Whether he is enlightening readers on the nuances of photographs with his posts on “The Lens” blog at The New York Times, curating an exhibit such as For All the World to See, or testing the boundaries of memoir and cultural criticism (as he did with his book White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness), you can count on Maurice Berger to be at the forefront of American culture’s engagement with its history and visual culture.

Berger is research professor and the chief curator at UMBC’s Center for Arts, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC). He is also a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York City. He took a B.A. from Hunter College and his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Berger’s range of activities is prolific – including cultural criticism in books and articles, curating exhibits and filmmaking. (His short film, Threshold, was screened in May at the Whitney Biennial.)

Berger’s interests range widely, and he has written about and organized exhibits taking in the grand sweep of 20th Century U.S. culture and its artistic movements. Yet it is his eagerness to tackle some of the thorniest issues in American race relations that has catapulted him to greatest prominence. Early in his career, Berger was a key voice in the debate over whether art museums were perpetuating racism (including a 1990 piece in Art in America – “Are Art Museums Racist?”). And his memoir, White Lies, dissected his own experience and attitudes about race while simultaneously conducting a rigorous yet empathetic analysis of the entire fraught concept of racial categories. (The New York Times called the book “startlingly original.”)

As Berger receives recognition and rewards for For All the World to See and his other work in cultural research (including an Emmy Award nomination for his work on a PBS Sunday Arts story about For All the World to See and the “Outstanding Exhibition in a University Art Museum 2010″ from the Association of Art Museum Curators), he is moving forward on new projects that include three future exhibits that will also appear at the CADVC in coming years: a 25th anniversary exhibit for the center and a new exhibit tracing the influence of modernism on the birth of American television.

Berger talked with UMBC Magazine recently about his career and those future exhibits. He is particularly excited about the opportunity to reach even wider audiences through his posts on “The Lens” blog.

“It’s an opportunity to explore the story of race in America through photographs,” Berger says. “The enormous audience that the Times affords will provides me with a broad, international platform to explore the fraught, but also vital, subject of race. The response to my first piece this July, on Gordon Parks’ civil rights photographs, was extraordinary. My plan is to write an essay every other month.”

– Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC Magazine: One thing that immediately stands out to me when looking at your career is that you have spent a great deal of time questioning how race works in our institutions and in our own individual lives – as you did so eloquently with your own life in White Lies.

Maurice Berger: My interest in questioning institutional attitudes about race goes back to my childhood, to growing up in an environment in which very few white people lived or worked. I saw how the system operated very early in life. I could walk around a department store and not be followed by security guards, for example, while my black friends would walk around the same stores and be followed. Even early on, I understood.

I also saw teachers who would treat black students quite differently from the way they treated me – since I for most of my early education I was one of the few white kids in the schools I attended. Even from that early vantage point, I could see things were not quite equal – and that institutions had certain kinds of collective attitudes.

I became a professor at Hunter College in the early 1980s. (First thing you know I was back as a professor at my undergraduate college.) And even there, I found it interesting that I had only one African-American colleague – and he was an artist, not an art historian. I had never heard a black artist discussed in any of my art history classes as an undergraduate or a graduate student, perhaps with the exception of a mention of Jacob Lawrence in passing.

Given that my field is 20th century American art and culture, that’s pretty amazing. And my teaching career began just about the time I began publishing in 1980. So at that point, I started to see that there was a problem. And I realized that I had to do something about it as an art historian and a cultural historian (as well as a responsible human being).

As you see with White Lies, I’ve always been thinking about these issues. But the reason that the memoir was published in 1999 and not in 1989 was that I wasn’t ready. One of the hardest things that I have accomplished as a writer was to write autobiographically. It brings up memories. It brings up things you’d rather not think about. It exposes you in a certain way. And then when you publish it, you rightfully (in an almost paranoid way) feel that what you’ve published isn’t a piece of writing, but you. If it is rejected, then you are rejected.

The good news is that White Lies was widely reviewed and almost every review was very positive and some were raves (it even was nominated for several awards). The book remains in print and it still has a relatively wide audience, especially among young people and in academia. So it turned out all right, but it was very scary at the time.

UMBC Magazine: When I went back and read the profile of you that The New York Times published shortly after White Lies came out, one of the things you noted was that readers’ responses to the book were very different and very personal. Telling your own story seemed to compel readers to share their journeys.

Berger: I think with race – and attitudes and behavior around race – if you want to change, it has to begin with personal honesty. I’ve always said that if people can’t see the problem and acknowledge the problem, then you can’t get past it.

Remember, so much of what I am writing about in White Lies is not just the domain of white supremacy in the South, it is also the domain of white liberals and leftists. Racism is not limited to conservatives or Southerners. We all need to collectively – and, even more important, intimately and privately, where there is less room to be rebuked or embarrassed – assess ourselves.

And that’s the point of White Lies. And it’s also part of the apparatus of For All the World to See. All the images and stories in the exhibit invite you to think about your own attitudes. Or, if you are older, to reflect on when you yourself first saw these images. How did they make you feel? Did they help change your attitudes? Did they awaken you to the reality of racism and segregation and the problems they presented for the country?

UMBC Magazine: Do you remember the moment when you had the vision for For All the World to See? Was there a particular image that set you in the direction you took in the exhibit?

Berger: It’s a funny thing to think about, because I can usually answer that question when someone asks it about a particular project. It’s not that I don’t remember with regard to For All the World to See, but the thing that’s different with this project – and possibly why it has been so well received and reached so many people (almost one million to date) – is that for the first time, in a dynamic and comprehensive way, I have been able to put together my two primary cultural research areas. The first is the history of American race relations – the issues of race and racism and the analysis of them.

The other interest I have been able to bring to bear on For All the World to See is how visual images manipulate, inspire, infiltrate and integrate ideas in American society and culture. As a cultural historian, my focus is on visual culture and how it operates in society.

So maybe that’s why I can’t remember a particular image. This project has been so natural. It’s the culmination of the two things I have been most driven to do and to explore, two things that have preoccupied me for most of my life.

UMBC Magazine: One of things in the exhibit that impressed me greatly was the way that the iconic journalistic images of the political and moral battles of the Civil Rights movement are juxtaposed and connected with lesser-known visual images created to build self-esteem in the African-American community and portray life in that community as very much like that in white America.

Berger: Until this project most exhibitions of Civil Rights history or Civil Rights culture focused on one particular thing: The way that photographers, and mostly well-known photographers or photojournalists (many of them white), documented the struggle for Civil Rights. And what that has meant is that these exhibitions are dominated by images of the events that we have come to associate with the Civil Rights movement: the protests, the marches, conflagrations, violence, poverty, and all the outward vestiges of racial segregation and prejudice. And that is what Civil Rights imagery has come to mean for most Americans.

For All the World to See argues that the Civil Rights movement is not just about who documented it, or the story of these protests and other events. It proposes that images of all kinds—from film and television to picture magazines and advertising (to quote the great, late photographer Gordon Parks) were employed by African Americans as a “weapon” against racism in America.

Thus, the story of the visual culture of the civil rights movement is far more complicated than we realize. For as [Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall said, the struggle for civil rights was not just about the protests or the legal cases, but also about African-American morale and legitimacy. How do you inspire a community that is continually beaten down by the realities of racism to rise up and keep the faith? How do you convince white people that the habitually negative and subservient images of black Americans in the culture at large were wrong and immoral? And, perhaps most important, how do you bolster the morale of African Americans scarred by racism and segregation? How to you reflect back to them images that showed the wholesome nature of black life, despite the onslaught of racism in myriad forms?

And, just as importantly, while much of white America did not perpetuate Jim Crow segregation, most white people remained uninformed about the African American community and the pervasive reality of racism, particularly their own. Once again, visual culture played an important role in educating white Americans about the reality of race and racism in America. Affirmative images of black people served as a very important aspect of the movement. These images not only bolstered the morale of African Americans in the face of withering prejudice, but also reminded white Americans that black people led the same kinds of lives and had the same kinds of family relationships as their white counterparts. Such imagery, in other words, powerfully appealed to the empathy of white readers and viewers.

UMBC Magazine: What’s next for you as a cultural historian and curator?

Berger: I am working on a number of projects simultaneously. Much of what I’ll continue to do revolves around the question of American race relations and the study of racism and segregation in America. I am working on another large Civil Rights exhibition and book, though it’s still a long way off, and it will be at CADVC in 2017: The Site of Memory: Reimagining the History of Civil Rights. Plus, I will be contributing regularly to the “Lens” blog at The New York Times, which I am very excited about. Writing for the Times gives me a broad, international platform through which I can share my ideas about race in America (and hopefully make a difference, even change minds and hearts).

I’ve also had a long term relationship with The Jewish Museum, where I have worked on a number of projects over the past twenty years. Last December, shortly after she came on board, newly hired Jewish Museum director Claudia Gould asked me to join the museum as consulting curator. She felt that my work and my point of view were a good fit. Over the past eight months, we’ve been working together with our colleagues to reshape the mandate of the museum and move forward in a bigger and more dynamic way.

I am also working on a collaborative project with The Jewish Museum and the CADVC, an exhibition and companion book (the latter to be published by Yale University Press): Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television. It’s the first major research project in a long time that does not focus on the story of American race relations It tells the extraordinary story of the birth and rise of American television from the 1940s to the 1960s, and how its executives and writers and producers – most of whom were Jewish – embraced the modernist avant garde as a source of inspiration, aesthetics, and ideas. Television pioneers such as Rod Serling were actively looking at surrealism; Ernie Kovacs was embracing both Dadaist and surrealist sensibilities in his work. And CBS employed some of the top modern artists and designers of the period to help them develop what was at the time one of the most progressive design campaigns of any American company.

The exhibit also argues that television was born not just in the spirit of entertainment, some of it frivolous, but also with deeply held artistic and intellectual concepts and ambitions. This story is virtually unknown to most Americans (and even most art and cultural historians).

Yet, even an institution as famous as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) got into the act of producing, curating, and analyzing the medium. In the 1950s, the museum established the MOMA “Television Project,” dedicated to exploring the creative possibilities of television and producing content that sold the gospel of modern art and established the importance of modern artists. We will actually be working with MoMA to produce an array of public programs and TV screenings around the exhibition.

Ultimately, and despite the commercialism of it all, art has always been present on television. The point of “Revolution of the Eye” is that art is in the medium’s DNA.

I am also proud to say that I will also be curating CADVC’s 25th anniversary exhibition, which will open in 2014. So at UMBC alone, over the next five years, three of my projects will premiere.

– Return to Staging the Struggle

With Josh Wilhide ’10 M.S., Mass Spectrometry Facility Manager

On a hot summer day, there’s nothing quite like the perky fizz of a just-opened soda to keep you cool and caffeinated. As consumers, many of us are incredibly loyal to a particular brand – even to the point of being sommelier-level tasters of sodas.

Many people can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi blindfolded. But how does the hardworking human taste bud stand up to the massive data-collecting power of one of UMBC’s mass spectrometers?

Josh Wilhide ’10 M.S., chemistry, can quench our thirst for this particular knowledge quite handily. Using one of the mass spectrometers in UMBC’s Molecular Characterization & Analysis Complex (or MCAC), and a bit of basic scientific reasoning, the mysteries of cola will be revealed!

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

1. An oh-so-discerning palate
2. Cups and paper for secret voting (no cheating!)
3. Sample colas: Pepsi, Coke and generic (Giant brand)
4. A mass spectrometer, if you can get one. Oh wait, we have seven of them right here at UMBC.

EXPLORING THE BORDER

When human beings have to be at a certain place at a certain time, they have lots of handy aids to do so: alarm clocks and watches, maps and GPS systems.

Michelle Starz-Gaiano, an assistant professor of biology at UMBC, is fascinated by the question of how cells do the same thing.

“Cells leave on time and get to a destination on time during development,” she says. “They get to the right places almost all the time and they don’t get lost.”

What guides cells? One aspect of this question that researchers in Starz-Gaiano’s lab want to understand is how cells decide which particular ones in an organism will move and which will stay.

For instance, many cells must divide as a person develops from an egg to an embryo, to a human being. And as they divide, those cells must also reorganize themselves – and many of those cells migrate to different locations within an organism to fulfill their missions.

Starz-Gaiano and her colleagues are studying cell migration in fruit flies, concentrating specifically on a population of cells called “border cells.”

“Genes and proteins are similar between humans and flies,” Starz-Gaiano observes. “So if we can understand how they work in a simple system like flies, it really predicts how they’re going to act in humans.”

The relative simplicity of fruit flies also helps aid researchers. “In flies you can see how molecular changes translate to the whole organism,” she says.

How do Starz-Gaiano and her colleagues unlock the secrets of cell migration in flies? Biologists call it “loss of function” – but what it comes down to is simple subtraction and observation.

“We take away one gene at a time and see if the cells migrate or not,” she relates. “Then we can infer that those genes are required for cell migration.”

Studying cell migration is not just about exploring genetics. The observation of the border cells requires a great deal of live imaging with a microscope – which offers an enhanced look inside the process that is not available with a simpler two-dimensional observation.

“One surprise that came out of the live imaging is that [the migrating border cells] rotate,” says Starz-Gaiano. “People have done a tremendous amount of work looking at cell migration in tissue culture dishes where the cells are moving across two dimensions.” Live imaging offers the “huge advantage to look at the whole tissue at once.”

Interdisciplinary collaborations with the mathematics and chemistry departments, funded with help from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have been a key to advancing the work being done in Starz-Gaiano’s research lab. (She is also the recipient of an NSF Early Career Award.)

The NSF’s Undergraduate Biology Mathematics Program has allowed Starz-Gaiano to team up with assistant professor of mathematics Bradford Peercy. “We’re doing some mathematical modeling to answer some of the harder questions about how the cells are moving and which cells are specified to move,” she observes.

Another grant from the NIH’s Chemistry Biology Interface Program (aimed to encourage interdisciplinary work by graduate students) is facilitating collaboration between Starz-Gaiano and UMBC professor of chemistry Katherine Seley-Radtke to explore applications that the cell migration research might have on drug design. Because cell movement is controlled in part by a cascade of molecules, this partnership is allowing researchers to work toward assembling drugs, molecule by molecule, that may inhibit some of the biological processes that promote cell migration.

— Nicole Ruediger

WIRELESS IS MORE

Most professors urge students to write concisely. But the students in Denise Meringolo’s public history class recently faced an extreme challenge to be succinct: Turn in a final project just 150 words long.

The work submitted by Meringolo’s students helped create a new smartphone app for Baltimore Heritage, a nonprofit preservation organization. The app leads users on a walking tour of Baltimore – and the 150 words is about as much text as can be read easily on an iPhone screen.

As an assistant professor of history and the coordinator of the public history track in the historical studies M.A. program, Meringolo often uses her Introduction to Public History class to collaborate with external partners on ways to enhance public understanding of history. Yet some of these classroom collaborations were never implemented by partner organizations, an outcome that was frustrating to a professor who likes to call her class: “Committing History in Public.”

Meringolo’s luck changed when she met Eli Pousson through UMBC’s Orser Center for Place, Community and Culture – where they are both board members. Pousson is the field officer for Baltimore Heritage, which needed content for their new “Explore Baltimore Heritage” app.

“It seemed like a very natural partnership,” says Pousson.

The collaboration on the app allowed UMBC students like Shae Adams ’13, M.A., historical studies, to wrestle with the issues faced each day by public historians. “I’ve had years of practice writing traditional research papers,” says Adams. “But to tease out a single story from that research and tell it in about 150 words? Much more challenging. Throughout the semester, I found myself loving the inherent challenge of interpretative public history.”

Meringolo’s partnership with Baltimore Heritage will continue this fall, when the graduate students in a class she’s called “West Side Stories” will create digital narratives – including oral histories – for the organization’s app.

Ironically, Meringolo doesn’t even own a smartphone yet. But she teaches her students that the principles of good storytelling stay the same no matter how the tale is conveyed.

“The mode of delivery is changing, not the impulse behind it,” says Meringolo, who has just published a new study of her discipline’s trends from the nineteenth century until today titled Museums, Monuments and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (University of Massachusetts Press).

It’s no surprise that Meringolo sees her own work as part of that continuum, and she values the fact that UMBC is also becoming ever more engaged in the work of public history. “Public history is an intellectual discipline in the service of the community, and public universities are supposed to be in service to the world around them,” she says. “The more we can recognize that humanities scholarship is also a problem-solving toolbox, the more we can be relevant to the world around us.”

Meringolo has her sights set on 2016, when the National Council on Public History will hold its annual conference in Baltimore. UMBC’s partnership with Baltimore Heritage is one concrete example of what’s in the problem-solving toolbox of the humanities at the university. But the professor who likes “committing history in public” also hopes that it’s another step toward making UMBC a model of community collaboration by the time public historians arrive in Baltimore.

— Chelsea Haddaway

As a child, Lekelia “Kiki” Jenkins ’97, biological sciences, could often be found on a fishing pier on the Chesapeake Bay, dangling a line for fish or chicken-necking for blue crabs with her family.
Today, you’re more apt to find her on a commercial fishing boat in Ecuador as she researches how fishermen can keep from catching protected species such as sea turtles.
It’s a race against time as Jenkins works with fishermen and government regulators to adopt new technologies out on the water. It can take 15 years or longer to come up with a new device to keep sea turtles from being snared by hooks or to prevent dolphins from getting tangled in nets.
“When you’re looking at some of the forecasts of when animals are going to go extinct – like leatherback turtles, which could be a decade before they’re extinct in the Pacific Ocean – then 15 years is too long of a time frame,” said Jenkins, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Jenkins focuses not only on the mechanics of the devices she’s helping to streamline – called bycatch reduction devices – but also the factors that lead commercial fishermen to adopt them or reject them. In particular, she’s been evaluating barriers that might prevent fishermen in other countries from using the devices that American regulators are pushing.
She blends a touch of the social sciences into biology, understanding not just how the animals behave with the devices, but how the people who use them behave, too.
“It’s really about the people, and the people are having an impact on the environment,” Jenkins said. “What’s going to effect change really starts with humans and why they do what they do, and where there are opportunities to improve that.”
Jenkins also studies how commercial fishermen might switch their fishing gear to different types that are less lethal to protected species – from nets, say, to baited fishing lines. She is also working on recounting historic fishing harvests to better understand how humans have influenced marine life.
Jenkins’ research often takes her out on the water, working alongside commercial fishermen.
“Fishermen are wonderful. They like me, so I’m lucky,” Jenkins says with a laugh. “They are really sweet, very open. They take their time to share.”
Jenkins’ career path was shaped by her mentors at UMBC. A former junior zookeeper at what is now the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, Jenkins initially considered studying veterinary medicine and endocrinology, so she could work in captive breeding.
But it was in the late UMBC professor of biological sciences Carl Weber’s ecology class that she found her calling.
“I was reading through the textbook, a chapter we weren’t assigned on conservation ecology, and I thought, ‘This is it! This is what I want to do,’” Jenkins recalls.
In addition to Weber, Jenkins credits other UMBC faculty, including associate professor of geography and environmental systems Sandy Parker, senior lecturer in chemistry Mark Perks, and former associate vice provost Teresa Viancour (who let Jenkins into the lab at night to observe electric fish) with helping her understand where her biology training at UMBC could take her.
Jenkins also found a “wonderful oasis” in UMBC’s dance department, where she earned a minor and found a creative outlet in an interest she continues today. In fact, after Jenkins earned her Ph.D. in marine conservation at Duke University in 2006, she choreographed a dance about her dissertation on sea turtles. It won second place in a dance competition sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Jenkins says the arts and science can mesh better than many might think. In fact, art can be used to communicate science to non-scientists.
“What I tell people all the time is that, especially when it comes to the environment, people’s interest in environmental issues are triggered by all sorts of things,” she said. That could be experiences in nature, photography, poetry or literature. It makes sense, she said, to communicate science through those same channels.
“If we as scientists want to deliver information back to stakeholders and people who care about the environment, doing scientific papers is insufficient,” she said.
Jenkins practices what she preaches, writing general-interest articles alongside each of her academic papers. In 2011, for example, she blogged about a research trip to Ecuador for the New York Times.
Jenkins hopes her work – whether with regulators, fishermen or regular folks – can help save vulnerable species.
“I want to make a difference. I want to have a lasting conservation impact,” Jenkins said. “When I did my dissertation, I said to my advisor: ‘I want to do work that someone’s going to use. It’s not going to sit on a shelf.’”
— Pamela Wood

As a child, Lekelia “Kiki” Jenkins ’97, biological sciences, could often be found on a fishing pier on the Chesapeake Bay, dangling a line for fish or chicken-necking for blue crabs with her family.

Today, you’re more apt to find her on a commercial fishing boat in Ecuador as she researches how fishermen can keep from catching protected species such as sea turtles.

It’s a race against time as Jenkins works with fishermen and government regulators to adopt new technologies out on the water. It can take 15 years or longer to come up with a new device to keep sea turtles from being snared by hooks or to prevent dolphins from getting tangled in nets.

“When you’re looking at some of the forecasts of when animals are going to go extinct – like leatherback turtles, which could be a decade before they’re extinct in the Pacific Ocean – then 15 years is too long of a time frame,” said Jenkins, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Jenkins focuses not only on the mechanics of the devices she’s helping to streamline – called bycatch reduction devices – but also the factors that lead commercial fishermen to adopt them or reject them. In particular, she’s been evaluating barriers that might prevent fishermen in other countries from using the devices that American regulators are pushing.

She blends a touch of the social sciences into biology, understanding not just how the animals behave with the devices, but how the people who use them behave, too.

“It’s really about the people, and the people are having an impact on the environment,” Jenkins said. “What’s going to effect change really starts with humans and why they do what they do, and where there are opportunities to improve that.”

Jenkins also studies how commercial fishermen might switch their fishing gear to different types that are less lethal to protected species – from nets, say, to baited fishing lines. She is also working on recounting historic fishing harvests to better understand how humans have influenced marine life.

Jenkins’ research often takes her out on the water, working alongside commercial fishermen.

“Fishermen are wonderful. They like me, so I’m lucky,” Jenkins says with a laugh. “They are really sweet, very open. They take their time to share.”

Jenkins’ career path was shaped by her mentors at UMBC. A former junior zookeeper at what is now the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, Jenkins initially considered studying veterinary medicine and endocrinology, so she could work in captive breeding.

But it was in the late UMBC professor of biological sciences Carl Weber’s ecology class that she found her calling.

“I was reading through the textbook, a chapter we weren’t assigned on conservation ecology, and I thought, ‘This is it! This is what I want to do,’” Jenkins recalls.

In addition to Weber, Jenkins credits other UMBC faculty, including associate professor of geography and environmental systems Sandy Parker, senior lecturer in chemistry Mark Perks, and former associate vice provost Teresa Viancour (who let Jenkins into the lab at night to observe electric fish) with helping her understand where her biology training at UMBC could take her.

Jenkins also found a “wonderful oasis” in UMBC’s dance department, where she earned a minor and found a creative outlet in an interest she continues today. In fact, after Jenkins earned her Ph.D. in marine conservation at Duke University in 2006, she choreographed a dance about her dissertation on sea turtles. It won second place in a dance competition sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Jenkins says the arts and science can mesh better than many might think. In fact, art can be used to communicate science to non-scientists.

“What I tell people all the time is that, especially when it comes to the environment, people’s interest in environmental issues are triggered by all sorts of things,” she said. That could be experiences in nature, photography, poetry or literature. It makes sense, she said, to communicate science through those same channels.

“If we as scientists want to deliver information back to stakeholders and people who care about the environment, doing scientific papers is insufficient,” she said.

Jenkins practices what she preaches, writing general-interest articles alongside each of her academic papers. In 2011, for example, she blogged about a research trip to Ecuador for the New York Times.

Jenkins hopes her work – whether with regulators, fishermen or regular folks – can help save vulnerable species.

“I want to make a difference. I want to have a lasting conservation impact,” Jenkins said. “When I did my dissertation, I said to my advisor: ‘I want to do work that someone’s going to use. It’s not going to sit on a shelf.’”

— Pamela Wood

PUZZLE POWER

Marie desJardins, a professor of computer science at UMBC, specializes in research on artificial intelligence. But at the 2012 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in March, her research became downright competitive when desJardins crossed pencils with a crossword-solving computer program.

The progam, dubbed “Dr. Fill,” was going up against one of the best crossword puzzle solvers in the country. DesJardins is the top-ranked female solver in the Mid-Atlantic region and she is the 44th best solver in the country. (Dr. Fill finished the same tournament in 141st place.)

“I didn’t realize I could be this good at crossword puzzles,” says desJardins. She adds that her development as a crossword competitor also highlights the hurdles to bringing more women into the sciences.

“A lot of girls think that they must not be intrinsically good at ‘that stuff,’” argues desJardins, who adds that the biggest impediments are “the psychological blocks we put up for ourselves.”

DesJardins has been closely involved in programs at UMBC to remove those blocks, including the Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT). She also works with the Multi-Agent Planning and Learning Lab (MAPLE), which she founded in 2003 to facilitate student research in artificial intelligence.

DesJardins has her eye on next year’s tournament – if she can reconcile it with an academic conference scheduled for the same weekend. “I might go to that conference,” she says. “But I’ll have to leave early to go to the tournament.”

— Andrew Holter ’12

NOT CAMERA SHY

Even on a campus as welcoming as UMBC, some incoming freshmen and transfer students find that orientation makes them nervous. There’s the stress of course selection and presentations on campus life, but also the question that comes with joining any new community: Will I make new friends?

This year’s contingent of UMBC Orientation Peer Advisors (OPA) decided to break the ice with a bit of video comedy, powered with the Mika song “Love Today” as a soundtrack. This year’s advisors are caught in a range of fun and goofy activities: playing video games, dancing, tossing a football, chasing ducks, bumping into things, and that perennial undergraduate favorite: sleeping.

Christina Animashaun ’13, who studies media communications and photography, teamed up with Jason Palumbo ’13, a graphic design major, to make the video in a single day. Palumbo was behind the camera, and Animashaun coordinated the sequences. Spontaneity was a key to the feel of the video: “It was very much talking out the storyboards,” says Animashaun, “as opposed to having it all set and ready to go.”

An introductory video made by the Orientation Peer Advisors has become a staple through the years, but the 2012 video duo wanted to get this year’s orientation started with a jolt of humor and movement.

“On the morning [of orientation], people are rolling up at 8 or 8:30 a.m,” says Animashaun. “They’re hyped up on coffee, and then you [show the video]. It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re real people. We’re real students…” Palumbo finishes the thought: “…and we also like to dance.”

Watch the video here.

— Nathan Glover ’12

SPURS OF THE MOMENT

North London’s Tottenham Hotspur Football Club (often called “Spurs” for short) is one of the world’s great soccer teams, having recently played in the UEFA Champions League and finishing fourth in the English Premier League last season. Clad in iconic white and dark blue uniforms adorned with a cockerel, Spurs are known for playing an attractive, free-flowing and attacking football.

For one sweltering day in late July, however, Spurs found a home on UMBC’s campus, which they used as a training facility before a July 28 friendly match at Baltimore’s M&T Stadium against Liverpool Football Club –another one of England’s biggest and most iconic teams.

Tottenham stars including Gareth Bale, Aaron Lennon, and longtime U.S. men’s national team goalkeeper Brad Friedel got in a morning training session on UMBC’s soccer field under the watchful eye of new Spurs coach Andres Villas Boas. Spurs players then adjourned for lunch at the True Grits dining hall.

Later that day, young Maryland soccer players sampled how Tottenham coaches players in its own football academy at an afternoon clinic led by Spurs’ head of football development Mark Jones.

“We plan for everyone to get 2,000 or so touches of the ball this afternoon,” Jones told the players and their parents before putting them through an afternoon of coaching and drills.

It is the second time in four years that world soccer powers have used UMBC’s state-of-the-art facilities on visits to the region. In 2009, English and Italian soccer powers Chelsea and AC Milan trained at UMBC before a friendly match.

— Richard Byrne ’86

THE RINGS THING

Every four years, the Olympic Games give athletes a chance to chase their dreams and compete at the highest level.

For UMBC swimmers Mohamed Hussein ’13 (Egypt), Patrick Husson ’14 (USA) and Pierre De Waal ’13 (South Africa), those dreams almost became reality. Husson and De Waal competed in the Olympic Trials of their respective home countries but fell short of earning a trip to London.

Hussein did his teammates one better – qualifying for Egypt’s team in the 100-meter freestyle and the 200-meter individual medley. But his trip to London was cut short by FINA, the international governing body of swimming, which abruptly changed the qualifying times required to make the Olympics. Hussein’s times fell just short.

“[In] all the past Olympic games, FINA allowed more than 1,200 swimmers to participate in the competition,” Hussein observes.

Despite the disappointment, Hussein remains one of the best swimmers in his native Egypt as well as at UMBC, and calls 2012 “the best year in my swimming career.”

De Waal had to return to South Africa to compete in the Olympic Trials during the spring semester. After a day and a half of travel from Baltimore to Durban, De Waal took to the pool for his best event, the 200-meter butterfly, where he fell to fellow countryman Chad le Clos, who went on to win gold in the Olympics over U.S. Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps.

Former walk-on Patrick Husson also swam in the Olympic Trials in his best event, the 200-meter breaststroke, finishing 99th out of 132 competitors.

“The three of them have all raised the level of our competition and our team,” UMBC swim coach Chad Cradock ’97 says.

— Dan Levin ’13

UMBC is known for innovation in education. Now, a couple of faculty members are taking that one step further and are teaching students to become entrepreneurs.

Baltimore Business Journal reporter, Sarah Gantz wrote about the class in the October 5, issue.

Gantz writes, “Two faculty members are developing a course for the school that would establish partnerships with businesses and nonprofit organizations to bring real-life problems to the classroom for students to solve by developing a product or service. William LaCourse, dean of UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences; and Gib Mason, co-founder of wraparound-earmuff company 180s Inc.”

She writes that, “The faculty members say the course is meant to offer students a hands-on experience with business implications beyond their grade point average, provide students who lack internship experience an opportunity to interact with businesses and establish a relationship with the business community that could lead to future jobs or internships.”

This course is still under development but she writes,

“The course would be modeled after a current class Mason teaches. In that class, students each come up with a product or service — some ideas from this semester include a knife with a safety sheaf, a mobile application that helps students navigate campus and a service to help find lost cellphones. They whittle down those ideas to one and spend the remainder of the semester working together to bring the product to market.”

Students love the course and Gantz reports that, Josh Massey, a 32 year old junior in the class says that, “Gib has a way of teaching you how to think, not what to think.”

So how does it end? “Mason said the course, which is not offered every semester, has developed a waiting list. Businesses may also be lining up to get in the future class.”

Proposition: The natural sciences will forever be at odds with the humanities and social sciences. Steven Gimbel ’90, philosophy and physics, argues in the negative. As chair of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College and the author of works such as Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion, Gimbel has made his career finding useful and provocative intersections between the sciences and the humanities and social sciences.

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There are days in college that leave an indelible trace on your mind. I will never forget sitting in professor (and now professor emeritus of physics) Robert L. Rasera’s solid state physics class about two weeks from the end of the semester, when Jon Lau ’90, physics (who busted every curve), asked for clarification about the topic being discussed.

I recall that Rasera paused, and then said three little words: “We don’t know.” Not “I don’t know,” but “We don’t know.” And as he sketched out competing views, everything changed for me.

As a double major in physics and philosophy, I was used to discussing disagreements between philosophers – that’s just what philosophers do. But science had always been beautifully clean. Every problem had an elegant solution. All equations had seamless derivations. Problems were solved exactly.

That moment in Rasera’s class showed me that science was also a process involving people arguing with each other. It was the real physics, the messy physics, the human physics. I had found the philosophy in the science – and I have stayed there ever since.

As a philosopher of science, students often tell me: “This philosophy stuff is interesting, but I believe in science.” Their mistaken view is something one could easily infer from the way we do things. We create departments of physics, chemistry, and biology, and then locate them in buildings away from history, sociology, and political science. Much of what we do at universities can entrench the idea that these divisions are absolute. Natural sciences go in one box, pack the humanities in a different one, and leave the arts and social sciences to their own.

But it just isn’t so. There’s no competition here, and no need to choose sides. Indeed, these seemingly disparate disciplines are complementary, working together to create multifaceted minds that appreciate the full breadth of the world and derive insight and wisdom from it.

Sociologists like Robert K. Merton, historians like I.B. Cohen, and philosophers like Thomas Kuhn looked at scientific communities and the reasoning of individual scientists in order to embed discoveries in historical and cultural contexts. If we want to understand not only how the science works, but where it came from and why it appeared when it did, then we need to blend our disciplines across borders.

This is what I do in my latest book Einstein’s Jewish Science. The title comes from a phrase used by the Nazis to denigrate the theory of relativity. Like so much that came from Hitler and his minions, we now dismiss it as absurd propaganda. But look closely at the history of our sciences, and you’ll realize how inextricably intertwined they are with the politics, ideas, and religious beliefs of their day.

But interdisciplinarity isn’t merely a retrospective exercise. It is essential to developing the minds of scientists who will move us forward. During the last week of my first semester of quantum mechanics at UMBC, I remember professor of physics Ivan Kramer discussing the interpretation of the equations we had been studying. The theory itself, Kramer argued, was “a bunch of squiggles.” But then he asked what those squiggles meant.

Again, I found philosophy in my physics class. Because looking for meaning, after all, is what a philosopher does. Some of the squiggles represented mass or length – things that can be measured. Others were mathematical symbols, like an equal sign, that form the grammar of mathematical language. And there were more squiggles standing for potential field values, curvature tensors, and other weird things that we can’t see. If the theory is true, how do we make sense of these? What does the theory mean? What does the universe really look like if this theory describes how it works? The equation doesn’t answer these questions. Philosophy does.

This meditation leads us to two important elements of interdisciplinarity. First, what theory tells us about the world may compel us to completely change how we understand ourselves and our universe. Moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system did not change an inconsequential technical parameter. The earth was removed from the center of Creation. There were other planets just like ours, and other suns just like ours. This required a full reworking of our relation to the universe.

Scientific advancement and new technologies lead to yet another place where the sciences and humanities collide and collaborate. New discoveries force increasingly complex ethical issues onto the cultural stage. Technology gives us new tools and science gives us the know-how to use them in unforeseen ways. But the questions of meaning are urgent: Should we use them in those ways, or indeed at all?

Again, consider Einstein, who saw the horrors of the two world wars in which science and technology helped create mass death. Knowing that the great German physicist Werner Heisenberg had been enlisted by the Nazis to create an atomic weapon, Einstein and fellow physicist Leo Szillard wrote to warn President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That letter helped create the Manhattan Project, which also led to the nuclear arsenals that shaped the Cold War and now stoke our greatest fears concerning terrorist organizations. Einstein later said: “I could burn my fingers that I wrote that letter.” Science yields knowledge, but that knowledge also forces weighty and complex moral decisions upon us.

We are faced with new and daunting ethical challenges each day because of the progress of science and the technology derived from it. That will not – and should not – change. But it does require us to shed the old way of thinking of knowledge in boxes. We must cross boundaries, weaving together the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. This is what education for a new age needs. It is what I received – and what students still receive – at UMBC.

Students in the Erickson School’s Project 2061 class have high expectations for technology and its power to meet human needs. Working across disciplines, they’ve created new possibilities for the future of senior care.

By Dinah Winnick
Photos: Marlayna Demond ’11. CAD images: Michael Mower ’12

Ashley Johnson ’12, MAgS (left), helped her team imagine the needs of “Ashley,” a 111-year-old former psychologist who loves to garden but struggles with dementia, diabetes and hearing loss. Abdulla Aljneibi ’12, mechanical engineering (right), inspired his classmates to design for “Abdulla,” an imagined 90-year-old man determined to live independently despite impairments from a stroke.

It’s hard to imagine ourselves five years into the future, let alone 50. But one group of UMBC students has confronted this challenge head-on in search of inspiration for new designs to improve the lives of older adults.

Their course, “Project 2061” was spearheaded by the Erickson School, UMBC’s newest college. Founded in 2004, the school offers undergraduate and graduate curricula that combine the studies of aging, public policy and management.

The Erickson School created Project 2061 after being invited to showcase UMBC student research at a conference on the future of aging. The project quickly attracted faculty and students from engineering, information systems, design, management of aging services (MAgS) and interdisciplinary studies (INDS) to collaboratively develop new technologies for older adults living in the year 2061.

As it turns out, the endeavor’s success hinged on something simple and personal: students’ reflections on their own imagined future needs and desires. The class created three avatars based on students’ life experiences – “Abdulla,” “Ashley,” and “Spencer” – to help them explore both the problems aging can bring and how design can meet those challenges.

“Abdulla,” for instance, was based on Project 2061 participant Abdulla Aljneibi ’12, mechanical engineering. His avatar is 90 years old and recovering from a stroke that has left him struggling with memory, speech and motor impairments. Yet he is determined to live independently and enjoy activities such as cooking, daily prayer and going to the theater.

For Judah Ronch, dean of the Erickson School, creating personas like “Abdulla” proved the key to making Project 2061 click.

“This is always the challenge in teaching about aging,” says Ronch, “Until you make it about us it’s very removed. If it’s always about them, it’s highly abstract, it’s not very real, and there is not a sense of urgency about it because [typical students] are 25 or 20 and we’re talking about 60 years down the road.”

Everything changes, Ronch observes, “once you start talking about yourself and [asking], ‘How will this affect me?’”

BUILDING A TEAM

Assistant professors Amy Hurst and Catherine Neylan explore data visualization with Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones ’12, computer science and interdisciplinary studies (left to right).

In May 2011, LeadingAge — a research and advocacy group focused on the lives of older adults — asked the Erickson School to create an exhibit on the future of aging.

LeadingAge planned a celebration of its 50th anniversary in October 2011 with a conference that would bring 8,000 participants to Washington, D.C. The group wanted to highlight dramatic changes in senior living from 1961 to the present, and also articulate a bold vision for the next 50 years.

Ronch says the exhibit “was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.” So he recruited faculty and students from across UMBC to create the school’s presentation as part of a new, boundary-breaking course in the Erickson School.

To teach the class, Ronch enlisted Tim Topoleski, a professor of mechanical engineering who studies mobility and the mechanics of joint replacements. Catherine Neylan, assistant professor of design, and Amy Hurst, assistant professor of information systems, followed, attracted to the course by their shared interest in design for people with disabilities.

These faculty recruited students from a range of majors. Neylan observes that technology and social problems are now so complex that “we need collective intelligence to build the things that we build.”

Eventually, 19 UMBC students joined the effort. Early in the process, MAgS major Joe Yoon proposed that the class should create specific design personas based on students in the course and then craft flexible technologies to meet those avatars’ specific needs. His idea was a game-changer.

“In all of our scenarios of how this would be used,” recalls Hurst, “we never said, ‘How would grandma use this?’ We said, ‘How would I use it in 50 years.’ I think that fundamentally changed a lot of the designs [and] helped the students be more creative and engaged.”

Yoon’s proposal also forced students to ponder uncomfortable possibilities. As Steven Hall, a junior majoring in graphic design, observes: “I don’t think anybody’s going to want to think, ‘What’s my life going to be like in 50 years? I’m going to have cataracts and be overweight. I’m going to have my foot amputated from diabetes.’”

The students had to deal with uncertainties about their lives and the world in 50 years. “You can’t take the current older adult population and simply throw them 50 years into the future,” argues Colleen Bennett, a gerontology Ph.D. student and Project 2061 teaching assistant. The project depended on young people confronting their own fears and desires for later life.

“Every generation is different, and then they age,” says Hurst. “Traditionally, people are very bad at abstracting and predicting what they would want in the future, but they can tell you what they want now and how they feel about things.”

REALIZING A VISION

The three personas gave Project 2061 students a concrete foundation to build on.

“Once we had a starting point,” says Aljneibi, “the ideas started flowing.”

The class worked quickly to conceptualize, research, and render designs for technologies to meet functional needs: eating, sleeping, hygiene, and entertainment/social engagement. Living environments in the future might be quite different, they reasoned, but basic human needs will remain the same.

Occasionally, there were hiccups. The blurred lines of interdisciplinary work and the indefinite nature of the problems that the project aimed to address frustrated some of the students, especially early in the process.

“You would think design and engineering would be closer, but they both want to have a product and their process is so different,” observes Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones ’12, computer science and INDS. At times, she adds, students misinterpreted their failure to communicate across a disciplinary “language barrier” as actual disagreement over ideas.

“They are beginning to learn that the real world is not as clear-cut as their well-designed classes,” says Hurst.

In four weeks, however, a dozen designs took shape, all of them informed by contemporary technologies and targeted to meet users’ specific needs.

One group devised a “Smart Closet” that reminds users with memory and other cognitive impairments when and how garments need to be cleaned. It also lets users know when they last wore a favorite dress or tie, and even what clothing is appropriate for particular activities or occasions.

Another design team emerged with a “Lavish Lavatory”—which auto-adjusts toilet and rail height to account for changes in strength and balance over time. The design’s flexibility means it can help communal facilities better meet the needs of diverse individuals. It also discreetly and unobtrusively monitors waste and automatically sends relevant health data to each user’s physician.

Eating properly is important at any age, so another group designed a “FoodPro,” that monitors the refrigerator and pantry, keeping track of grocery inventory, expiration dates and nutritional content. It also helps users prepare meals that meet their particular dietary needs, taking into account health conditions, lifestyle choices and food preferences.

These projects formed the core of the Erickson School’s LeadingAge exhibit— “My Surroundings, My Well-Being”— which centered on personal experiences with technology.

The student designers took the exhibit opportunity as a chance to demonstrate how individuals would use their products in home environments. They acted as docents to the conference exhibit, explaining to visitors how each invention would serve “Ashley,” “Abdulla” and “Spencer” in their future lives.

Helping people connect with the exhibit in a personal way was a priority for Aljneibi—and not simply because he lent his identity to the design process. He also belongs to a close-knit multigenerational family with a grandmother facing mobility problems.

“When she goes into the shower,” he says, “it’s always in our heads: ‘What if she slips? What if she falls?’” For his family, respecting her boundaries means resisting the impulse to help her in the shower. In what ways could his team’s designs enable her, and people like her, to more safely bathe by themselves?

Though he approached the course from a neuroscience background, Talmo Pereira, an INDS major and Meyerhoff Scholar, took the tenets of user-centered design to heart.

“Considering that the environment should adapt to the user,” he suggests, “the mutability of the environment is one of the things that will most compensate for differences in culture and preferences, and certainly limitations.”

The exhibit received an enthusiastic response from vendors, senior care professionals, and LeadingAge organizers, who immediately invited the students back for 2012.

FULL SPEED AHEAD

Creating an exhibit with an October deadline left everyone involved in Project 2061 with the question of how to best make use of the rest of the semester. Focus on prototyping the exhibit designs or generate new concepts? Continue team projects or pursue independent research? The answer was different for each participant.

Aljneibi chose to continue his team project on bath designs. “When I came to the States I wasn’t fine with communal bathing, especially in the gym,” he reflects. “I used the handicapped one because I needed my privacy.” For him, this experience— uncomfortable though it felt—was an inspiration. After all, if the United States continues to grow increasingly diverse, certainly consumers would appreciate flexible bathing technologies.

Steven Hall ’11 and Pavlo Yankovetz ’11, both in graphic design, explored how visualizing health data in particular ways may offer older adults a sense of self-awareness and empowerment. They argue that information can motivate or stifle health-seeking behaviors, depending on how it is conveyed. “If you’re just giving someone numbers, that’s not helpful or useful. We want those numbers to mean something,” says Hall.

Meyerhoff Scholar Deanna Easley ’12, mechanical engineering, worked to develop safer flooring for older adults, who are often injured in falls. Having broken her own wrist in a fall, Easley understood the mental and physical traumas of injury and lengthy recovery.

“People told me, ‘At least you didn’t break the hand you write with,’” recalls Easley. “But I’m a pianist. I need both hands.” With a deep understanding of how injury can wreak havoc on one’s sense of self, plus input from MAgS students, Easley designed flooring that would not only enhance safety, but also offer aesthetic appeal and emotional comfort to potential consumers.

INNOVATION STARTS AT HOME

Academic leaders at UMBC applaud the new class, arguing that it breaks new ground at a university already known for its commitment to promoting undergraduate success through active learning.

“Project 2061 represents a striking example of UMBC’s ability to create innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches to teaching and learning that address significant future challenges,” says Provost Philip Rous.

“In the process of researching real problems, our students not only gain knowledge, they also co-create knowledge and contribute to the field,” says Diane Lee, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education.

Connecting research to reality and realizing its potential for lasting impact isn’t simply a hypothetical draw to students. For Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones, Project 2061 is about “actually making a difference right now” rather than just “writing up a piece of code and turning it in.”

Ashley Johnson ’12, MAgS, who helped her classmates understand the needs of “Ashley,” a 111-year-old former psychologist who loves to garden and meditate in the year 2061 but struggles with dementia, diabetes and hearing loss, agrees: “I’m never asking, ‘Will I use this in the future?’ I know I will.”

Students aren’t the only beneficiaries of this work. As Don Engel, Assistant Vice President for Research, articulates: “Universities support research both to expand human knowledge and to engage students in the forefront of their disciplines. Project 2061 demonstrates how interdisciplinarity and a focus on real-world challenges produce compelling results and provide a valuable education to students and faculty alike.”

Part of Project 2061’s success, it turns out, was also rooted in participants’ refusal to play it safe. Not only did they take risks with ideas, but students and the faculty broke out of their intellectual comfort zones when they crossed disciplinary boundaries.

When you predict the future, says Ronch, “you have to be prepared to be wrong.” This kind of risk-taking requires what he calls “a special kind of iconoclasm: looking at a blank space and seeing what could fill it.”

“For major league baseball fans in Washington, it’s been 79 years of waiting for another postseason appearance. The last time they made it to the playoffs, Herbert Hoover was just leaving the first air-conditioned Oval Office. This Sunday, the wait ends,” writes Ryan Bloom, English lecturer, in The American Prospect.

Bloom gives an account of the complicated history of baseball in the nation’s capital, concluding that “Whatever may come, the excitement in Washington is palpable… it seems D.C. fans of all stripes know what the rest of baseball is just figuring out: This time, the Washington Nationals are here to stay.”

The piece, “Nationals Pride,” appeared online on October 5.