Mustafa Al-Adhami M.S. ‘15, Ph.D. ‘20, mechanical engineering, won the national Three-Minute Thesis competition last week, during the annual conference of the Council of Graduate Schools. His winning topic: rapid detection of bacteria in blood. 

Al-Adhami developed a rapid bacterial-detection test that can assess, within an hour, if a patient has an infection. It can also help physicians determine which specific antibiotics should be administered to help fight the infection. Al-Adhami’s device, ASTEK, costs a fraction of the price of the current antibiotic susceptibility test. He hopes that it will reduce the duration of hospital stays and can reduce antibiotic resistance by avoiding unnecessary antibiotic use. 

Al-Adhami earned first place in two qualifying rounds of the competition, on his path to claiming the national title. The first round was held at UMBC. The second round included 150 competitors from universities across the southern United States. The top two students from that round qualified for the national competition in Nashville.

In Nashville, Al-Adhami and nine other finalists presented their three-minute talks in front of a live audience that selected the ultimate winner. He explains that as he moved through the competition rounds he felt more at ease. 

“I was very nervous doing the UMBC Three-Minute Thesis competition, but things got easier as the competition progressed,” Al-Adhami says. “Last weekend was more fun than anything else, maybe because I had my wife and a UMBC team with me this time.”

In addition to presenting in the Three-Minute Thesis competition, Al-Adhami has shared his work at UMBC’s GRIT-X talks, Idea Competition, and Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition. He was also on a team of three UMBC graduate students who won the BMEidea competition hosted by VentureWell (a national alliance of collegiate inventors and innovators) in August. He conducted his research in UMBC’s Center for Advanced Sensor Technology, and was advised by mechanical engineering faculty Marc Zupan, associate professor, and Chuck Eggleton, professor.

Learn more about Al-Adhami’s research in UMBC Magazine

Banner image: Mustafa Al-Adhami, Ph.D. ’20, speaks at GRIT-X 2019. Photo by Arionna Gonsalves.

Ambassadors from the European countries of Slovenia, Estonia, and the Czech Republic convened at UMBC this month as part of the first joint European Union (E.U.) State outreach trip outside of Washington, D.C. Delegations from over twenty E.U. member states participated in the day of engagement with Maryland state and local officials, students, educators, and environmental and trade organizations. 

The visit’s aim was to showcase and further strengthen the close cultural and commercial ties between Maryland and European Union member states. The E.U. is Maryland’s biggest source of foreign direct investment. Over 100,000 jobs in Maryland have been created due to trade with and investment from European Union member states. 

The three leaders who visited UMBC participated in a panel at the Albin O. Kuhn Library, moderated by Brian Grodsky, professor and associate chair of political science. They included Stanislav Vidovič, ambassador of Slovenia to the United States; Jonatan Vseviov, ambassador of Estonia to the United States; and Hynek Kmoníček, ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States. In addition to discussing economic and policy matters, the leaders answered questions from students, staff, and faculty. 

“We find it very practical out of Washington D.C., out of the diplomatic bubble, to meet the real people living in the States because you can get a refreshing perspective on the issues, where Washington D.C. is in the trenches of the party discussion. This allows us to get closer to the real voice of the real United States,” shared Kmoníček.

During the discussion session, Ukrainian student Danylo Leschchyshyn ‘22, history and political science, a Humanities Scholar and member of the Honors College, asked the visiting ambassadors about the hope of eliminating corruption in his homeland. The panel responded by discussing the importance of combating corruption as a means of upholding democracy through diplomacy and the rule of law. 

“If you cannot handle corruption effectively, you will not only be unable to build a free society, but you will lose your freedom. The aim of corruption is to undermine the feasibility, the success of our societies. Our system of governance cannot coexist with corruption that is out of control,” explained Vseviov.

He continued, “Ukraine’s challenge is not only about how it handles the war in the east. Ukraine’s challenge is also the battle that is taking place in the hearts and minds of every Ukrainian. That battle is a battle of corruption and whether Ukrainians believe they have managed to take their country back not only from foreign interventions but also from their own corrupt businessmen.” 

Romy Hübler, assistant director of UMBC’s Center for Democracy and Civic Life, shared her experience growing up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She asked the guests about how older adults in post-Soviet regions are experiencing democracy today in ways different from the theoretical democracy they imagined during the Cold War. Hübler found the ambassadors’ descriptions of life during the Cold War—without democracy, and with human rights abuses and limited freedom—to be familiar. 

“I have never had the opportunity to hear firsthand from representatives of Eastern European countries about their experiences and their thinking about their country’s path toward democracy as well as challenges that still persist,” explains Hübler. “I believe that we have much to learn from one another about those pathways, not only in Eastern Europe but also in the United States, including how people who live in these countries feel empowered or disempowered to participate fully and shape their futures.” 

Banner image: (Front row, L to R) Ambassador Hynek Kmoníček; Ambassador Stanislav Vidovič; Ambassador Jonatan Vseviov; Carolyn Forestiere, associate professor and chair of political science. (Back row, L to R) Member of the E.U. delegation; David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education; Irina Golubeva, associate professor of intercultural communication; and Brian Grodsky, professor of political science. All images by Marlayna Demond ’11.

Today, a paper published in Science documents for the first time the global wind circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere of a planet, 120 to 300 kilometers above the surface. The findings are based on local observations, rather than indirect measurements, unlike many prior measurements taken on Earth’s upper atmosphere. But it didn’t happen on Earth: it happened on Mars. On top of that, all the data came from an instrument and a spacecraft that weren’t originally designed to collect wind measurements. 

In 2016, Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment. They wanted to see if parts of the instrument that were normally stationary could “swing back and forth like a windshield wiper fast enough,” to enable the tool to gather a new kind of data. 

Initially, the MAVEN project team was reluctant to implement the modifications Benna and his colleagues requested. After all, MAVEN and NGIMS had been orbiting Mars since 2013, and they were working quite well collecting information about the composition of the Mars atmosphere. Why put all that at risk? Benna and his colleagues argued that this project would collect new kinds of data that could shape our understanding of the upper atmosphere on Mars, inform similar studies on Earth, and help us better understand planetary climate. 

Benna, a planetary scientist operating out of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center with the UMBC Center for Space Sciences Technology (CSST), came up with the windshield-wiper idea while brainstorming how to create an instrument that could collect information about global circulation patterns in Earth’s upper atmosphere. It occurred to him that, together, MAVEN and NGIMS could do the same thing on Mars—and they were already in space.

With some persistence and a lot of preliminary analyses, Benna and his colleagues convinced the MAVEN mission leadership to give their idea a try, after Lockheed Martin, the spacecraft manufacturer,  determined the modifications might be possible without damaging the satellite. “It’s a clever reengineering in flight of how to operate the spacecraft and the instrument,” Benna says. “And by doing both—the spacecraft doing something it was not designed to and the instrument doing something it was not designed to do—we made the wind measurements possible.”

Ripple effect

The new paper was completed in collaboration with Yuni Lee, also of UMBC’s CSST, and colleagues from the University of Michigan, George Mason University, and NASA. It is based on data collected two days per month for two years from 2016 to 2018. Some results were expected, and others were big surprises. “The refreshing thing is that the patterns that we observed in the upper atmosphere match globally what one would predict from models,” says Benna. “The physics works.”

Overall, the average circulation patterns from season to season were very stable on Mars. This is like saying that on the East Coast of the United States, throughout the year, weather systems generally flow from the West to the East in a predictable way. 

One surprise came when the team analyzed the shorter-term variability of winds in the upper atmosphere, which was greater than anticipated. “On Mars, the average circulation is steady, but if you take a snapshot at any given time, the winds are highly variable,” Benna says. More work is needed to determine why these contrasting patterns exist.

A second surprise was that the wind hundreds of kilometers above the planet’s surface still contained information about landforms below, like mountains, canyons, and basins. As the air mass flows over those features, “it creates waves—ripple effects—that flow up to the upper atmosphere” and can be detected by MAVEN and NGIMS, Benna explains. “On Earth, we see the same kind of waves, but not at such high altitudes. That was the big surprise, that these can go up to 280 kilometers high.”

Benna and colleagues have two hypotheses for why the waves, called “orthographic waves,” last so long unchanged. For one, the atmosphere on Mars is much thinner than it is on Earth, so the waves can travel farther unimpeded, like ripples traveling farther in water than in molasses. Also, the average difference between geographic peaks and valleys is much greater on Mars than it is on Earth. It’s not uncommon for mountains to be 20 kilometers tall on Mars, whereas Mt. Everest is not quite nine kilometers tall, and most terrestrial mountains are much shorter. 

“The topography of Mars is driving this in a more pronounced way than it is on Earth,” Benna says.

Forging ahead

Continuing to analyze the data from this study may help scientists figure out whether the same basic processes are in action on Earth’s upper atmosphere. Ironically, “We had to go take these measurements on Mars to eventually understand the same phenomenon on Earth,” Benna says. “Ultimately the results will help us understand the climate of Mars. What is its state and how is it evolving?”

But the team isn’t satisfied with the current data set. “We want to keep measuring. We have two years of data, but we’re not stopping there,” Benna says. Even with the data set they already have, “We have many years of modeling and analysis ahead of us.” It’s a trove of information that can be examined in ways not yet imagined, to learn even more about how planets work.

Banner image: The MAVEN spacecraft orbits Mars (artist’s concept), courtesy of NASA.

UMBC has named Brian Barrio the director of athletics, physical education, and recreation, effective January 2020. He will direct UMBC’s 17-sport NCAA Division I intercollegiate athletics program, all campus recreational programs (including intramurals, club sports, and recreational activities), and the physical education program. 

Commitment to student success

Barrio comes to UMBC after serving as director of athletics at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) and in leadership positions at the University of Nevada, Pepperdine University, University of Southern California, and the America East Conference.

In each role, Barrio has developed programs and implemented policies supporting student-athlete success. During his tenure at CCSU, the Blue Devils won seven Northeast Conference titles and the CCSU baseball program won the university’s first-ever NCAA Tournament contest. In just one year, he increased athletics fundraising by 44 percent.

“UMBC has a bold and clear vision for how athletics can move the needle on the university’s strategic goals,” Barrio says. “I am thrilled to be trusted to help execute that vision over the coming years. The tremendous coaches and student-athletes already in place at UMBC will make this an exciting transition for me.”

Barrio also shares, “UMBC has made a strong commitment to intercollegiate and recreational athletics—a commitment that will benefit all UMBC students and will foster a vibrant student life. A university that makes that commitment while remaining steadfast in its support for student-athlete academic success and personal development—that’s the total package for an athletics director.”

Continuing UMBC’s momentum

Barrio comes to UMBC at a time of sustained athletic and academic success over several years. This includes highlights like the men’s basketball team’s “16-over-1” NCAA victory, swimming and diving programs dominating conference competition, men’s soccer’s numerous America East titles and women’s soccer’s first trip to an NCAA Tournament. Most recently, UMBC’s men’s lacrosse and softball teams overcame challenges to win 2019 America East Championships.

UMBC student-athletes also continue to excel academically. In fall 2018, they achieved a record grade-point average for the third consecutive semester, posting a mark of 3.14. Over two-thirds of student-athletes posted GPAs of 3.00 or higher.

Welcoming Barrio to Retriever Nation

Barrio earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from Boston College in 1999, where he got his start as a team manager for the men’s basketball team and an intern in the sports information office. He went on to earn his Juris Doctorate from the University of California-Hastings College of the Law.

“I am delighted to welcome Brian Barrio to UMBC,” says UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski. “His values and experience are impressive. He will be an outstanding ambassador for UMBC Athletics and a leader who will make an immediate contribution to the campus.” 

“Brian really understands the role athletics and recreation can play in building vibrant campus life, driving enrollment, and helping connect people to the university,” says Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04, public policy, vice president for Institutional Advancement, who co-chaired the search committee.

UMBC will hold a welcome event and press conference next week to formally introduce Brian Barrio to the Retriever community. It will be on December 17, 11:30 a.m., in the Retriever Room of the UMBC Event Center.

See UMBC Athletics for more information about Brian Barrio.

From Eritrea to UMBC, this physicist is cultivating a diverse generation of climate scientists. 

It’s a nearly cloudless afternoon at UMBC in early October. A group of physics students and their two faculty advisors, Belay Demoz and Ruben Delgado, make their way to the roof of the physics building to continue their conversation about atmospheric research. Earlier, gathered in a small, dimmed lecture hall, the students engaged their advisors and each other in robust discussions about their research while practicing their presentation skills.

In that session, Amanze Ejiogu ’22, physics, had the chance to explain his findings on the Bay Breeze. Rather than an adult beverage, it refers to breezes coming in off the Chesapeake Bay that redirect back to land air masses (and the pollutants they contain) that would otherwise blow offshore. 

The Bay Breeze effect is a complicated phenomenon. Many factors contribute to it, from precipitation to wind speed to the overall quality of the air. Understanding it is a multidisciplinary effort, requiring chemistry, fluid dynamics, statistics, and meteorology skills. That’s exactly the kind of challenge that Demoz, physics professor and director of UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), likes to help his students tackle.

After Ejiogu’s presentation, Demoz asks questions. His elbow leaning casually against a railing, he breaks into a grin—he is in his element. Of a certain result, he asks, “Is that expected?” And a minute later, “That’s for you to figure out,” his Eritrean accent inflecting his speech.

Climate change and other environmental issues like air and water quality disproportionately affect people of color. Today, Demoz sees his role at UMBC as empowering students, especially students from underrepresented backgrounds, to take ownership of their research and contribute to their communities. Eventually, he hopes his graduates will also become mentors and advocates for their own students and colleagues—behaviors he models for them every day.

This wasn’t always Demoz’s idea of what his life’s work would be. After a challenging childhood in what is now the East African country of Eritrea, Demoz came to the United States for graduate school in the 1980s. His original goal was to learn how to seed clouds—to bring rain to his drought-stricken homeland. He’s still doing climate research, but his focus has shifted. His experiences as a youth in Eritrea and his years as an African in the United States have shaped who he has become and what he seeks to achieve.

Graduates from all backgrounds have left Demoz’s lab and taken roles at places like NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other research institutions. These alumni create a ripple effect that will continue to enhance diversity in atmospheric research and answer questions that have the potential to change the lives of people around the globe, in part because of Belay Demoz.

Maurice Roots, a graduate student in atmospheric physics, has already felt the effects of Demoz’s efforts. Roots, who graduated from Hampton University, only applied to UMBC for graduate school because Demoz approached him at a conference. “Belay has a great set of stories to tell,” Roots says. “His journey shows that perseverance is possible.”   

A changing homeland

“It’s where the desert and the green are always fighting.”

That’s how Demoz describes the location of Eritrea. It’s a small African country on the Red Sea, sandwiched between Sudan and Ethiopia, right where the Sahara Desert and the jungles of central Africa meet. Many people there are subsistence farmers, including generations of the physicist’s family.

It used to be that when drought or floods hit, Eritrean farmers moved to where the grass was literally greener. But that changed after their land was colonized by the Italians and later the British. Strict political borders limited movement. “Once you put a wall, that valve of mitigating drought disappears,” Demoz says.

His childhood and youth in Eritrea, in the 1960s and ’70s, was one of the most volatile times for the region, when an internal resistance movement was fighting Ethiopia to gain independence. “My time was a time of coups, a time of drought, a time of war,” Demoz says. “Those are the times when a lot of heartache happened.”

Many people died because they weren’t allowed to migrate. Their crops failed in the drought, and some starved. Some died when they attempted to migrate and met violence along the way. Demoz’s older brother and many of his friends perished fighting in the resistance.

An unlikely advocate

Belay Demoz knew the challenges his people were facing. So in 1980, when he finished high school and was assigned to study physics as an undergraduate at the University of Asmara in what was to become Eritrea, he knew he wanted to find a way to use his education to make things better for his family.

At first, he struggled. He failed his first three exams. And then the first of several major turning points in his life happened, the first time help came from where he least expected it. 

Demoz and his roommate frequently played soccer together. Both were highly talented but knew there was no career for them in the sport. So, after Demoz failed his third physics exam, his roommate decided it was time for an intervention.

“You can play soccer so well, but you’re going to let physics twist you?” he asked Demoz. “No, you study with me.” So he did. And by the next semester, Demoz was at the top of his class. “Part of me was afraid,” Demoz admits. Why? His roommate had recently been released from prison on a murder conviction. But “if I didn’t find him, I don’t think I would have made it.”

As his undergraduate career was coming to a close in 1984, another severe drought hit Eritrea. Demoz wanted to do something, but he didn’t know how his nuclear physics degree could help the situation. Then, he learned about cloud seeding in a Physics Today article.

In the 1980s, cloud seeding seemed like the next big revolution in weather modification. In order for clouds to produce rain, the water molecules they contain need to condense into liquid form. That happens around tiny solid particles inside the cloud. Cloud seeding adds these particles, creating more opportunities for raindrops to form.

“That’s when I switched from nuclear to atmospheric physics,” Demoz says. “I wanted to help make it rain.”

He applied and was accepted to the atmospheric physics program at the University of Nevada, Reno, but to leave Eritrea, he had to promise that he would come back. Without the required funds to guarantee that promise, his parents had to put their family home on the line so that he could study in the U.S.

“I was given $50 and a plane ticket,” Demoz remembers. “My dad didn’t blink. He just said, ‘Go. We will find a way.’”

Peaks and valleys

In Nevada, everything was new and different. “At 22, it was my first time to see snow,” Demoz says. And not just through his dorm room window—his courses and research involved spending ample time in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After replacing his dress shoes with snow boots and skis, Demoz began to learn his way around the mountains.

In addition to the new climate, there were other steep learning curves for Demoz in graduate school. One of the core courses required computer programming skills. One day, Professor Jim Telford—Demoz refers to him as a “cloud giant”—called Demoz into his office.

Telford devised the stochastic rain theory when he was a master’s student in the 1960s, which describes why and predicts when clouds will produce rain. Today there is still no better theory. Demoz describes him as an arrogant, brilliant Australian scientist, who also went to great lengths to ensure his students’ success. Demoz remembers their first conversation going something like this:

“You must be pretty good in programming,” Telford says.

“No, I’m not.” Demoz replies.

“Well, have you used a computer?” Telford asks. 

“No.” 

“Have you touched a computer?” 

“No.” 

As Demoz recalls, Telford roared with laughter and rushed to another room to share with a colleague the ridiculousness of a Ph.D. student in physics who had never touched a computer.

“At this point, I’m thinking, I’m doomed!” Demoz remembers. “But there’s something inside me saying, I am an Eritrean, and others are fighting for independence. There’s something instilled in me. And so I stood there.” And instead of throwing him out, Telford agreed to give Demoz a crash course in computing.

For two weeks, Demoz sat with a clunky 1985 desktop and a pile of Fortran books in Telford’s office, learning how to program. Today, Demoz tells his students, “If you cannot compute, you cannot compete. Everyone who has achieved something in our field is good in programming.” But his experience with Telford was about more than programming. It was about a mentor making a special effort to help a student succeed. Belay carries that memory with him today and strives to pay it forward to his own students.

In addition to learning all about clouds and weather modification, and completing a dissertation titled, “Sierra Nevada Winter Storms Using Microwave Radiometry, Ice Crystal, and Isotopic Techniques,” Demoz learned something else important in Reno—what it felt like to be black in the United States, especially in higher education and especially in physics. 

He noticed it right away in his courses (he was the only black person) and in the city. “It takes a toll,” he says. “Reno had a very tough police force.” He was stopped on many occasions as he drove home late from doing research in the mountains, seemingly for nothing. “I tend to be an outlier,” he reflects. “You don’t see a lot of black people doing cloud seeding and working with snow.”

Only later would he find out that the graduate program had accepted him as a “test case”—he was the first African accepted to the program and the first to graduate with a Ph.D. He remembers John Hallett (another “cloud giant” and another of Demoz’s important mentors) telling him, years later, “We wanted to see if those schools [in East Africa] were any good. That’s why we admitted you.” That, of course, didn’t sit well with Demoz and stayed with him as his future in physics unfolded.

Shifting the landscape

Once he finished his Ph.D., Demoz pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Illinois in cloud chemistry. In 1997, UMBC finally entered his experience. He completed a second postdoc with UMBC at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Demoz continued his work at NASA after his postdoc ended. Then, another life-changing moment: He got a call from Howard University to help create a new atmospheric research center there in 2006. “The whole reason I studied this field was to go back and seed clouds,” Demoz reflects. “That wasn’t happening, but I realized, there is plenty to be done here.” So Demoz jumped at the chance to contribute to the historically black university while continuing his research program at NASA. 

“It was around that time that I started to be conscious of my status as a minority in the field,” Demoz remembers. “It bothered me, being one of the only ones.”

At a conference around then, Demoz and a handful of other atmospheric researchers of color met in the lobby. “And we asked, OK, what is our part?” Their first step was to join efforts in developing the Howard research center together. 

In 2005, Demoz was awarded a NASA Administrators Fellowship—a two-year sabbatical during which recipients are expected to build up a program at a minority-serving institution. The fellowship allowed Demoz to focus full time on building up the research center in Beltsville, which is administered by NOAA. When the two years were up, Demoz didn’t go back to his research program at NASA, choosing instead to commit himself permanently to the work of increasing the success of minorities in atmospheric science.

“Most people thought I was crazy because NASA is a stable job for life,” Demoz says. “But thinking about all the support that I had growing up, I decided my place was there.”

Building the pipeline 

Over the next several years, Demoz and colleagues built up the NOAA Center for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) at Howard University’s campus in Beltsville, Maryland. The NCAS is a “super-site” among the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Reference Upper Air Network (GRUAN), a set of sites worldwide that looks at air and cloud chemistry.  People around the world rely on the data it collects and the analyses the Beltsville researchers (including many students) conduct for their own work. The Beltsville GRUAN site contributes powerfully to science and also to increasing the diversity of scientists. It is the only GRUAN site in the world operated by a university, which is a source of pride for Demoz.

Students who’ve studied at the GRUAN site from Howard, UMBC, and elsewhere—many of them from underrepresented backgrounds—have gone on to careers at preeminent government and private research organizations. “You can involve students no matter how specialized and difficult your science is,” Demoz says. “The Beltsville site has made quite a number of important scientific advances and also brought diversity to the federal agencies.”

At the same time, the small group of African and African-American climate researchers who had met at the conference in the early 1990s started to formalize their lobby conversations into an official event at other meetings. “It paid off. We used to meet in a bar in the hotel lobby at the American Meteorological Society conferences. Right now, Colour of Weather is perhaps the biggest minority-focused group in atmospheric sciences, and it is what we started,” Demoz says with pride. “It’s held in a ballroom. I look at that and I think, I didn’t go back to Eritrea and seed clouds, but I’m making a difference here.”

Bringing a meaningful vision to life 

With his experience at NASA and as a professor of physics at Howard, and his commitment to mentoring students from all backgrounds, Demoz was a perfect fit to serve as the next director of UMBC’s JCET, a partnership with NASA formed in 1995, when the position opened up in 2014. 

As JCET director, Demoz has clear ideas about what he wants to accomplish. “If I can get a really strong, diverse graduate program here, that would be great. And I think that’s possible here.” In addition to recruiting and mentoring students from diverse backgrounds, Demoz says continuing to diversify the faculty is also a worthy goal. The UMBC physics department is already off to a strong start, with faculty members from Brazil, Eritrea, China, Hungary, Greece, and Puerto Rico.

Students are noticing the changes Demoz has modeled. “He really cares about his students and wants them to succeed,” adds Kylie Hoffman, a third-year graduate student. “He wants to help you do what you want to do.” 

He supports graduate and undergraduate students alike. After giving his presentation at the lab meeting, sophomore Amanze Ejiogu expected that “a seasoned atmospheric science veteran would pull it apart like cotton candy,” he says. But Demoz didn’t. “He was very respectful and asked genuine, thoughtful questions that will help me take my research forward.”

“Belay has been a great mentor for teaching lessons that are never covered in a classroom,” says Brian Carroll, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate. “I’m proud to be part of such a diverse research group,” Carroll adds. “Thanks to my experiences with the group, I will pursue and highlight diversity in my own workplaces and the community at large as I progress in my own career.”

When asked about Demoz’s mentoring, Maurice Roots is more straightforward: “He’s good at it,” Roots replied. “So I’m taking notes.”

Demoz himself benefited from support and mentoring—sometimes from unlikely places. “Help will come from the place you least expect it, so be open,” Demoz says, maybe remembering the time a convicted murderer got him through his nuclear physics degree or an arrogant scientist made sure he was ready for programming class. Or maybe even the time he got the green light from Howard University to start the Beltsville Climate program or the call from UMBC to apply for the JCET directorship. 

It’s all part of Demoz’s story. Now he’s taken it as his mission to help students create their own stories, with a strong start at UMBC. 

“By seeing us,” he says, “I hope that students say, ‘I belong here.’”

*****

Header image: Demoz meets with students on top of the physics building. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11. 

Evan Avila’s goal is to work on Capitol Hill, advocating for immigrant communities’ access to financial security and economic equality. He has now been recognized as a finalist for the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, affirming his path to a career of leadership in public service. 

The Marshall Scholarship is awarded annually to up to 50 students from the United States to pursue graduate study at a university in the United Kingdom, following an intensive application and interview process. Avila, a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar majoring in economics and political science at UMBC, was selected as a finalist for his long record of public service as well as his experience developing economic policy proposals. At the final stage, Avila was not among the students chosen to receive the scholarship. However, he still plans to pursue graduate study in Washington D.C. next fall as a Harry S. Truman Scholar. 

How does UMBC identify students to nominate for this prestigious scholarship? “We prioritize a student’s ability to demonstrate strong potential as a change agent in their chosen field, based on their leadership and intellectual skills,” explains April Householder, director of undergraduate research and prestigious scholarships. “Evan emerged because of his exemplary commitment to public service, and his ability to work with diverse groups of individuals. We felt that he has great potential as a policymaker and social change agent.”

Avila is the fourth UMBC recipient of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship. He was chosen in the spring of 2019 for one of just sixty scholar positions out of 840 candidates nationwide. 

The award grants Avila $30,000 toward a competitive graduate school of his choice. In addition, scholars gain access to continuous leadership development programs, such as the Truman Scholars Leadership Week and the Summer Institute. Scholars also benefit from mentorship by top leaders in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, public and private educational institutions, and advocacy organizations. Following a master’s degree, Avila plans to pursue a J.D., to specialize in taxation and employee benefits law.

Building a public service career 

Avila has dedicated his time at UMBC to developing his knowledge of financial systems and applying his studies to work with people in need of financial services and expertise. This includes years of service with UMBC’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. Avila recently shared, “My driving ambition is to combine the intersections of financial services, taxation, and employee benefits” to address the significant challenge of wealth inequality faced by workers, families, and students.

Laura Hussey, associate professor of political science and director of the Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar program, has witnessed Avila’s longstanding commitment to serving communities. Hussey is quick to point out that it is not just Evan’s résumé, but also his character, that exemplifies Sondheim Scholar ideals. His time spent at the Esperanza Center, which provides educational, legal, medical, and other services to immigrants in Baltimore, is a meaningful example of his work. 

“In choosing the Esperanza Center for his Sondheim Scholar service-learning, Evan sought to leave his comfort zone and address his complicated relationship with his family’s immigrant heritage,” explains Hussey. “Though intimidated by the one evening per week he would spend there, given his limited Spanish proficiency and tutor training, Evan described his service at Esperanza Center as ‘truly joyous’ and a ‘deeply personal and spiritual experience.’”

Avila has also been recognized for his work on retirement planning for today’s young adults. In June 2018 he won the iOME challenge with the policy proposal Rethinking Millennial Retirement: Policy Recommendations for a Gig Economy. Cindy Hounsell is president of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER), which sponsored the competition. She shared, “We are impressed by Mr. Avila’s response to the more complicated challenges and deterrents millennials face in preparing for their future retirement.”

UMBC has a strong tradition of supporting applicants for the Marshall Scholarship, as well as other prestigious awards. Loren Siebert ‘93, computer science, earned his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Manchester as a Marshall Scholar. He then invented LinguaStep, a language learning software, and is now a technical advisor to entrepreneurs in San Francisco. 

Naomi Mburu ‘18, chemical engineering, was UMBC’s second student selected for a Marshall Scholarship, in 2017, but she declined the award to become UMBC’s first Rhodes Scholar. Mburu is currently pursuing a doctorate in nuclear fusion at Oxford. She offered Avila advice in preparation for his Marshall interview.

Avila looks forward to continuing that tradition after his graduation in the spring, offering support to future UMBC students who are reaching for their dreams.

Banner image: Avila at his internship at the United States Census Bureau. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 unless otherwise noted. 

By Jason Loviglio, founding chair and associate professor of media and communication studies, UMBC

From its start half a century ago, National Public Radio heralded a new approach to the sound of radio in the United States.

NPR “would speak with many voices and many dialects,” according to “Purposes,” its founding document.

Written in 1970, this blueprint rang with emotional immediacy. NPR would go on the air for the first time a year later, on April 20, 1971.

NPR is sometimes mocked, perhaps most memorably in a 1998 “Saturday Night Live” sketch starring actor Alec Baldwin, for its staid sound production and its hosts’ carefully modulated vocal quality. But the nonprofit network’s commitment to including “many voices” hatched a small sonic revolution on the airwaves.

As a radio historian, I have written about the medium’s unique blend of intimate voices and public address. As the 50th anniversary of public radio draws near, I’m interested in NPR’s contradictory legacy of sonic innovation and monotony.

This is NPR

One of the first voices to become associated with NPR’s flagship evening news program was Susan Stamberg. Hired in 1971, she soon became the first woman to co-anchor a national nightly newscast on radio or television in U.S. history.

William Siemering, the network’s first program director and the author of “Purposes,” wanted the voice of the network to communicate curiosity rather than authority.

Stamberg, 31 when she was hired, brought youthful exuberance to the job. And, in another departure from newscasting’s baritones, with their supposedly neutral midwestern accents, Stamberg’s voice was “nasal, quizzical, and unashamedly female,” as Lisa Phillips put it. It came she said, “with a hometown – New York – and an ethnicity – Jewish.”

The decision to stick with young and relatively unproven voices came at a cost, according to Jack Mitchell, the original director of the “All Things Considered” evening newscast.

In his account of NPR’s beginnings, “Listener Supported,” Mitchell later recalled how Siemering passed up Ford Foundation funding tied to hiring the proven and respected newscaster Edward P. Morgan, a white man originally from Walla Walla, Washington. Instead, NPR stood by the less “authoritative” and more engaging voices of Stamberg and her peers, even if they sometimes sounded “less than professional.”

“Masculine, commanding” voices were “exactly how we DON’T want to sound,” Siemering told his staff, as Stamberg later recalled in “This Is NPR: The First Forty Years.”

Early feedback on Stamberg from station managers around the country wasn’t encouraging. She sounded too New York, too Jewish, too off-putting, Mitchell wrote.

Siemering hid these negative reviews from Stamberg as she found her own broadcast voice, which helped her win many prestigious awards in broadcast and digital journalism. The network regards her as one of its “founding mothers.”

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Computers Judge What Makes The Perfect Radio Voice

Women as anchors

NPR has kept speaking with many voices that would sound out of place on the air anywhere else. Many, if not most, have been female. As hosts and anchors, correspondents and reporters, women have played a key role in giving NPR its distinctive sound.

Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts brought hard-nosed journalism and inside-the-Beltway sensibility to the fledgling network in the 1970s. In the process, these white women changed what the news sounded like.

By the time Wertheimer took over as an “All Things Considered” co-anchor in 1989, it was no longer controversial to hear women deliver the news of the day.

But on network television, most of the early stints for the women who were the first to anchor daily news programs were short-lived. Barbara Walters lasted two years in the mid-1970s as an “ABC Evening News” co-anchor. Diane Sawyer co-anchored the “CBS Morning News,” from 1981 to 1984 and Katie Couric spent five years, starting in 2006, as the sole “CBS Evening News” anchor.

Curating distinctive voices “rich with the rhythms and accents of their regions” was another explicit way in which “All Things Considered” initially sought to sonically mark its difference from what had come before, according to Stamberg.

A wider range?

NPR’s commitment to many voices included those who brought regional, as well as gender, diversity to the airwaves.

Occasional commentators Baxter Black, a cowboy poet from Texas; Vertamae Grosvenor, a culinary anthropologist born in the Gullah community of North Carolina; and Kim Williams, a naturalist, checked in during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with field reports from their corners of the country. Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-American artist living in New Orleans, began to bring his thickly accented English and droll humor to NPR in 1983.

Putting these folks on air seemed to address the network’s vision of speaking in many voices and accents. The intent, Mitchell wrote, was explicitly democratic, to be “representative of the nation. That meant white, black, Hispanic, Asian and as many women as men.”

NPR’s growth led to the opening of foreign bureaus, even as print publications hemorrhaged these expensive positions. International coverage further expanded its vocal range.

Some of the women now working as the network’s anchors got their start as foreign correspondents. Doualy Xaykaothao spent years reporting from Asia and Lulu Garcia-Navarro covered Latin America and the Middle East for NPR.

Other women with nonconventional news voices, including Eleanor Beardsley in Paris, Sylvia Poggioli in Rome and Ofeabia Quist-Arcton in Dakar, are still overseas. Their signature approach to signing off with their name and locale is a sonic pleasure for many NPR fans.

Favorite @NPR pronunciations:

—Ofeibea Quist-Arcton saying “Dah-KARR.”

—Michele Kelemen saying “Wash…ing…ton.”

—Eleanor Beardsley saying “Paris” with that flat “a.”

—Sylvia Poggioli saying “Sylvia Poggioli.” https://t.co/SH4wA4CVlG

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) May 19, 2018

Even so, by the turn of the century, the network faced complaints about its tight control over pronunciation, cadence and accent, especially for women and people of color.

Critics denounced a sense that the voices of NPR’s female journalists sounded “alike in their sober nasal condescension,” as the writer and actor Sarah Vowell put it – hinting at a class-related critique, along with a gendered one.

NPR’s women, some of these naysayers contend, have low-pitched voices that sound too much like men and that NPR voices in general sound more like each other than everyone else. Writer Scott Sherman calls it the “NPR drone.”

Even Stamberg said in a 2010 interview that one price of NPR’s success was that listeners weren’t “hearing great voices anymore.”

Another round of criticism, this one aimed primarily at young women, identified “vocal fry,” a low creaky way of speaking, as an irritating feature of public radio voices. The critique, which came mostly from men and older folks, suggested that despite what the critics were saying, NPR’s sound was not static but evolving.

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From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?

NPR’s sonic palette and its range of voices has broadened in recent years, especially through its podcasts and on weekends – when Navarro, who is Latina, and Michel Martin, an African American woman, are two of the network’s main three news anchors.

Sam Sanders, an openly gay African American man, hosts a cultural talk show branded with his own name. Programs like “Alt.Latino” and “Radio Ambulante,” which are either in Spanish or in English punctuated with Spanish words, indicate that the network aims to serve new listeners.

As NPR looks forward to the next 50 years, its decisions over whose voices belong on the air will determine how well it lives up to its founding commitment to sound like America. And it is likely that criticism of how those voices sound will reflect dominant attitudes about who gets to speak.

*****

Jason Loviglio, Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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

Header image by Jonathan Velasquez on Unsplash.

The film begins, a fast-moving montage of seemingly unrelated images: eyes, people dancing, an airplane landing, artillery, President Kennedy, wrestlers, a woman applying hairspray, all interspersed with wacky cartoon-like animated images. 

It’s the start of Breathdeath, Stan VanDerBeek’s experimental 1963 masterpiece that would influence a generation of artists, including Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. VanDerBeek’s genius and visionary thinking—not only as a filmmaker, but also as a video artist, computer animator, and futurist—would earn him worldwide fame and, in 1975, a full professorship at UMBC, where he taught until his untimely death in 1984.

VanDerBeek’s vision can still be seen in the programs he helped found and the alumni he inspired at UMBC.

Underground Artist

Born in 1927 in New York to immigrant parents, VanDerBeek’s early interest in painting, architecture, and design led him to Black Mountain College, where he befriended pioneering composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and inventor Buckminster Fuller, all of whom were to prove deeply influential on the artist. In the early 1950s, working as a designer on the CBS children’s program Winky Dink and You—which featured plastic screens children could apply to the television and draw on with special crayons—VanDerBeek learned basic animation skills and, by 1955, began to create his own animated films. In 1959, he organized a New York film festival entitled “Films from the Underground,” and the term “underground film” was born.

Throughout his 30-year career, VanDerBeek was more than an artist; he became a visionary who thought beyond limits and boundaries, often dreaming up fascinating ideas that couldn’t be executed—at least in his lifetime. In 1980, midway through his tenure at UMBC, he imagined, “You’ll sit in your backyard and look up at beautiful paintings I and other artists will do for you on a 10,000 square mile screen of clouds. The strokes and colors will be images projected by laser beams. I call it ‘painting with light’ or optical painting.” 

At UMBC, recalls Ellsworth Hall ’82, visual arts, the cloud projections were realized on a smaller scale. “A good friend of mine, Ed Hopf, with whom I’ve made films with since we were 13, helped Stan on his multimedia presentations. He would have film projected on the ‘smoke’ created by melting dry ice. At one point there wasn’t enough ‘smoke’ and Stan was in a hurry trying to coordinate some other aspect of the production so he grabbed the dry ice with his bare hands and threw it in the container to melt!”

For VanDerBeek, moving images weren’t only material for his artwork—they had the power to facilitate global understanding and to help the world move toward peace. In a manifesto, “CULTURE: Intercom and Expanded Cinema,” he wrote, “I propose the following: that immediate research begin on the possibility of a picture-language based on motion pictures; that we combine audio-visual devices into an educational tool: an experience machine or ‘culture-intercom’; that audio-visual research centers be established on an international scale to explore the existing audio-visual devices and procedures, develop new image-making devices, and store and transfer image materials, motion pictures, television, computers, video-tape, etc.; that artists be trained on an international basis in the use of these image tools…” He set forth ideas with the certainty that they could be accomplished and even needed to be accomplished. 

To facilitate that vision of global communication, VanDerBeek forged what was perhaps his best-known creation, the Movie-Drome. Located at Stony Point, New York, at the Gate Hill Cooperative (populated by the young VanDerBeek family in addition to others who had migrated from Black Mountain College, including John Cage, pianist David Tudor, and potter M.C. Richards), the Movie-Drome was the top of a grain silo dome. Guests were invited inside, asked to lie down, and, looking up, watched a mosaic of continually changing films and slides that were concurrently projected across the dome’s interior. VanDerBeek imagined a network of Movie-Dromes operating internationally, linked by satellite, presaging the internet.

Endless Possibilities

By the time VanDerBeek arrived at UMBC in 1975, he was already in the international limelight—a filmmaker whose works had won awards at festivals worldwide and who had received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He had taught, lectured, or been in residence at Columbia University, MIT, the Walker Arts Center, the Smithsonian Institution, WGBH (Boston), NASA, and dozens of other institutions and had enjoyed a 1968 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Ever fascinated by the possibilities of emerging technologies, VanDerBeek had branched out from film to embrace videography and computer animation, which seemed to offer endless possibilities. (His early computer-generated films were produced at MIT and at Bell Labs, where he was in residence and assisted by computer art pioneer Ken Knowlton.) An exhibition of VanDerBeek’s work Machine Art: An Exhibit of “Inter-Graphics” was presented in UMBC’s Library Gallery in spring 1976.

“It was a dynamic time,” remembers Ferdinand Maisel, who studied at UMBC and also worked in the dance department, “and Stan was maybe among the first interdisciplinary/collaborative artists of the 20th century. He was fascinated with how other people would think and solve problems. I met Stan via my work with Liz Walton—I worked for the dance department back then as a composer. Stan immediately had me push his shopping cart of films (which he was known to walk around campus) to a Steenbeck film machine, where I watched, with amazement, some of the films for which he wanted music.” VanDerBeek tapped Maisel to help run his Image Lab, a precursor to UMBC’s present-day Imaging Research Center.

While at UMBC, VanDerBeek recreated the Movie-Drome. Baltimore newscaster Denise Koch, who taught acting and theatre performance at UMBC, recalled, “Stan built a geodesic dome in the center of a large field and projected clouds and nighttime sky-lines, and had people come and lay on the floor for the experience.” (He had planned to erect on campus a 70-foot dome housing a 40-foot planetarium screen.) 

Koch also stars in a 1979 VanDerBeek film, Mirrored Reason. “He came to me and told me he’d been given a studio at the Voice of America for a day, and wanted to play with some of the equipment and asked if I’d participate as his actor—how could I refuse! We went to the studio, and he placed me in a room and just asked me to do an improvisation. I think I used a Kafka story to fall into a state of paranoia as Stan fooled around with my image. At one point my head splits in two and then I’m facing myself—thus, I believe, Mirrored Reason. Stan and our theatre company, Kraken, collaborated a number of times. Once, he took video of each actor’s head in the exact same position and then had us bleeding or melting into and out of each other as if we were a company made up of one face that held the persona of eight different people. It’s hard to explain, but I remember I was stunned!” 

Ellsworth Hall remembers that VanDerBeek’s “office was rather messy with stacks of magazines, books, and film cans, but he knew where everything was!” Always encouraging his students to branch out with novel techniques, “In Experimental Film class Stan would have us put objects directly on unexposed film and then move them and expose each frame so as to create a direct animation on the emulsion. Very unusual technique, but it resulted in some interesting images.”

Steve Estes, who studied film at UMBC as an undergraduate and then returned to earn an MFA in 1997, remembers VanDerBeek as an encouraging, supportive force. “He was very open, and very open to whatever you really wanted to do. Stan was the kind of guy who was helpful by basically just being there, and letting you do what you did, and providing whatever assistance he could. He had suggestions about this or that, but he was pretty much, ‘Go for it! Freedom, man, just go ahead and do it. Explore! Play!’”

Filmmaker Richard Chisolm ’82, interdisciplinary studies, recalls VanDerBeek as a character whose mind was sometimes racing so quickly that he wasn’t always focused on teaching, but says, “This dreamer personality, this charming dreamer, is kind of by definition boundary-less, and wild, and expressive. We need Stan VanDerBeeks to challenge our otherwise concrete, boring, structured way of looking at the arts. True art is extremely messy. It requires taking risks, and it requires trying things that are going to fail, and losing money, and losing time during those failures, and people like Stan are just fearless and have no regard for whether this dream is going to come true or be doable or not. It’s the old cliché about throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks—that’s definitely how he looked at ideas. He got ideas every day, and every week, and he tried to contagiously get people to jump in with him, and sometimes they would. He was going super fast every day, always walking and talking fast and could never sit still.”

Dreaming at UMBC

VanDerBeek’s “dreamer” personality was, in fact, fascinated by dreams. He posted a note in a 1970s-era publication, Dreamworks, encouraging readers to send him brief written descriptions of their dreams, saying, “I am seeking this material for developing my ‘dream theater’ and for other futuristic dream-related media projects…. I am convinced that movies are the visual enactment of the dream state. I do not know how specific this function of pre-visualizing and making tangible the dream state is in our lives. But my own instincts move me further into experimenting with such illusory systems, such as freedom of metamorphosis to create ‘meta’ images that can approximate the geometry and forms of dreams.”

UMBC’s connections to the VanDerBeek family run deep. Two of his children—August and Max— studied briefly at UMBC, and his daughter Julie graduated in 2003 with a degree in theatre. Max returned in the 1990s to teach for the Department of Music; his son, Clay, was a Linehan Artist Scholar who graduated in 2017 with a degree in theatre. Another of Stan’s daughters, artist Sara VanDerBeek, has exhibited and spoken at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture. Stan VanDerBeek’s second wife, Louise, graduated in 1976 with a degree in interdisciplinary studies and an arts emphasis and then returned to earn a master’s in 1995 in instructional development systems. 

“If I had to draw a cartoon for The New Yorker that was about Stan VanDerBeek?” Richard Chisolm asks rhetorically. “It would be Stan VanDerBeek buys furniture at IKEA, and then you see him in a room with the boxes, and then in the next frame you would see something that didn’t look at all like furniture, and the instructions would be curled up in the corner, and what he built would be this anarchistic mound of panels and windows that was not at all what the IKEA people were telling you to build.”

VanDerBeek served as chair of UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts for only a short time in 1983 and 1984 before becoming ill. Several days before his death in September 1984, he received a poignant good-bye letter from fellow experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who wrote, “I grow more sure of what we’ve done, and that someday…our works and lives will be fully known to the ears and minds of human beings….”

— Tom Moore

*****

To learn more about Stan VanDerBeek’s work, visit stanvanderbeek.com. An exhibition, VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek, which presents artwork by Stan VanDerBeek alongside work by Sara VanDerBeek, is on display at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center through January 4, 2020.

Thanks to Max VanDerBeek, August VanDerBeek, Chelsea Spengemann, the Stan VanDerBeek Archives, and Judy Taylor.

All images, including header, courtesy of the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek.

By Amy Froide, chair and professor, Department of History, UMBC

In a recent interview with Vogue, actress Emma Watson opened up about being a single 30-year-old woman. Instead of calling herself single, however, she used the word “self-partnered.”

I’ve studied and written about the history of single women, and this is the first time I am aware of “self-partnered” being used. We’ll see if it catches on, but if it does, it will join the ever-growing list of words used to describe single women of a certain age.

Women who were once called spinsters eventually started being called old maids. In 17th-century New England, there were also words like “thornback” – a sea skate covered with thorny spines – used to describe single women older than 25.

Attitudes toward single women have repeatedly shifted – and part of that attitude shift is reflected in the names given to unwed women.

The rise of the ‘singlewoman’

Before the 17th century, women who weren’t married were called maids, virgins or “puella,” the Latin word for “girl.” These words emphasized youth and chastity, and they presumed that women would only be single for a small portion of their life – a period of “pre-marriage.”

But by the 17th century, new terms, such as “spinster” and “singlewoman,” emerged.

What changed? The numbers of unwed women – or women who simply never married – started to grow.

In the 1960s, demographer John Hajnal identified the “Northwestern European Marriage Pattern,” in which people in northwestern European countries such as England started marrying late – in their 30s and even 40s. A significant proportion of the populace didn’t marry at all. In this region of Europe, it was the norm for married couples to start a new household when they married, which required accumulating a certain amount of wealth. Like today, young men and women worked and saved money before moving into a new home, a process that often delayed marriage. If marriage were delayed too long – or if people couldn’t accumulate enough wealth – they might not marry at all.

Now terms were needed for adult single women who might never marry. The term spinster transitioned from describing an occupation that employed many women – a spinner of wool – to a legal term for an independent, unmarried woman.

Single women made up, on average, 30% of the adult female population in early modern England. My own research on the town of Southampton found that in 1698, 34.2% of women over 18 were single, another 18.5% were widowed, and less than half, or 47.3%, were married.

Many of us assume that past societies were more traditional than our own, with marriage more common. But my work shows that in 17th-century England, at any given time, more women were unmarried than married. It was a normal part of the era’s life and culture.

The pejorative ‘old maid’

In the late 1690s, the term old maid became common. The expression emphasizes the paradox of being old and yet still virginal and unmarried. It wasn’t the only term that was tried out; the era’s literature also poked fun at “superannuated virgins.” But because “old maid” trips off the tongue a little easier, it’s the one that stuck.

The undertones of this new word were decidedly critical.

“A Satyr upon Old Maids,” an anonymously written 1713 pamphlet, referred to never-married women as “odious,” “impure” and repugnant. Another common trope was that old maids would be punished for not marrying by “leading apes in hell.”

At what point did a young, single woman become an old maid? There was a definitive line: In the 17th century, it was a woman in her mid-20s.

For instance, the single poet Jane Barker wrote in her 1688 poem, “A Virgin Life,” that she hoped she could remain “Fearless of twenty-five and all its train, / Of slights or scorns, or being called Old Maid.”

These negative terms came about as the numbers of single women continued to climb and marriage rates dropped. In the 1690s and early 1700s, English authorities became so worried about population decline that the government levied a Marriage Duty Tax, requiring bachelors, widowers and some single women of means to pay what amounted to a fine for not being married.

Still uneasy about being single

Today in the U.S., the median first age at marriage for women is 28. For men, it’s 30.

What we’re experiencing now isn’t a historical first; instead, we’ve essentially returned to a marriage pattern that was common 300 years ago. From the 18th century up until the mid-20th century, the average age at first marriage dropped to a low of age 20 for women and age 22 for men. Then it began to rise again.

There’s a reason Vogue was asking Watson about her single status as she approached 30. To many, age 30 is a milestone for women – the moment when, if they haven’t already, they’re supposed to go from being footloose and fancy-free to thinking about marriage, a family and a mortgage.

Even if you’re a wealthy and famous woman, you can’t escape this cultural expectation. Male celebrities don’t seem to be questioned about being single and 30.

While no one would call Watson a spinster or old maid today, she nonetheless feels compelled to create a new term for her status: “self-partnered.” In what some have dubbed the “age of self-care,” perhaps this term is no surprise. It seems to say, I’m focused on myself and my own goals and needs. I don’t need to focus on another person, whether it’s a partner or a child.

To me, though, it’s ironic that the term “self-partnered” seems to elevate coupledom. Spinster, singlewoman or singleton: None of those terms openly refers to an absent partner. But self-partnered evokes a missing better half.

It says something about our culture and gender expectations that despite her status and power, a woman like Watson still feels uncomfortable simply calling herself single.

*****

Amy Froide, Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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

Header image: Photo by Lucian Andrei on Unsplash.

The London-based Times Higher Education (THE) has released subject-area listings for its World University Rankings 2020, recognizing UMBC as among the best in the life sciences, physical sciences, and psychology.

.@timeshighered World University Rankings 2020 name UMBC a top university in the life sciences, physical sciences + psychology. #UMBCproud pic.twitter.com/JHOhEY5Nt2

— UMBC (@UMBC) November 26, 2019

Earlier this fall, before the subject-area rankings were announced, UMBC was included in the broader 2020 THE World University Rankings. UMBC was named among the top 800 universities worldwide — #130 among U.S. universities on that global list.

In April, Times Higher Education also recognized UMBC as #3 as in the nation in achieving social and economic impact. Their University Impact Ranking measured how well universities deliver on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a blueprint for global peace and prosperity.

Featured image: Abby Cruz ‘18, biological sciences, a Meyerhoff affiliate and MARC U*STAR Scholar, works in Fernando Vonhoff’s biology lab.