Sonya Squires-Caesar, a doctoral candidate in UMBC’s language, literacy, and culture program, has been interviewing communities who use susus to save money for big-ticket items like homes, farms, or everyday needs like transportation and bills. Susu, a word thought to come linguistically from West African languages, is an informal structure of communal savings where individuals agree to give an equal amount of money to one pool. Members then decide the frequency of when someone receives the entire amount.

“I remember my mother planning her spending around when she would get her payment,” says Squires-Caesar, whose family is from Barbados. Squires-Caesar explains that susus—or rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs)—can be a way for people to access larger sums of money without the barriers formal banks and finance systems pose to people without high levels of disposable income.

“While there is a significant body of ROSCA research, it tends to focus on groups living in poverty or with minimal or no access to formal financial instruments,” says Squires-Caesar. “My study differs by focusing on middle-class and upper-middle-class immigrants who opt to use this informal, unregulated financial tool in the U.S. alongside mainstream financial services such as banks, credit cards, investments, etc.”

Squires-Caesar, the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ graduate student research fellow for fall 2023, is interested in studying the evolution of susus from the transatlantic slave trade to today. She explains that for centuries people have pooled their resources for individual and communal needs. 

Honoring African indigenous knowledge

Susus are a cultural practice rooted in African indigenous knowledge, a term for how various African cultures orally passed a range of information, customs, and beliefs from generation to generation. “In African indigenous knowledge, the act of learning is thought to be a fully engaged journey to ‘find one’s face,’” says Squires-Caesar, “which is considered the path to discovering your roots, revealing your spirit, and determining the ‘fire in your belly’ or core elements that matter most to you.”

Squires-Caesar “found her face” when she aligned her research path with her authentic identity. “Western research methods couldn’t guide mine. I felt I was trying to fit a square peg into a circle,” explains Squires-Caesar. “I found my face when I realized the methodology that my project needed had to model the community I was looking to understand.”

Researching what’s below the surface

Squires-Caesar’s approach to understanding financial literacy is less about the stock market and credit and more about what is intangible. She calls it the iceberg effect.

“On top of the iceberg are tangible things like bank accounts and credit cards,” explains Squires-Caesar. “You can see, touch, feel, and measure them, but beneath the iceberg are the processes that may not have official rules and regulations and where the general public may not know they are happening, like susus.” 

During the four years she managed a community college financial literacy program, Squires-Caesar met many students surviving from month to month. Through ethnographic research, she found students were using non-traditional ways to make ends meet, like getting cash advances from bingo halls to pay for bills and groceries. The data also showed that some students were overwhelmed by the idea of saving.

To shift that thinking, she created a microsavings project for her students to take them through the process of saving—a few cents here, a few dollars there, which grows over time. 

These stories about the complexities of susu communities have inspired Squires- Caesar, as part of her Dresher Fellowship, to decorate physical masks as three-dimensional representations of financial identity, of “finding face.”

Renique Kersh became UMBC’s vice president for student affairs in August 2023, and her first days were a whirlwind that included dropping her sons at school, moving from Boston to Maryland, and attending a number of UMBC welcome events for students and the community.

Now that she’s had the chance to replant her roots at UMBC (her first job out of graduate school was as a community director for Residential Life from 2001 – 2003), Kersh is using her time to listen to the community and bring her expertise to the table as she works with campus leadership and partners to support student success and well-being.

Her excitement and eagerness to be here is evident in the way she enthusiastically talks about UMBC students, staff, faculty, alumni, and families—and the work ahead.

UMBC Magazine: What has excited you the most about being at UMBC so far?

The students! One of the most exciting parts of my interview process was meeting students in person. I appreciate how humble they are and how seriously they take the privilege of being here and caring for our community.

I’ve also loved meeting and hearing from staff and faculty across campus. It’s a phenomenal group with a lot of spirit, energy, and commitment to the university and creating opportunities for students. 

Some people have heard me say this already, but it’s true: When we moved from Boston and crossed the border into Maryland, I immediately felt a sense of home. I do believe that this is my home, and it’s where my heart has been for many years. I wake up every morning thankful to be part of such a supportive campus environment.

I’m also honored and humbled to work for a president who is a dynamic leader who deeply appreciates UMBC’s history and is committed to taking the university to the next level. I’m excited to be part of that work too.

I’m grateful for the alumni who have welcomed me, and I look forward to additional opportunities to engage with them and hear about their experiences as students here. I would love to bring alumni who were student leaders during their time here to meet with our current student leaders.

UMBC Magazine: What are your initial goals to connect and support students and the campus—now and future? What is the importance of campus partnerships in student affairs?

I’ve been doing a lot of listening, and I hear five areas where we need to grow: belonging; staff well-being and capacity; space; structure; and synergy. I want to build priorities around what I am hearing.

We are a diverse community but we still need to pay attention to how students feel welcome. Our demographics are changing quickly and as part of our commitment to inclusive excellence we need to have the infrastructure to support the diverse student body. The goal of the Division of Student Affairs is to support and engage both undergraduate and graduate students. To do that fully we need to engage in some difficult conversations in order to build community, while honoring differences and similarities between the two.

We are in need of additional space to support students, staff, and faculty. The pandemic has changed how we use space, and we need to consider these changes and look at how we can use space. We need to find more spaces where students can gather together in the ways we hope for them. 

Partnerships across our division and campus are key. We do work better together. Together we can address capacity and efficiency so that students are successful. This includes technology to evaluate success, communication structures, and bringing academics together with co-curricular engagement experiences.

Over the course of my career, I’ve spent a great deal of time in student affairs, and a long time on the academic side of universities as well. Both areas show a care and concern for student success, but sometimes barriers build up between the two. This work cannot be done in silos, and I’m committed to finding the connection points and focusing on ways we can work together. 

UMBC Magazine: How do we support students in challenging times? 

It’s really important to listen to students and not impose our way of being on them. What do they need? Often, the first things they begin to share with us don’t give us an immediate sense of what they are feeling or need; we have to keep listening and encourage them to tell their story before we respond. What is their concern a symptom of, and how do we diagnose it? 

Being present with students also calls for humility and understanding our limitations. Answers aren’t always simple. We have to look at the support systems we offer, and if they don’t have the impact we are hoping for, we may need to change how we do things or consider new ways of doing them. 

The mental health crisis is ongoing, so we need to think creatively about what we offer students. That may mean going beyond care appointments to, for example, pop-up spaces with resources and trained facilitators. We know this crisis calls for a major shift in how universities approach this work and that there’s also an impact on faculty and staff, who may struggle to know how to help students while dealing with their own challenges. Sometimes it calls for difficult discussions about students and their responsibility as a member of this community and how they can support themselves and others.

UMBC Magazine: As you began your vice president’s role, you also traveled to Germany in October as part of your Fulbright Administrators Award. What did you learn from the experience?

The experience was transformative both personally and professionally, and I was honored to be one of the 15 leaders chosen from across the country. 

First of all, everyone in my group shared their schools’ challenges with equity issues. While our educational systems and our assessment methods are different, we had important conversations and struggled with the idea of trying to change a system that has been in place for quite some time.

I learned that administrators from Germany traveled to Kentucky as part of their Fulbright, and they were shocked by our standard of care. They shared that the level of support and guidance we provide seems excessive and indicated that in Germany the philosophy is that when students turn 18 they are adults who can navigate institutions on their own.

Our conversations led us to discussions about what we can learn from Germans about giving students more space to figure things out and what they can learn from us about meeting students where they are and considering the standard of care that may be needed at each stage of development. In the future, I would love to teach a comparative analysis class and take students to Germany to learn more about their approach to education and care.

In reflecting back, I see the Fulbright as a seed for me and my work, but also an opportunity for my sons to see what is possible for them, too.

UMBC Magazine: In 2022 you were also selected to be an Aspen Institute Senior Impact Fellow. What were the outcomes of this program?

What I loved about this fellowship is that it’s an intergenerational program, so there were leaders in high school and college up to university presidents. We discussed our perspectives on what leadership means and how to create opportunities for experiential equity for students. Some of the things children engage in or are responsible for can be examples of leadership, but are not traditionally acknowledged as such. How do we capture that and provide more resources and support for them? 

As part of my fellowship, I co-authored a report focused on the advancement of youth leadership development opportunities. “Advancing Youth Development Leadership Research,” was published in October 2023 under the new name of the organization that spun off of Aspen, The Center for Expanding Leadership and Opportunity, along with an additional report on “The Future of Youth Leadership Development Practice.”  

UMBC Magazine: As a leader, how important is self care to you and how do you practice it? 

My doctoral research focused on the relationship between stress and the health risks for women leaders in higher education. It’s real, and the more responsibility women have as leaders the more unhealthy they become. This really spoke to me, and as I grow as a leader I’ve never forgotten it. I have to remind myself to take time for me, that no one else will do that for me. For me, this means personal retreats focused on what I need at the time, whether it’s space to think and write or just a relaxing getaway.

In the day-to-day, I love Peloton, and I just started shadowboxing! I also love spending time in community with family and friends.

Interview by Eleanor Lewis

After 18 months of intensive design work by a team of more than 100 scientists, which followed years of preliminary work and investment, in November the scientists and engineers on the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) science team took an important step toward delivering this next-generation space telescope. They became one of 10 teams to submit their formal project proposal to NASA, requesting nearly $1 billion in funding to further develop the design and build the telescope. 

Adi Foord, assistant professor of physics, and Eileen Meyer, associate professor of physics, serve on the central AXIS leadership team, and Foord co-leads the sub-team focused on supermassive black hole evolution. If selected for production, AXIS will improve upon the highly successful, but aging, Chandra X-ray Observatory launched in 1999. 

As an X-ray telescope, AXIS aligns with one of the established priorities laid out in NASA’s 2020 decadal survey. These surveys initiate a years-long competition to be the one major instrument eventually selected for launch to address one of the priorities. 

A revolutionary x-ray telescope

“AXIS is going to revolutionize our understanding of supermassive black hole growth and evolution by detecting some of the earliest known supermassive black holes to date and tracking them across cosmic time,” Foord says. “AXIS will be the premiere high-angular-resolution X-ray mission of the 2030s, observing deeper into our universe than currently possible with existing X-ray telescopes.”

The lead investigator on the AXIS team is Chris Reynolds at University of Maryland, College Park, and the co-lead is Erin Kara at MIT. The team will know by fall 2024 if its proposal is one of two or three selected to move on to the next phase. After that, one proposal will eventually emerge the winner, and the selected team will build their satellite for launch in the early 2030s. 

The team is optimistic about their prospects, given the strength of the proposal and the potential impact of the new satellite’s capabilities. AXIS’ “superb resolution means that it will be able to detect many new systems of interacting supermassive black holes,” Foord explains, such as pairs orbiting each other very closely and expected to merge. “We currently don’t know of too many of these systems, and AXIS is predicted to find hundreds to thousands of them.”

When LeBron James comes calling, you answer the phone. Philip Knowlton ’03, visual arts, knows this better than most.

The NBA legend doesn’t have the UMBC alum in his contacts because Knowlton is great at one-on-one (probably). Instead, Knowlton has collaborated with James’ media company Uninterrupted on several documentaries as a director, editor, producer, and director of photography. Uninterrupted was founded to empower athletes to tell their stories in their own words. This time, Knowlton was called upon to direct and co-executive produce Redefined: J.R. Smith, a four-part Prime Video documentary series released in April 2023 that follows J.R. Smith, a retired two-time NBA champion, as he navigates a new challenge—college.

“This is the story of him post-NBA as he decides to go to college at North Carolina A&T [State University] to pursue a degree but also to try out for the Aggies golf team,” explains Knowlton.

Student-athlete turned filmmaker

“It was just a really inspiring project to be a part of,” says Knowlton, who made his first sports documentary about UMBC track and field when he was a student-athlete on the team. Having played (and won championships) with James on both the Cleveland Cavaliers and Los Angeles Lakers, Smith became good friends with James. So, when Smith made the decision to pack his book bag, head to college, and try out for the golf team, his team connected with Uninterrupted to see about interest in a possible film project.

“Of course they were on board,” says Knowlton, who received the call from Uninterrupted soon after. “They asked me if I’d be interested in flying to Greensboro to film a sizzle.” In the film world, a sizzle is like a demo—a short trailer used to pitch the story to networks.

Knowlton jumped at the opportunity to once again work with Uninterrupted.

“I think what they really like about me is that I’m able to direct and shoot,” says Knowlton. “It keeps the team smaller and more intimate. So, you’re able to be in places that a big crew may not be able to get into. Or athletes may not want a whole big team following them around.” 

Knowlton worked with the team at Uninterrupted to put together a treatment and map out the story they wanted to tell. Then, he hopped on a plane to Greensboro and filmed the sizzle.

“Next, we took meetings with everyone like HBO Max, ESPN+, Amazon—all of them,” explains Knowlton. “There was interest from quite a few networks, but it ultimately landed on Prime Video.” 

By this point, Smith was just about two or three weeks out from starting school. So, Knowlton had to move quickly. “This production, specifically, was really dictated by Smith’s golf season and his school year,” says Knowlton. The team made it in time to film the first couple days of school and practice. Then, they returned every month or two for different milestones throughout Smith’s first year, like his first tournament and A&T’s homecoming celebration. 

“It was amazing to see J.R., who could have retired and moved to Miami to hang out by the pool, want to go to college for the first time and push himself,” says Knowlton.

Find a place that let’s you do both

Of course, this story starts way before Smith decided to trade basketballs for golf balls. This story starts at a still-burgeoning university in Baltimore County, Maryland.

“I was looking for a school where I could run cross country that also had a good video or digital art program,” explains Knowlton, who now owns and operates Opposit, a creative studio he founded in 2018 specializing in original documentary film content. “A lot of schools have one or the other but not both.” UMBC gave Knowlton the opportunity to explore both.

“It was kind of a no-brainer,” admits Knowlton, who received an athletic scholarship to run on the cross country and track and field teams while pursuing his B.A. in imaging and digital arts. “That program was perfect in that it let me experiment in a lot of different art forms.”

Throughout college, Knowlton was still trying to find his passion. He knew he loved visual arts but was unsure where to focus his energy. He enjoyed photography, graphic design, and film. It wasn’t until Vin Grabill’s video art class that it all started to click.

“I taught students that video could be seen as a kind of ‘painting in time.’ Utilizing video edits as brushstrokes, students created short rhythmic works that brought impact to their source material,” explains Grabill, associate professor emeritus in UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts. “Phil’s exercises exemplified these goals, eventually leading to final projects where narrative content was successfully built around a solid rhythmic structure. I’m very happy to see Phil pushing his work forward 20 years later!”

“Today, when I do Q&As about my films, I like to quote [basketball coach] Jim Valvano, who said, ‘Every single day, in every walk of life, ordinary people do extraordinary things,’” says Knowlton. “When I work on documentaries, a lot of the time I am filming everyday people doing amazing things. But J.R.’s story almost feels like the reverse. He’s this extraordinary person doing something more ordinary—going to college. To have been a part of J.R.’s journey and help share with the world has been a great experience.”

- If you are traveling this month, make sure you have a travel signature on your DS-2019!

UMBC is continuing its commitment to diversifying Maryland’s biomedical and life sciences ecosystem through its latest collaborative effort with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) to develop a new life sciences accelerator program focused on faculty development and research commercialization efforts. 

UMBC and UMB were jointly awarded a four-year, $4 million Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hubs (REACH) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance the biomedical entrepreneurship and innovation economy in the Baltimore region. This grant will be used to build on the work that began when UMBC and the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) received a $13 million NIH Common Fund Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) grant in 2022 to enhance recruitment and training of junior faculty from groups underrepresented in biomedical science.

“We have a long-term commitment to enhance the diversity of the faculty on our two campuses in the biomedical and life sciences,” says Karl V. Steiner, UMBC’s vice president of research and creative achievement and co-principal investigator of the new REACH grant. “We are pleased to further strengthen the close partnership with our colleagues at UMB and beyond with this next initiative.”

Building a life sciences accelerator program

The REACH grant will fund up to 44 early-career faculty and students from UMBC and UMB (11 each year) with up to $100,000 each to develop and test commercially-promising biomedical and life science technologies. Additionally, UMB will use a portion of the grant funding to create the University of Maryland, Baltimore Life Science Discovery (UM-BILD) Accelerator Program’s “proof-of-concept” hub that will be housed at the University of Maryland BioPark and at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park. The UM-BILD hub, set to launch next year, is one of only five REACH hubs awarded funding across the nation. 

Aaron Miscenich, executive director of bwtech@UMBC, explains that bwtech@UMBC has done extensive work in developing a strong community centered around entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. 

“UMBC’s partnership with UMB to create this technology commercialization hub will [further] enhance our work and bring additional support to UMBC’s research community,” Miscenich says. “It’s a great opportunity to bring together UMBC faculty and students with resources that can help further develop promising technologies and help them to grow into thriving businesses.”

UMSOM’s Jason Rose, principal investigator of the REACH grant, shared how both institutions plan to support the biotech entrepreneurs who take part in the accelerator program. 

“We recognize that to create our own unique cohort of newly trained biotech entrepreneurs here in Baltimore, our accelerator will need to provide them with both research support and funding, as well as guidance through the process of commercialization and technology development,” Rose said in a UMSOM press release. “We will be providing mentoring and educational programs from a diverse set of successful life science innovators and leaders to help distill their broad experiences—from navigating FDA regulatory pathways to financing new companies—to all of those who interact with the hub.” 

This initiative, Steiner adds, aims to increase the number of Black and Latinx entrepreneurs in the biomedical and life sciences.

“As we look at the makeup of entrepreneurs across our communities, it’s obvious that we are under-serving those underserved communities. This will be yet another building block in our joint commitment to ensure that we focus on and benefit from the breadth of entrepreneurial talent in Maryland,” says Steiner. “We’re looking to bring in more individuals from underrepresented communities into the faculty ranks and actively help them develop a strong network of peers and mentors to allow them to successfully build their careers and their businesses in Maryland, with support from UMBC with bwtech and support from UMB.”

UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby shares that “we are excited to work together to create opportunities for everyone to benefit from and contribute to this innovation ecosystem, staying true to our long-held commitment to inclusive excellence.” 

Commercialization efforts at UMBC

Wendy Martin, director of UMBC’s Office of Technology Development, will assist in selecting and managing the projects that will be funded through the REACH grant. Martin has worked closely with faculty in all aspects of intellectual property protection and commercialization, including helping faculty to receive internal and external funding to develop new products. Those funding opportunities have included UMBC’s long-standing partnership with TEDCO’s Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII), which will also be a collaborator of the UM-BILD accelerator along with the University of Maryland, College Park, Morgan State University, and Blackbird Laboratories.

Since launching in 2012, MII has supported 39 UMBC faculty in their commercialization pursuits, including the development of bendable zinc-based batteries and vibration-powered sensor technology for wind turbines. 

“I’m excited that we can bring everyone to the table. UMBC provides a continuum of support for these commercialization projects,” says Martin. “We’re building on enhancing things that we’re already doing. It’s great that we will have these additional resources to keep it going and to do it better.”

They may say the best things come in threes, but that’s not good enough for UMBC volleyball. Over the weekend, the number one-seeded Retrievers captured their fourth-straight America East championship. After outright winning the season title, they went on to topple Bryant University in the America East semifinals, and they sealed their victory with a sweep of third-seeded Binghamton University on Saturday. 

“Winning four straight championships in college sports is really tough, regardless of sport or league,” said head coach Kasey Crider. “More than anything, this past weekend was the standard for what America East volleyball can and should be, in performance and environment.”

More than 110 academic researchers, industry pros, government officials and educators met at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) for the second annual Sustainable Aquaculture Systems Supporting Atlantic Salmon (SAS²) conference in October. The conference’s nine panel discussions (with more than 50 panelists), local field trips and tours, and social events gave stakeholders the opportunity to share progress and address remaining challenges to move the aquaculture industry forward.

Yonathan Zohar, professor of marine biotechnology at UMBC and IMET, leads the SAS² consortium, which includes 32 co-investigators, 12 research institutions, and 11 industry partners, from around the U.S. and internationally. 

Salmon is consumed more than any other fish in the U.S., but over 90 percent of it is imported at a value of $3.8 billion annually, Zohar shared in introductory remarks. People across sectors are interested in reducing this trade deficit and improving environmental sustainability of salmon aquaculture by eliminating the carbon footprint associated with transporting salmon from overseas. As a result, domestic salmon aquaculture is experiencing an investment boom, Zohar says. The investment is particularly strong for land-based aquaculture, which Zohar and colleagues are advancing at IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center (ARC). 

“This is a stakeholder-driven program,” Zohar says. “Industry and academia are engaged in genuine brainstorming towards enabling salmon aquaculture in the U.S. to be a success story.”  

University System of Maryland Chancellor Jay Perman shared that the SAS² team’s efforts, from biotechnology to market strategies to workforce development and education, “are poised to change the face of food scarcity and food production the world over.”

Research for the public good

The work at IMET has been critical to move the industry forward worldwide. The SAS² initiative, awarded $10 million by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2021, builds on the Recirculating Aquaculture Salmon Network, also led by Zohar and funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant Office.

IMET, and the ARC in particular, are “a showcase of our best ideas, ideas that promise solutions to so many essential challenges—food security, environmental sustainability, economic resilience,” Perman shared. The SAS² consortium is “research for the public good,” Perman added. “That’s our mission and this project is emblematic of that.”

Session topics at the conference included scientific and engineering challenges like waste remediation, water reuse, and managing the salmon life cycle in captivity. Other sessions discussed market research for salmon produced on land and examples of education programs that increase awareness of aquaculture careers. 

Attendees also traveled to The Conservation Fund Freshwater Institute in West Virginia to see collaborative SAS² research, visited Baltimore City Schools that incorporate aquaculture into the curriculum, toured the ARC, and heard from graduate students contributing to the research arm of SAS².

“SAS² is an amazing accomplishment—the best example of public-private partnership to solve problems for industry,” shares Steve Summerfelt, a conference panelist and the chief science officer at Superior Fresh, which raises land-based salmon and recycles the nutrient-rich wastewater to grow greens. “SAS² is providing relevant and groundbreaking research with strong tech transfer to help land-based salmon farmers.”

Enabling aquaculture innovation

Overall, the conference emphasized aquaculture’s important and growing role in worldwide food production.

“Land-based, sustainable production of seafood is critically important technology to meet the rapidly growing need for healthy seafood as a source of protein in diets worldwide,” Russell Hill, director of IMET, said. “A land-based approach has huge advantages for minimizing pollution in the coastal environment and taking pressure off wild fish populations—and all of this can be done through this resilient technology that’s also adaptable in the face of a changing planet.”

By bringing together people from across industries, the event created opportunities that will enable more breakthroughs.

“The lively engagement and productive brainstorming of all relevant sectors led to several innovative ideas and collaborations which will contribute in the short term to making Atlantic salmon farming in the U.S. and globally more environmentally responsible and economically feasible” concluded Zohar. “Everyone left inspired and excited about the opportunities being created by the SAS2 program for innovative and sustainable aquaculture.”