When UMBC’s volleyball team headed to the University of Southern California (USC) for a tournament, Athletics reached out and invited West Coast Retrievers to an LA happy hour before the game. Eager to reconnect with their alma mater and meet other alumni in the area, folks gathered together and new friendships were formed. 

Despite the decades between their UMBC experiences, Matt Sheriff ’00, political science, and Nathenael Dereb ’21, computer science, bonded over a quintessential California connection—surfing. Specifically, Dereb, a recent relocator, wanted to learn how and Sheriff, who’s been on the West Coast for years, had the skills to teach. Since then, the pair has been meeting before work in the mornings catching the waves. They carved out some time to share the experience with UMBC Magazine. 

UMBC Magazine: We know how you two met—can you tell us how you hit it off?

Sheriff: I attended graduate business school at USC, so when I read about a tournament volleyball game at USC that the UMBC team was invited to attend, I was simply amazed that my undergrad school was coming to USC. At the alumni pre-party, I met Nate Dereb, who, like me, also relocated from Maryland to LA. He was interested in learning to surf, so I’ve been introducing him to the sport when our schedules align. The beauty of living in Los Angeles is we can surf in the morning and be at work by 9 a.m., even earlier if necessary!

UMBC Magazine: What are your best surf tips?

Sheriff: Take it slow in terms of expectations and remind yourself that the best surfer is the one having the most fun.

UMBC Magazine: How was the change from Maryland to California?

Dereb: Relocating across the country to a city I’ve never been before was an overwhelming experience, but I was fortunate to have my family around me during my relocation. One of the shocking things was finding myself outside only in shorts and a shirt in February! I’m still amazed by that.

UMBC Magazine: What are you up to now?

Sheriff: I’m a senior advisor at Southern California Edison where I lead regulatory economics projects and represent the company before the California Public Utilities Commission as an expert witness. Most of my work is finance-related but the communication and analytical skills I learned at UMBC are immensely helpful.

Dereb: I am working as a software engineer at Adobe within the analytics organization. On the side, I’m still maintaining and adding data for the platform I built during my senior year that assists students and faculty in retrieving data regarding course grades, course evaluations, and professors at UMBC.

UMBC Magazine: What was your experience at UMBC like? 

Dereb: My involvement in the Center for Women in Technology organization, as a Cyber Scholar, is an experience I will always cherish. I was also fortunate to win several awards and scholarships, get multiple internship opportunities, become a teaching fellow for Computer Science 202, and do innovative research as part of the Interactive Robotics and Language lab on campus. I am a proud Retriever!

Sheriff: More than anything I feel like I grew into a young adult who was ready for the world.

President Valerie Sheares Ashby is a people person. You can see her eyes light up while she talks with folks. 

On her very first day as president of UMBC, Sheares Ashby made it clear that she wants to be available to students. Right off the bat, in true professor form, she set up weekly student office hours to do just that. 

As you might expect, her office hours are already very popular, so we decided to reflect her friendly open-door philosophy in this regular president’s column. Sheares Ashby is also engaging in a listening tour to hear from faculty, staff, students, alumni, and partners across campus and beyond in the coming month. We look forward to sharing highlights from the tour in future issues.

UMBC Magazine: How would you describe your first few months at UMBC, and what has it been like getting to know this community?

President Sheares Ashby: These first few months have been energizing, inspiring, and joyful. The more people I meet, and the more I start to make connections, the more I love this place. You can love something from a distance because of its values. But when you meet the people, and they embody those values, your love grows even deeper. It has been especially rewarding to engage with students, see who they already are, and imagine what they will become as a result of their experiences at UMBC.

And then, what is most inspiring for me is that it’s becoming more clear every day what the possibilities are for what we can do together going forward.

UMBC Magazine: That’s a terrific segue! What would you like alumni to know about your thoughts on UMBC’s future and how you hope they will be involved?

President Sheares Ashby: Well, right now, as you know, I’m holding listening sessions with members of the community, and I want as many alumni as possible to participate. As we do this, I know that I will discover even more about our collective purpose and the possibilities for UMBC. I have said to alumni that I don’t know what I’m going to ask them to do yet, but when I feel like I’ve got something that’s worthy of their time and effort and the difference that they can make, I will bring it to them. And there will be something that I need our alums to do, for sure, because they are such an important part of UMBC’s future. 

I had the opportunity recently to meet with the executive committee of the Alumni Board of Directors and then, of course, many, many more alumni during Homecoming. As they introduced themselves, they talked about what they are doing and what they loved most about their UMBC education. It was wonderful because I could hear how they are living out the values of the institution wherever their careers and lives have taken them.

I heard people talk about civic engagement and social justice and the things that we believe deep in our core. They’re out there in the world exemplifying what UMBC is, in business, professions, public service, and the arts, and that is just incredible. The more people see our alumni doing this, the more we will continue to attract excellent students, and UMBC will only grow stronger.

Meet Sandra Abbott, who has been working in UMBC’s art world for 14 years. Whether it’s through setting up world-class exhibitions or coordinating educational programs, Sandra combines her work as curator of collections and outreach at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC) and affiliate faculty in the visual arts department. Sandra thrives in her role of introducing Retrievers and community members to great art.

Q: What part of your job do you enjoy the most and why?

A: I love working with students who are exploring my profession. They keep me on my toes and ask the best questions.

Q: Who is someone in the community who has supported you, and how did they do it?

A: When I needed to research local 3D printers for a special K-12 art project, I reached out to alum Maks Prykhodko, M.F.A. ’21, IMDA. Maks returned my email within 24 hours and offered help, including a personal introduction to those I needed to connect with at the best vendor.

This is only one example of many alumni I’ve reconnected with professionally after UMBC. This community supports you at UMBC and beyond. It’s the best network!

Q: Tell us about what you love about where you work.

A: What I love about the CADVC gallery is the amazing, world-class artwork I pass by every time I come and go from my office.

Headshot courtesy of Abbott.

Q: What brought you to UMBC in the first place? 

A: I was drawn to UMBC as a place known for its academic rigor and scholarship. I wanted to develop my career amongst those who took their work as seriously as I took mine.

Q: What would you tell someone who is considering a career at UMBC?

There is always someone who can help you when you have a question or a challenge. The network of experts we have access to at UMBC is astounding. They range from those in cybersecurity and STEM to the arts and beyond. I’ve made many connections here, which often continue beyond UMBC. 

There is also always something happening—live theater, films, exhibitions, lectures, and performances. Personal growth, wellness, and education are among so many shared values here.

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

It’s official: The Baltimore Sun has again named UMBC one of the “Top Workplaces” in the Baltimore region, for the eighth time since 2013. UMBC is featured on the Sun’s list of top large employers—organizations with 400 employees or more—and is the only college or university honored this year.

The “Top Workplaces” designation reflects the results of an independent and confidential employee survey conducted in the summer. The Sun announced the news online on December 8 and highlighted all of the region’s top workplaces in a special section of the paper on December 11.

“What a great honor for us to be recognized by the Baltimore Sun!” says Lynne Adams, UMBC’s chief human resources officer.

“The faculty and staff at UMBC are the best of the best, and we will continue to ensure that we are doing everything possible to make this an appealing and exciting work environment,” she shares. “Each day as we focus on supporting our students’ success, we also recognize that we need to focus on our team members’ successes and well-being. I am excited to work alongside my fellow community members to make sure we do that.”

Shared values, meaningful work

The survey measures aspects of workplace culture such as shared values, effective management, and a sense of meaningful work. It also measures employees’ perspectives on compensation, including pay and benefits. The organizations and companies that earn top marks compared to similarly sized institutions earn the designation of “Top Workplaces.”

Earlier this year UMBC was also recognized as one of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Great Colleges to Work For.” It was UMBC’s 13^th year on the list and the 11^th year the university was also highlighted as an “honor roll” university—a distinction for institutions that score high marks in several categories. In fact, UMBC was the only R1 university in the nation recognized in every “Great Colleges to Work For” category this year.

Want to work at UMBC? See listings for faculty and staff positions through UMBC’s human resources office.

UMBC researchers designed the Cybersecurity for Manufacturing Operational Technology (CyMOT) program to help manufacturing professionals grow their cybersecurity skills, protecting the sector from cyber threats and increasing their career opportunities. Now, the program has received significant additional funding to expand its impact.

The CyMOT program—launched in 2020 in collaboration with the Chicago-based MxD (Manufacturing x Digital) and UMBC Training Centers—has been renewed with a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation (OLDCC). The funding will support the implementation of new training curricula around machine learning and cybersecurity. 

“In recent years, there has been a large number of cyber attacks on the manufacturing sector,” says Nilanjan Banerjee, professor of computer science and electrical engineering and the grant’s principal investigator. To address this rising concern, Banerjee explains, CyMOT aims to “make sure that people that are in the manufacturing business can get trained and upskilled in cybersecurity concepts around manufacturing.”

Expanding the curriculum

The first initiative of the multi-phased project included developing a cybersecurity curriculum tailored for people who already worked in the manufacturing industry, building on their existing expertise. It provided training for a manufacturing cyber systems operator role and offered content through an online training platform. 

The first cohort included 25 manufacturing professionals. In summer 2022, the program expanded when community college students in Chicago were invited to participate in a modified version of the course.

With this recent 12-month contract renewal, the next phase of the project will include courses for two more senior roles: a manufacturing artificial intelligence/machine learning engineer and an advanced manufacturing cybersecurity operator. This phase is slated to begin in February 2023. The additional funding will cover the cost for up to 150 new students interested in the programs. 

Creating an operational technology cyber range at UMBC

As this program continues to grow, Banerjee also has a related objective in mind: building an operational technology (OT) cyber range at UMBC focused on cybersecurity in manufacturing. 

“We will have equipment on campus with software to run exercises for small and medium manufacturing businesses in Maryland and students at UMBC,” Banerjee explains. “The cyber range will include red team-blue team exercises, as well as exercises to learn about cyber attacks on a company’s infrastructure. We will also conduct exercises around attacks at the interface between information technology networks and operational technology networks.”

With the cyber range, manufacturing professionals in the state can learn how to detect and mitigate cyberattacks through hands-on exercises using similar equipment found in a manufacturing OT environment.

The cyber range will be a unique resource for training and research in Maryland. It will also tie to several cybersecurity programs offered by UMBC and an apprenticeship program offered through the Maryland Extension Partnership (MEP). With emphasis on digitizing the manufacturing sector in Maryland at a time of continually increasing interconnectivity and automation (known as Industry 4.0), the cyber range will act as the testbed to train manufacturers across the state.  

Workforce development in Maryland

Donna Ruginski, UMBC’s executive director of cybersecurity initiatives and a co-PI of CyMOT, shares that the project has the potential to expand Maryland’s workforce development in a significant way, whether through curriculum development and delivery or an OT cyber range. 

“As the manufacturing industry implements digital transformation to Industry 4.0, cybersecurity training resources have become more important,” says Ruginski. “There is a shortage of people who can do cyber-related jobs. CyMOT is an avenue to up-skill and train a talent base positioned to fill those gaps in the workforce.” 

After getting its start with implementation in Chicago, CyMOT has attracted the attention of Maryland state agencies, such as the Department of Commerce, and has been recognized by leaders in manufacturing, such as the Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland (RMI). UMBC was named as one of RMI’s Champions of Maryland Manufacturing at its 2022 Maryland Manufacturing Celebration, held earlier this fall. 

On behalf of UMBC, Banerjee and Ruginski accepted an executive citation in recognition of CyMOT’s contributions to Maryland’s manufacturing industry.

“It is a great honor to be awarded an RMI Champions award,” says Banerjee. “The work around cybersecurity training and research performed at UMBC is having a true impact on growing the workforce and digitizing the regional manufacturing ecosystem, and the award is testimony to that fact.”

Opioid-related deaths have risen sharply in the U.S. in recent years. In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis to be a public health emergency—one disproportionately affecting historically marginalized communities—and the crisis has worsened since then.

In response to the rising epidemic, UMBC researchers have partnered with the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) to develop a device that could help prevent opioid overdose deaths. The device is a non-invasive CO2 monitor designed to more effectively detect and reverse an opioid overdose in real time. It was recently awarded a one-year grant of more than $500,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

“Opioid-related death is a serious problem for the country. We hope this new device will help to directly address this issue,” said the study’s co-PI Xudong Ge, research professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering (CBEE). 

Meeting an urgent need

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reported that during a 12-month period ending in April 2021, more than 100,000 drug overdoses were recorded in the U.S., with nearly 76,000 deaths attributed to opioid usage. In a separate 2022 report, the CDC noted the severity of this impact among underserved communities of color. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, overdose death rates increased 44 percent amongst Black populations and 39 percent in American Indian and Alaska Native populations.

“If you look at the statistics, the people who are dying from opioid overdoses largely come from underserved minority communities. They are the ones that need the most help,” said Thelma Wright, associate professor of pain medicine at UMSOM, who developed the idea for the study. 

As a pain medicine physician, she said she was aware of how medically-prescribed opioids have contributed to the rise in overdose death rates. In 2016, Wright began to conceptualize a way to non-invasively monitor if a patient is about to die from an opioid overdose and ways to immediately administer naloxone, an opioid antagonist that can quickly reverse an overdose.  

Despite administering naloxone to people experiencing opioid overdose, to reverse their respiratory depression, many overdose cases are fatal because the naloxone was not administered in time, Wright shared. 

“When someone is dying from an overdose, they cannot get the antidote from their medicine cabinet to administer it to themselves. I asked around if there was a sensitive monitor that could immediately detect an opioid overdose, and there was nothing,” said Wright. “I needed to find some sort of parameter that would signal respiratory depression due to an overdose, and the most accurate parameter happened to be a carbon dioxide (CO2) monitor.”

Evolving CO2 monitoring research

Opioids stimulate receptors in the brain and can cause a decrease in pain perception. When brain receptors are overstimulated, the brainstem can then become desensitized to rises in CO2 levels. As a result, the opioid user could experience respiratory depression, loss of protective airway reflexes, and respiratory arrest. 

Ge, who serves as the assistant director of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST), has spent more than a decade researching and developing non-invasive CO2 sensor systems. During the pandemic, Ge, along with Govind Rao, a professor of CBEE and the director of CAST, co-authored a study published in Medical Engineering & Physics analyzing the effects of face coverings on transdermal CO2 levels. The study demonstrated the potential effectiveness of monitoring CO2 levels through the use of wearable transdermal CO2 sensors. 

“The original CO2 monitoring device is large, about the size of a suitcase,” said Ge. Wright approached Ge and Rao to develop a miniaturized, wearable version that could address some of the shortcomings of other devices available today.

Ge explains that traditional non-invasive CO2 monitors that are used on the skin heat up to about 42 degrees Celsius, or more than 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the high heat, they can leave burns on skin and cannot be worn for an extended amount of time. The monitors tend to work at a slower speed and can come with a price tag averaging about $25,000. 

Along with miniaturizing the device, Ge aims to create a monitor that is safer and more comfortable, delivers data more efficiently, and is more affordable for the average consumer.

Developing the device

When a patient wears the CO2 device and experiences respiratory depression due to an overdose, the device will trigger an alarm that will automatically inject naloxone. In order to validate the study’s proof of principle, the initial phases of the study will start with developing and testing CO2 sensor prototypes. The test results will then be compared to data from a similar FDA-approved device that they are hoping to improve on. 

“We will run side by side tests to see how accurate our device is and then do challenge studies, like holding your breath, breathing into a bag, or exercising to get the subjects’ CO2 levels up in the body to see if we are able to detect it,” says Rao. “We will incorporate some elements of machine learning to detect the signal accurately, to make sure that there are no false positives or false negatives.”

The investigators have hired UMBC postdoctoral researcher Preety Ahuja to work on the prototyping. If the study is granted additional funding, Wright and her team of researchers will test the sensor on animal subjects to validate whether the wearable transdermal CO2 alarm will be effective. The researchers also intend to develop a mobile app to gather and share the data provided by the monitor. 

Rao looks forward to collaborating closely with Wright through this UMBC-UMSOM partnership, noting the significance of her work with underserved populations in Baltimore. He shares, “Dr. Wright is very keen and passionate about finding solutions and our UMBC team is very excited to be working with her.” 

At UMBC, we welcome Retrievers of all stripes… and feathers. Spotted on campus recently enjoying student life is an 87-year-old yellow crowned amazon parrot named Chicken. Yes, you read that right, Chicken. 

Elle Kreiner ’20, anthropology, a current master’s student in applied sociology, rescued the bird in 2017 after his long-term caretaker passed away and the family wasn’t able to keep him. Despite coming to campus to spread his wings (metaphorically—Chicken doesn’t enjoy flying), Kreiner doesn’t believe their parrot would make a great student, although he does speak three languages. 

Prior to his time with Kreiner, Chicken lived in pre–World War II Germany and then spent most of his years in Florida. As a result, he is prone to colorful language in German, Spanish, and English, says Kreiner, but his favorite word? “Definitely ‘cracker.’” 

“If I had to personify him, he’d be a really old crotchety professor, who should have retired 20 years ago but is still here because everyone likes him,” says Kreiner. Like many octogenarians, Chicken doesn’t enjoy the cold, so if you see him on campus on a sunny day, be sure to say Guten Tag!

At the 2022 Homecoming alumnae volleyball scrimmage, Kasey Crider, who joined UMBC as head volleyball coach earlier this year, got a firsthand view of the connections the program has forged over the last 50 years—connections that he considers the foundation of the team’s success. “I exist in that ecosystem of this legacy, which hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m walking out of there going, ‘Man, this is why you do it. You have these incredible people.’”

The volleyball players over the years would tell you that common values and hard work unite a team that comes from all over the world. Robbin Lee ’13, visual arts, remembers the process of bonding with her teammates, even in some unexpected ways: “We spent the preseason meshing and melding our languages—like the way we talk and the slang we use,” she says.

“By the end of the season we all sounded like each other.” This only reflected the close bonds they’d forged. To hear Lee tell it, “our team was a group of sisters. We loved and annoyed each other a lot. But, at the end of the day, we held each other accountable and we pushed each other to be better off and on the court.”

Earlier alumnae recount a similar sisterhood. Elizabeth (Straley) Beckelman, ’90, psychology, played in the ’80s under the nickname “Biff” and met her lifelong best friend Melissa (Diehlmann) Little ’90, psychology, on the first day of tryouts.

“I was a walk-on,” Beckelman remembers. “I didn’t even know if I would make the team.” And yet she did, and now fondly remembers her coaches keeping her grades on track, getting “more competitive” as the program grew, and strenuous running drills. “It really grounded me and kept me focused and kept me on a track and on a path,” Beckelman says.

As the newest member of the team celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, Crider came in as coach with one question on his mind: “What’s best for the players?” It sounds like the program is well-equipped to answer him.

On a chilly morning in early spring 2022, Eileen Meyer, Roy Prouty, and Erik Crowe were on the roof of the UMBC Physics Building. They were inside the observatory dome, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the 32-inch telescope installed when the building was constructed in 1999. They had already determined that the shutters designed to keep dust off the mirrors were jammed, rendering the telescope temporarily unusable.

“So we’re up there with flashlights and ladders that are not quite tall enough,” Meyer recalls, “trying to figure out what is happening and realizing that some of the motors have died.” They weren’t terribly surprised, given the age of the instrument and the harsh conditions on the roof of a building: extreme heat in summer and cold in winter as well as high humidity. At one point, Meyer says, birds unfortunately had to be evicted from one of the ventilation grates, but not before they had spread debris around the dome.

As someone who decided as a first-year graduate student that hands-on lab work wasn’t really her thing, Meyer may seem an unlikely candidate for climbing ladders, ordering parts, and figuring out wiring as the observatory refurbishment lead. In fact, Meyer, associate professor of physics, has spent the better part of the last decade using computers (often the “super” variety) to conduct astrophysics research, mostly on black holes (the supermassive variety)—but she is finding fulfillment in expanding her work.

“That’s the beauty of having a career that is hitting its mid-stage,” Meyer says. “You can start trying different things.”

Leaning into the turning points

The telescope renovation project is a symbol of Meyer’s evolution as a scientist. Because it requires expertise outside her wheelhouse, it’s enhancing her management and delegation skills, she says, and allowing her to collaborate with a wider range of students and colleagues, including engineers. Plus, the upgraded telescope will enable other projects she’s diving into now, creating new opportunities at a turning point in her career, she says.

When it was built, the observatory was a state-of-the-art facility, designed to conduct observations of the near-Earth atmosphere and to serve as a public-outreach tool. The latter function is still underway today, with programming offered by observatory director and current Ph.D. student Roy Prouty, M.S. ’16, atmospheric physics, but the aging of the telescope and its original cameras means it is no longer up to the task of cutting-edge research.

With generous financial support from the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and hands-on help from people like Prouty and Crowe, the Physics Building manager, Meyer says, “The goal is to modernize the observatory and bring it up to the level of something that we can actually put research-grade equipment on and do observations.”

The beauty of physics

While the details of Meyer’s research might be shifting, her overall drive to conduct research and create knowledge are longstanding and unchanged. “I always wanted to be a scientist from as soon as I knew what that was,” Meyer reflects—although astronomy was something “I fell into by degrees,” she says.

As an undergraduate at Rice University in Houston, physics won her over because “it’s so beautiful,” she says. “It’s this interplay of the natural world and the mathematical descriptions you can make of it. It can be deceptively simple.”

“And once you’ve been trained as a physicist, it’s something you can’t turn off,” she adds. “You’re driving down the highway, and you see something oscillating on a truck, and you start to think how you could model this with equations …You start seeing these things everywhere, and it explains to you why the world works the way it does. It takes away a lot of the mystery, but it does it in a beautiful way.”

Meyer initially pursued particle physics, thinking that was the frontier—the field where she could ask fundamental questions about the rules by which the universe operates. But after changing advisors early in her graduate career for a better personality match, she found herself in an astronomy research group, and has stuck with it since. “It turns out that astronomical observations allow us to constrain fundamental physics,” she says, “so it’s not like I went away from that after all.”

Plasma jets and giant mergers

To date, her work has largely focused on “understanding why black holes do what they do,” Meyer says, with a good deal of it focused on the giant jets of extremely high-energy plasma that often stream from them in opposite directions. The jets can be bigger than entire galaxies, carrying tremendous amounts of energy and material, Meyer explains. “And galaxies are enormous,” she adds. “Those themselves are already hard to imagine, they’re so big.”

Supermassive black holes, while denser than anything known in the universe, can have a volume about the size of our solar system. “It’s unbelievably tiny compared to the scale of the chaos that they’re unleashing” with their jets, Meyer says. The existence of the jets “was something that nobody predicted,” she adds. Even in the 1960s, some scientists were still arguing that black holes themselves (forget about their jets!) did not exist. Today, black holes are well established, but, Meyer says, “it’s still a major open question—how do they produce these jets?”

Black holes and their jets “are basically super extreme environments, so they’re interesting to study and to try to understand,” Meyer says. “There’s just major things that we don’t know about them. We’re hopeful we can understand them eventually, through observations and heavy-duty computational modeling—because that’s what they didn’t have in the ’60s. And even today, we regularly run up against the capabilities of what the computer can do.”

Meyer also studies black hole mergers—the combining of two black holes into one. It’s another research area fraught with uncertainty and with much left to discover. Recently, she co-led a project that found the most convincing evidence yet of a merged black hole that has been “kicked” out of the center of its galaxy, in this case, at 4.5 million miles per hour.

“The history of studying black holes,” Meyer says, “is just one surprise or ‘what the heck’ after another.”

Striking out on her own

As exciting and rewarding as studying black holes is, when asked about major milestones in her career trajectory, rather than naming the funding of a huge proposal or a publication that moved the needle in her field, Meyer turns to more intangible matters. After completing a Ph.D., which Meyer did at Rice in 2012, a researcher should transition to becoming truly independent in setting goals and priorities, bringing in funding, managing a research group, and going beyond “the projects your advisor wanted to do,” she says.

After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STCsI) at Johns Hopkins University under an inspiring mentor, Bill Sparks, Meyer joined the UMBC faculty in 2015. It would be the first time she had a “lab of her own.” Sparks was confident she was on a path to great things at the time. “It was a real pleasure to work with Eileen at STScI; we considered ourselves very fortunate to bring her there,” he says, adding that her work there “was extremely favorably received. An eminent astronomer described it as ‘truly beautiful work.’”

Yet, like new faculty members everywhere, at UMBC Meyer says she went through a period of proving herself— working hard to bring in major grants, come up with fresh research ideas, and publishing high-impact papers as a lead investigator. The first major milestone  “felt like it happened eventually after  I’d been here a couple years,” she says.  “I felt like I could call myself an independent researcher.”

Independent, but not alone 

Even as she worked toward independence as a researcher, Meyer certainly wasn’t alone. Mentors like Sparks and Meyer’s husband, Markos Georganopoulos, professor of physics at UMBC, and others in the department and at the university have provided support along the way.

“He was a little bit ahead of me in the career stage,” Meyer says of Georganopoulos, “so everything I would go through he had gone through a few years before. You can kind of mentor each other because you have a sounding board.” Their research is similar enough that Georganopoulos is a co-author on some of Meyer’s publications.

Jane Turner, former director of the Center for Space Sciences and Technology, a UMBC partnership with NASA, also mentored Meyer in her early days at UMBC. “I’ve come to appreciate that UMBC is a very supportive place—the department, the college, and the school in general,” Meyer says. “It’s absolutely true that people want you to succeed here. I’ve always felt that.”

Meyer understands the importance of mentorship, as the first person in her family to earn a Ph.D. She enjoys paying that support forward to UMBC students. “I really love our student population. They’re just fantastic,” she says. “There’s a certain seriousness and maturity that they have that I really appreciate.”

Some of her students are the first person in their family to earn a college degree, and many more, like Meyer, are the first in their family to be considering graduate school. “I feel like I identify with our student population, which makes working with them really  a joy.”

Life as a parent-researcher

In 2019, Meyer and Georganopoulos welcomed their son into the world, and she felt the strength of the UMBC community even more. “Parenting and being a highly active researcher is a real challenge,” Meyer says, especially when you’ve moved far from family in order to pursue your dream of being on the faculty at a research university. While “the department and UMBC in general has been very helpful,” parenting still hasn’t been easy given “systemic bigger issues that we have with supporting parents,” she says.

Always a determined problem solver, however, Meyer has found ways to succeed both as a parent and as a scientist. Mentors advised her to consider all of her unfinished projects (of which any researcher usually has many), and instead of trying in vain to complete them all, “focus on where you can make major progress in the field. Focus on impact, and let the others go,” she says. She has taken that advice to heart—especially through the pandemic.

And now that she’s more established in her field and as a researcher, it’s time to step back from the “take every opportunity” mentality and learn to say no, which can be a special challenge for women and young scientists, Meyer says. “Bill [Sparks] was always very good at that,” though, she adds—and that’s not the only thing she’s taken from his mentorship.

“He is my model for what a scientist should be,” Meyer says. Especially with current pressures to publish and win grants at a rapid clip, Sparks “always did only what he was interested in,” even shifting focus from astrophysics to astrobiology later in his career. “I want to be as free as he is with how he does his work,” Meyer says.

Living the freedom

Today, Meyer is living that freedom by exploring new kinds of research using the UMBC observatory, and Sparks has joined UMBC as an adjunct faculty member to support the effort. In addition to fixing up broken motors and buying a much larger ladder, Meyer plans to build a new instrument called a polarimeter, which will make observations of objects in our solar system, phenomena farther away such as flare stars, and other targets possible with the UMBC telescope. 

“It’s great to be working with Eileen again—she’s so darn good at everything and always open to taking on something new and unfamiliar, whether it’s building polarimeters, climbing wobbly ladders, or thinking about black holes and the origin of the universe,” Sparks says. “Eileen is one of the most capable and versatile researchers in astronomy—and our project should keep UMBC at the forefront of a unique, innovative scientific niche.”

Making new missions happen

She is also on the leadership team of a University of Maryland-led consortium competing for NASA funding for a new space-based satellite mission. NASA put out a call for proposals for high–energy astrophysics missions, and her team’s entry, the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS), would capture extremely high resolution X-ray images to study galaxy formation, black holes, and much more.

This role is an exciting change for Meyer. She describes herself as coming from “a classical academic path,” where she relied on data from both land- and space-based instruments but was never involved in their design, construction, or the bureaucracy often involved in actually putting a satellite in the sky. After attending a summer workshop at Harvard, however, her perspective shifted. A scientist on the original Chandra X-ray Observatory mission team gave a talk describing the iconic mission’s 30-year journey from concept to launch, which finally happened in 1999.

“I was astounded by how difficult it was—the immense challenge—but then also how amazing it is that eventually this thing flew, and it’s still working—it’s still taking amazing images all the time,” Meyer says. “Ever since then, I always thought I would love to get involved in that process, to help be an advocate for new observatories, new technologies. So when I was asked to join AXIS I was very happy, because it’s been a long-term side dream of mine to be involved in making new missions happen.”

The things that are mine

As her career—and her family—moves forward, Meyer is hitting her stride. “I love studying black holes and jets, but it’s still true that that was my advisor’s topic,” she says. But with AXIS, the observatory work, and other new collaborations, “I feel like I’m getting into the things that were really mine—the things that were interesting to me all along,” she says.

The UMBC physics department plans to hire at least one more faculty member in high-energy physics soon. That could also shape Meyer’s work, depending on her new colleague’s areas of interest. She’s also been approached by researchers in the Center for Space Sciences and Technology for collaboration. Put simply, the future is bright for Eileen Meyer, and she’s savoring it all.

“I think of myself as an open person; I could see myself doing work that I haven’t imagined yet,” she says. “I like it when people bring me problems to think about. We’ll see where we go next.”

As a visual artist, Monique Crabb, M.F.A. ’22, intermedia and digital arts, draws from her environment quite literally—producing textile-based artworks colored with the rich hues of plants and objects around her. This fall, she spent a month in residency at the Baltimore County Public Library, teaching workshops and engaging with library users as she created new work inspired by her surroundings. These are her reflections from that experience. 

One of the most calming places to be in is a public library surrounded by people’s research, stories, and history of every place and culture from almost every perspective imaginable. At times, the amount of knowledge at my fingertips can feel daunting knowing I’ll never be able to take it all in. I’m reminded of a scene in the ’80s movie My Stepmother Is an Alien, when the main character Celeste, played by Kim Basinger, travels to earth in a model’s body to conduct research on human life and discovers books. She’s able to retain the books’ information instantly through osmosis, spanning the gamut of human emotions, and is starved for more. This scene has imprinted itself in my mind as a superpower I wish I had. 

Growing up in a working class neighborhood to a mom who would every weekend pull open the large rolling door to our garage for the permanently set-up sale of our used things, and a father who worked various jobs and seemingly was never around, I spent most of my time outside of school on the streets, at friends’ homes, or playing in the woods. My parents did not engage much with books, the arts, or academia; I was mostly influenced by pop culture. 

As I got older, books came to me at very specific times in my life to change my perspective and help me find my place in the world of things. One of those times was my junior year in high school when my English teacher gave the class a list of authors to pick from for a book report and I selected Kurt Vonnegut, solely on the fact that his name sounded cool and he shared a first name with Kurt Cobain. I then found myself sitting on the floor of my school’s library absorbed by the opening line of Slaughterhouse-Five: “All this happened, more or less.”

The rest of the book was an eye-opening view of one person’s experience in the world during a time so far removed from my own, yet with relatable philosophical ideas with quotes like, “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” Books allow us to travel through time and place to help us find meaning in our lives, which is a magical experience that visual arts achieves just as profoundly. 

The Baltimore County Public Library month-long Artist in Residence program was a gift to take part in. Each week I walked through a sea of books and would greet the librarians on my way to their maker space, The Hive. Being there allowed me the time and space to focus on one project.

I also had the opportunity to engage with a community outside of my own through two workshops I gave on eco-printing and dyeing with food waste as well as having the studio space open to visitors while I was working. On my lunch breaks I would browse books and take walks, once visiting the nearest cemetery and other times just taking in the colors and patterns from the intersecting relationship of plants and human-made constructions in the area. 

During my time in residency, I started a project using secondhand vintage linens made with open cut and intricately detailed hand and machine embroidery. I either cut up or used the entire napkin, handkerchief, or tablecloth and machine-pieced them together using pojagi, a Korean form of quilting that creates a seam on both sides of the pliable plane. These textile objects, often made by women, were and continue to be so precious that the folds and creases in them become deep from decades of being stored away unused.

I was drawn to bringing these objects out of storage, unfolding, and piecing one to the other to create a frankensteinian curtain that was large and would present as a confrontation in the middle of a room. I hadn’t fully unraveled the idea, but I knew if I put in the work that richer layers of context would reveal themselves.

Toward the end of my residency I had a library visitor come through and we chatted for a while about art, the artist’s process, and the meaning behind what is made. It was during this exchange that I had a lightbulb moment for my project of painting cyanotype directly onto the napkins and exposing stark images of tools used in the domestic world like a toilet brush. Adding this layer of context expanded my exploration of materials from domestic life by bringing attention and exposing the hidden labor behind the undervalued role of homemaker, woman, and caregiver. 

It’s essential to my growth as an artist to be in new environments and around new people as well as the opportunity to step back from being so deeply inside of my artwork by engaging with communities outside of my own. Meeting the folks who took my workshops and the ones who came through the studio to ask questions about what I was working on reminded me of the importance of my role as an artist. I believe our stories connect us and often find that the narratives I encounter, whether in person or from books, inform and enrich my practice in ways I could never do alone.