Few days in a person’s life that are truly unforgettable; others we carry with us for our entire lives. In a way, Edie Windsor and Fizza Gulamali-Majid share just such a moment – the days they found out their children had been accepted into the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at UMBC.

“I will always remember when [my son] Andy called to tell me he’d been accepted,” says Windsor. “I knew that this was the place for him.” Founded in 1988, the program has graduated more than 800 students, most going on to earn graduate degrees from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Carnegie Mellon.

That unforgettable moment grew into a lifelong commitment for both Windsor and Gulamali-Majid, both of whom give back through donations and their work with the Meyerhoff Parents Association because of the enormous impact the program has had on their children.

“It helped shape the person my son has become,” says Windsor, whose son received his M.D. from University of Maryland School of Medicine in May and is now an Emergency Medicine Resident at University of Maryland Medical Center.

Although their scholarships lifted a monetary burden, the benefits that Windsor and Gulamali-Majid’s children received are unquantifiable: a sense of personal pride and a community that cheers them on in their endeavors and celebrates their accomplishments. When their children became Meyerhoff Scholars, the mothers explained, they joined a family, one that reaches far beyond the years students spend at UMBC.

“A remarkable trait we’ve seen in every person involved with the Meyerhoff Program is an incredible sense of the importance of giving back,” says Windsor. “They know how much they’ve been given, and they want to help others.”

Windsor and Gulamali-Majid will be the first to tell you that they know how fortunate their children have been, and they—along with the rest of the Meyerhoff family—want to be sure that other students have the same opportunities.

“My daughter wouldn’t trade her experience in the Meyerhoff Program for the world,” says Gulamali-Majid, whose daughter is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in translational biology and molecular medicine at Baylor University in Texas. “It became a second family to her and to us.”

Originally posted in 2010.

Chartwells, which operates dining services programs at over 200 colleges and universities nationwide, just named UMBC Dining Services “National Account of the Year.” The award is given annually to the university account that demonstrates excellence in several areas, including customer service, customer satisfaction, community service, diversity and growth.

In particular, dining services has worked hard to incorporate its employees into the larger UMBC culture, which pays off in both employee and customer satisfaction. Tom DeLuca, resident district manager for UMBC Dining Services, said the award “validates the efforts of our team and our commitment to being the best—having a quality food program backed up by the best service possible.”

Tweens, teens, and kids of all ages are “plugged in,” and parents are always looking for ways to make sure their time on the internet is safe and productive.

ABC reports that Joan Korenman, professor emerita of English, is helping parents achieve that goal: she created a page on UMBC’s web site that holds a host of links to “websites for girls.” 

Korenman is also the founding director of UMBC’s gender and women’s studies program and CWIT.  She moderates WMST-L, one of the longest running online academic discussion lists, and she started work on the “websites for girls” while directing CWIT. Her UMBC web page provides additional resources on gender issues and resources in women’s studies.

The story, “Looking for websites to encourage and challenge your tween or teen? Here are 5 places to start” appeared on the ABC website on October 12.

Maryland Congressmen Christopher Van Hollen and Roscoe G. Bartlett have met with Governor Martin O’Malley to request changes to the state’s redistricting proposal. The Baltimore Sun reports, “An analysis released by the Maryland Democratic Party shows that in making Bartlett’s district more Democratic, the map makes Van Hollen’s district significantly less so.” However, political analysts suggest Van Hollen will still likely be safe in the next election. Although State Sen. David Brinkely is considering a run against Van Hollen, Donald Norris, chair of public policy at UMBC, said, “I don’t think he’s in any jeopardy.” He continued, “If it is around 60 percent, that is a slam-dunk, isn’t it?” Electoral maps are assessed each decade to reflect population data collected in the census.

Theo Gonzalves, associate professor of American studies, will moderate a conversation with Oscar-nominated director John Sayles on Thursday, October 20. The conversation will follow a screening of Sayles’ film, “Amigo,” which is presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program in honor of Filipino American History Month.

“Amigo” provides an optic on the easily forgotten history of the Philippine-American War, a short lived but brutal war that claimed the lives of about 4,000 Americans and between 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos.

The screening and discussion will take place on Thursday, October 20, at 6 p.m., at the National Museum of the American Indian’s Rasmuson Theater. More information can be found here.

Marie desJardins, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to participate in NAE’s Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium. desJardins was one of sixty-five faculty members selected from all over the country to participate in the symposium.

“I am very excited about having been selected to attend NAE’s symposium on Frontiers of Engineering Education,” says desJardins. At the symposium desJardins will be presenting the interdisciplinary approach that she uses for teaching students about complex systems and computational modeling in her Honors seminar on “Computation, Complexity, and Emergence.”

desJardins says her goal for the symposium is to engage in conversation with committed educators from across the country about the under representation of women and minorities in computer science and engineering.

The symposium will be held November 13-16 in Irvine, California.

UMBC and Its Cyberdawgs Tackle a New Challenge

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There’s no question that cybersecurity is a booming field. In Maryland, the state and federal government have made significant investments, and the number of companies working in the field is growing rapidly. For example, the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park, which housed six cybersecurity companies in March, has added seventeen companies since then.

For Max Spector, a senior at UMBC, competing with the university’s Cyberdawgs is a savvy move to prepare for those career opportunities. But computer security is also in his blood. “I live and breathe it,” he said. “I walk into a bank and I see where the cameras are. In a supermarket, I see which version of Windows they’re running and I know where there is a vulnerability. It’s just how I think.”

UMBC hopes to encourage more Spectors. Along with several partners, the university is sponsoring the first-ever Maryland Cyber Challenge & Conference (MDC3) to get a new generation excited about defending our nation’s cyber systems.

To grow the field, companies and government agencies need “a skilled and clearable workforce,” said Ellen Hemmerly, executive director and president of the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park. “UMBC plays a role in that it produces the most computer science graduates in the area.”

And, with the cyber challenge and conference, UMBC is enhancing not only its own role – but building Maryland’s overall strength in cybersecurity, she said. The event, known as MDC3, is slated for October 21 and 22 and will feature competitions for both students and professionals. The event was founded by UMBC, SAIC, the Tech Council of Maryland, the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and the Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development.

“The competition is unique,” said Richard Forno, Director of UMBC’s Graduate Cybersecurity Program. “We’re the official cyber-challenge event for Maryland, and I believe one of the few, perhaps only, such challenges in the country to offer meaningful scholarship prizes for the winners.”

Winning teams in both the high school and college divisions will receive scholarships sponsored by the National Security Agency. First place team members in each division will receive $5,000 scholarships, and second place team members will receive a $2,000 scholarship.

Spector and the Cyberdawgs will be competing in the challenge on October 22, along with seven other teams. All have already made it through two qualifying rounds.

In the first round, Spector said, teams were given 6 hours to complete the challenge. The way it works he said is “they give us two machines that are vulnerable to attack and we have to secure them.” The second round, he said, “is a more of a forensics challenge where we will be given machines infected with malware. And we need to remove that malware.”

Malware are viruses, spyware, or anything you don’t want on your computer, said Spector. “Some are easy to remove and some are really difficult to remove. It’s a big problem. Anti-virus software only works on malware that has been seen before. So there’s a need for people to identify malware that has never been seen before.”

Fahad Alduraibi, another member of the Cyberdawgs and a Ph.D. student in computer engineering, initially planned to be a doctor. But then he realized that if you wanted to do an experiment, “you need a big lab and fancy equipment. For computers you have your own lab in your computer.”

Changing his career goals from medicine to computer engineering harked back to an earlier interest for Alduraibi: “When I was young, in elementary school, I started working with the old Atari computers,” he said.

Marc Warfield, a junior and the president of the UMBC cyberdefense club, said that when he was “super excited” when he found out in his freshman year that UMBC had a cyberdefense team. He met the club president and another member of the team, “and they started explaining the basics to me right away,” he said. “It’s interesting because they don’t teach cybersecurity in school,” he said. “You have to learn really fast or sink.”

The team’s enthusiasm is infectious. The Cyberdawgs function mainly on their own, although they do have a faculty advisor, Charles Nicholas, also a professor of information technology and engineering. “Those guys know the technical stuff better than I do,” Nicholas said. “Most of these guys are very self-motivated.”

During practice and in competition the Cyberdawgs team splits into halves. Half of the team works on Windows and the other half works on Linux just as they will in the competition. Then two or three days before a competition, the event organizers will announce what the team will likely face.

“Then, we will start trying to mimic the scenarios they’ve told us we can expect,” ” said Alduraibi.

What will it take to win?  “We need to be organized, and we need a team leader that will help in organizing the tasks,” said Alduraibi. “Someone with a to-do list.”

(10/07/11)

Freeman Hrabowski, President, Jack Suess, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, and John Fritz, Assistant Vice President for Instructional Technology & New Media, write for the EDUCAUSE Review about transformational initiatives in higher education, the value of assessment and the role of information technology. You can read the full article, “Assessment and Analytics in Institutional Transformation,” online.

Read Science this week and see what Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC, had to say about the Anthropocene.  Ellis also participated in a chat on Science Live hosted by Gaia Vince.

Dan Shechtman, a former visiting professor at UMBC, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week. Shlomo Carmi, then dean of the College of Engineering, recruited Shechtman in 1997, and the materials scientist remained a visiting professor at UMBC until 2005. During that time Shechtman conducted some of the key research that led to the Nobel Prize at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, in nearby Gaithersburg, Md.