In the early morning of March 26, 2024, the massive cargo ship Dali lost power as it left the Port of Baltimore. The ship collided with one of the supports holding up the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River and the bridge collapsed, killing six construction workers and severely disrupting the flow of people and goods around Baltimore. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, officials began the process of planning for a new bridge, and now UMBC students are getting an up-close look at the massive project.

A year and half later, three Retrievers visited the bridge site, observing as workers demolished parts of the remaining structures in preparation for building a new bridge. Emily DiMarzio, a rising junior studying environmental science and geography, and Cristian Mena and William McConnell, both rising seniors studying mechanical engineering, were all selected to join The Key Bridge Rebuild Internship Program this summer. While their trip to the bridge this August was partly photo-op, it also represented their experiences throughout the summer, which included regular trips to the bridge and surrounding sites to learn about the ongoing work there.

The Key Bridge internship program launched this year as a partnership between the Maryland Transportation Authority (MDTA) and the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC). This summer nine students from four Maryland universities, including Retrievers DiMarzio, Mena, and McConnell, got hands-on experience in project management, environmental analysis, construction oversight, and community outreach.

“It hurt when the bridge went down,” says McConnell, who grew up in Baltimore and now lives with his wife and three kids in Catonsville. “You could practically see it from our neighborhood, and now see that it is missing. So when the opportunity came along to apply for this internship, I jumped on it.” 

Bridge building boot camp

At the start of the internship, the students were divided into teams based on their interests. McConnell and Mena were on the structural and geotechnical team, which worked to review, analyze, and visualize data that was collected earlier in the year while boring into the layers of sediment where the structural supports for the new bridge will go. DiMarzio was on the environmental compliance team that performed reviews of permitting documents and requirements and observed how the requirements are met during construction.

A large part of the process was coming up to speed fast on the bridge-building process.

“I’ve learned so much—I feel like a bridge expert after this summer,” laughs Mena. 

McConnell noted that all the interns on the structural and geotechnical team came from mechanical engineering backgrounds. “It was nice for us to be exposed to and learn a lot about the civil engineering field,” he says. 

The interns went on regular trips outside the office to see the bridge-building process in action. They visited the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which was being redecked, and visited the Key Bridge site multiple times.

They also visited the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center in McLean, Virginia, where they saw how researchers were testing a 3D model of the new bridge to better understand how the force of waves will affect the sand around the bridge’s supports. 

“I thought that was super cool,” says Mena. “That was one of my favorite project sites.”

“The UMBC students are great to work with,” says Jason Stolicny, the deputy director of project development at MDTA who served as their supervisor this summer. “They show a genuine interest in learning and gaining exposure to new things.” 

Community outreach

As part of the internship, DiMarzio, Mena, and McConnell also worked together to develop a hands-on workshop for students at Cherry Hill Middle School in Baltimore as part of the UMBC Summer Math Program through the George and Betsy Sherman Center. They prepared a presentation on different bridge types and the workers who come together to build and maintain them. They also worked with students to design and build model bridges. The workshop was part of a summer enrichment program that UMBC runs in partnership with Baltimore City Public Schools. The interns’ workshop fit into a curriculum about bridges that Malaysia McGinnis ’21, geography and environmental science, and M.A. ’24, secondary education and teaching, a teacher at Cherry Hill and Sherman Scholar, had designed for the summer program.

The interns agree it was rewarding to make connections with kids in the Baltimore community.

“There was one kid that stood out to me because during the whole presentation, he looked like he was asleep and so he kind of reminded me of myself,” says Mena. “So after the presentation I partnered up with him in the activity. He was super bright and answered all the questions I asked him. Hopefully, I inspired him to see his career choices and to continue learning and growing.”

MDTA plans to continue the Key Bridge internship program until the bridge has been rebuilt, which is currently anticipated to be in fall 2028. 

“It was an honor to be part of the first group of interns,” says McConnell. “I hope we helped set the stage for future interns to have really great experiences too.”

Mena contemplates what it will feel like to see the new bridge spanning the river: “That’s going to be quite a sight. I think it’ll be pretty meaningful because even though I contributed in a very small way, it’ll stand in our community as something bigger than ourselves and a symbol of what we can do when we put our minds together.”

Used to working in beautiful sunny weather, Giovanna Orfali, a visual arts senior from São Paulo, Brazil, spent this summer behind the camera as a digital content intern at the Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC). A seasoned filmmaker and photographer, this internship was an opportunity to expand her professional network and bring a fresh perspective to Maryland history by creating short-form social media content to share the center’s unique exhibits and events with audiences across the state.

Orfali is a recipient of the #YouAreWelcomeHere scholarship that offers tuition support for international students. She came to UMBC with experience as a television video editor and videographer and has used her skillset working on a wide range of projects. She produced and edited “Arthropod Biodiversity and Applications,” a full-length instructional video course for the Department of Biological Sciences, and works part-time as a photographer for UMBC athletics events. When Orfali is not at the MCHC, she produces digital media for UMBC’s event and conference services, her second summer internship site.

“When I began taking classes back home, no one was interested in editing audio, so I volunteered. I learned to say yes to all opportunities. At the TV station, I filmed interviews, exercise classes, and tourism commercials,” says Orfali. “I did the same when I came to UMBC. Being open to learning all aspects of audiovisual production has made me more confident and helped me make a lot of connections in and outside of the classroom.” Orfali’s short film “A Shared Story of Distance” was chosen to represent UMBC at the 2023 Maryland Film Festival Day: Student Shorts Showcase.

Hundreds of Retrievers like Orfali maximize their summer by putting their hard-earned skills to work in collaboration with campus and community partners. The 2025 arts, humanities, and social sciences summer interns are getting it done, one sunny day at a time.

Designing a career

No matter where a Retriever is in the world, they can search the online student job platform Handshake for thousands of summer internships, including on-campus opportunities. This was crucial for Humanities Scholar Kendal Howell, who stepped off the plane after studying business management abroad in France this past spring and into the office as an intern at UMBC’s Division of Student Affairs for their new academic partnerships and high-impact experiences (APHIE) unit. James DeVita, assistant vice president for APHIE, says his group needed materials and resources to help stakeholders understand the value of developing and engaging in high-impact experiences. So he turned to the experts in student experiences—the students themselves.

“We wanted to add to the number of on-campus internships. It was wonderful to have created a new professional experience for over 25 students, whose research will directly benefit their peers in a multitude of ways,” says DeVita. “By the end of the internship, the interns had collectively reviewed over 30 publications and drafted six resources in addition to completing the mapping research and related presentation.”

“The student-led research team studied high-impact practices for scholars programs, including UMBC’s, and synthesized academic research of these practices on student success in higher education,” says Howell, an Africana studies and sociology senior, with a minor in entrepreneurship. She focused on entrepreneurship, education abroad, work-based learning, and student leadership opportunities. “The information we gathered will help inform campus leaders in improving UMBC’s scholar programs. This was my first internship, and I loved it!”

Second-year gerontology doctoral student Claire McDonald also had the opportunity to conduct new research. Trained in quantitative research in psychology, McDonald gained qualitative methodology skills in her spring sociology class as part of her training to conduct research about aging in the LGBTQ+ community, a growing area of research. She is utilizing the mixed-methods LGBTQ+ Social Networks, Aging, and Policy Study, one of the few datasets on this topic, and hopes to add to her dissertation qualitative data from interviews with older LGBTQ+ adults in Baltimore for a mixed-methods project. Impressed with McDonald’s rigor, her professor recommended her to Rowena Winkler, the new assistant director for graduate student career development at the UMBC Career Center, who was seeking graduate students to conduct a 10-week qualitative research project. 

“I recruited over 100 students, conducted 11 individual interviews, and three focus groups to learn how and why graduate students use the Career Center and why they don’t,” says McDonald.  Winkler appreciated the partnership. They co-facilitated two of the focus groups together. “I watched Claire build rapport with the students. She was very open-ended and asked great prompts and follow-ups,” says Winkler. “I’m happy she had the opportunity to hone in on some of these skills that she learned in her class.”

From intern to staff

Professional growth and community building throughout the summer help students maintain ongoing growth at every stage of their learning process, leading to new jobs in other organizations, extending their internship to another semester, or a promotion from an intern to a staff member.

Like Howell, Handshake helped Orfali find both her summer internship at the MCHC as well as a spring internship in media production and audiovisual at the CATO Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. She impressed the MCHC team so much that they have extended her internship through the fall. “I learned a lot about working at a nonprofit that values the importance of history and culture, as well as collaborating with the external affairs team to create content for marketing purposes,” shared Orfali on LinkedIn. “This experience made me very interested in producing informative and educational videos and documentaries.”

As students advance in their academic careers, they can access paid, hands-on learning opportunities by serving as graduate assistants. Over the last eight years, Caleb Ruck, a language, literacy, and culture doctoral student and two-time alum, has climbed UMBC’s student worker ladder, including as a graphic designer and social media manager for UMBC’s Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion, and Belonging. He served as a special projects intern for the Center for Democracy and Civic Life and moved to the front of the classroom as a graduate teaching assistant for the modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication department. 

Ruck is now the first year-long graduate assistant for the Center for Social Justice Dialogue where he is helping develop and establish programming and procedures, such as co-facilitating a first-year seminar on the intricacies of dialogue around social identity, race, power, privilege, and oppression, and co-facilitating Building Bridges Across Difference: A Dialogue for Every Day for staff and faculty. 

This summer, Ruck focused on professional development by attending the National Intergroup Dialogue Institute, hosted by the University of Michigan’s program on intergroup relations, and preparing to welcome the first group of interns he helped interview.

“The skills I’ve acquired in this job make me feel more competent and prepared to co-facilitate dialogue, especially in student, staff, and faculty-facing contexts,” says Ruck ’22, modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, and M.A. ’24, intercultural communication. “I want to be a faculty member, teach, and conduct research on social identity topics. Being able to navigate dialogue across differences is key.”

The UMBC Career Guide has templates and resources for students to help with internet and job search at every stage of their internship and job search. Listen to more tips on UMBC’s Careers Unleashed podcast.

In the heart of the BioHealth Capital Region—spanning Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.—more than 2,300 life science companies, 78 federal laboratories, and 35 million square feet of laboratory space create a vibrant hub for biotechnology and pharmaceutical innovation. For UMBC students interning at AstraZeneca, a global leader in healthcare, this summer offered a chance to bridge classroom learning with real-world challenges. Through their work, Mustafa Akpinar, Alek Read, and Ty Allen honed technical expertise, built teamwork and communication skills, and forged connections with peers and professionals on the Baltimore/D.C. biotech scene.

Building technical mastery

At AstraZeneca, UMBC interns are diving into hands-on projects that align with their academic training and career ambitions. Akpinar, a senior information systems major, works as a cyber threat intelligence and threat detection intern, analyzing potential cyber threats and sharpening detection systems using tools like Splunk. 

“This internship is a perfect fit for both my academic path and long-term career goals,” Akpinar says, noting how the role builds on his data communications and networks and database design courses. “Long term, I want to work in cloud security or threat detection,” he adds, “and this internship gives me practical exposure to both.” 

Alek Read, a senior environmental science major, contributes to sustainability efforts at AstraZeneca’s Frederick Manufacturing Center as an environmental health safety intern. His projects include measuring biochemical oxygen demand in wastewater and ensuring environmental compliance, directly tying into his passion for sustainable innovation. 

“This experience has helped me explore how large companies manage their environmental footprint,” Read explains. “It has been exciting to see how environmental practices are applied in real-world production settings.” He’s also learned about the environmental permitting process, he says.

Allen, a junior mechanical engineering major, is a site operations intern at AstraZeneca. He applies his engineering skills to edit technical drawings in AutoCAD. The role offers him a practical glimpse into the day-to-day life of an engineer, Allen says, allowing him to apply classroom knowledge in a professional setting. “It’s a great way to experience what being an engineer is like outside of school,” he shares.

Communicating for team success

Beyond technical skills, the interns are developing essential relational skills like collaboration and communication. Akpinar highlights the collaborative nature of his work, saying, “One major takeaway is how critical collaboration is in cyber defense—threat intelligence isn’t done in a vacuum.” His ability to share ideas with mentors and teammates has grown, and his suggestions are taken seriously and encouraged by his team, Akpinar says.

Read collaborates regularly with teammates across departments, giving him ample opportunities to practice clear communication. Plus, his teammates trust him to set task deadlines independently, boosting his project management skills. Similarly, Allen values the confidence his team has in him, explaining that as long as he checks in regularly, he can manage his work as he sees fit. Developing the ability to manage one’s workload independently and coordinate with colleagues across an organization are valuable skills that will serve these interns well in any future career.

A launchpad for future careers

The internship experience extends beyond individual tasks, offering opportunities to connect with fellow interns and industry professionals. Akpinar has enjoyed bonding with other UMBC interns across diverse roles at AstraZeneca. “It’s been great having that shared experience—we support each other and exchange insights from our different teams,” he says.

Read especially appreciated an AstraZeneca UMBC alumni and intern mixer, where he networked with former UMBC students now thriving at the company. These interactions not only broaden the interns’ perspectives on the kinds of careers available in the region, but also help them build lasting professional connections that could serve them in the future. Touring manufacturing facilities and participating in inspections was another highlight for Read. 

For Akpinar, Read, and Allen, interning at AstraZeneca is more than a summer job—it’s a stepping stone to their future careers. From protecting digital assets to advancing sustainability and engineering innovation, their work has the potential for real-world impact well beyond the BioHealth Capital Region. As they grow in their roles, these UMBC students are building skills, forging connections, and laying the foundation for success in the booming biotech industry.

When students think of working in technology, they may dream of moving to Silicon Valley and landing jobs at companies such as Google or Meta. But the traditional tech giants aren’t the only employers offering careers to computer science grads.

“When I first started applying for summer internships, I was like, ‘Let me apply to Google. Let me apply to Apple. Let me apply to Uber,’” says Wonder Akpabio, a rising junior in computer science. But she also took a look at companies outside the stereotypical tech world—and found an internship that felt just right in UMBC’s own backyard. This summer Akpabio worked as a global technology intern at the Baltimore-headquartered investment management firm T. Rowe Price.

Akpabio was one of four UMBC students who interned at the company this summer. She worked on testing and updating software the company uses to report the daily value of a type of investment instrument called an exchange-traded fund. Gabriel Farmer, another rising junior computer science major who interned at T. Rowe Price this summer, worked on a team supporting the internal email and text message communications software at the company.

“Once we leave, they’ll continue to use and build on what we did, so it’s definitely been fulfilling,” Farmer says. 

A company with Baltimore roots

T. Rowe Price was founded in 1937 in Baltimore and in the subsequent decades grew to include clients, staff, and locations throughout the U.S. and the world. In 2025, the company moved its global headquarters into newly built office space in Harbor Point in downtown Baltimore. They also operate a 72-acre suburban campus in Owings Mill, Maryland.

“T. Rowe Price has strong connections with UMBC and Maryland,” says Farmer. He appreciated the large network of Retriever alumni working there and the outreach the company did with the school, for example sending recruiters to HackUMBC. 

In the spring, T. Rowe Price hosted an online program, called “Launching Your Legacy,” designed to introduce undergraduate students to career paths within T. Rowe Price, and the asset management industry in general. Farmer applied for and attended the two evening sessions. “I was able to meet people who worked there, and it gave me a better idea of the company. Since I participated in the program, they offered a lot of help throughout the summer internship application process.”

Akpabio also made a personal connection to the company when she met a recruiter at the UMBC Career Fair who guided her through the interview process.  

Once arriving for their summer jobs, Akpabio and Farmer were each assigned two mentors within the company and given many opportunities to network with other interns and with more senior colleagues. 

“Anytime you ask a question, people are ready to help,” Farmer says. “It’s been a very good experience, and T. Rowe Price is definitely a place I could see myself continuing to work at.”

On left, Wonder Akpabio and Bintu Jalloh at the T. Rowe Price intern orientation. On right, a group of interns attends an Orioles baseball game together. (l-r): Bintu Jalloh, Roselyn Ojo, Sarah Floyd, Wonder Akpabio, Aracely Saenz, and Kate Martinez Palmero. (Photos courtesy of Akpabio)

Learning on the job

Both Farmer and Akpabio say they learned valuable lessons during the internship. 

“The main thing I took away was the value of allowing yourself to make mistakes,” says Akpabio. “At the beginning, I was afraid I might break something, so I quickly asked for guidance. Now, I try to rule out possible problems myself first. I find I retain information better when I let myself struggle a bit longer.”

Farmer says his most important take-away from the internship is the importance of networking. “Many people I met had experienced a point in their career where they felt lost. And it was the people they made the effort to build a connection with who helped them out of it.”

Farmer and Akpabio are still exploring career possibilities. Akpabio says she could see herself eventually transitioning to the business or trading side of a company like T. Rowe Price. 

“There is a lot of uncertainty in the tech world right now,” Farmer says. “Looking beyond the big tech firms and trying the T. Rowe Price internship was a great experience.”

In 2024, information systems Ph.D. student Ommo Clark penned an opinion piece for BusinessDay Nigeria exploring why many Nigerians diagnose and treat their medical conditions themselves, often turning to unreliable online information.

While the essay was inspired by firsthand experiences in her native country, the impulse to consult “Dr. Google” is a worrying global trend, Clark says, and one that has motivated her Ph.D. work. It’s unlikely that people will stop going online with health questions, so Clark is researching ways that AI could help patients, healthcare providers, public health officials, and content platforms better understand and evaluate the sea of medically related content on the internet.

A dual approach to misinformation

Ommo’s efforts were recently recognized when one of her research papers, co-authored with information systems professor Karuna Joshi, won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Digital Health 2025, held in July in Helsinki, Finland. The paper, titled “Real-Time Detection of Online Health Misinformation using an Integrated Knowledgegraph-LLM Approach,” describes the results of combining two types of AI approaches (a concept sometimes called third-wave AI) to tackle the problem of identifying online health misinformation.

Clark and Joshi combined a large language model (LLM), which excels at understanding nuanced language, with knowledge graphs, which provide structured factual verification—in this case of medical knowledge. They found the combined approach significantly outperformed either approach by itself. 

“The most significant takeaway is that effective health misinformation detection requires both linguistic understanding and structured medical knowledge. Neither alone is sufficient for the complexity of health discourse online,” Clark says. 

Equally important, the researchers built robust privacy protections into the system, a critical piece that is missing from many current misinformation detection systems, Clark says.

Informing, not dictating

Going forward, the team is working to further improve their system by giving it the ability to understand the emotional undertones, cultural cues, stance, and persuasive structures of online health stories, in which people may describe personal experience with health treatments. This “narrative” information is important, Clark says, because it illuminates how some stories can be particularly compelling. The researchers are also working to build a system that can evaluate the clinical risk of misinformation, sorting potentially harmless claims from those that could risk your health. 

The upgrades will produce a tool that gives users critical information and meaningful risk assessments without presenting a “true/false” judgement, Clark says. “This nuanced approach respects user autonomy,” she says. “Rather than censoring content, we are giving people the tools to make informed decisions about the health information they encounter. In this era of declining institutional trust, transparency about methodology and risk assessment rather than authoritative declarations may be more effective in protecting public health while preserving democratic discourse.”

Clark has already received positive feedback from potential users of such tools. A nurse practitioner at Retriever Integrated Health whom she talked to about her work immediately asked if the system could be integrated into Google. Healthcare practitioners consult evidence-based medical sources before diagnosing or prescribing, the nurse said, “but patients go to Google!”

A web of mentorship, as intricate as the arachnids Mercedes Burns studies, stretches from her UMBC lab to University of North Carolina at Charlotte and University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

At the web’s center is Burns, a passionate arachnologist whose guidance heavily influenced Sarah Stellwagen, a former postdoctoral fellow in Burns’ lab and now a faculty member at UNC Charlotte. Burns and Stellwagen both mentored Tyler Brown, Ph.D. ’24, biological sciences, at UMBC, and today Brown is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow with Stellwagen in North Carolina. The web extends to Emily Marinko ’23, biological sciences, who coauthored research with Brown and Burns and today is pursuing graduate work in Nevada. 

Like spider silk, this network is strong, flexible, and enduring—fostering a love for science and a supportive environment that extends beyond the lab and into the community. All four of these researchers share a commitment to spreading their love for the often-maligned arachnids they study with broad audiences as a means of dispelling myths, reducing fear, and promoting the value of diversity.

Guiding the next generation

Burns’ mentorship style is “a very one-on-one approach,” Stellwagen says. “She has an open door and wants to talk about details and help you think through your experiments and your projects. That was a very successful way to mentor me, and I’m trying to mentor students in that way, too.” 

Burns meets students where they are, helping them pursue their interests within her research program’s framework. Burns focuses on the evolutionary ecology of Opiliones, commonly known as daddy longlegs, while Stellwagen explores the material properties of arachnid silks and glues.

“I appreciated Mercedes’ willingness to open up her lab to my interests, so we could push our expertise together, which has made me a lot more successful down the line,” Stellwagen says. “I took that openness to heart. Today, I’m a silk lab, a biomaterials lab—but for people who have different interests, as long as you can incorporate some bit of silks and glues into your research, I’m very open.” 

That attitude extends to Brown, who is more interested in behavioral research. In Burns’ lab, he led a study of Opiliones mating behaviors using a novel video-tracking method driven by machine learning. Marinko conducted many of the trials, and both are co-authors with Burns on the resulting paper. Now in Stellwagen’s lab, Brown is continuing to pursue behavioral work with a silk-and-glue twist.

“Connecting with them personally is something I’ve really appreciated with both Mercedes and Sarah. It makes the lab a more comfortable place to be in,” Brown says. In turn, “Being accessible on a personal and professional level to Emily was something that was important for me. I made sure that they had the level of independence they were hoping for.”

The personal, high-touch mentoring style in the Burns lab worked well for Marinko. “Dr. Burns and Tyler were very supportive, and I felt very welcomed. It helped me feel like I was able to ask questions, which I think is a really important part of learning in science,” Marinko says. “I wasn’t just a pair of hands that did busy work. I felt like I was really learning and contributing to the research, and that experience helped me get my position as a grad student.”

Sharing science, breaking down barriers

While much of their work happens in the lab, Burns’ team understands that thoughtful outreach can help the public care for—and perhaps even learn to like—arachnids.

“We’re talking about organisms that most people dislike,” Burns acknowledges, “so if we understand them and are curious about them, that’s going to take some of the fear away.”

For Brown, it started with “getting to know them on a more personal level”—the arachnids, that is. “Working with arachnids every day and learning so much more about them, it just becomes so much more interesting, and any fear you have sort of goes away, the more you understand them,” he says. He wants to help others overcome their fears, too. 

To that end, Brown recently participated in a children’s outreach event at a local library. “A lot of people were very nervous when they saw a bucketful of tarantula molts, but even in the short time frame of the event, getting to explain things and seeing people overcome that initial fear because they’re learning a bit—that has really helped guide me toward what I want to do with outreach.”

The entire Stellwagen lab participated in an outreach event at a major youth museum in Charlotte. “I think the commitment to outreach is born from having such a strong love for these organisms,” she says. “We do this because we love them so much, and we want people to learn about them so they don’t have this stigma. In the end, it’s about, ‘How do you get this information effectively to the public so they can care about and preserve these precious things?’”

Events at libraries, schools, and museums can foster scientific literacy and humanize scientists and the scientific process, leading to a better informed and more open-minded community. 

Marinko started out with some of their own hangups around arachnids, but over time, that changed. “When Dr. Burns talked about her research, she was so passionate about it that I wanted to be more like her, I guess. I wanted to overcome my fear; I wanted to be braver,” they say. Today Marinko works with a potentially even scarier organism: ticks. “And obviously since I ended up working with ticks, I’m not as afraid of them as I used to be, either,” Marinko says.  

Embracing difference

Reducing fears of organisms we don’t understand can even affect how we think about and interact with people who are different from us, Burns says. “I don’t think it’s an accident that I’m interested in biodiversity, and I also care a lot about human diversity—about celebrating that experience and how people bring different ideas, passions, and interests to the table,” she says.

Burns strives to promote curiosity, a genuine desire to learn, and a willingness to change one’s mind in all of her students. “If you’re curious about something, there’s less fear and more of a motivation to understand,” she says. “By getting a broad range of students involved in research, they’ll go out and have those casual conversations with friends and family that lead overall to a more open perspective on biodiversity and, more broadly, an appreciation of diversity.”

“When you go into Mercedes’ lab, there’s an excitement about these organisms that you feel,” Stellwagen says. That passion helps attract outstanding students and keep them motivated, she adds. “Mercedes has created arachnology ‘lifers’ with her enthusiasm, and now that’s trickled down into me being able to pull in some lifers, too.”

Teamwork fuels discovery

The culture of supportive mentorship in Burns’ lab extends beyond work in the lab to the group members’ collaborative approach to applying for grants to fund their ongoing research. Together, Burns, Stellwagen, and Brown refined a strategy—ranking reviewer concerns and proposing solutions—that won funding after initial rejections. 

“We collaboratively came up with techniques to go through the grant application process, and that has helped us all a lot,” Burns notes. Having each other for support also kept the group’s morale up, even when they received harsh feedback from reviewers. 

Brown was involved in some of those applications, which he says “definitely helped me make mine into a successful application in my second year in Sarah’s lab.”

Burns collaborated with Stellwagen on a major grant when Stellwagen was still a postdoc in her lab, which is not necessarily typical. “I feel like a collaborative approach to grant-writing has been more my style,” Burns reflects. “If we want rich collaborative experiences, we need to enable our colleagues to be co-PIs and apply with us.”

The mentorship web spun by Burns, Stellwagen, Brown, and Marinko at UMBC illustrates a dynamic cycle of learning, collaboration, and outreach. Their shared passion for arachnids not only drives innovative research but also fosters a supportive environment where students can grow into confident scientists. 

This network, built on personal connections and open inquiry, extends its impact through public engagement, encouraging broader appreciation for biodiversity. By fostering curiosity and embracing diverse perspectives, the lab’s legacy weaves an ever-expanding web, inspiring new generations to advance science and understanding—and maybe even grow an appreciation for arachnids along the way.

Figuring out what to get someone for their birthday can be both fun and daunting, especially when it’s their 250th birthday. On December 16, 1775, Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. Margie Burns, an assistant teaching professor of English literature, is a lifelong superfan of Jane Austen’s six novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. 

With Hollywood movies and New York Times-bestselling spinoffs of Austen’s novels, it might seem that everything there is to say about the prolific author has already been said. Burns begs to differ as she ushers in a year of Austen celebrations worldwide with her latest contribution to the Austen canon withJane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase “Pride and Prejudice”(McFarland, 2024). This new insight into Austen’s life allows Burns to open up a fresh discussion for Austen enthusiasts and to attract new readers interested in female authors who challenge societal norms by writing leading female characters with bold opinions. Burns discusses her Austen journey in a Q&A below.

Q: When did you become interested in Jane Austen and why? 

A: I first read Pride and Prejudice as a college freshman. At that time, we had a full year of freshman English, focused on literature, alert reading, and writing. This was a great opportunity, even after I had taken a course on major works of literature in high school.

I was hooked. In time, I read the rest of Austen’s books. Naturally, when I like an author, I seek out everything else they’ve written and devour that as well. With Austen, as with Shakespeare, my interest deepened over time, reinforced (rather than undermined) by academic rigor. Given Austen’s current global standing, I have come to think of Jane Austen as England’s second Shakespeare.

Q: Why did you choose to write Jane Austen Abolitionist?

A: I was flabbergasted to discover how widespread, prevalent, and ethically fundamental the phrase “pride and prejudice” was in Britain and even in America before Austen chose it as her novel title. I was even more powerfully struck by finding out, over and over again across more than two centuries, that “pride and prejudice” as a phrase was being used as a critique of slavery and the slave trade. There was absolutely no one else writing about this aspect of Austen’s work.

Once I dug deeper, I found hundreds of examples. Most of the discussion about the Austens and slavery has focused on Austen’s more remote relatives. I do not believe that Jane Austen was unduly influenced by family finances involving her non-nuclear relatives. Her immediate family opposed the slave trade. More importantly, the evidence is overwhelming that she opposed it. 

I would like to produce a second edition of the book. There is further relevant and closely related material, literary and historical evidence, through the end of the U.S. Civil War. 

Q: What is your favorite Austen book?

A: That is a hard question. My “favorite” Austen book is probably whichever one I am working on/doing research on, or writing about at a given time. 

Q: Which Austen character do you like to quote?

A: Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice says one of my favorite quotes: “You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security for happiness.” (Elizabeth is talking about Charlotte Lucas’s decision to marry Mr. Collins. )

Q: Why would anyone be interested in Austen’s work centuries after it was published?

A: I dislike the word “themes” and try to avoid it, but there is no doubt that Austen’s heroines, their situation/s, and their ethics still speak to readers today, and in a language easily understood by contemporary readers. The readers are also being joined by millions of viewers, as the ever-evolving stream of film adaptations from Hollywood, Bollywood, and elsewhere demonstrates. 

I am not alone in seeing that part of Austen’s appeal lies in the successful transmission of ethics through her heroines: pro-health, pro-spirit, and pro-ethical stature, although not in a simplistic and preachy way. Currently, of course, the appeal is broadcast farther through a range of media and genres, from podcast to parody.

Read more about Burns’s insights into Austen’s ideas on abolitionism in “The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice” article she wrote for The Conversation. 

Burns will present her research at the annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America in Baltimore this fall 2025.

Learn more about UMBC’s English department.

Header graphic: Design by Jill Blum/UMBC. Headshot by Brad Ziegler/UMBC. Book cover courtesy of Margie Burns.