Lekelia “Kiki” Jenkins ’97, biological sciences, assistant professor of marine and environmental affairs at the University of Washington, is one off 126 recipients of the Sloan Research Fellowship, named annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, Jenkins received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2006 by pioneering a new field of study into the invention and adoption of marine conservation technology. Her research interests include: the theoretical and empirical study of the invention and adoption of marine technologies, especially bycatch reduction devices and tidal energy arrays; the study of the integration of “lay” expertise into scientific decision-making; and the study of gear substitution as a means to reduce bycatch and habitat impacts of fishing gear. Recent research includes studying the factors that cause fishermen to adopt, or not to adopt, equipment that can help sea turtles avoid being caught by fishing gear or cause them the least harm if they are caught.

Read a UMBC Magazine profile of Jenkins here.

In a recent interview with Baltimore’s City Paper, Nick Podgurski ’07, music, lets readers in on his latest project, Feast of the Epiphany. Podgurski, who first made a name for himself in the Baltimore indie scene as drummer for the band Yukon, has released numerous albums since graduating from UMBC featuring his drumming, songwriting, vocal and synthesizer skills.

Speaking about Feast of the Epiphany, which is uncharacteristically devoid of drums, he tells City Paper:

“The interaction between the parts is kind of a drum set, that’s the way I sort of hear it,” he says. “It’s so interactive it becomes static, kind of forcing the drumset into another set of instruments, and then forcing those elements into such amounts of interaction that they become a static ambient field. And then simultaneously, that static ambient field can’t be evaluated as a static ambient field because of its inherent parts within.”

Read the full story here.

Three UMBC alumnae and one faculty member were among the list of semi-finalists for the 2013 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize, the The Baltimore Office for Promotion and Arts announced this week. Congratulations Imaging Media and Digital Arts MFA alumni Mina Cheon ’02, Marian Glebes  ’09, and Agnes Moon ’99 for their selection.  Associate professor Lynn Cazabon, visual arts, is also a semi-finalist.

The Sondheim prize awards a $25,000 fellowship to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Baltimore region. The prize is in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced with our partners, The Walters Art Museum (WAM) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Approximately six finalists will be selected for the final review for the prize.  Their work will be exhibited in the Special Exhibition Gallery at The Walters Art Museum.

An exhibition of the semi-finalists’ work will be shown in the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries of the Maryland Institute College of Art during the Artscape weekend (July 19-21, 2013).

Robert Provine, psychology, has an essay in a newly published book entitled “This Explains Everything,” a collection of answers to Edge.org’s annual question for 2012. This year’s question was “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” In Provine’s response, “Observers Observing,” he writes that “observation is the link between all empirical sciences, and the reason why physicists were among the founders of experimental psychology. The difference between psychology and physics is one of emphasis; both involve the process of observers observing. Physics stresses the observed, psychology the observer.”

Provine has also answered the annual question for 2013, “What should we be worried about?,” the answers to which are posted on the website. Provine writes in “The Gift of Worry” that “too much worry strands us in an agitated state of despair, anxiety and paranoia; too little leaves us without motivation and direction. Worry contributes life’s “to do” list, but its relentless prompts are unpleasant and we work to diminish them by crossing items off the list. The list is constantly fine-tuned and updated. As life’s problems are solved, topics of worry are extinguished, or if a dreaded event does not occur or becomes obsolete, we substitute new, more adaptive topics of concern. The bottom line? Stop worrying about worry. It’s good for you.”

Robert Provine, professor of psychology, has won an Association of American Publishers’ 2012 PROSE Award for “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond.”  The book received the award in the category of Biomedicine and Neuroscience.

The PROSE Awards – the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence –honors the best in professional and scholarly publishing, as judged by peer publishers, librarians and academics. This year’s competition attracted 518 entries of books, reference works, journals and electronic products in more than 40 categories.

“The winners and honorable mentions announced this year are high caliber works and genuinely represent the best in scholarly publishing,” said John A. Jenkins, Chairman, PROSE Awards and President and Publisher Emeritus, CQ Press.

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association representing 300 premier US publishers of high-quality scholarly, professional, education and entertainment content produced using the most current technology, reaching the world.

The Baltimore Office for Promotion and Arts announced the semi-finalists for the 2013 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize this week. Congratulations to Lynn Cazabon, visual arts, and Imaging Media and Digital Arts alumni Mina Cheon, Marian Glebes and Agnes Moon for their selection.

The Sondheim prize awards a $25,000 fellowship to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Baltimore region. The prize is in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced with our partners, The Walters Art Museum (WAM) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Approximately six finalists will be selected for the final review for the prize.  Their work will be exhibited in the Special Exhibition Gallery at The Walters Art Museum.

An exhibition of the semi-finalists’ work will be shown in the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries of the Maryland Institute College of Art during the Artscape weekend (July 19-21, 2013).

Following the Ravens’ Super Bowl win, the team will increase ticket prices at M&T Bank Stadium, reports the Baltimore Sun. Season ticket holders will see an average price increase of 10%, plus a $5 parking rate increase.

UMBC sports economist Dennis Coates notes, “In the grand scheme of ticket price changes, I’m not sure that a 10 percent is particularly a big one. But it doesn’t make it any easier for the average fan to pay an extra 10 percent. We’re still in a relatively sluggish economy and there are a lot of people whose income hasn’t changed a whole lot.” However, Coates suggests, compared with 20-30% ticket price increases that some franchises have tried, particularly after building new stadiums, the 10% raise is more modest, and fans might be more willing to accept it following the Super Bowl victory.

Responding to recent cheating scandals — from Lance Armstrong using banned substances to reports of inflated performance data in higher ed — Thomas F. Schaller’s latest Baltimore Sun column argues, “there’s ample evidence that cheating is rampant in almost every sphere of American life.” The political science professor delves into the economic impacts of cheating, particularly in the realm of tax evasion.

Schaller writes, “In a July 2012 report, the Tax Justice Network estimated that, conservatively, between $21 trillion and $32 trillion of global income is hidden in offshore tax havens…that means probably a minimum of $5 trillion in U.S income is currently shielded from taxation. Assume an average marginal tax rate of just 20 percent, and that’s $1 trillion lost to the treasury.” He further suggests that asymmetry in the U.S. tax system “makes cheating especially tempting to the rich.” Read Schaller’s full commentary on the Baltimore Sun website.

“As the Baltimore Ravens’ march to victory in Super Bowl XLVII defied the common wisdom of the sports world, so, too, has an examination of the genetics of their winged namesakes in the western United States led one local biologist to evidence he says defies the common wisdom of his field,” writes reporter Arthur Hirsch in the February 17th edition of the Baltimore Sun.

Hirsch’s story follows the work of Kevin Omland, Professor of Biological Sciences here at UMBC. Omland who has been working for the past 15 years on reverse speciation of ravens.

Vist the Baltimore Sun to learn more about Omland’s work.

Denise Meringolo, associate professor of history, has won this year’s National Council on Public History Book Award for her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History.

The National Council on Public History is an organization dedicated to making the past useful in the present and to encouraging collaboration between historians and their public.

In Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, Meringolo traces the roots of the public history field, showing that the roots of public history reach back to the nineteenth century, when the federal government entered into the work of collecting and preserving the nation’s natural and cultural resources. Meringolo shows that the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s gave public history an institutional home that grounded professional practice simultaneously in the values of the emerging discipline and in government service, but that even thereafter, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to define and redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day, Meringolo argues, as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad.

In selecting Meringolo’s book for the award, the committee said that “Meringolo turns the historian’s trained eye on the historical profession itself and in so doing has produced an outstanding work on the public practice of the history profession…[,] bring[ing] new insights to the origins and craft of public history. Public historians have always had to tink hard about self-definition and this is often conceived in relation to historians within the academy. Meringolo reminds us that what makes public history so distinctive, and so potentially powerful, is that its origins lie not within either side of the university/non-university dichotomy, but rather within a truly collaborative effort among a variety of public and private institutions to render the idea of ‘nation’ meaningful to American society at large. By examining the origins of public history, Meringolo’s book can reframe and reinvigorate debates about how history can remain in the public sphere, and about the types of partnerships which can be created to sustain history’s relevance.”