In UMBC’s Department of Marine Biotechnology, Yonathan Zohar and his colleagues are creating sustainable fish farms that may revolutionize our notions of fishing and seafood.

– By Anthony Lane

A well-known proverb appears on a wall near the entrance to the Columbus Center on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.

A worthy sentiment, yes. But what happens if we use up the bounty of the world’s oceans and seas? Talk for a few minutes with aquaculture pioneer Yonathan Zohar and you might be moved to coin a new proverb:

Teach too many people to fish, and there might one day be nothing left to catch.

Zohar is chair of UMBC’s new Department of Marine Biotechnology. At the Columbus Center, he and his colleagues develop new techniques and technologies to protect the world’s oceans and seas and preserve the life inside them.

Pollution, climate change and gushing oil wells are all threats to aquatic systems. But even the act of fishing itself has advanced to a point of deadly efficiency: high-tech fishing fleets use spotters in airplanes and other techniques to maximize their catch and meet a growing global demand for seafood.

“If we don’t do anything about it,” Zohar observes, “the oceans could be out of 90 percent-plus of the major fishery stocks by the year 2050.” Many fisheries are already in serious trouble in 2011, he adds: “Cod used to be one of the most abundant fish out there. Now the cod fishery is almost gone. The giant bluefin tuna has been fished almost beyond repair.”

One answer to overfishing of natural waters is fish farms. But much of the news there is also troubling. Marine fish such as salmon and sea bass are typically raised in offshore floating net pens, where they cause pollution, absorb toxins, and exchange diseases with their wild cousins. Selectively bred farmed fish sometimes escape from their pens, displacing the natives or getting cozy with them.

So where will seafood come from in the future?

Zohar and his colleagues think they have an answer: a sustainable aquaculture system that they have developed in the Columbus Center’s basement. It uses a system of filters and pumps to clean and recirculate artificial seawater, providing ideal conditions for marine fish to grow and breed in safety. The fish can’t escape, and the design eliminates the risk of transmitting diseases or polluting coastal waters. Even the fish wastes are put to productive use: they are converted to methane, which can be used to help power the whole aquaculture system.

Humans have domesticated an array of animals and plants over the course of centuries to meet most of our food needs, Zohar observes. That still hasn’t happened with seafood.

“You don’t go to the wild to catch poultry or bovines,” he says. “Seafood is the only hunt-and-gather crop.”

Zohar believes that the aquaculture system at the Columbus Center – which could be used in landlocked Iowa just as easily as it can be used near the Inner Harbor – could be a green, clean and efficient way to raise fish anywhere.

A Tricky Business

Zohar grew up in Jerusalem, and he developed an early fascination with oceans and marine life studying magazines such as National Geographic. Though he was close to the Mediterranean Sea all his life, it was not until he was teenager that he first visited the water during a school trip to the beach. “I loved it from first sight,” he says.

This passion for the sea eventually brought Zohar to Baltimore. In 1990, he joined the Center of Marine Biotechnology at the University System of Maryland to conduct aquaculture research. He later became the director of that center, remaining in that position until July 2010, when the center became the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), a partnership between UMBC, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Zohar continued on as IMET’s interim director, and he is chair of the new Department of Marine Biotechnology at UMBC.

Aquaculture was in its early stages when Zohar studied biology as an undergraduate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Completing his master’s degree in oceanography in the mid-1970s, the young researcher started working at a national lab in Israel dedicated to developing techniques for raising marine fish such as European sea bass and sea bream. But progress in aquaculture in that era was stalled by a roadblock: The fish would not reproduce in captivity.

“We had to go collect juvenile fish in the wild,” Zohar recalls. “It was very clear this was not practical or reliable.”

Zohar eventually became an expert in reproduction, completing his Ph.D. in comparative endocrinology at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris in 1982. Reproduction is a tricky business with marine fish. In the wild, they will migrate hundreds or even thousands of miles to reach the spawning grounds where their offspring are most likely to survive. During these migrations, changes in temperature, water depth, salinity and other environmental factors essentially serve as an elemental sort of foreplay. The fish spawn only when these conditions are just right.

One way around the reproduction roadblock would be to mimic these environmental conditions in captivity. This approach wasn’t working, so Zohar decided to try something different, examining instead how the fishes’ hormonal systems respond to the environmental changes that lead to reproduction.

In an effort to understand why fish held in confinement fail to reproduce, Zohar’s research team collected spawning fish from the wild to compare them with their captive, reproductively challenged cousins. It became clear that a surge of a particular hormone resulted in spawning. His group traced the failure of captive fish to release this hormone to a malfunction in a related hormone system in the brain that produces what are known as gonadotropin-releasing hormones (GnRHs). They eventually found completely new forms of GnRH, a breakthrough that spurred reproductive research in animals and humans.

Zohar and his colleagues learned to synthesize a specific type of GnRH, and they discovered that injecting it into captive fish would trigger the reproductive response. Or the start of it, at least. After the injection, it turned out that enzymes in the fish would naturally break the hormone apart. So Zohar’s team spent a period of years developing a novel form of the hormone resistant to that process. They also engineered a “sustained delivery system” so that the hormone could be released at just the right pace to induce spawning.

That approach effectively cleared a path for the field of aquaculture to develop. In the recent New York Times bestseller Four Fish, Paul Greenberg details Zohar’s aquaculture research, characterizing his impact in bold terms. “Over the years he has gained a reputation as one of the world’s best at cracking the reproductive codes of the marine world.”

A Sustainable System

Challenges in marine aquaculture are not limited to reproduction. For a system to be sustainable, it must be engineered to reproduce in miniature the microbial processes that support life in the oceans.

The system Zohar and his colleagues have developed over the last 15 years now sprawls across 18,000 square feet in the Columbus Center’s basement. Zohar beams proudly as he leads tours through the facility, explaining how it defines a new level of sophistication in aquaculture systems.

“Ours is the first system in the world to be fully and completely self-contained,” Zohar says.

The Columbus Center is only two blocks from the National Aquarium in downtown Baltimore, and its aquaculture facility feels in many ways like an industrial version of its tourist-oriented neighbor. Massive round tanks brim with European sea bass, sea bream, cobia and other fish species. The fish circle intently, abruptly striking with open mouths when Zohar throws in a handful of food pellets.

Next to each tank, water churns through towering filtration units filled with what appear to be wagon-wheel pasta pieces. A labyrinth of pipes and tubes connects with a web of filters and sensors to keep the water within healthy limits for the fish.

The “seawater” in the tanks is actually manufactured; the system starts with dechlorinated tap water, which is mixed with salt and other trace elements to simulate what is found in the oceans. In this water, the fish go about their daily business, leaving behind wasted food and producing ammonia and feces that would soon turn the water into inhospitable sludge.

A network of filtration systems keeps the water in pristine condition. The first separates out the food and feces, producing a viscous, salty sludge. In freshwater systems, the sludge can be used as fertilizer. This can cause pollution, however, and it’s not an option given the leftover salt in marine systems.

Enter Kevin Sowers, a professor in the Department of Marine Biotechnology who is an expert on methane-producing bacteria. Over the years, he has helped find a blend of organisms that can effectively devour the sludge created in the Columbus Center aquaculture system and convert it into methane.

“It’s very critical that all these organisms stay in balance,” Sowers observes. And when they do, 90 percent of the waste can be converted to methane.

The aquaculture system developed by Zohar and the marine biotechnology team has already been licensed to a private company for commercial production. When that system is up and running, Sowers says, it should be able to meet at least five to 10 percent of its electricity needs by burning this methane.

The other major waste product created by the system is ammonia. It’s relatively simple to convert ammonia into less toxic nitrogen compounds: Those filters filled with wagon-wheel-shaped pieces are designed specifically for this purpose. The plastic pieces are coated with a film of bacteria that thrive on ammonia, converting it into the nitrogen compounds nitrite and nitrate.

That’s only part of the process, however. The nitrogen compounds build up in the system over time. The nitrate, in particular, renders the water toxic. To get rid of it, aquarium owners and the operators of other land-based aquaculture systems are accustomed to frequently changing their water, but doing that in a commercial marine aquaculture system would be both costly and unsustainable.

Marine biotechnology faculty members Hal Schreier and Keiko Saito, along with other colleagues at the Columbus Center, developed a parallel filtration system that keeps the nitrate in check.

This system amounts to something of a high-wire act. Sulfate is a compound that occurs naturally in aquaculture systems, but aquaculture engineers have shied away from trying to use it productively due to an undesirable side reaction that produces toxic hydrogen sulfide, which could turn the water into an acidic broth.

The Columbus Center aquaculture system harnesses that reaction. Hydrogen sulfide is produced in one step by the bacteria residing in one waste chamber, and the compound is then channeled to another chamber where it is available to a special crop of finicky bacteria. Some of these bacteria consume a cocktail of hydrogen sulfide and nitrate, and churn out sulfate, hydrogen and harmless nitrogen gas in the process.

“We used the process that everyone wanted to avoid,” Schreier explains, “and we turned it to our advantage.”

Fishing for the Future

So where does the aquaculture system developed by Zohar and his colleagues go from here?

Adapting it to a commercial scale is one challenge. It could happen soon: A start-up company called Maryland Sustainable Mariculture has licensed the technology and is now looking for warehouse space that can accommodate an expanded operation. Zohar and his team will help with that effort.

Schreier says there are still parts of the innovative set-up that could be fine-tuned. Though the present aquaculture system minimizes pollution, it still produces a minimal amount of phosphate. The compound shows up as white flakes that must be collected and removed.

Schreier imagines that researchers will one day find a chemical or biological pathway to eliminate this waste product.

Marine biotechnology members are also continuing research on other fronts, including the use of bacteria to break down contaminants in the ocean, the development of algae that can be used in the production of biofuels and the exploration of the seas as a source of new pharmaceuticals.

Zohar envisions a future where aquaculture and marine biotechnology both contribute to the health of the world’s oceans.

“We have too many fishermen,” Zohar says, “and too many fishing boats.”

For now, anyway. Zohar predicts a more sustainable future: “Fishermen, I think, can readily become aquaculturists.”

UMBC associate professor of history Anne Sarah Rubin is at the forefront of using digital approaches to research history and other areas in the humanities.

– By Scott McLemee

The very thought of a website devoted to Sherman’s March may inspire mild dread. After all, the path of destruction that General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Union Army blazed across Georgia during the final weeks of 1864 was one of the most violent episodes in American history.

But by some unwritten law of the Internet, historical trauma nearly always returns as digital kitsch. One braces for a cross between a Wikipedia entry and a bunch of Gone with the Wind mash-ups on YouTube, a screen that fills with animated flames and speakers emitting the sound of a melancholy harmonica.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And a collaboration between two UMBC faculty members is exploring the potential of a movement known as the “digital humanities” – wherein digital tools are used to explore history and other subjects in all their depth and complexity.

Since 2008, Anne Sarah Rubin, an associate professor of history, and Kelley Bell ’05, M.F.A. imaging and digital arts, an assistant professor of graphic design, have been putting together Sherman’s March and America: Mapping Memory [www.shermansmarch.org]. The multimedia site launched in July 2010, funded with a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and support of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center.

Rubin says that the version now online is a work in progress representing about twenty percent of what the creators have in mind. They hope this “proof of concept” (as the bureaucratic lingo calls it) will help them to secure the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities when they apply for funding this fall.

The site design is simple and elegant. But closer examination also reveals a sophisticated engagement with issues in historiography (that is, the questions historians ask themselves about the methodology of reconstructing the past).

Visitors to the site are greeted by a map showing the area covered by Sherman’s men as they made their way between Atlanta and Savannah in November and December of 1864. The troops followed two different courses between those points, scorching the earth as they went. At the bottom of the screen is a timeline. Slide the cursor on it and you can trace the progress of each wing of the Union Army. Click on one of the highlighted towns along the way, and there pops up a short video based on events in that area during the campaign.

But the three-minute clips don’t just recite information on the military campaign, as viewed with the benefit of nearly 150 years of hindsight. The stories they tell reflect the variety of groups affected by the march. Yankee soldiers, Confederate citizens, and newly freed slaves, for example, each experienced things from distinct perspectives. And those final weeks of 1864 threw a long shadow, inspiring later generations to create books, films, and tourist attractions. How events were woven into the public memory becomes part of the story. The site looks at General Sherman, of course – but also at Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind.

“I like big questions, big issues, ‘going wide’ in looking at history,” says Rubin. “What appealed to me about Sherman’s March as a subject was the possibility of using the map as a way to frame the ‘multipositionality’ of events – how they looked from a variety of perspectives. As a digital history project, this isn’t just a collection of facts about the past. It’s also about narrative, storytelling, and memory.”

Rick Shenkman, founder and editor of the digital History News Network notes that the site’s design “reflects the sensibility of historians who have, in effect, reinvented history in the modern era.” Where historians once tried to create “a grand narrative into which Americans could stuff all of their disparate stories, pulling and tugging on the edges so that none of the pages stuck out in an unseemly manner,” the contemporary approach is to confront the variety of vantage points head-on.

“Rather than shy away from conflicting interpretations of the past, as many museums do,” Shenkman says, “the modern approach is to embrace them.” And this Sherman’s March and America does – using digital tools to map both the events and the nature of historical memory itself.

Collaboration and “Creative Foraging”

“This is definitely one of those post-tenure projects,” Anne Rubin says. Maybe so – but putting together the project was no lark. Rubin, who received her Ph.D. in American history from the University of Virginia in 1999, belongs to the first generation of scholars in the humanities to feel perfectly at home using new media.

She has done her share of work in the more traditional forms of academic publication – conference papers, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries, for example. She turned her dissertation into a book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005. That same year, she received tenure from UMBC. The book went on to win an award from the Organization of American Historians.

But Rubin was already exploring the potential of digital history well before she got her Ph.D. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, she began working in 1993 as the project manager for Valley of the Shadow – a pioneering effort to put history online, started at a time when the World Wide Web itself was brand new.

Initiated and overseen by the historian Edward L. Ayers (now president of the University of Richmond), Valley of the Shadow involved creating a digital archive of all available Civil War-era documents from Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. This enormous project won two awards from the American Historical Association. Valley helped consolidate digital history as an important part of the profession. But it also left Rubin wondering about the further potential of the new tools.

“I liked the idea of continuing to look at both the Union and the Confederacy as we’d done with Valley,” she says. “I didn’t want to build an archive, though, because I’d already done that.”

The challenge was to go beyond using the Internet as a delivery system for information that might be presented just as well in a book or a film. Were there arguments or issues that digital tools might be uniquely suited to explore?

As it happened, the seed of an idea was already planted – by way of Ross McElwee’s quirky documentary Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1986). Setting out to make a film about how the March was remembered and commemorated in the contemporary South, McElwee found history and his own life becoming knotted up in poignant and amusing ways.

“It made me think about the way that Sherman’s March could serve as a powerful metaphor,” Rubin recalls, “and made me start probing the way that Americans thought about the March and used it as a symbol.”

As with any scholarly project, this one involved long stretches of solitary reading and thinking – but it also required collaboration, and plenty of it. In 2007, Rubin took her idea to Dan Bailey, the director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center, who helped put together a grant proposal submitted to the American Council of Learned Societies. This yielded the funding necessary for Rubin to devote 2008 to the project, as well as $25,000 for technical support. The IRC later contributed $12,000 to help flesh out the work-in-progress.

“Once she got the grant,” Bailey says, “I matched Anne with Kelley Bell, and IRC supported their collaboration by assigning undergraduate interns to work on the project. Anne was open to ideas that IRC had about how to connect to a broad audience – that’s part of our mission, supporting interdisciplinary work on campus, but also getting it out to the public.”

“We were a fortuitous pairing,” says Kelley Bell, whose artistic skills translated Rubin’s historical ideas into striking imagery. As a freelance designer, Bell had been involved in film and television productions in Baltimore earlier in the decade – including a stint working on The Wire, which future generations will study to understand what America was like at the turn of the millennium. (Bell created diplomas that hang on the walls of various characters in the HBO series.)

It was while getting her own graduate degree from UMBC that Bell began studying digital animation. The Sherman’s March project allowed her not just to put that skill to work but to explore and experiment.

“This hasn’t been the usual experience between designer and client,” she says. “It’s more collaborative, a dialogue. We do a lot of ‘creative foraging,’ with a great deal of historical research on my end to find images, maps, and typefaces that fit the material.”

At the heart of everything is the historian’s in-depth understanding of the material – which must be converted into a series of resonant but extremely succinct video segments.

“The narration for three minutes of video,” says Rubin, “works out to 500 to 550 words of text. We use visual imagery to carry much of the narrative. But as a writer, I’m used to being able to explore tangents, while this is a discipline of constantly revising, constantly tightening my focus.”

Avoiding the ‘Ken Burns Approach’

A volume she is writing in connection with Sherman’s March and America will give Rubin a way to chart out some of those tangential lines of thought. The University of North Carolina Press is interested in the book, which Rubin says she hopes will be in print before the sesquicentennial of the March in 2014.

By that time, the digital project should have 100 narrative-rich video “points” on its map. The five short films now available on the beta version of the site give a taste of how Rubin and Bell have blended their expertise.

The clip for Milledgeville is a good example of what Bell calls “avoiding the Ken Burns approach.” The animation uses toy soldiers to portray how Sherman’s men took over the state capitol building and held a mock legislative session to repeal secession.

“Some people have been taken aback,” says Bell, “because the incident was so violent. They really went on a rampage. But this was our way of using imagery for its symbolic value. The Union soldiers saw what they were doing as a lark, as play, even though they really destroyed the town.”

The segment for Ebenezer Creek recounts one of the most bitterly ironic moments of the whole war. Sherman’s men threw up a temporary bridge over the creek, but refused to let dozens of newly liberated African-Americans get across before tearing it down. They were left to face the rage of Confederate troops. Many drowned while trying to escape.

“We went to Georgia and shot on location,” says Bell. “It was an incredible experience.” The video opens with a portrait of Sherman as a narrator recounts the agonizing events. Footage of the creek slowly rises from the bottom of the screen to wipe out the General’s image – as if to show that this act of treachery might be the real legacy of his campaign.

The site is impressive for both its design and its sensibility, in the opinion of another historian working with digital tools. In the early 2000s, William J. Turkel, an associate professor of history at the University of Western Ontario “struggled with the problem of representing place, voyaging, differing viewpoints, historical evidence, and commemoration” while working on a monograph about the history of British Columbia.

“If I were to do that project now,” he says, “I would try to build something like the Sherman’s March site…. By manipulating the maps or the timeline, the user is able to juxtapose different ways of knowing about the past. We say ‘Sherman’s March’ as if there was such a thing that can be readily singled out and talked about – this site complicates that idea, while helping us gain a more nuanced understanding of the way an ‘event’ is retrospectively created.”

From one point of view (to be “multipositional” about it) Sherman’s March and America looks like part of the cutting edge – a fusion of new media and new ideas, leaving what we might call “the History Channel aesthetic” far behind. But from another perspective, it’s the new normal. Digital historiography is just part of the way we know about the past, now.

Professors Rubin and Bell talk with great enthusiasm about the possibility of spinning off a team-taught workshop course that will give UMBC students a chance to experience the sort of collaboration they’ve been practicing.

In any case, it’s a taste of things to come for Rubin. “I can anticipate that this is going to be a regular part of my work as a historian,” she says. “From now on, everything I do will have a digital component.”

Images courtesy of Kelley Bell

Like any campus, UMBC is a blur of movement when school is in session. But when that motion is concentrated, studied, refined or performed – it can become truly special. UMBC’s Dance Department is the core of that activity, blending the grit of classes and rehearsal with the grace of performance. But the celebration of dance is not confined to classrooms or concert halls. At UMBC dance is contagious, filling up The Commons, the RAC and even Beuys Sculpture Park with the beauty of bodies in motion.

REBECCA M. JUNG ’87

In a master class for UMBC students, Rebecca M. Jung ’87, dance, wants dancers to think in shapes. “I see line and design,” she says, helping students assemble geometries of movement. “I call this sculpture garden. Let’s sculpt!”

Jung brings insights from her work with the innovative Pilobolus Dance Company to the class – and an insistence on persistent effort. “Try again,” she says after one droopy run-through. “I haven’t seen 100 percent with you guys yet!”

But as the students finally put the shapes in motion with grins and grimaces, Jung also smiles and exclaims: “The sculptures start to move. They become kinetic!”

— Richard Byrne ’86
Photo by Chris Hartlove

MODERN DANCE

A group of modern dance students are still stifling Monday morning yawns as Carol Hess, professor of dance, leads them through a series of flowing rolls, reaches, swoops and spins that grow in intensity and complexity.

“Let’s clarify,” Hess says suddenly. And under her gaze and instruction, the students wrestle their bodies into shapes and movements that tell stories. Motions that were simple and tentative at the beginning of class now blossom into creative expressions. In repetition, the students grow in grace and confidence and speed.

Hess nods with approval, urging her students on as they move: “Travel, travel, travel!”

— Richard Byrne ’86
Photo by Chris Hartlove

BALLET

At UMBC, ballet class is not the stuff of Degas, all pink tutus and tightly-wound buns. The students wear rainbow knee socks. One has the outline of a swallow behind her elbow. There’s a small square of injury tape on the wall that reads: “I UMBC Dance.”

But the movement here is all ballet: a wonder of balance, of shape, of discipline. A pianist plays Mozart as lines of students spin into pirouettes. The air between the mat and the landing of a perfect grand jeté feels timeless somehow. And the swallow appears to fly.

— Jenny O’Grady
Photo by Chris Hartlove

SENIOR DANCE CONCERT

The thrills and grace of circus acrobats was the center of Mystique – a piece choreographed by Meghan Alokonis ’11 at the Senior Dance Concert. Inspired by Cirque du Soleil and entwined with classical ballet, six dancers spun in a flying swirl of colors – neon greens and purples and pinks. Their leaps and poses, splits and arabesques, were accompanied by the dizzying and enchanting music of the carnival.

— Derek Roper ’11
Photo by Enoch Chan

FALL DANCE SHOWCASE

The UMBC Fall Dance Showcase is held in simple space, a dream-like emptiness that invites the audience to join in the act of creation, and imagine themselves in more deft and graceful limbs. Colored lights fade and revive as dancers run, jump and slide in their glow. We fill in blank spaces, tell our own silent stories. Too soon, the lights go black and we re-enter the waking world. The dancers, now all grins and heaving chests, take their bows as we applaud.

— Meredith Purvis
Photo by Enoch Chan

DANCE-A-THON

The heavy bass beat of a Dance-a-Thon for charity leaks out even before you arrive at the University Center. And you need that beat; the idea is to dance all night, from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m.

No one here is conserving energy yet. At one moment, breakdancers drop to the floor in an eye-blurring display of movement, feet flying. Then a group of six or seven dancers, moving in unison, forms a diagonal line that dominates the dance floor before it is submerged by the crowd and the music and cheers.

— Emma Marston ’11
Photo by Erin Ouslander ’03

THIRTY OAKS

In Thirty Oaks, a piece performed in the Beuys Sculpture Park, the dancer’s stage opens up around her. Autumn moss caresses her heel. A gray oak trunk is a maypole to arched back and wind-strewn hair. A rock is a fulcrum for her moving body. The soil works itself into the seams of her evolving costume, her fingers plunge root-like into mulch.

A tree branch snaps against her, a natural staccato. She smiles, and a ray of sunshine peeks through the leaves like a spotlight. Dance can happen anywhere.

— Jenny O’Grady
Photo by Erin Ouslander ’03

DANCE TEAM

At Homecoming this year, UMBC’s Dance Team had to tweak its choreography mid-routine to squeeze all 22 dancers onto the The Commons’ Main Street. But the team’s dancers – who often take Retriever Fever out of the RAC to pep rallies, fundraisers and campus events – are old hands at tight fits. “We performed inside the bookstore once,” says co-captain Meghan Alokonis ’11. “We were trying not to knock down the mugs!”

— Chelsea Haddaway
Photo by Michelle Jordan ’93

MAJOR DEFINITION

Hip hop is all about flow. Intensity. From the emcee to the beats to the movement that the music inevitably creates. And when the rhythm kicks in, campus dance troupe Major Definition brings flow and intensity anywhere they throw down – in the RAC, in The Commons (where they perform and teach classes) and in contests like the East Coast Dance Competition, which the group won in 2009.

— Richard Byrne ’86
Photo by Melissa Van der Kaay

VIDEO EXTRA: Dance at UMBC

UMBC is one of 50 public institutions in the United States recognized by The Princeton Review as a “Best Value College” offering a combination of educational excellence and affordability.  The ranking was announced February 22 on the Today Show and in USA Today.

Read the full story here.

Champions in the Water

From the very beginning, emphasis was on the team. In the first month of practice, Chad Cradock ‘97, head coach of the swimming and diving teams, called out the names of student athletes and had them  describe what the team meant to them. Students cited their determination, their sacrifice, their love of the sport and their support for each other. The men were hungry for another championship and the women were not about to let the men hog the spotlight. “It created such a positive environment,” Cradock said.

It looks as if that positive environment paid off. Both men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams clinched 2011 America East Championships, the eighth consecutive such victory for the Retriever men and the third crown won by the women since they joined the conference.

“The coaches and staff are really proud of our athletes for buying into the hard work,” said Cradock. “They’re not your average student athletes. They get up and swim at six in the morning, then come back in the afternoon to train again.”

There were several stand-out athletes at the championship, and some new records were set. Brad Reitz ’11 earned the “Male Coaches’ Award” with 223 points earned during his four years as a Retriever. At the championship, he broke both the school and pool record for the 200-yard butterfly with a time of 1:47.26.

Abbey McKenney ’12 earned the award for “Most Outstanding Female Swimmer.” Her 100-yard freestyle time of 49.66 seconds is a new record for both UMBC and the America East Championship.

Johan Rohtla ’14 was named “Most Outstanding Male Rookie,” after he won gold and set a school record in the men’s 200-yard backstroke with a time of 1:46.80, breaking a record he had set earlier that day by 1.5 seconds.

Several other Retrievers earned medals and contributed to their teams’ victories. Pierre De Waal ’11 earned gold in the men’s 1,650-yard freestyle, Eric Jones ’11 won silver in the men’s 100-yard freestyle and John Mendenhall ’12 brought home the silver medal in the men’s 200-yard breaststroke.

In the women’s 200-yard butterfly, Tara Morrissette ’13 earned silver and Jennifer Kotonias ’13 brought home bronze. Amy Fay ’13 won bronze in the women’s 1,650-yard freestyle and set the second-fastest time in school history.

UMBC also brought home the award for “Men’s Co-Coaching Staff of the Year.” Cradock said they earned the award “solely on the performance of our men.”

Elsewhere in what was a busy weekend for UMBC athletics, the men’s track and field team took fourth place and the Retriever women took sixth at the America East Indoor Championships, earning three gold medals in the process. Read more about track and field here.

(2/22/11)

Committed Modernist

It’s been a big year for Jessica Berman, chair of English: she was recently elected to the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) board, is putting the finishing touches on a book that she has been researching and writing for the past six years and is co-editing a new book series.

“The scholarship that I do bridges that distinction between a national literature department, like UMBC’s English department, and what we think of more properly as comparative literature,” she said. Berman’s work across these two fields allows her to bring a unique perspective to the classes she teaches. It is also getting her noticed in the scholarly community: Berman’s recent nomination and election to the board for the ACLA, the principal society in the United States for scholars whose work involves cross-cultural literary study, signals that she’s one of the premier voices in this field.

“It feels like a great accomplishment to have been able to continue work in this field and to have been recognized as a scholar at a national level,” she said.

Berman’s appointment to this board is an obvious choice based on her current scholarly work. Her recently completed book, tentatively titled “Modernist Commitments: Transnational Modernism between Ethics and Politics,” is at the cusp of a growing trend in the study of modernism because she looks at how authors influenced each other across national borders. This means that in addition to well-known modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the book discusses writers from regions including the Caribbean, India and Spain. “In comparative literature you’re always thinking about how a text circulates,” she said. “When you come across somebody that nobody’s worked on or who people don’t really know exists, there’s a very exciting sense of discovery.”

The book also examines how these writers were influenced by and responding to each other and the political events of their times. “It’s really hard to shake this idea that if you are trying to complicate the picture of the world [as modernist writers do], it takes you away from concern with the world. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.”

Berman is helping to develop the field of transnational modernism in other ways, too; a new book series that Berman is co-editing called “Modernist Latitudes,” published by Columbia press, is seeking out and connecting scholars in this area of research. Berman and her co-editor, Paul Saint-Amour of the University of Pennsylvania, are selecting books for the series that consider modernism in new or understudied ways. When “Modernist Commitments” is published in late 2011 or early 2012 it will be the third book in the series.

With so many recent accomplishments, Berman isn’t slowing down. In fact, she’s already getting excited about what she expects to be her next book, a study of how modernist writers migrated not only between countries, but between media. As always, it’s a fresh approach to her field.

(2/21/11)

Cyber Games

As a senior at UMBC majoring in computer science, Max Spector has spent long hours in the classroom learning the theories and principles that explain how information systems work. He has studied the vulnerabilities that can cripple and corrupt these systems, and he talks rapid-fire about such hacking techniques as “buffer overflow attacks” and  “ARP spoofing attacks.”

But for Spector, who aspires to a career in cybersecurity, what happens in the classroom is only one part of his education.

“In a class, there’s not a lot of, ‘Here’s a computer, and here’s someone attacking you,” explains Spector, who is president of the UMBC Cyber Defense Team. Theoretical knowledge is vital for defending a computer system, but textbooks and lectures can’t simulate the adrenaline surge brought by a real cyber attack.

“What do you do if hackers are already inside your server?” he asks excitedly. “How do you get them out?”

Helping Maryland students and young professionals experience the challenge and excitement that this real-world element brings to cybersecurity is a big reason why UMBC, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and other partners are planning the first-ever Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference (MDC3).

The October event will bring new and experienced teams together to hone their skills in an event that combines the strategy of a chess tournament with the relentless pace of a sporting event.

 “Maryland colleges and universities have a critical role to play in preparing students for careers in cybersecurity and related fields,” explains UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski. “This event will support those efforts by encouraging the development of valuable cybersecurity skills in a competitive setting.”

Founders of the event include SAIC, UMBC, the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED), and the Tech Council of Maryland (TCM).

Orientation sessions for teams in each of three divisions — high school, collegiate and industry and government professionals — will be held at UMBC in March and April. Two qualifying rounds will be conducted online using SAIC’s Cyber Network Exercise System (CyberNEXS), a scalable training, exercise and certification system.

The final rounds of the challenge will be held at the conference Oct. 21-22. High school teams will compete in a cyber defense challenge, while collegiate and professional teams will go head-to-head in a “capture the flag” scenario. Winners of each division will receive their trophies and awards at a formal ceremony at UMBC.

For members of the UMBC Cyber Defense Team, the event creates a new focal point on their calendar, serving as a “championship” for a state that has rapidly emerged as a national leader in cybersecurity.

Spector is excited. Though UMBC’s team is less than two years old, it has already been successful, making it in 2010 to the Mid-Atlantic Regional competition of the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

With the new Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference, Spector sees an opportunity for more students and young people to get a taste of both the challenges and rewards of cybersecurity work: “It’s preparation for the real world.”

For more information, visit http://bit.ly/fWJdcX.

(2/9/11)

Eco-Education

A first-year seminar class offered this semester is giving students the chance to explore environmental issues from a humanities perspective. The class, Sustainability in American Culture, focuses on eco-literacy; that is, an awareness of how cultural influences can affect our relationship with the environment.

“In a humanities course, it’s possible to think about thing like culture, discourse and language and how those things shape our thinking and how our thinking shapes our interaction with the environment and the natural world,” said Rita Turner, ’11 Ph.D., language, literacy and culture, who is teaching the class. Turner’s dissertation is based on developing curriculum to cultivate environmental awareness in high school and college students, so when she heard that the university was testing the idea of having graduate students teach first-year seminars she jumped at the chance to use her materials.

The class allows students to approach environmental issues from multiple perspectives, rather than just learning the science of the environment. For example, students read about how everyday items are produced, wrote creative pieces from the perspective of nonhuman beings in the environment and created digital stories about places.

“We look critically about what’s said in the media, how our attitudes are shaped, what metaphors we use to talk about the natural world and what rights we have,” said Turner. By discussing popular discourse on the environment, Turner hopes to empower her students—many of whom are science majors who plan to work on environmental issues —to understand and critique the range of factors that contribute to our attitudes about the environment.

“I like the fact that we can step into the gray areas instead of being in the black-and-white place that we normally are when it comes to classes and answers,” said Heather Harshbarger ’14, chemical engineering.

 “I was surprised at how much information the class covered,” said Jennie Williams ’14, social work. “Not only did the curriculum focus on conservation, but it also explored consumerism, corporate power, political influence and even art and creative reflection in nature.”

Williams, an avid recycler and vegetarian, said that she was aware of environmental issues before taking the class but that it has expanded her view of these issues. “I have definitely become more aware of consumerism in the American culture and it has motivated me to stay active in education and projects of environmental protection,” she said.

Turner said that teaching the class has helped her to hone the curriculum that she will present with her dissertation, and she looks forward to being able to share what she learned in a real classroom with her dissertation committee. Teaching the class has reinforced her belief that students should learn to think critically about the environment. “This sort of humanities piece of the puzzle is missing, and I feel like there’s a real need for that,” she said.

(12/6/10)

Excellence & Affordability

UMBC is one of 50 public institutions in the United States recognized by The Princeton Review as a “Best Value College” offering a combination of educational excellence and affordability.  The ranking was announced February 22 on the Today Show and in USA Today.

The honor is the third major national distinction UMBC has received from leading higher-education rankings publications this academic year. For the second year in a row, UMBC was named America’s #1 “Up-and-Coming” national university by U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges Guide.  The University was also included on Kiplinger’s Best Value Public Colleges list.

The Princeton Review recognizes UMBC, a research university with nearly 13,000 students, for  attracting serious students and supporting them with undergraduate research opportunities throughout the Baltimore-Washington region and beyond. The campus location near BWI-Marshall Airport gives students access to internships with government agencies, nonprofits and leading private-sector companies.

 “UMBC provides a distinctive undergraduate education to outstanding students, many of whom go on to prestigious graduate schools and professional opportunities. We’re delighted to be recognized by The Princeton Review’s list of ‘Best Value Colleges,’ ” said UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III.

The Princeton Review selected schools by using institutional data and student opinion surveys. Broadly speaking, it examined factors covering undergraduate academics, costs and financial aid. A school’s academic rating was derived from admissions and other institutional data and student opinion surveys.

A school’s financial aid rating was based on data about tuition, fees, room and board and need-based financial aid packages and student opinion surveys regarding award packages and the service provided by a school’s financial aid office.  Approximately seventy-seven percent of students at UMBC receive some financial aid in the form of scholarships, loans and grants.

Dale Bittinger, director of undergraduate admissions and orientation, said, “Being named to the ‘Best Value Colleges’ list once again is something that we are proud of as it reaffirms, among many values, our commitment to attracting a highly diverse community of high-achieving students.”

UMBC was also named a “Best Value College” in 2009 and in 2008 was ranked the second “Most Diverse Student Body”  in The Princeton Review’s “The Best 368 Colleges: 2009 Edition.”

(2/22/11)

Getting Intuit

It’s a feeling that both artists and researchers are familiar with: a problem seems unsolvable when suddenly, in a flash, a creative solution becomes clear. This moment of insight might get credited to instinct or your gut, but what if it’s more than a hunch?  What if it’s part of how the brain solves problems, as trustworthy as conscious thought?

That’s what Lee Boot, associate director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC), asked himself when he was invited by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to prepare an exhibit for October’s USA Science and Engineering Festival on the National Mall. Now, nearly a year later, IRC is preparing to unveil an exhibit that leads visitors to reach the “eureka” of intuitive insight and teaches them what is happening in their brain at that moment.

“It was important for us to invite an artist to explore this perspective. Lee’s research was extensive and his group’s ability and willingness to bring together a variety of perspectives is one of the reasons we felt that working with him would be a fertile exploration,” said J.D. Talasek, director of cultural programs of the NAS. In many ways, the NAS and the IRC were a perfect fit: the NAS creates exhibitions and programs that explore the intersection of art, science and culture, while the IRC investigates how science and art can influence each other to lead to greater understanding.

To Boot, intuition is at the core of this connection, because it can lead to discoveries in all disciplines. “The fact that scientists have discovered a part of your brain that people who have an intuitive insight have used gives validity to an entire way of thinking,” he said. “It’s one of the things that human brains do that pocket calculators don’t.”

Boot worked with IRC artists and researchers including Abbey Salvo ’10, computer animation; Eric Smallwood ’03, digital arts,’10 M.F.A. imaging and digital arts, and IRC technical director; Gianfranco Mirizzi, M.F.A. imaging and digital arts student; David Gurzick ’09 Ph.D., information systems; and Shane Lynch ’09, computer science, to conceptualize an exhibit that would allow visitors to both learn about intuition and experience their own moment of insight. They eventually settled on a large black booth with four peepholes, through which visitors will watch short films that comprise different parts of a scene. Visitors are invited to intuit what the larger scene that connects the four short films might be and share their ideas, which will be displayed on a screen. On the side of the booth is an interactive visualization where visitors can see what happened in their brain as they watched the film and reached the insight.

“We want them to experience their own brain at an intuitive moment,” said Boot.

In order to create the visualization, IRC researchers read scientific papers on the “neural basis of insight,” and consulted with scientists about the accuracy of the IRC’s representations. They eventually developed an illustration that reflected both the current knowledge and the artists’ impressions. “We want to be consistent with the science, but there are a lot of different windows through which we can look at the human experience,” said Boot.

In addition to helping visitors understand their own brains, the booth will help scientists understand the visitors’ brains. It was designed so that the videos, visualizations and even the graphics on the side could be changed, allowing researchers to use it to collect data about how to help people achieve intuitive insight. This fits another of the IRC’s goals: to use art to contribute to scientific discoveries.

“When you think about what artists can bring to research, I think it is comfort with intuition, comfort with improvisation and comfort and skills with playing,” said Dan Bailey, director of the IRC.

Before the booth heads down to the National Mall for the Festival it will be in the Commons on October fourth (12-5 p.m.) and fifth (9 a.m.-5 p.m.). Boot hopes to get feedback that can be implemented before the festival on October 23-24, which is expected to attract thousands of attendees.

(9/24/10)