SWEET RELIEF?

Think of sugar and you likely think of the tasty treats to which they lend sweetness – candies and soda and ice cream – or the way that a spoonful of it helps the medicine go down.

But sugars have a potential medical role past helping Mary Poppins get some bitter but healing syrup down the hatch. Certain complex sugars, known as polysaccharides, can also play a role in improving the health of children according to UMBC researchers.

Polysaccharides are attached to the outside of bacteria. These polysaccharides come in different types (or flavors, if you like), and wave around on the surface of a bacteria’s coating like trees in a breeze.

The polysaccharide type can determine how serious an illness will be in the bacteria’s human host. Some sugars in the outer coat of the bacteria mimic the sugars on the surfaces of human cells, making it difficult for immune cells to seek out and destroy them. Other bacteria have polysaccharides in their coats that immune cells recognize and treat as foreign invaders, marking the invading bacteria for destruction.

“These complex sugars play an important role in [bacteria] talking to the outside world,” says Allen Bush, a professor of biochemistry at UMBC. “They interact with antibodies, creating immunity in the patient when used in a vaccine.”

Scientists need to better understand the structures of polysaccharides in order to fully exploit their potential role in vaccine development. Here at UMBC, Bush and his colleagues have already discovered the chemical structures of five key polysaccharides attached to the Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria and published their findings in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Bush observes that knowing these sugars’ structure is especially promising for children’s health. Pneumonia vaccines used for adults are composed only of polysaccharides, but those same vaccines don’t work in children, who respond to vaccines that combine a polysaccharide and a protein. Drug companies need the detailed understanding of polysaccharide structure that Bush and his fellow researchers are providing to fashion those vaccines.

Determining that structure required a bit of technology. Bush and his colleagues dissolved a small polysaccharide sample in a liquid known as “heavy water” – a form of water that, because of its molecular properties, is heavier than regular water. The researchers then put a tiny fraction of the dissolved sample in a small tube and placed it inside a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) machine. This instrument (about the size of a small subcompact car) operates on principles similar to those involved in now-familiar Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques used to detect human ailments. Performing NMR on a polysaccharide is like using an MRI machine on a molecule.

“The resulting structures were surprising,” says Bush. “We just didn’t understand a lot about polysaccharide assembly. The current technology for identifying the bacterial types relies on genetic and antigenic methods that give rise to a lot of mistakes and misleading information about their structure.”

Bush says there are at least 90 recognized distinct pneumococcal types and the detailed chemical structures of many of them still are not accurately known. But using NMR, Bush hopes his team and other scientists will give vaccine developers new tools to make their vaccines even better – and the children who get those vaccines healthier.

— Nicole Ruediger

SIEGE MENTALITY

The Siege of Sziget is among the great works of Renaissance Europe, but you probably haven’t ever heard of it.

Likely that’s because this verse narrative of an epic battle between Ottoman invaders and embattled Christian defenders of the city of Sziget – written in Hungarian by Count Miklos Zrinyi and first published in 1651 in Vienna – has never been translated into English until this year, when Laszlo Korossy, a graduate student in UMBC’s public policy program, had his version published by The Catholic University of America Press.

The translation was a labor of love for Korossy, who became intrigued by the poem as a child and spent a number of years working on his version before finding a home for it at the university press run by his alma mater. (He has a B.A. and an M.A. from Catholic University of America.) He arrived at UMBC this year to pursue his interest in researching the “megalopolis” phenomenon with John Rennie Short, a UMBC professor of public policy and one of the world’s foremost scholars on urban issues.

“The text attracted me,” he says, “because it was so unlike anything I had ever read.”

The Siege of Sziget is very much a product of its era. Miklos Zrinyi was a successful military leader in the wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Hapsburg Empire, and his poem refashions his own family history – notably his great grandfather Ban Miklos Zrini’s heroic but failed defense of Sziget against the Ottoman ruler Suleyman the Magnificent in 1566 – into a cosmic battle that ends in his relative’s glorious martyrdom and ascent to heavenly reward.

The Siege of Sziget is more than a work of religious devotion and anti-Ottoman propaganda. It is a key text in Hungarian literary history, filled with vivid and realistic tableaux of the warfare of that era:

Some half dead but still alive cry for their companions
Some on the horribly hard ground whimper
Between blood and arms sound the wretched appeals,
You would think from afar, that the sky had fallen.

While Zrinyi’s poem is bookended by scenes of vast cosmological drama (God sends demons to incite the Turks and then sends in angelic hordes to vanquish a demonic horde at the poem’s end), a subtle psychology is woven through The Seige of Sziget: the fierce interior battles of men fighting their pride, their anger, their lust and their grief as they wage war upon each other.

“Zrinyi is a man of humanism and a man of faith,” Korossy observes. “My own faith is important to me, and this is something I could really understand in him.”

Korossy’s grasp of the poem’s dual nature shines through in his translation of The Seige of Sziget, revealing Zrinyi to be a poet deeply in touch with life’s vicissitudes and able to articulate them across the centuries:

Man scrambles, fatigues, grasps at the world,
He expects it to yield constant happiness;
He does not believe that Fortune will snap apart
In his hands, and after a little sweetness will yield a hundred agonies.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Image: The Attack of Zrinyi by Johann Peter Krafft 1825, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

LANGUAGE ARTIST

When John E. Nelson joined the Peace Corps in 1965, he thought he was signing up to be a history teacher. But when Nelson’s plane landed in Ethiopia, the headmaster of the school where he’d been assigned told him, “No, you’ll teach English instead.”

Nelson had no idea how to teach English as a second language (ESL); he’d never even learned a second language himself. With twelve hours’ warning, he was put in charge of six classes of adolescents – a total of 250 students. He bought himself a little time by memorizing every student’s name, but he knew that he desperately needed to learn effective methods of teaching ESL.

To his surprise, Nelson fell in love with that challenge. Forty-six years later, he still hasn’t stopped looking for better ways to teach English-language learners. After a long and varied series of jobs in the field, Nelson became director of UMBC’s highly regarded program in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) in 2004. And his efforts of a lifetime have not gone unnoticed. In October 2011, Nelson received a lifetime achievement award from the Maryland TESOL Association.

“He has a scholarly understanding of language acquisition, and he also has deep practical knowledge of how school systems operate,” says Eugene Schaffer, the chair of UMBC’s education department.

“I don’t know if Americans appreciate how important English has become in the last 20 years,” Nelson says. “I’ve read one estimate that more than a billion people are learning English as a second language. I don’t think we often do a very good job helping English language learners in this country. But I hope that our program can help push districts to do a little better.”

The path that brought Nelson from the Peace Corps to UMBC went through Los Angeles, Cairo, Montreal, and Washington. After earning degrees at UCLA and McGill University and teaching in Egypt, in 1980 Nelson joined the staff of the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit organization in Washington. In that post, Nelson began serving as a consultant to the Prince George’s County Public Schools. The role eventually led to full-time jobs in the Prince George’s school district, where Nelson served as a staff developer for ESL instruction and as the director of parental involvement for the ESL program.

Along the way, in 1988, Nelson began teaching evening courses at UMBC. So when he applied to direct the TESOL program in 2004, he was hardly a stranger to the university. “This is probably the only job that I’ve competed for in my entire life,” Nelson says. “And it’s been a godsend. I still have fun teaching every night.”

This fall, Nelson extended his reach by giving online instruction via Skype to a training program for English teachers in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The UMBC TESOL program largely consisted of three-week summer visits by UMBC faculty members, but online conferences, Nelson says, have the potential to make the relationship much deeper.

“It was a fabulous experience,” Nelson says. “I was able to sit here in my office and answer their questions about principles of grammar instruction.”

Photo: John Nelson, in Ethiopian formal dress, with some of the students he taught as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1965. The students collected funds to purchase the suit as a farewell present.

— David Glenn

CHANTING THE UNIVERSE

Don’t pick up a book of Michael Fallon’s verse if you’re scared of depths – or heights. In works such as Since You Have No Body (Plan B Press) and The Great Before and After (Brick House Book), Fallon delves deeply into the subtle power of grief and ponders epic mysteries of astronomy and metaphysics.

A senior lecturer and associate director of the writing and rhetoric division in UMBC’s English Department, Fallon says the university has been a congenial place for him since he arrived in 1984.

“I can make a living and teach what I’m interested in,” Fallon says. “And I can learn, too… I’ve kept learning.”

Much of what Fallon gleans from teaching and learning makes its way into his work. Since You Have No Body consists of 30 powerful elegies in loose blank verse which is sculpted into almost-sonnetic shape and fueled by keen recollection of landscapes and lived experience.

“Part of what the book wrestles with is the idea of whether there is an afterlife or not,” Fallon says.

Among the most powerful works in Since You Have No Body is “Ascent,” a poem in which Fallon offers his own vision of the dead leaving the world. “Do they ever turn and look back at us,” the poem begins, See the distorted mouths, the dumbstruck faces….”

The abrupt reversal of perspective from deeply-felt and deeply-observed griefs to a falling away of cares leaves the reader breathless. “When you read about people who’ve had near-death experiences,” Fallon explains, “all of them say something about the fact that they don’t want to come back. They don’t want to look back. Why should they?”

The way in which scientists and philosophers looking backward into time and space to read the destiny of the universe and our own planet is among the most powerful themes of Fallon’s other recent book, The Great Before and After.

Much of the book is written in the voice of Tumulty, whom Fallon describes as “a guy who’s trying to understand all this – a comic everyman.” The poems in The Great Before and After are not the measured iambs of Since You Have No Body, but a more playful yet musical free verse such as this stanza from “Tumulty Meditates on the Human Enterprise”:

How strange,
reflected Tumulty,
for it occurred to him—
like the builders of Babel
like Prometheus,
thief of fire,
like the fallen angels—
that humanity wanted to be God.

“The trouble is writing a poem about ideas that isn’t boring or abstract,” says Fallon. “Open form seemed the way to do it. Something like jazz.”

The Great Before and After pulsates with a comic intensity that reflects Fallon’s own view of the cosmos.

“The poems are written from the position that those of us who aren’t scientists are in,” he observes. “You read deeply and find that the scientists themselves argue and call each other fools. So everyone becomes a fool in the end.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

The new U.S. Department of Education report “Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy” recognizes UMBC’s Prove It! as a unique initiative at the forefront the higher ed’s emerging civic learning movement.

Prove It! is a campus-wide contest that funds student-led efforts to improve the university, such as projects to create a campus wi-fi plaza and convert waste oil into fuel for campus vehicles. This initiative is a hallmark of our Student Government Association’s focus on inspiring peers to become citizen leaders and problem-solvers in their own right.

The report notes that Prove It! demonstrates how UMBC “transformed its student government from a client-service model to one that promotes social entrepreneurship.” Beyond sparking campus change projects, Prove It! has been a powerful vehicle for spreading the SGA’s core message: all UMBC students can apply their skills and ingenuity to addressing community challenges.

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, spent her winter break traveling to the Czech Republic, for research, and to India, where she gave the first annual alumni lecture to English Alumni Association of Ravenshaw University in Cuttack and the keynote address at the International Seminar on Children’s Literature and Politics.

Spitz shared an account of her journeys on Talking Heads, UMBC’s faculty expert blog.  Her post can be read here.

A number of Baltimore County public officials use Twitter, Owings Mills Patch noted.

Rebecca Adelman, assistant professor of media and communication studies, predicts Twitter use among public officials will soon become the norm.

“I could see how that could be a real benefit for someone trying to maintain a relationship with their constituents,” she said.

The story, “Baltimore County Public Officials To Follow on Twitter,” appeared on the website on January 17.

Tanner Almon ’02 has a lot on his plate, and everybody knows it.

That’s because the visual arts alum runs multiple blogs and Tumblr feeds chronicling his life, his photography and poetry — and pretty much anything else that strikes his fancy. The Huffington Post interviewed the Brooklyn-based artist this week about “My Daily Journal Thing,” which literally lists a daily to-do list and accompanying drawings each day.

HuffPost Arts: You have a lot of different projects on your website, what are you most passionate about? Photography or film?

Almon: I don’t know anymore. Film is where I started (at least it’s what I went to school for), but once I graduated and had no money I started taking photos and I really like that now too. Tumblr’s cool because I realized I really like writing off the wall stories and poems about my photos, if you look at tannerblog.com. So I don’t know, I really just like telling the stories in my head, it doesn’t really matter anymore if it’s photo or video or just written in a journal.

Read the full story here.

PUZZLE PAIR

When Marianne and Don Engel first met and started to date, they assembled a 1000 piece glow-in-the-dark neon jigsaw puzzle of the Eiffel Tower. Now almost three years later, Don, an assistant vice president for research at UMBC, and Marianne, a research scientist at the Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute at Fort Detrick, have moved on to assembling the mother of all puzzles – 10,000 pieces of paper from a shredder.

The Engels recently completed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Shredder Challenge, coming in second out of nearly 9,000 teams. The Challenge consisted of five puzzles, or shredded documents, to be assembled by each team. The puzzles were ordered in levels of increasing difficulty and the Engels completed all of the first three and some of the last two. Unfortunately, they came to the competition one week late. “If we’d had an extra day, we definitely would have finished,” says Marianne. “The hardest thing,” she says, “was that the contest was time-limited.”

The Engels completed the first puzzle manually on the computer by designing a program that would digitally cut all the pieces out, move them around, rotate them, and slide them around on a computer screen. “Then,” says Don, “we didn’t have to deal with our cat jumping on the table and knocking the pieces all over the floor.”

For the rest of the contest, Don and Marianne split the difference between a completely automated solution and a completely manual solution. “We figured,” says Don, “that if we went for a completely automated solution we would lose because there were probably people who were more experienced in computer vision than we were, and that if we went for a completely manual solution there were teams that had more people than we did and we probably would lose.”

Their strategy was to look for things that a human would need computer assistance for in order to do well. “We would do tasks manually until we realized enough about what we were doing to automate that part,” says Don.

The Engels worked on the competition every night after work and every weekend. Don even took one vacation day. “We spent hundreds of hours,” he says. Despite the time commitment Marianne says, “It was a lot of fun. We really, really enjoyed it.”

As for personal security – are people who shred their personal documents like credit card and bank statements safe from the Engels? Don and Marianne say that they are. “We only had to deal with a very few shreds,” says Don. For example, there were only six-thousand shreds for the fifth puzzle. Puzzle five was only three pages. And, says Marianne, “you’re not going to shred one document and throw it in the trash, and then shred the next document and throw it in the trash.”

Don agrees: “If you had many more pages it would drastically increase the complexity.” This goes for your average criminal, too, says Don. “As long as you shred a lot of personal information at one time you’re safe.”

— Nicole Ruediger

DOG TAG

Many students broadcast their UMBC pride in traditional fashion – on a black and gold t-shirt, hoodie or ball cap. But UMBC seniors Chris Snyder ’12 and Chris Bowie ’12 have taken their case of Retriever Fever one very permanent step further.

“It was my last season of cross country, so I wanted to do something special,” says Snyder, a mechanical engineering major who along with Bowie had the new UMBC retriever logo tattooed on his left calf last spring.

Since its debut in summer 2010, the Retriever logo has spread quickly across the university’s walls and furniture, but never quite so indelibly as this. The inking process – including the addition of traditional cross country wings at the base of the dog – took about half an hour per runner, they said.

“You know, I like this school and I put all four years here into (a sport) I love,” says Bowie, a political science major. “It just made sense to want something permanent from a place that means something to me.”

So far, neither runner regrets the decision (or, at least, admits it). In fact, they both claim to get quite a few compliments. “You know, it might actually become a tradition,” says Bowie. “A lot of the freshmen runners want to get the dog… but they say they want to prove themselves first.”

— Jenny O’Grady

FAME GAME

On February 4, UMBC director of athletics Charles Brown headed up another distinguished class inducted into the university’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

Joining Brown in the biennial celebration of UMBC athletic and academic achievement were Jen Dragoni ’04 (women’s lacrosse), Brad Green ’04 (swimming & diving), Adam Grossman ’06 (track & field, right), Ted Lawler ’98 (men’s soccer), Josef Novotny ’04 (men’s tennis) and Keith Puryear ’90 (UMBC’s head tennis coach from 1990 to 2008).

UMBC’s Athletic Hall of Fame now boasts 119 members, chosen for their successes as student athletes at the university and their status as proud alumni of the university.

Brown is the longest-tenured director of athletics at the NCAA Division I level in the state of Maryland. In the past 11 years, Retriever teams have won 52 league titles and made 31 appearances in NCAA Championship competition and in the past 12 years, 32 student-athletes have earned Academic All-American honors and the student-athlete graduate rate is 10 percent higher than the university rate.

The February ceremony at the Westin-BWI hotel also honored Marvin Mandell, who received the athletic department’s Charles Woolston Award. The award is given to an individual who provides outstanding service to the department and strives to improve the student-athlete experience. A professor of policy sciences, Mandell has served as the university’s NCAA faculty representative for the past nine years.

— Richard Byrne ’86 and Steve Levy ’85

In response to Mitt Romney’s first Spanish-language ad, released this week, Salon has published “GOP’s Latino problem gets worse,” a new commentary by UMBC political science professor Thomas Schaller.

Schaller argues that although Romney’s commercial is a positive step, the GOP still has a long way to go in appealing to Latino and other minority voters. What is the biggest issue? “Although other issues have contributed to the GOP’s struggles with Latino voters, the party’s strident opposition to immigration reform has poisoned the electoral well,” Schaller says.

Just in time to commemorate the 2nd anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, leaving 316,000 people dead and millions displaced, an alumni-directed documentary chronicling two brothers’ return to the country has been released for online viewing.

“Lift Up,” which was co-directed by Huguens Jean ’03, ’11, Ph.D., electrical engineering, and Philip Knowlton ’03, visual arts, recently completed a year-long international film festival tour during which is was awarded the Amsterdam Film Fest Van Gogh Award, Documentary Directing and the Williamsburg Film Fest Outstanding Achievement, Feature Documentary award.

The film follows Jean as he and his brother, Clifford Muse, ’11, information systems, returned to Haiti in March 2010 to honor the memory of their grandfather, whose funeral they missed because of the earthquake. Read more about the documentary here.

WYPR’s Sheilah Kast interviewed UMBC political science professor Roy Meyers today on “Maryland Morning,” discussing the Maryland state budget. The Maryland General Assembly convenes for their 2012 session this week. As they review the first version of the 2013 state budget, they’ll need to begin reckoning with a deficit over $1 billion.

Meyers discusses the options for filling this budget gap, including one-time savings, tax increases and spending cuts. He also notes the difficulties associated with state budgeting at a time of uncertainty regarding Congressional tax policy decisions and global economic trends. Meyers explores the issue of balancing the general fund by transferring money out of the Transportation Trust Fund and other dedicated sources in a web extra.

Update: The political fact-checking site PolitiFact also consulted Meyers this week on the Obama campaign’s assertion: “Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich all say they would cut foreign aid to Israel — and every other country — to zero.” Meyers suggested that the campaign misused the term “zeroing-out” and that the statement is “misleading, to say the least.”