Due to the pandemic, this year’s selection process was entirely virtual for the first time, but interest in the national program was stronger than ever. The fellowship committee received over 500 applications across a range of fields represented at UMBC and was energized by the incredibly talented applicant pool, shares Autumn Reed, assistant vice provost for faculty affairs, who coordinates the program’s application and selection processes. 

UMBC’s Executive Committee on the Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement of Underrepresented Minority Faculty launched the program in 2011 to support promising scholars who are committed to diversity and inclusive excellence in the academy and to prepare these scholars for possible tenure-track positions at UMBC. During their two-year term, fellows receive a stipend, benefits, travel funds, office space, teaching and research mentorship, and specialized professional development opportunities. In addition to pursuing their research, fellows teach one course a year in the host department.

Out of the 20 fellows who have been part of the program, 11 have become faculty at UMBC. Another seven are faculty at other colleges and universities across the U.S. And one, Kara N. Hunt, is director of education and outreach at Maryland Commission on Civil Rights.

A researcher’s path

Dunn comes to UMBC with a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, but her original career goal was to become a lawyer. Two classes changed her path. In high school, American Minority Relations introduced her to sociology. Later, at Spelman College, she took a course on the sociological imagination that gave her a new way of thinking about social change, equity, and everyday life. 

Seeing her enthusiasm, a faculty mentor encouraged her to consider becoming a sociology professor. “I had never seen any Black people with a Ph.D. before I attended Spelman,” shares Dunn. “I didn’t think that was something for me.” 

She changed her mind after attending a sociology summer research program where she fell in love with different sociological frameworks, including the theory of intersectionality. “Being in a space for Black women in Spelman was really enlightening,” explains Dunn. “Having students and faculty that understood and cared about me as a person and seeing other Black women that were professors motivated me to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology.”

Structural solutions

As Dunn continued to broaden her skills and define her interests, she began to focus specifically on the entanglements of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism in the understanding of HBCU women’s sexual and romantic experiences. She notes that public health practitioners often assume Black college women have higher-risk sexual behavior in comparison to college students as a broader group, and that this perception and labeling are consequences of interlocking systems of oppression.

“It’s important to look at why certain populations are labeled ‘at-risk’ and how those labels reflect racism, heterosexist, and classist practices that impact a person’s sexual choices,” says Dunn.

Limited and inaccurate assumptions about Black women’s sexual practices and sexual health reinforce negative stereotypes of Black women as hypersexual and decontextualize their sexual interactions. Often, they have also historically gone hand-in-hand with recommendations for individual-level behavior change, rather than structural public health solutions.

“Public health is everywhere, and improving health is often broader than we might think,” says Dunn. “It means combatting those larger power structures that set up the conditions in which we live, love, and experience the world. My research, and intersectional work in general, highlights the need for structural solutions for structural problems.”

Illuminating voices

Dunn found critical social theory and a person-centered approach rooted in intersectional Black feminism as the most effective frameworks for her to understand the many systems that support the marginalization of Black and Brown people. “My research centers the experience of traditionally marginalized people and illuminates their voices and stories to understand a collective impact, but also to untangle the issues that affect one person,” says Dunn. 

Her research also gave her insights into her hometowns of Valley and Opelika, Alabama, where several family members suffered early deaths due to social factors that impacted their health. The towns, centered around a textile mill, were devastated when the mill closed during the Great Recession. Many workers had mill-specific work skills and limited education, which left them with few employment options after the closure. This, in turn, led to great economic and social challenges that impacted their health. 

An intersectional approach helped Dunn gain clarity on how the social determinants of health can impact a community and individuals. “I learned that we don’t just inherit genes,” says Dunn. “We also inherit social conditions.”

Student connections

Dunn is excited to draw more students into sociology and further support those already committed to the field. Working with students is something she enjoys. She wants them to see the world in new ways, just like she did when she learned about critical social theory. “I don’t take lightly that me being a Black woman in the classroom can really be powerful in terms of other students who look like me to imagine those possibilities,” says Dunn.

Her strategy for a successful learning environment is to connect with students on something that is important to them and use that to explain complex concepts. “My approach to teaching is to find what is interesting to students right now and connect with them on that aspect of their lives,” says Dunn. “I then use that connection as a launchpad for students to view sociological theories and concepts.” 

“Sociology is about understanding life,” Dunn says, “and it should be an exciting and inspiring process as it was for me.” 

Support for career advancement

Dunn looks forward to continuing to grow both her teaching and research through the fellowship, to progress in her academic career. “We are thrilled to have Dr. Dunn as a new colleague. As an applied sociologist with public health training and expertise, her research centers Black women’s racialized, classed, and gendered relationship experiences within an HBCU,” says Dunn’s UMBC faculty mentor Brandy Wallace. 

Wallace is associate chair of the department of sociology, anthropology, and public health, and associate professor of sociology. She looks forward to working closely with Dunn and connecting her with additional colleagues and mentors. She’s also excited about Dunn’s future impact on UMBC and higher education more broadly.

“Mercedez’s work incorporates theories of intersectionality, which is appealing to our students at UMBC,” says Wallace. “It also has meaningful implications for promoting equity and inclusion efforts in higher education.”

In addition to the fellowship, Dunn is also receiving support from Maryland’s Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) for her biomedical work on Black women’s sexual health. This University System of Maryland effort led by UMBC received National Science Foundation funding to transform hiring practices and boost the career success of historically underrepresented minority faculty in biomedical fields.

Tahir Hemphill, visual arts, is also a 2021-22 Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity, on a new visual arts fellowship track. Read his story here.

Featured image: Mercedez Dunn, photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Joshua Slaughter ‘22, M30, has received the Marshall Scholarship, becoming the second student in UMBC history and the first in 29 years to be selected for the prestigious award. Slaughter is one 41 American students selected this year from institutions across the country for the Marshall Scholarship, which supports graduate study at institutions in the United Kingdom. He was also a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.

Slaughter, who is earning his degree in computer engineering, will pursue his Ph.D. in informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His goal is to advance equity in the developing field of personalized medicine.

Applying for the Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships is something that Slaughter has had his eye on since he arrived at UMBC. The Marshall Scholarship aims to produce global change-makers who use their education to improve society. Becoming a finalist for the Marshall and Rhodes, and then being named a Marshall Scholarship recipient, has been “a dream come true,” he says, because his selection has affirmed that he can truly have a global impact. 

“I am incredibly proud that, in the past four years, UMBC has produced finalists and awardees in some of the most competitive and prestigious international scholars programs, including both the Marshall and Rhodes,” says UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski. “Our rise on the global stage is continuing at a rapid pace thanks to our exceptional students, and the caring faculty and staff who support them.”

Support from students who have been there

One of the first things that Slaughter did when he found out that he was finalist for both awards was to text Naomi Mburu ‘18, M26, chemical engineering, who was the first UMBC student to be named a Rhodes Scholar. While Mburu was not allowed to offer guidance during the interview processes, she did offer more general words of encouragement. 

“It is exciting to see the great strides UMBC has been making all over the world in recent years,” says Mburu. “Slaughter is an amazing and dedicated student who I had the pleasure of mentoring through Meyerhoff Summer Bridge, the Goldwater Scholarship, and now the Rhodes and Marshall interviews. I look forward to welcoming him to the UK next fall.”

Slaughter has also received encouragement and support from Sam Patterson ‘21, M29, mathematics, statistics, and economics. Last year, Patterson became UMBC’s second Rhodes Scholar. He is currently pursuing his interest in transportation equity at Oxford. 

Opportunities to grow

In addition to being a Meyerhoff Scholar, Slaughter is a member of the UMBC Honors College and the U-RISE program, an undergraduate research program that prepares students from underrepresented groups to pursue a Ph.D. in the biomedical sciences. He is the president of UMBC’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, and Tau Beta Pi, the honors society for engineering students. 

Earlier this year, Slaughter was one of four UMBC students named Goldwater Scholars. The goal of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program is to provide the United States with “a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers” to move the nation forward. 

Learning to research from researchers

At UMBC, Slaughter conducts research with Distinguished University Professor Tulay Adali, computer science and electrical engineering (CSEE). They study machine learning applications in fields such as neuroimaging, which uses data-driven algorithms to identify features of neurological disease. 

Slaughter explains that it’s essential to diversify the field of machine learning. People of all backgrounds need to be involved in the development of algorithms, he says, to help produce algorithms that reflect the diversity of society and have equitable impacts.

In addition to conducting research at UMBC, Slaughter has completed research internships at Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon University, presented research at national conferences, and published two scientific papers.

His interest in research began when he was in high school. Slaughter connected with UMBC’s Matthew Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, and began working in his lab several hours each week. While the focus of Slaughter’s research has shifted to computing, he says that Fagan provided important support that allowed him to see the impact that research can have on various communities. 

When Slaughter came to UMBC, he took a class taught by Chuck LaBerge, professor of practice in CSEE. LaBerge went on to become one of Slaughter’s biggest supporters and mentors. He encouraged Slaughter and his classmates to examine real-world problems and envision success in engineering as using their skills and knowledge to create change in the world.

Research with public impact

April Householder, director of undergraduate research and prestigious scholarships, says that UMBC students’ success with earning prestigious international scholarships is inspiring for many reasons, but she is particularly excited that there is now a community of Retrievers pursuing graduate studies in the U.K. who can be there for each other. “Mburu, Patterson, and Slaughter are sharing this experience together, and supporting one another at the next level,” she says. 

Householder also notes that, like UMBC’s prior prestigious scholarship winners, Slaughter cares deeply about UMBC’s values of equity and of inclusive excellence. “Slaughter is committed to changing computational methods to improve healthcare, particularly in underserved populations,” she notes. “He is a deep critical thinker, and he examines how asking questions about identities like race, gender, and class can help combat the biases inherent in biomedical research.” 

Looking ahead, Slaughter is eager to get to the University of Edinburgh, but he says that UMBC has played an essential role in his journey. “Receiving the Marshall is a testament to all of the people who have come before me, and the amazing support group and environment that UMBC is. The support at UMBC is unmatched,” Slaughter says. 

“I don’t think I could have done this anywhere else,” he shares. “It speaks volumes to the inclusive community that UMBC has fostered over the past 30 years.”

Banner image: Joshua Slaughter. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Late this summer, President Freeman Hrabowski announced that he will be retiring from UMBC at the end of this academic year after a career that has included more than 30 years at UMBC. We sat down to talk about moments of joy he has experienced in his penultimate semester, and why he’s so very excited about the future of UMBC.

UMBC Magazine: I’ve been thinking a lot about what life must have been like for you since you made your big announcement. In the days and weeks that followed, what has brought you joy?

Freeman Hrabowski: Well, it has been this spirit of love that is all around us. You may recall that in one of my opening speeches on campus, right after announcing, I talked about the idea that UMBC is “the house that love built,” which is inspired by the Ronald McDonald house. And that thought has really resonated with people—from alumni to faculty and staff, to our students. People believe in the UMBC way, and that means an emphasis on grit and resilience. It means supporting each other, having compassion, academic excellence, and really being grateful to be a part of such a healthy community. And that’s the part that’s given me such joy. 

People from around the country have been writing and saying, “Wow, what is the magic sauce, that secret sauce at UMBC?” The truth is that when you talk to people who work here, they love it. You talk to our alumni, and they’re so proud to be from our institution. So, when they ask, “What is the secret sauce?” I say, “We have really good people here. We care about each other. We love ideas. We love working with people in the communities. We’re proud of our alumni.” 

And to see just how supportive people are is just wonderful… and at this past Homecoming taking photos with the children of alumni, I was just surprised by it all. I didn’t think I could ever be surprised, but at Homecoming when we took the big community photo, and you’ve got all those folks on the library steps and they’re all applauding—well, I wasn’t ready for it. I was getting a little emotional. But it was so special. And that’s what I’ve been feeling since announcing. 

At Homecoming 2021, Dr. Hrabowski snaps a shot of the group who gathered to take an updated community photo. Courtesy of Jim Burger.

UMBC Magazine: Thinking ahead, what are you hoping that alumni and our community will be keeping top of mind as we travel into the spring and the transition ahead?

Hrabowski: It is the idea that this is not a story about one person. It is about all of us and  the alumni who helped build the foundation; UMBC really belongs to the alumni. And it’s about how proud we are as faculty and staff, administrators, and students to be here at this moment. For all of us, it is about caring about this university, this house that love built.

You know people always say, “What’s going to happen to UMBC?” And I’m saying, “UMBC is going to continue to get better and better and better because we’ve laid a great foundation… People have been so amazingly supportive of me for the past 30 years, and the other five when I was here before that, that everybody knows a new president will be given a chance to thrive and to help the university go to the next level. And she will be fantastic. I’ve been saying that to people putting that idea in the universe. We’ll see. We don’t know who that person will be. There are many people in leadership positions interested in the presidency of UMBC because the university is one of the most talked about and admired institutions in the country, and I leave it in really good shape. I feel so good about that.

And so this transition will be one where we’re shedding light on what’s important, and our shared values… the emphasis on people, loving ideas, the importance of grit, and most important—believing in ourselves. We are UMBC.

Learn more about the Presidential Search Process at president.umbc.edu.

*****

Header image by Marlayna Demond ’11.

UMBC will grow its aquaculture collaboration with Israeli colleagues thanks to a new statement of intent signed last week at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), a collaborative research facility in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor that supports faculty affiliated with UMBC; University of Maryland, Baltimore; and University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The new agreement builds on decades of collaboration between Israeli researchersand Yonathan Zohar, professor and chair of marine biotechnology at UMBC. It will enable them to grow their ongoing efforts to improve and expand the aquaculture industry around the world.

Coming together to sign the document were Oded Forer, Israeli Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development; Russell Hill, executive director of IMET; and Karl V. Steiner, UMBC’s vice president for research. The minister visited IMET on December 1 with a delegation from the agriculture ministry. Leaders from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal Production and Protection program also attended the signing event, which was followed by a tour of the Aquaculture Research Center at IMET. 

The partnership will center on addressing challenges to the industry that, once overcome, will make aquaculture more efficient and sustainable, and expand it to more seafood species. Developing zero-waste systems, improving fish health and performance in captivity, and scaling up land-based aquaculture systems are all among the partners’ priorities.

“This is a very important day for IMET and aquaculture,” Hill said at the event. “There is an urgent need to promote agriculture in a sustainable way in the U.S., and we hope to contribute as much as possible to that effort.”

Focused on the future

Zoharhas been working in the aquaculture space for over 35 years and is an international leader in aquaculture research. In fact, in November 2020, the Binational Agricultural Research Development Fund (BARD), a partnership program between the U.S. and Israel, honored him for the economic impact of his research.

In addition to the BARD recognition, Zohar has received several other awards and accolades in recent months. He was awarded a $10 million grant from the USDA to lead a consortium of aquaculture researchers. He also led the creation of a partnership with Aquacon, a Norwegian company investing $1 billion in aquaculture in the U.S., including a large land-based facility on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. And Zohar’s startup, Silfra Biosystems, LLC, founded in partnership with UMBC microbiologist Kevin Sowers, was recognized as a “Maryland Future 20” company for 2021.

Zohar continues to forge full speed ahead in his work to increase food production in a sustainable way for the increasing human population. “The world’s population is growing by 200,000 each day, placing an increasing demand on our food supply,” Zohar says. “Aquaculture is the fastest growing sector in all of agriculture, and now produces more fish than traditional fishing. Still, we must double production by 2030 to meet the growing demand for sustainable protein sources.”

The land-based systems Zohar pioneered and continues to champion will be a big part of the solution, he believes, especially for salmon. “Atlantic salmon’s U.S. future is land-based,” Zohar says.

Public research, public good

University System of Maryland (USM) Chancellor Jay Perman called the environmental research being conducted at IMET one of the “crown jewels” of the system, in remarks during the signing event. “I can’t think of anything in higher ed that’s more current than the environment,” Perman said. 

Israeli institutions bring their own strengths to this field. For example, they’ve worked to develop agricultural systems that can succeed in drought conditions, which are common in Israel. In particular, the National Center for Mariculture (food production from the sea) in Eilat, Israel is a world leader.

“Bringing together the complementary expertise of UMBC, IMET, and Israeli institutions is exactly the kind of collaboration that is needed to produce innovations that advance aquaculture and the broader mariculture field,” Steiner says, and the public impact this work will have is directly in line with UMBC’s values.

“As a public research university, our motto is ‘public research for public good,’” Steiner continues. “I can think of no better way to embody this motto than by focusing on one of the most pressing questions of our time—how do we ensure that we can feed the world within rapidly changing ecosystems? We are absolutely delighted that this new agreement will allow us to further strengthen the impact of our faculty’s important work.”

Header image: Yonathan Zohar (left) explains operations of the Aquaculture Research Center to Israeli officials Yakov Poleg, Senior Deputy Director General of the Foreign Trade and International Cooperation; Yoram Kapulnik, Executive Director of BARD; and Oded Forer, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, during the delegation’s visit. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

A protein produced by viral DNA is orchestrating the critical “SOS response” in a large group of bacterial species, according to a new study in Nucleic Acids Research co-led by Ivan Erill, professor of biological sciences at UMBC, and first author Miquel Sánchez-Osuna, a graduate student at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) whom Erill advises.

Their new results suggest the relationship between these bacteria and the viruses that infect them, called bacteriophages or simply “phages,” may go back more than 1.5 billion years. Because of viruses’ prevalence and their ability to evolve so quickly, Erill believes there are likely other examples of this phenomenon that researchers have yet to discover. The results may even have implications for development of new antibiotics.

“The main message is that the bacterial SOS response is in reality a phage response,” Erill says. “It was not created by bacteria; it was the other way around.”

The bacterial SOS response involves over 40 genes and responds to DNA damage in the cell. When the cell is healthy, a protein called a repressor keeps the genes turned off. But when damage occurs, the repressor molecule self-destructs, allowing the genes to get to work fixing the DNA damage. 

Phages also have a molecule that detects DNA damage. When the virus’s host cell experiences damage, that’s a signal to the virus to burst out of the cell and find a new home. “It’s the SOS response because if the bacteria or virus doesn’t get it right, they die,” Erill says.

Ivan Erill. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Unraveling a mystery

The exact mechanism and proteins involved in the SOS response vary across groups of bacteria. For this study, the research team set out to identify the repressor molecule in Bacteroidetes, a group of bacteria that makes up a significant fraction of the microbiota in the human gut, but for which the repressor was still unknown.

First, Erill used computational tools to search Bacteroidetes genomes for proteins closely related to the repressor molecules found in other groups of bacteria. But, surprisingly, there were none. “So we started scratching a little bit more,” Erill says. 

Next, he looked at genes in Bacteroidetes that one would expect the repressor to regulate—those genes generally involved in the SOS response in other bacteria. Many of these genes in Bacteroidetes shared a particular pattern, like a keyhole for a shared key. Upon further investigation, including collaboration with Aaron Smith, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, the mystery “key” turned out to be a known repressor protein—but, surprisingly, from a phage, not bacteria.

“So we have a bacteriophage repressor controlling the SOS response in this group of bacteria,” Erill says. “I always suspected that the bacterial repressor that controls this system was actually a phage repressor in disguise.”

Creative repurposing 

It’s well understood that over their billion-plus years of shared history, bacteria have incorporated phage DNA into their genomes and repurposed it for their own needs. “So,” Erill says, “it doesn’t take a stretch to imagine a phage at some point going into a bacterial cell, getting inactivated somehow, and then the cell deciding, ‘This repressor responds to DNA damage—that’s perfect!’”

“Our results suggest that bacteriophage repressors have taken up regulating the SOS response in Bacteroidetes,” says Sánchez-Osuna, who is co-advised by Jordi Barbé at UAB, another of the new paper’s authors. That means the most common SOS repressors in other groups of bacteria “may also have originated from the capture of a phage repressor,” he adds. “Why reinvent a function that already exists?”

A more complicated “trick”

What’s particularly exciting to Erill about this new study is that the SOS response regulated by the phage repressor in Bacteroidetes is so complex. Previous examples of bacteria gaining new functionality from phage genes have been more straightforward. “You can get a new gene and then get a new trick directly from the gene,” Erill says. In fact, bacteria that cause diseases such as cholera and botulism obtain their virulence directly from phage genes, he explains.

But the new study shows something altogether different. After the bacteria took up the phage repressor gene close to a billion years ago, a complex network of interdependent regulation evolved over time, involving dozens of genes and proteins. The phage repressor is the linchpin molecule for this network, and the network is virtually indistinguishable from similar networks in other groups of bacteria that employ a bacterial repressor.

This diagram from the new paper shows how a bacterial cell can take up a phage (red), and incorporate the phage genome into its own (1). In the typical process, when the bacterial cell suffers DNA damage (2′), the phage takes that as a signal to break out of the cell (3′). But, if the normal phage life cycle is inactivated somehow (2), then the phage genes, and the proteins they produce, can be repurposed. Eventually, many of the bacterial genes (green arrows) can come to be regulated by a phage protein (in this case, the repressor, represented by a pink arrow) (3).

One step beyond

“What we show here is that these networks are the result of convergent evolution,” Erill says. Convergent evolution occurs when organisms evolve very similar traits not based on shared genetic history, but, rather, because the organisms experience similar evolutionary pressures that drive the generation of functionally similar—but genetically distinct—systems. Other examples include wings in bats and birds and fins in whales and fish.

It’s easy to think of bacteria as all being closely related, but Bacteroidetes is no more closely related to other bacteria than humans are to sea sponges. So it is remarkable for Bacteroidetes and other bacteria to have evolved nearly identical systems for responding to DNA damage that are based on different “molecular switches”—different repressor molecules that turn the response on and off.

For Erill, this research finding “answers an important evolutionary question, and it points to this process being more frequent and being capable of generating more complexity than we thought,” he says. “We had typically been thinking about getting a gene and using it as-is, and this shows one step beyond that.”

Rethinking antibiotics

The results may also influence development of antibiotics. Most antibiotics induce DNA damage in the bacteria they target, which activates the SOS response. However, as the SOS response works to repair the damage, it often makes mistakes, introducing mutations into the DNA. More mutations increases the chances that a mutant will be resistant to the antibiotic.

Some scientists have suggested that new antibiotic drugs should also inhibit the SOS response to prevent the increased risk of generating resistant bacteria, Erill says. This study shows that to be effective, new drugs will need to target the phage repressor as well as the bacterial repressor that orchestrates the SOS response.  

Viral innovation

While Erill finds the results and implications of this research exciting, he doesn’t find them terribly surprising. “To me, it always made sense that the origin of the switch was the virus,” he says. “In an evolutionary race between a bacterium and a virus, the virus always wins. It has a higher mutation rate and can replicate faster.”

In fact, 20 percent of human DNA is known to come from viruses, Erill says. He believes it is likely much higher. Viruses can do amazing things, like generate a protein that mimics the shape of DNA, which has so far proven impossible for any chemist. Examples like that, and this new study, “show you the level of evolutionary invention that viruses can have,” Erill says, which he discusses more in a piece for The Conversation.

This new study demonstrates Erill’s hunch more convincingly than ever before by deploying a suite of interdisciplinary techniques. Computational work identified the patterns in the Bacteroidetes genes that matched the phage repressor. Then, wet lab work confirmed that the phage repressor would bind to those patterns. Finally, structural analysis in Aaron Smith’s bioinorganic and structural biology lab further proved that the repressor in question was much more closely related to viral proteins than ones with bacterial origin.

“I think this work is a nice illustration of how a blend of big data, computational modeling, and wet-lab experimental biochemistry and molecular biology can come together to answer really intriguing and important questions about evolution,” Smith says.

Header image: Pictured left to right, Ivan Erill, Pilar Cortés (UAB), Jordi Barbé, and Miquel Sánchez-Osuna are all authors on the new paper, along with Aaron Smith and Mark Lee, a chemistry Ph.D. student in Smith’s lab. Photo courtesy of Ivan Erill.

Cameron Hindle finished 22nd of 92 cross country runners in the America East Championships. Lauren Reid played nearly every minute in all 17 soccer games as a central fullback. Hayden Lim scored the game-winning soccer goal to clinch a playoff spot.

What do these UMBC student-athletes have in common? They are all first-year students at UMBC, after COVID-19 curtailed their senior year of high school.

Since the NCAA allowed all student-athletes enrolled in the spring of 2020 and the fall and winter of 2020 – 21 to earn an extra year of eligibility, fifth-year seniors and graduate students are dominating most NCAA Division I intercollegiate rosters. But at UMBC, this trio of student-athletes are among many first-year Retrievers who are contributing to their teams’ success. 

Cameron Hindle at the 2021 America East Conference Cross Country Championship meet in Durham, NH, in October 2021. Photo courtesy of America East Conference.

Only two other America East first years outpaced Hindle in cool, muddy conditions on the New Hampshire course on October 29. Moreover, the Elliott City native’s UMBC classmate, Ayalew Fantaw ’24, information systems, was the second Retriever to cross the finish line.

As a member of the women’s soccer team, Reid was one of seven first-year students that started at least six times and one of 14 first-year players on the roster. The Retrievers earned as many “results” (eight, with five wins and three draws) than they have since 2015. Reid came to UMBC from Denver, Colorado, and credits her new #RetrieverNation family for her early success.

“Each and every single one of the players on the team pushes you to be the best version of yourself that you can be whether playing or going through life,” said Reid. “The coaches are also a huge part of my success this semester. They provide constant support, checking in on school, food, mental health, etc. In every part of life, they are making sure that we’re okay.”

“The 14 young women from the class of 2025 have not only been able to complement our returners but have also been able to start to lay down the initial steps of what their legacy will be here at UMBC,” said fourth-year Women’s Soccer Head Coach Vanessa Mann. “We are incredibly optimistic about where we are headed and feel now like this really was our true ‘year-one’ in terms of moving the program forward.” 

The nationally-ranked New Hampshire men’s soccer team faced UMBC on October 23 with 10 graduate students on their active roster and barely escaped Retriever Soccer Park with a 1-0 victory. Six days later, Lim and the Retrievers faced a must-win game at NJIT, a team which featured the nation’s top active goal-scorer. UMBC fell behind, 2-0, but rallied with three second-half goals, including Lim’s game-winner with 17 minutes remaining, to clinch a playoff berth.

“I believe that some of my success started with the attitude of knowing I am younger but still wanting to make an impact to help the team any way I can,” said Lim. “I have gained a lot of confidence by having good chemistry with the team on and off the field and also knowing the trust coaches had in me in high-stakes moments. This has and will continue to make my first semester here a memorable one and I can’t wait to keep going.”   

— Steve Levy ’85

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Header image: UMBC freshman midfielder Izzy Binko led the Retrievers to a 5-1 victory over Delaware State in October 2021. Photo courtesy of UMBC Athletics.

During the summer of 2021, several months into an uptick in racist violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, six Asian women were shot and killed in Atlanta, Georgia. Sharon Tran, assistant professor of English, found herself dismayed by public reluctance to denounce these acts of violence as hate crimes. For Tran, the Atlanta shooting was yet another example of anti-Asian racism in the United States and how it intersects with sexism and misogyny—a focus of her research. 

The Citizens and Scholars Institute has now recognized Tran’s work through a Career Enhancement Fellowship supporting her new book project, Minor Forms: The Affective and Aesthetic Economies of Asian Girlhood. The book examines how the minor figure of the “Asian girl” can provide a new way of understanding U.S. racism and imperialism.

Asian girlhood

Tran’s research centers the Asian girl, in contrast to current practices in both Asian American studies, which subsumes her within theoretical frameworks of Asian women’s experiences, and girlhood studies, which strongly emphasizes Black-white experiences. Her book provides important explorations of how histories of imperialism, militarism, commodity capitalism, and trans-Pacific migration have shaped Asian girlhood while intersecting with and exacerbating anti-Black racism. 

Additionally, Tran explores how the Asian girl, as a minor and dependent figure, can create new feminist paradigms going beyond individualist, adult models of subjectivity and agency privileged in Western liberal politics.

Through this fellowship, the Citizens and Scholars Institute has recognized Tran’s work for its distinctive point of view in the field of English and for fostering diversity and inclusion through scholarship. 

By studying the narratives of Asian girlhood, Tran plans to further public understanding of the trauma of growing up Asian in the U.S. She will research how these narratives change and vary over time and across contexts. Her goal is to help readers better grasp how racism, racialization, and their negative social, physical, and mental impacts become part of our histories and how we define racism in the U.S.

Research access and support

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the fellowship seeks to increase the presence of underrepresented junior and other faculty members in the humanities, social sciences, and arts by creating career development opportunities for scholars with promising research. Only 16 junior faculty in the nation have received a 12-month fellowship through the program this year. The award funds will support a one-year sabbatical for Tran to work on her book, as well as research and travel, mentorship, and professional development.

“Across time, literature has often served as a site of protest. Dr. Tran’s work addresses this important aspect of literary studies,” says Jean Fernandez, professor and chair of English. “The English department is proud of the recognition she has garnered with this prestigious award.”

Tran came to UMBC in 2018 and is the fifth UMBC junior faculty member to receive the Career Enhancement Fellowship. “Fostering more institutional access and support for communities of color is what animates my research and teaching, so it feels wonderful to receive recognition for this work,” says Tran. Her mentor is Laura Hyun Yi Kang, professor of gender and sexuality studies, at the University of California, Irvine. 

“I am honored to have been awarded this fellowship because of the organization’s mission to support scholar-teachers committed to eradicating racial disparities in higher education,” says Tran. 

Banner image: Sharon Tran. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11.

At their most basic levels, learning and play can look a lot alike. Both call for creativity and resourcefulness; inspire curiosity; and require failure, reflection, and practice. For some students, learning isn’t all fun and games. But members of the UMBC community are looking to change that.  

Kerri Evans always strives to make her curriculum engaging, but knew she needed a new way to connect her students to the material. As a social work professor at UMBC, Evans teaches and studies the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees to the U.S. and wanted a new way to expose her students to the trials and triumphs of immigrant children navigating the U.S. education system. 

“Social work curriculums largely rely on analyzing and reflecting upon case studies,” Evans says. “But immigrant stories are so diverse—it’s hard to understand the breadth of their experiences just by reading and responding to a case study.”

While working as a program manager at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in downtown Baltimore, Evans saw how an engaging training activity helped foster parents, educators, and staff to better understand the experiences of immigrant and refugee children. For the activity, participants read cards containing stories of immigrants as they navigated various stages of their journey, like falling off the train in Guatemala, or losing your relatives at the U.S. and Mexico border, for example. A group discussion followed of how these experiences, some horrific, influenced the lives of unaccompanied children in the U.S. 

“It wasn’t a game in the traditional sense, but it was inspiring and engaging,” she says.

And thus, Evans’ idea for the board game “Emerging: The Educational Journey of Immigrant Students” was born.

The gamification of learning is an approach more instructors are adopting to motivate their students to think outside of the box. Professors like Evans and others are maximizing enjoyment and engagement in their classes by capturing the interests of students and inspiring them to keep learning. Students across disciplines at UMBC are getting hands-on experience building games—tangible ones like “Emerging” as well as a host of video games that also foster a collaborative learning environment. Both the students and teachers agree: Learning is a lot easier when you’re having fun. 

Understanding the “Rules of the Game”

“Emerging” is still in its infancy, but it is attracting the help of people across the UMBC community. In fall 2021, Evans paired up with UMBC’s assistant professors of education, Jiyoon Lee and Keisha Allen, and five UMBC undergraduate and graduate students to help bring the game to fruition. 

Both the game and a future interdisciplinary course will focus on the immigrant experience in the U.S. from pre-kindergarten to college, with the goal of teaching UMBC students who will become service providers and teachers to understand the experiences faced, to advocate for inclusion, and to dismantle racism in schools. 

Kerri Evans headshot courtesy of Melissa Penley Cormier.

Funded by a UMBC Hrabowski Innovation Fund Grant: Implementation and Research Award, “Emerging” will be a multiplayer, cooperative game where participants assume the role of an immigrant child and work together to gain the resources necessary for “success” such as educational attainment, language skills, and social networks. Along the way, players will face challenges, get helpful boosts, and be forced to mitigate stress before it brings the game to a close. Picture Forbidden Island- meets-Catan-meets-Monopoly-meets immigrant experiences. 

Participants will need to achieve both happiness and self-sufficiency to win, and players will lose if their stress levels get too high or if they are unable to access help and resources they need. 

Advancing on the board will require strategy, resourcefulness, collaboration, and a little bit of luck. Players could land on spaces that require them to pick a card that describes a “win” or a “setback.” Wins may include getting an A on a test, making a new friend, or having a teacher stick up for you. Setbacks may look like getting bullied, forgetting to turn in your homework, or having troubles with immigration status. 

Players can also gather “resources” along the way, which could come in the form of joining a sports team, partaking in an after-school program, or going to a tutoring session. These resources play an integral role in managing your players’ mental health, an essential part of winning the game. 

All of the “wins” and “setbacks” will be based on real-life stories collected by a research process the students are currently undertaking, something Evans says is important to the integrity of the game.

“We don’t want these stories to be hearsay or things that could theoretically happen, we’re doing our research to create an accurate game of experiences that have truly happened,”  Evans says. 

“I think we are creating something really special,” says social work and psychology undergrad Ashley Pereira ’22, who is part of the team currently analyzing hundreds of peer-reviewed journals and case studies to find stories of success and heartbreak to include. “And to know we are creating it in a way where it’s based on research just makes you feel so confident about the decisions you make.” 

The game also aims to highlight the cultural differences within the education systems of various countries. For example, Evans says, it’s important to be mindful that immigrant students may not understand how to open up a locker, or the need to raise your hand to ask for permission to speak. The team is working on ways to include these discrepancies into the game.

“We take for granted that we know the ‘rules of the game,’ in our education systems,” says TESOL graduate student and team member Eric Chen ’22.  “If educators assume children from other countries come in with this knowledge, it can put the kids at a disadvantage.” 

Like all great games, “Emerging” plays on participants’ emotions. The stakes are high, and tragedy or triumph may be just around the corner. 

Game Developer Galore 

Over in the Engineering building, a different type of game development is taking place. Over 46 game developers are congregating to create the next great video game. Founded in 2005, the Game Developers Club is dedicated to bringing students of all majors and skill levels together to learn about game development, work as a team, and of course, create video games.

Emotions are high around this time of year, as club members pitch their ideas to the group in hopes their game will garner interest from other club members. Vice president of the club, Seth Davis ’22, computer science, is well acquainted with the process. He’s been a part of the club for three years and has created three games. Pitch time is his favorite time of the year.

“It’s always so exciting to see a person get up in front of the club and talk about an idea they’re passionate about,” Davis says. “Some people are so nervous that others won’t like their idea, but then after they pitch it, five people come running up to them saying they love the idea and want to support them.”

In 2020, Davis pitched the idea for a game called Binary Bubbles, a side-scroller (think Super Marios Bros.) puzzle game. The goal is simple: Get to the yellow flag as quickly as you can. The catch? There are malfunctioning robots in the way. Using strategy and logic, players must hack into the robots, steal their code bubbles, and move the code bubbles to other robots.

Davis and his team created 20 levels that span over two worlds, something he says would only be possible by working with an interdisciplinary team. Davis enlisted the help of art students, music students, and English students to make his games a reality.

“There are so many majors represented in the club, it’s not just computer science people,” he says. “This club teaches you how to work as a team to create an amazing product.”

Turning games into jobs

If Davis had to pick a second-favorite time of year, it would be the unveiling of the games. It’s when club members take their projects to the school and community and let others play the video games they’ve worked so hard to create.

Binary Bubbles was featured at 2020’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) along with 13 other video games created by members of the Game Developers Club. Previous games have also been featured at Artscape, Baltimore’s largest annual art festival.

Members of the Game Developers Club receive more than just thunderous applause at URCAD and Artscape, they also get job offers from blue-chip employers. They’ve gone on to find positions at Facebook, Unity Game Engine, and Firaxis games, to name a few. 

“Our club is actually very career-focused,” Davis says. “Employers love it when they see our portfolios and see we completed a game. Lots of former members got jobs because of this club.”

As a member of the club’s executive board, Davis works hard to ensure the games are seen by as many people as possible, including professional game developers. Some of those professionals are former club members themselves. Davis says alumni like Eric Jordan ’08, computer science, currently at Facebook, are eager to help current club members achieve their dreams.

“This club is such a great way to network and build real relationships,” Davis says. “It’s the perfect way to get that gaming job you’ve always dreamed of.”

The Go-To Gamer Guy

Marc Olano knows a thing or two about video games—he’s commonly referred to as UMBC’s “go-to gamer guy.” Ironically, Olano isn’t much of a gamer himself, but he certainly knows the recipe for creating a great game.

Marc Olano headshot courtesy of Ryan Zuber ’04, Imaging Research Center.

Olano has been doing research on video game graphics hardware for over 25 years. He pioneered procedural shading on graphics hardware, a technique that is used to add details to a surface of an object. The model is now the standard on every PC and game platform. Olano also pioneered UMBC’s Game Development track and helped usher in UMBC’s 3D photogrammetry scanning facility in 2015, now serving as the director for both. 

The Game Development track and the Visual Arts Department’s Animation and Interactive Media concentration make up “GAIM:” UMBC’s Games, Animation and Interactive Media program. GAIM prepares students for careers in the video game industry, and exposes them to internship opportunities at local game development companies such as Firaxis, Big Huge Games, Epic Games, Mythic Entertainment and Zynga.

In the GAIM capstone course, visual arts and computer science students join forces for a semester to design an original game. The course mimics the setup of teams in the industry where 500 artists and programmers must work together for several years to develop a single game.

“My role is teaching the students how to do the work, then letting the students figure out for themselves how to actually do it,” Olano says. “I’ve found it brings students a lot of joy to know they created something very independently.” 

“Bandit”

Olano’s first taste of an educational game development project was with UMBC history professor Anne Rubin. In spring 2015, Rubin and Olano united their classes to create a computer game called “Bandit” which detailed the 1861 Pratt Street Riots, an event many scholars believe was the site of first blood shed in the American Civil War. Undergraduates in the Game Development track built the game and Rubin’s history students served as historical researchers and consultants.

A still from “Bandit.”

In the game, players control a fox who is on the loose on the streets of Baltimore during the Pratt Street Riots, when Massachusetts militiamen came in contact with anti-war protestors in Baltimore. The fox is on the hunt for documents from the riots which can be examined and recorded all while trying to avoid guards patrolling Pratt Street.

“MeetingMayhem”

Olano is currently working with professor of computer science Alan Sherman and students from the UMBC Cyber Defense Lab to create a video game called “MeetingMayhem.” The web-based game aims to help students learn about adversarial thinking, or the ability to embody the technological capabilities and strategic reasoning of hackers. The goal of the game is to arrange a meeting time and place by sending and receiving messages through an unsecure network that is under the control of a malicious adversary. Players can choose to be the hero or the villain, or in this case, the benevolent meeting-maker or the hacker. The hacker can disrupt the efforts of the meeting-maker by intercepting, modifying, blocking, and injecting messages into the unsecure network. 

In this engaging challenge, computer science students learn the basics of the Dolev-Yao intruder network model, a framework used to analyze safety protocols within a communications network. Students also learn the value of using cryptography to mitigate these dangers. 

What Does it Mean to Win?

Across UMBC, professors and students are harnessing the power of play to enrich their learning experiences. Be it video games, board games, or anything in between, Retrievers are rich with ideas of how to make learning a little more interactive and a lot more fun. 

Olano, who was recently appointed associate dean for Academic Programs, is adjusting to his new responsibilities, but for him, it’s still all about the students and the games. 

“It never gets old seeing students when they realize they can actually build a game for themselves and they are excited doing it,” Olano says. “Honestly, it brings me a lot of joy, too.”

For Evans, winning means the participants of “Emerging” leave the game with more insight than before—even insight into what different types of “success” could look like. In the meantime, her students will experience joy as they learn research skills, build the game, and begin to introduce the game to more students in the coming semesters. The team plans to gain knowledge from other UMBC students who are immigrants themselves and discover how this subset of students found success in college. After that, the team will enlist the help of UMBC art students to help design a prototype. In the future, the team hopes to premiere the game to educators outside of the UMBC community

“People have sympathy reading case studies, but it’s not nearly as visceral as if you’re playing a game and your character experiences something tragic and now you’ve lost three turns,” Evans says. “Players will feel the anger of feeling left behind and the joy of successes.”

For Davis and the Game Developers Club, winning means making friends, networking, and having fun. “At the end of the day, we’re really just having a great time making games,” he says.

— Kennedy Lamb ’20 and Illustration by Marissa Clayton ’21.

First Mate Alex Barnard ’09, American Studies spends many mornings high atop the mast on the 150-foot sailing ship Kwai, watching the bright horizon of the Pacific Ocean through binoculars for the shimmer of an abandoned fishing net. When she spots a clump of plastic waste, she guides the captain toward the tangle of fishing nets and the garbage they accumulate. 

Then sailors on deck throw grappling hooks into the floating trash. A hydraulic crane hauls onto the deck the dripping hunks of degrading plastic nets—sometimes the size of Volkswagen Bug, sometimes 100 feet long. Barnard and the crew stumble through tangles slick with algae and seaweed, throwing the trash’s resident crabs and fish back overboard. Those moments are cathartic, Barnard says, as if they’ve just pulled a rotten tooth from the mouth of the ocean.

“I just think about that moment as beautiful. I love seeing that net up on deck,” Barnard says. “It’s so toxic and then to watch it come out. Just to be able to do that all day every day. It’s pretty amazing.”

Walking down a steep hill on her family’s farm, Roxann Brooks Motroni ’06, M14, biological sciences is searching for her cattle.

“Hey mamas! Hey cows!” the veterinarian calls. A fuzzy black head pops up over the next hill and bellows. The cattle gallop toward Motroni and her bucket, which rattles with hay cookies.

She steps into the pasture and is mobbed by her family’s cattle, the flies clustered on their backs in the late autumn heat. Cookie, the black Lowline Angus most fond of the treats, pushes to the front of the herd. The cow’s foot-long tongue curls around Motroni’s forearm, leaving bubbly trails of slobber and grass bits.

Ignoring the fresh cow patty her black boot has just stepped in, Motroni hands out cookies, then tosses the rest of the nuggets into the scrum. She swipes off her freshly slimed arm and continues naming the cattle—The Hereford, Valentino the bull, and her favorite, Nellie, named for a great-grandmother because they’re a bit alike.

“Sweet, but a little suspicious of new people,” Motroni says and wades out of the herd distributing scratches all around, oblivious to the flies and slobber and excrement.

Stephen Bradley, associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts, hauls on a braided cord connected to a white lifesaving ring that bobs on the water of the Jones Falls in Baltimore. A Doritos package, two latex gloves, a slick of oil, and some liquor bottles float nearby. And that’s just what’s visible. Other ingredients in the toxic stew flowing toward the Inner Harbor are heavy metals, fertilizer, microbes, pesticides, and sewage, as well as industrial sound pollution.

Bradley, an artist who adds video and audio sensory layers to his sculptures, pulls out his dripping hydrophones and fiddles with their connections. Then he lowers the receivers back in, to record the underwater sounds of mussels, gizzard shad, and blue crabs, along with the urban noise of HVAC systems and traffic.

Chatting away, Bradley pulls out his sketch pad to show some drawings, then licks his thumb to turn the page. He stops to grimace at his thumb, which was just mucking about in the murky water.

“Guess I shouldn’t have done that,” he says.

Making a difference in the world isn’t always a neat endeavor. Hard to keep your hands clean when you’re raising cattle humanely and safely, pulling communities together to pick up trash and make art, or hauling tons of plastic waste from the Pacific Ocean. These three Retrievers all find immense joy in work that is sometimes smelly, usually dirty, and always requires an intrepid spirit. 

Sustainability sparked Barnard’s quest

Alex Barnard wrote her UMBC honors thesis on her attempts to live sustainably in Baltimore. “Extremely challenging,” Barnard summarizes, with a wry chuckle. “It completely changed my life. I see everything through this lens now.”

For nearly 10 years, she traveled, trying to live lightly on the planet. She worked in an eco-cafe in Fiji, labored on an organic farm in Hawaii, sailed on eco-tourism voyages in the South Pacific, and biked New Zealand.

Now, she has her captain’s license and sails as a chief mate on National Geographic voyages to Costa Rica, Alaska, and Baja with Lindblad Expeditions, a company known for its green approach to travel.

Alex Barnard (top, center) poses with her team. All photos of Barnard, courtesy of Ocean Voyages Institute.

Barnard’s schedule of two months on, two months off gives her time to volunteer on the Kwai for the Ocean Voyages Institute. The institute partners with companies that turn the trash into fuel, shoes, clothing, and building blocks for construction.

Through overconsumption and improper trash disposal, humans have created five garbage patches in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans, where trash is concentrated by currents. 

Courtesy of Alex Barnard and Ocean Voyages Institute.

Discarded nets and lines from fishing boats now make up 46% of the waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Dubbed “ghostnets” or “ghost gear,” the fishing waste kills marine life by the thousands—turtles and whales and dolphins tangle themselves in the nets that are tossed off fishing boats. But because oceans are vast, and the nets sink and bob in the waves, they’re difficult to find. 

“It’s not like wading through trash,” Barnard explains. “There are big spaces in between. If you were at sea level, the nets are hard to see. We could be sailing right by one and not see it until we’re past it. The plastic breaks down in UV light. A lot of it is microplastic, which is deadly to the ocean.”

Last summer, Barnard and the Kwai crew hauled 170 tons of plastic from the ocean, a fraction of the 17 billion tons dumped into the world’s waters every year. Other organizations, like Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Greenpeace, The Ocean Cleanup, and the 5 Gyres Institute, are also focusing on ghostnet removal. Many environmental groups are pushing the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, a collaborative effort by the fishing industry, NGOs, governments, and researchers to regulate plastic dumping. 

“This work is possible and successful,” Barnard says. “The idea is to show that we need more boats, a fleet of vessels doing the same thing. It feels like a starting point more than anything.”

Temporarily on land, in a remote cabin in Michigan where she’s doing some writing for Lindblad, Barnard hikes often, always with a trash bag.

“It’s my dream to go somewhere and not have to pick up trash,” Barnard says. “I could spend my whole life picking up trash everywhere I go. That’s not very efficient. It has to be bigger than just one person. But it’s better than not picking it up.”

A family farm affair

Every morning and evening, Roxann Brooks Motroni visits her cattle, not just to offer treats but to check the herd for a limp, some pinkeye, a calf that’s not thriving.

Her family started 804 Cattle Company in Upper Marlboro in 2016 with three cows. They now raise 25 cattle on 33 acres. A vet married to an agricultural business expert, Motroni works the farm with her parents, John and Chantal Brooks, both retired doctors. And while Motroni has a day job as a National Program Leader for Animal Health for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, focusing on research solutions for livestock diseases, she begins and ends her days on the farm. 

“This is a family affair. My mom is the chief cow operator. I do the vet work, my husband does the finances and handyman work,” Motroni explains, plus he’s the beekeeper.

The farm is also devoted to teaching the next generation of farmers and veterinarians. Today, two interns hoping to be veterinarians are chasing Nutmeg the goat and grooming horses. The family brings in veterans seeking help getting started in agriculture, through the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. The farm also sells at the Capital Market, whose mission is to provide quality food, produced by businesses and farms run by people of color, to residents of Prince George’s County’s food deserts.

A Meyerhoff Scholar, Motroni quotes its motto, “To Whom Much Is Given, Much Is Expected” and says she lives by it.

Their farm prides itself on their humane and safe practices with their cattle. The animals and their health comes first.  No hormones or steroids go into their cattle and they limit antibiotic use to only sick cows. Their chutes and corrals are designed to reduce their cattle’s stress. All animals spend all their lives on grass pastures.

The family also uses regenerative agriculture practices to improve soil health and combat climate change through carbon sequestration while limiting fertilizer and pesticide usage. Motroni crouches in the pasture to show off the shoots of radishes, hairy vetch, turnips, oats, and rye that she interplants with grass, to aerate and fix nitrogen and carbon in the soil. Plus they offer her herd fine dining.

“I didn’t know when I became a cattle farmer that I would also become a grass farmer. I’ve come to realize how magical cow poop is. Every year our pastures get better and better,” she says, laughing. “All those plant physiology classes at UMBC really served me well.”

She hikes up the hill again, squelching through the mud around a water pump.

“Wow, now you can really smell the cow,” she says and smiles at the odor and the view.

Traces of life fuel his art

As an artist, Stephen Bradley sees and hears things a little differently. From the pop of color of a blue plastic container handle to the squelching clicks of the mussels underwater, the evidence of life is fascinating to him. 

For more than 12 years, he has labored in the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay area of Baltimore, partnering with the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the National Aquarium, the local Boys and Girls Club, and the Masonville Cove Environmental Education Center to clean up the alleys and streets and to make art, from sidewalk paintings and murals to trash sculptures. 

Right now, he’s bent closely over a pier in the Inner Harbor, lowering a round lifesaver strung with microphones and chum to attract fish into the water. He occasionally catches the attention of passersby and eagerly explains his artistic vision to them.

The project that inspired his recording in the Jones Falls waterway is a collaborative biodiversity study with the National Aquarium and the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET). IMET has sunk a biodisk in the same areas Bradley is recording, to track biodiversity in the waters by collecting DNA samples. Those findings will be paired with Bradley’s recordings to provide a fuller picture of what’s living in Baltimore’s waterways. Bradley’s Inner Harbor’s soundtrack is run through a spectrograph to determine what species made the sounds, most of which can’t be heard by human ears, such as the mating songs of water bugs. 

“With these recordings, it’s almost as if I have my ear to the water,” he says. “The gift is going home and listening.”

Bradley’s portion of the IMET project, called Bio-Buggy: Ear to the Harbor, will draw attention to the harm that human-generated noise pollution inflicts on aquatic species, including disrupting mating and growth. 

In the fall, Bradley was recording at Marshy Point Nature Center and heard explosions coming from his underwater recorders, from the direction of Aberdeen Proving Ground, nearly 30 miles away. 

“Hundreds of small minnows leaped out of the water each time there was an explosion, and there were nine huge discharges,” Bradley says. But in between, he heard the complex harmonies of bubbles and critter sounds, something he calls “musical marshlands.” 

He has also built an exhibit, called the “Oh, Murky Waters Chorus,” with trash compositions, an aquarium with teeny water critters still living on one of those IMET DNA sampling biodisks, and an interactive video of microscopic creatures paired with their noises. The art installation showed at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture in 2019, and Bradley hopes to exhibit it again, as a work-in-progress later in 2022. 

“The trash-filled sculptural elements in the art installation…are there to represent the stress and urgency for us as a society to gain control of our waste before we drown from it,” Bradley explains. Baltimore has taken recent steps, including banning polystyrene and taxing plastic bags, to reduce the trash in the Inner Harbor enough that if it hasn’t rained in 48 hours, according to Blue Water Baltimore, some areas are swimmable.  

At the IMET open house next spring, Bradley hopes to show a prototype of the Bio-Buggy, a mobile science and sound collection lab, which engineering students at UMBC will work to design with him as their capstone project. The Bio-Buggy exhibit will also feature Bradley’s sound compositions based on the Inner Harbor and other Chesapeake Bay recordings. 

“I have no aspiration to be a scientist, but I am inspired by science, the tools, the rigor, the process,” he says and tucks his headphones back on, listening for evidence of life in the waters. Perhaps, Bradley hopes, if people hear and see the life below the surface, they’ll pocket their Doritos packages and recycle their water bottles, instead of tossing them in the gutter for him to find later. 

People who care about change must be willing to plunge their hands deep into the mess of this world. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

— By Susan Thornton Hobby

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All photos courtesy of Marlayna Demond ’11 unless otherwise noted.