When Samuel Bendek, a current mechanical engineering sophomore at UMBC, was still in high school, he worked in a soccer ball factory in his native country of Colombia. At some point, he was given the job of figuring out how much energy the balls retained after bouncing off a wall.

He went to work, measuring and calculating. “And it turned out, it was greater than 90 percent,” Bendek says. “I was surprised that a soccer ball is so energy efficient!”

The balls were made from natural rubber, made from the sap of certain trees. When the balls hit a wall, the rubber compresses, storing the kinetic energy from their motion in elastic potential energy. Then, as the balls bounce back, the elastic potential energy turns back into kinetic energy, with very low energy loss.

The experience got Bendek thinking—what if rubber could store more than the energy of a soccer player’s kick? What if it could store energy from the sun and the wind?

About five years later, Bendek and his sister and fellow entrepreneur Juliana Bendek pitched that very idea on the stage at the inaugural Maryland Student Ventures Showcase, held February 18 in Baltimore to celebrate the nine local student ventures selected for the first-ever Pava LaPere Innovation Awards. As an award-winner, the Bendeks’ company Elastic Energy will receive $50,000 from the state of Maryland to further its development of a mechanical battery made from natural rubber.

The award and showcase marked the latest step in Bendek’s entrepreneurial journey. Along the way he has embraced the support and guidance of friends, family, and mentors, from UMBC and beyond.

“I have always wanted to create things, since I was a kid destroying my grandmother’s clock to build a new toy,” says Bendek. “This is an opportunity to create something that makes the world a better place.” 

From garage tinkering to investor meetings

Shortly after his soccer-ball-inspired light-bulb moment, Bendek got to work in his proverbial garage, experimenting with different ways to stretch rubber and store energy. When he had a decent prototype, he recruited his sister to join his efforts. 

“My sister is super smart and very good at connecting to people,” says Bendek. “When I had the prototype, I called her up at like 2 a.m. in the morning. I said, ‘It’ll work. Let’s do this thing together.’”

With some initial funding from family and friends the two started developing the next phase of the technology, while also pitching new investors and building out their team. 

Along the way, Bendek, who is also a competitive swimmer, was recruited by UMBC and decided to become a Retriever. He took his dreams to Maryland, and it didn’t take him long to connect with UMBC’s resources for student entrepreneurs.

He reached out to Kevin Fulmer, the director of the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which supports the entrepreneurial mindset at UMBC with courses, speaker series featuring business leaders, startup accelerator programs, and assistance with business ideas and networking with experts.

“I met Samuel when he was still a first-year student,” says Fulmer. “He came in with a slide deck that included pictures of a working prototype, and I was really impressed. We started meeting on a regular basis and it’s been really fun to see his progress and certainly exciting to see him win things like this $50,000 grant.”

“Kevin has helped me a lot,” says Bendek. “He helped me build a business plan, put me in touch with local experts, and helped find opportunities like the Pava LaPere Innovation Grant.”

Imagining a clean energy future

The batteries Bendek’s company plans to build are slim cylinders a little taller than an average person. Inside, a motor, ideally powered by solar cells or other renewable sources of energy, stretches a 100-meter elastic band to more than ten times its original length by winding it around an inner core. When the power to the motor is turned off, the system can go into reverse. The motor becomes an electric generator, powered by the unwinding elastic band. 

Each battery can store about 1 kilowatt-hours of energy—For comparison, a typical American household uses about 30 kilowatt hours of electricity a day.

While Elastic Energy’s batteries cannot provide as much energy as chemical batteries of the same weight, Bendek says their main selling points are that they are long-lasting, relatively inexpensive, and don’t require the mining of minerals like lithium, which can damage the environment and also lead to geopolitical tensions due to the minerals’ uneven distribution around the world. 

The company plans to first target the consumer market, offering the batteries as backup power for homes or RVs. Eventually, they hope they can become part of the solution for grid-scale energy storage.

Bendek plans to test the technology this summer in a remote, off-grid town in Colombia to demonstrate its viability. 

“These batteries are a technology that really has the potential to grow, I’m confident of that,” says Fulmer. “And Samuel has a great mindset—the entrepreneurial mindset of making things happen.” 

When Johnny Olszewski walks the halls of the Longworth House Office Building across the street from the Capitol dome, he stands head and shoulders above most of his peers. And while his height may be the first thing that sets him apart from the flood of new legislators in Washington, D.C., his consistent dedication to his homebase constituents—including much of Baltimore County where he was born, raised, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in his backyard at UMBC—has helped him arrive as a first-term representative in Congress with a solid reputation preceding him. 

“All around the Capitol, people are learning how to say ‘Johnny O, Johnny O.’ They were saying it the first day,” shares Olszewski’s fellow congressman Kweisi Mfume, who represents Maryland’s 7th district, which includes UMBC.

To say that public service in the Baltimore area has defined this Retriever’s career would be a bit of an understatement. Prior to getting sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in early January 2025, Olszewski, Ph.D. ’17, public policy, served as the Baltimore County executive, leading the 73rd most populous county in the country. He came to that role with two terms in the Maryland House of Delegates. When he originally won the delegate position, Olszewski was a 24-year-old social studies and special education public school teacher.

How does a first-generation college student from Dundalk work his way up to the District? “There’s a saying in D.C.,” explains Olszewski, “that you’re generally one of two types of politicians—you’re a show horse or you’re a work horse. And my grounding at UMBC and elsewhere has me really wanting to come and do the right work and find solutions for some really important, but also very challenging and sometimes divisive, issues that are facing our country.”

From classroom to Congress

Many students daydream about an out-of-state school experience, but for Olszewski—seated in his congressional office with an extra-large painting of a crab with a can of Old Bay across from him—staying local was the goal.

“UMBC was a no-brainer,” says Olszewski, who points to his diploma hanging high on the wall, “first and foremost, because of the reputation of the institution. Secondly, the availability of and the reputation of the specific program—public policy. And then also, I do believe in taking advantage of it being a state school, and it’s in my county.”

With his personal experience of electoral politics and other hands-on practice as a Maryland delegate, the public policy professors eagerly welcomed Olszewski into the program. While originally Olszewski saw his Ph.D. as more of a personal project, he quickly realized how impactful his growth and connections gained on campus would be in governing. 

Roy Meyers, professor emeritus, was Olszewski’s dissertation chair. “It was a great benefit to have him as a current legislator in the classroom,” says Meyers. “Other students learned from the real-world examples he provided, either confirming or improving on what I taught.” 

Meyers notes that there’s a potential drawback for mid-career students with government experience—they might rely too much on that experience, and fail to pick up what the academic experience can provide: exposure to different theories, perspectives, and methods. “That was not the case with Johnny, quite the opposite,” says Meyers. “It was clear that he intended to use much of what he learned from all the courses in the program. An example is how Johnny emphasized transparency and communications with constituents on the Baltimore County budget, a big improvement from previous practice.”

Renee Whitby, M.P.P. ’15, one of Olszewski’s fellow students in a summer sociology course at UMBC, says that, “Johnny was smart, down to earth, and had a good sense of humor. We often have a preconceived notion about politicians, but he proved to be a regular person.” Whitby, who now works in Towson University’s College of Education, was so excited to cast her vote for her former classmate in his congressional run. “Johnny brings a wealth of knowledge and common sense that will benefit the constituents of District 2 in shaping federal legislation,” she says.

Meyers, who was occasionally tapped by Olszewski in his prior role to lead groups about spending affordability or process modernization, knows first hand that Olszewski is well-equipped to make the leap from county executive to congressman. “That he was elected by fellow Democratic freshmen to be their representative on the influential Steering and Policy Committee is a sign that he is already a respected member, and I expect that he will be visible,” says Meyers. 

Olszewski now represents the majority of Baltimore County, Carroll County, and a northern sliver of Baltimore City—as well as global reach with his committee assignment to Foreign Affairs—and he’s ready to call on his academic background and history of legislative experience to lead on a larger scale on issues like affordable housing, gun safety, workforce development, and other areas he took on as county executive. The congressman has a word of advice for students and constituents alike: “Don’t wait your turn. I think if you have a burning passion to get involved, there are so many ways you can do it.” 

Common sense to scale

Olszewski is not naive about the polarization of federal politics but he wants the chance to scale some common sense bipartisan change like he aimed for in Baltimore County. 

“One of the things that I prided myself on as county executive was just how open, accessible, and transparent we were about what was going on, how we made decisions, and what was happening. And I expect very much to continue that approach here,” says Olszewski, sweeping his hands around his congressional office space. “We passed bipartisan police reform. We had Republicans and Democrats voting unanimously for budgets, which is just unheard of these days.”

Olszewski’s public policy dissertation at UMBC explored conditions under which lawmakers actually use evidence to drive policymaking as opposed to other considerations. What he discovered is that, “policymaking, unfortunately, isn’t just an academic exercise,” says Olszewski. “A lot of academics and researchers spend a lot of time coming up with really thoughtful research and understanding of the world…and there might be really compelling policy prescriptions that will move the needle on any number of issues. But there are folks across the aisle who, because of personal beliefs or political considerations, just can’t support that.” 

“It’s still a little humbling and inspiring to know that a kid from Dundalk, who was the first in his family to go to college, is now part of a group that is responsible for leading our nation, but also still just being a kid from Dundalk,” says the freshman representative.

His commute and his title have changed, but Olszewski plans to still bring the best of himself, all 6 feet 6 inches to the job at hand. “Compromise is possible without compromising values,” he says. On this day in January, where the sidewalks are lined with stacks of disassembled but not yet removed barricades following the inauguration, he adds, “And that’s where it gets complicated. It might not be the pure, perfect answer, but I think that there are places where we can still find that common ground.”

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A new $7.8 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will support the development of biologically-powered underwater sensors. Right now, a vast network of underwater sensing devices in oceans around the world conducts environmental monitoring and supports national security—and most of these devices rely on batteries and underwater cables for power. 

“The motivation of the project is to eliminate the requirement for periodic battery replacement or recharging, which is expensive and logistically demanding,” says Kevin Sowers, professor of marine biotechnology and a co-PI on the award, which is led by Stephanie Lansing, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park. The project is supported by DARPA’s BioLogical Undersea Energy (BLUE) program and includes researchers from nine universities and companies.

A new fuel source for underwater sensors

The proposed devices, called the Persistent Oceanographic Device Power (PODPower) system, will autonomously draw phytoplankton from the surrounding water into a fermentation chamber. There, microorganisms will break down the phytoplankton into simpler chemical compounds. Finally, other microorganisms in a microbial fuel cell will use those compounds to generate electricity, Sowers explains. Sowers, a microbiologist, will work on engineering bacteria that can break down the phytoplankton into chemicals such as acetic acid that the microbes in the fuel cell can use. 

Sowers will also lead efforts to develop a testing environment in the Aquaculture Research Center (ARC) at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) in downtown Baltimore to evaluate components and a complete prototype of the new devices. The current award will support development of a functioning prototype, and there is the potential for $3.4 million more for testing in the open ocean. 

“This unique collaboration of interdisciplinary experts will produce a bio-inspired system that has game-changing potential to provide direct electric power to improve sensing capabilities while protecting and limiting the impact to the environment through use of this unique bioenergy system,” Lansing said.