The only things faster than David and Caitlyn Bobb themselves, perhaps, are the zingers they toss at one another. 

As Caitlyn, a rookie running star now in her sophomore year, describes what it’s like to have a father as head coach of track and field at UMBC, her dad dryly turns it into a bit. 

“My dad has many sides to him, okay?” Caitlyn laughs as Coach Bobb literally acts out everything she’s saying while seated beside her. 

“There’s the coach side, where he’s stern, and he’s got the stopwatch in his hand, arms crossed, hat on, and ‘GO!’…And then there’s the dad side, who comes to practice all excited, and says ‘Woo, I’m hyped, let’s go!’” 

It’s not surprising that Caitlyn is poised for another amazing season. She’s a very hard worker, of course, and also the product of phenomenal athlete parents. Her mom, Dawnnette, represented Bermuda in the 1992 Olympics in the 100-meter dash, and Coach Bobb ’97, information systems, still holds six separate records for indoor and outdoor events at UMBC. 

“My mom, she was like, ‘Okay, I saw that coming.’ I’m pretty sure my dad did, too. It’s in my genes. I didn’t have a choice,” Caitlyn says. 

Caitlyn wowed the competition in her rookie season, earning several “most outstanding” titles at the America East Championships and placing 17th in the 400-meter dash at the NCAA Championships with a school record-breaking time of 51.84 seconds. And as she continues to learn from her dad and other coaches—like paying attention to the way she pumps her arms, for instance—she’s on course to make improvements each season. 

“We’re doing what we’ve been doing for years—the only difference is we’re now doing it at UMBC,” says Coach Bobb. “Hearing my experiences and her mom’s experiences helps her prepare for situations she’s going to encounter herself.” 

Although bubbly off the track, Caitlyn is extremely serious in her training—pushing thoughts out of her head in order to focus on breathing above all else. She often runs and studies with her friend Ibra Khairat, a sophomore biological sciences major. 

“I would describe Caitlyn and Coach’s relationship as one that’s balanced just right,” he says. “Although she is the coach’s daughter, Coach Bobb gives her room to grow as an athlete and doesn’t give any type of special treatment, which is why it works so well. They are both able to balance that father/daughter and coach/athlete dynamic.” 

Coach Bobb is big on building relationships and trust and making sure his runners feel supported, both as athletes and students, he says. As father and daughter gently rib each other, it’s clear the one-upping is grounded in love. 

“I know what it takes to be successful in this sport, so I just sit back and look at the execution of her race. Is she doing what she’s been trained to do?” Beyond that, he says, it’s about seizing the moment and improving wherever you can. “As a parent, I’m just making sure that I’m supportive. Track and field is only going to be X years of her life. I’m always going to be her dad.” 

It’s true: Nobody runs track forever. Caitlyn is studying biological sciences with a minor in entrepreneurship and innovation with hopes of someday being a biology teacher—and possibly a coach herself. 

She has a great model right next to her,  even if she doesn’t always get his Karate Kid training jokes. (Don’t worry, they can watch it together later.) 

“He cares about his students’ well-being, and he makes it a warm, welcoming environment. He cares a lot,” she says, getting serious for a moment. “Good job, Dad.”

UMBC faculty are leading interdisciplinary, community-engaged immigration research that is shifting the relationship between higher education institutions and immigrant communities. Their approaches include centering the economic, academic, social, and cultural contributions of immigrants to the well-being of U.S. cities. This scholarship challenges stereotypes and also works to dismantle systemic racism in higher education.

In 2020, New York Times reported that U.S.-born children of immigrants or immigrant students raised in the U.S. accounted for nearly 60 percent of the growth in U.S. university enrollment since 2000. The majority of these students are the children of international students from India who stayed in the U.S. to work, and the children of Latin Americans, and refugees who came to the U.S. in search of better living conditions.

Felipe Filomeno, associate professor of political science and global studies, and associate director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship, and Christopher Brown, a global studies lecturer, explore how immigrant students can be an asset to higher education with their study “Immigrant Students and Global Education.”

Filomeno and Brown designed a collaborative, project-based undergraduate course to study the intercultural experiences of immigrant students at UMBC. Students developed the ability to collect and analyze qualitative data and empathy for immigrants as they learned about diverse peer experiences. The study determined that project-based assignments designed to take advantage of immigrant students’ intercultural experiences could yield significant contributions to the global education of immigrant and non-immigrant students alike.

“It is important that there are such stellar colleagues committed to the vital work of exploring the realities, lived experiences, and challenges of our immigrant communities,” says Kimberly R. Moffitt, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. “We can only thrive as a society by supporting and working together with all members of our community and recognizing their contributions to a global society.” 

Digital storytelling for education and advocacy

Several of UMBC’s community-engaged researchers use digital storytelling to shift the focus away from the researcher creating information toward information being created by the community. One such project is “Intercultural Tales: Learning with Maryland’s Immigrant Communities,” developed by Thania Muñoz Davaslıoğlu, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication (MLLI), and Tania Lizarazo, associate professor of MLLI and global studies. 

This project approaches digital storytelling from a feminist lens where non-academic knowledge such as lived experience is considered equally valuable in teaching and research. “Our project is informed by feminist theory and the field of critical intercultural communication in which power structures and hierarchies are emphasized when thinking about communication,” says Lizarazo, “Intercultural Tales is shaped by all of these fields/practices to facilitate (not guarantee) a more nuanced understanding of immigration as part of UMBC (instead of outside of it).”

This project, now in its third year, brings together students studying Spanish or global studies to produce digital stories of immigrant experiences with the goal of countering stereotypes. In one of the digital stories, “Pack Your Bag,” Heejin Hong ’18, MLLI, speaks of her parents’ transition from Korea to Paraguay, her time living in Brazil, moving to Mexico, and eventually settling in the U.S. 

“My parents were first-generation immigrants from South Korea to Paraguay, where I was born. Their life as immigrants was not easy. They worked day and night to support our family,” Hong shared. “They constantly moved to other cities and countries looking for work. When I was little, I moved to Brazil to be with my grandparents because my parents had to work. Brazil was my first experience with immigration and learning a new language, new places, new food, and new cultures.”

She continued, “I have now been living in the U.S. for more than ten years. I used to see all of the changes that made me grow up quickly and think of what I didn’t have. Now, I realize that I gained something greater: courage, independence, patience, a positive outlook, not to lament, and to keep moving forward.”

Muñoz notes the findings, which were published in the Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education, show the process of sharing and valuing knowledge through the project in some cases enabled the students to reframe fear, confusion, and shame through a new lens that revealed feelings of pride, solidarity, and insight. 

“Most students had a more nuanced understanding of immigration,” says Lizarazo, “and a renewed appreciation for their classmate’s knowledge, which, in turn, shaped a less hierarchical learning space.”

Community-building through digital storytelling

Lizarazo also collaborated with local immigrant women to create “Moving Stories: Latinas en Baltimore.” The digital storytelling archive visualizes the immigrant experience from the perspective of Latinas in Baltimore. It aims to dispel stereotypes and share the diversity of their experiences.

Camila Daniel shared her experience of being a Black-Brazilian Latina living in Baltimore in her digital story “When Baltimore Became My Home.”

“In 2006 when I came to Baltimore, I lived the experience of what it means to be Black and Latina at the same time in a country that expects people to be only of one race. When people saw me with my accent, my hair, and my Black skin, they assumed I was African American. Many of the Brazilians were white. I didn’t feel I fit in anywhere. I suffered a lot,” says Daniel. 

She continues, “Now, I feel it was good for me to come to Baltimore, live in a predominantly Black city, and learn from Black people what it is to have pride in how you look and your history. At the same time, with Spanish and Baltimore, I have created a family that does not have my blood or nationality but one heart.” 

Since 2017, Lizarazo and Filomeno have also worked in partnership with Baltimore’s Latino Racial Justice Circle to develop, design, execute, evaluate, and share the “Honest Conversations on Immigration” project. Through dialogue, and digital storytelling, the program fosters conversations between U.S.-born citizens and immigrants that share faith-based spaces but rarely engage in dialogue. Since 2019, about 85 members of 15 congregations have participated. 

“Our goal as researchers is to use dialogue and digital stories as ways to bring different communities together around religion, race, and immigration,” explains Filomeno. “Through that process, we hope to create the potential to change the relationships among individuals, and between communities and society for the better.”

Baltimore’s immigration policies

Filomeno last year received the Hispanic Heritage Award from Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott in recognition of his work facilitating dialogue as well as an earlier comprehensive assessment of Baltimore’s immigration policies. The study “Baltimore’s Policies to Attract and Retain Immigrants: A Community-Engaged Evaluation” was critical in shaping the strategic vision of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. It built on a prior study in which Filomeno reviewed Baltimore’s economic development, multicultural, and law enforcement policies, collaboration with civil society, and policy advocacy. 

“In all these studies, I have engaged local groups and organizations in the creation of knowledge about immigration and the application of this knowledge to help solve real-world problems,” says Filomeno. “This research has helped a local government trying to encourage the city’s growth through immigration, a faith community trying to build connections between congregants of different nationalities, and a university trying to leverage student diversity of national origin to promote global learning. As we say at UMBC, it is public research for public good.”

Documenting places of belonging and meaning 

Beyond Maryland, Yolanda Valencia, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, explores the Mexican immigrant community of Pasco, Washington, and how this community creates places of peace, tranquility, and family—places of belonging and meaning—under disadvantaged conditions. In the forthcoming book Relational Life: Legal Death, Valencia draws on years of fieldwork in Pasco, transnational ethnography, archival research, interviews with city leaders, and testimonies from undocumented Mexican immigrants. 

“I aim to provide a historical political economy analysis of geographies of oppression overlaid with an analysis of spaces where this community thrives, as they both happen simultaneously across scale, time, and border,” says Valencia.

This year, Valencia received a 12-month Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. She was also selected as a 2020 – 2022 Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement (SITPA) scholar. The mentoring and professional initiative is designed to facilitate junior faculty members’ successful transition to tenured associate professor status.

Another faculty member has been highly engaged with immigrant communities in New Orleans. The success of taco trucks and Soul Food pop-ups there have raised complex questions about food truck regulation, worker rights, and immigration. The Whiting Foundation awarded a $50,000 Public Engagement Fellowship to Sarah Fouts, assistant professor of American studies, along with local New Orleans organizers Toya Ex Lewis and Fernando López, to implement “Project Neutral Grounds: At the Intersection of People, Street Food, and the Hustle.” 

Lewis is the organizer of Project Hustle, born in New Orleans, and López is a Mexican-born documentarian. The three partners have worked together since 2013. Their latest collaboration will bring together Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and immigrant food vendors in New Orleans to celebrate, share, and document their experiences and histories.

Challenging extractive research

This innovative research intentionally values the knowledge of immigrants and creates new ways for academics to think about primary sources. It highlights thriving communities and enables communication, personal reflection, and empathy while challenging systemic racism and the role of education and institutions in perpetuating inequalities.

“Recognizing each other’s humanity is not an abstract process. It requires a commitment to questioning pedagogies that reproduce the hierarchies we critique,” Muñoz Davaslıoğlu and Lizarazo explain. “Teaching and learning are inextricable from struggles against the dehumanization of immigrants and minorities.”

Natural dust particles and human-produced pollutants in the atmosphere affect Earth’s overall energy budget in different and nuanced ways. A new three-year, $620,000 NSF grant led by Zhibo Zhang, professor of physics, will study how dust, pollutants, and water vapor in the atmosphere interact, to increase understanding of their overall effects on the global climate.  

Atmospheric dust particles are large enough that they can reflect the Sun’s energy back to space, producing a cooling effect—but they can also trap energy from the earth trying to escape, contributing to warming. Most pollutants are too small to contribute to cooling, and tend to warm the planet instead, Zhang explains. But when the two mix in the atmosphere, which is commonplace, things get complicated. The new project will work to disentangle the effects of different kinds of particles through a combination of techniques.

Zhang is particularly excited about the upcoming work, because research led by his former students made it possible. Qianqian Song, Ph.D. ’21, atmospheric physics, “wrote three papers over the last three years that gave us the credentials to apply for this program,” Zhang says. Olivia Norman’20, physics, also contributed substantially. Song is currently pursuing a postdoc at Princeton, and Norman is in graduate school at M.I.T.

Moving forward, Tony La Luna, a new Ph.D. student in Zhang’s lab, will focus on the project, and Zhang is looking forward to adding more students to his team.

Domino effect in the atmosphere

Wind is always lifting dust from Earth’s surface, especially in arid areas such as the Sahara and Gobi Deserts. Once airborne, the dust can travel long distances and interact with other particles in the atmosphere. 

“When dust moves from its source region to a polluted area, it gets mixed with the pollution there. And we are interested in these interactions,” Zhang says. His team’s research has shown these interactions are most common in eastern China, India, and central Africa.

Until very recently, researchers typically modeled dust and pollutants separately, assuming they did not interact. But based on Zhang’s group’s research, that approach doesn’t produce a good approximation of what’s actually happening, he says.

Where dust and pollutants mix, tiny pollutant particles can condense onto larger dust particles. “The pollution particles can bump into the dust and stick together,” Zhang says. Then a domino effect ensues: “Once the pollution is coated on the dust,” he says, “it changes the way the dust interacts with water.”

Dust generally repels water, but pollutants are often attracted to water molecules. So dust coated with pollutants, called “coated dust,” can start to collect water. By changing how the dust reflects light, “This coating can change the net effect from cooling to warming,” Zhang says. By providing a surface to which water molecules can attach, the coated dust can also contribute to cloud formation, which affects precipitation.

Beyond satellite images

It can actually be difficult to tell whether a satellite image shows dust, pollution, or coated dust—so developing techniques to distinguish between different kinds of atmospheric particles is another one of the team’s goals.  

“First, we need a good dust model,” Zhang says. His collaborator Dr. Diana Ortiz-Montalvo at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses a special imaging technique to precisely measure the shape of dust particles in the lab. Those measurements will help create models of different kinds of dust. 

In general, pure dust has jagged edges. However, if the dust is thickly coated, it appears spherical again; this is called “smoothed dust.” A smoothing effect can also happen if water binds to dust and then evaporates. 

Knowing exactly what each type of dust looks like will support efforts to more accurately identify them in satellite images, and understand how each type will behave in the sky. 

Scattering light—and focusing on results

With the dust models in hand, Zhang’s team will calculate how the dust would interact with different particles it might encounter in the sky, like water, smoke, or industrial pollutants. Specifically, they will estimate how the dust would reflect—or “scatter”—light that strikes it. The scattering pattern depends on how rough or smooth the dust is.

The researchers will also analyze observational data that measure how dust all over the globe is scattering light. “Then we’ll combine lab measurements, the scattering calculations, and these satellite observations all together,” Zhang says, to answer the project’s ultimate question: Is dust and its interactions with other particles warming or cooling the planet, and how much?  

Zhang’s research group melds computer science, physics, and climate science to address some of the least understood factors contributing to global climate. The new project will further those efforts, with the potential to clarify what roles dust and other atmospheric particles play. Along the way, it will also prepare students for successful careers in science. 

“The new grant is indeed based on the success of the students. They laid the foundation for this project,” Zhang says. Much like his students, he adds, “I’m excited to take this essential next step in addressing an issue that affects our planet so profoundly.” 

It’s no secret that at UMBC we do things a little differently. As a university, we’re young, agile, and (buzzword that it may be) truly innovative. We can see the success of these traits in our rankings or research-lab results or employee-satisfaction surveys, but those numbers don’t tell the full story of how, when the Retriever community joins efforts to achieve greatness, we arrive there together.

So on the eve of UMBC’s 50th anniversary in 2016, when the institution put forth a goal to raise $150 million— money that goes directly to student scholarships, graduate fellowships, professorial awards, and so much more— we didn’t question if we would succeed, we just wondered how we’d be able to capture the magnitude of the collective campaign when it came to a close.

Now, wrapping up the endeavor with over $189 million, we get to celebrate the stories that made this all possible. This campaign called upon our community’s Grit & Greatness, and Retrievers responded in kind by making big breakthroughs, forging true partnerships, and transforming lives.

Making Big Breakthroughs

The Talent Goes Both Ways

“One of my top priorities is recruiting the best talent who aspire to be great leaders for our company and the nation,” says Jennifer Walsmith, vice president of the Cyber and Information Solutions business unit at Northrop Grumman and executive lead for university relations with UMBC. “Our deep connection with UMBC enables us to recruit and hire the very best. Many of our UMBC graduates have remained at Northrop for decades and play an invaluable leadership role in cybersecurity.”

Walsmith knows something about connection as a Retriever herself, graduating in 1990 with a degree in computer science—something she said was only possible due to 2 a.m. study sessions with classmates and encouraging lunch meet-ups with friends on campus. In her current role, she oversees 2,000 plus employees and is often seen on campus speaking to alumni, faculty, and board members.

“As a nation, we have been enabled by enjoying a technically superior way of life. However, the number of students in the technical fields is getting smaller, especially among women in these majors.” So how do Northrop Grumman and UMBC plan on breaking through that limitation? “I believe it’s vitally important that we all give back,” says Walsmith.

That looks like dozens of UMBC interns each semester who get the chance to work on the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense, and cyberspace; an alumni chapter at Northrop Grumman over 600 employees strong who volunteer considerable time at local schools; and millions of dollars spent to benefit students, programs, and research over the last campaign.

Northrop Grumman has a unique relationship with UMBC, but they are not alone in their support of UMBC students and faculty and graduate research. Throughout the Grit & Greatness campaign, 69 percent of commitments came from foundations and companies like T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin, and Baltimore Gas and Electric Company.

“We are technical leaders, and I love to see our UMBC students thrive to become future leaders of our company and give back to other students,” says Walsmith. “So when you create the engine where people on each side fuel this relationship, it strengthens everyone.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

Breaking Through Education Barriers

In Baltimore City, middle schoolers are making roller coasters out of insulation tubing and tape. High schoolers are dunking basketballs to learn math equations. And not too far away at UMBC, the Sherman STEM Teacher Scholars are prepping to spread even more innovative, inclusive lessons throughout city schools.

The Sherman STEM Teacher Scholars Program, founded in 2006, and other initiatives supporting Retrievers to become culturally responsive and compassionate educators in historically underserved, urban schools, are thanks to the vision of philanthropists Betsy Sherman and her late husband George.

In early 2022, the Sherman Family Foundation donated $21 million to create the Betsy & George Sherman Center, which expands and integrates UMBC’s work in teacher preparation, school partnerships, and applied research focused on early childhood education and improving learning outcomes for Baltimore students. This gift allows educators to implement new teaching methods and find ways to break through learning barriers for their students.

The gift—the largest in UMBC’s history—will transform both UMBC and generations of local students. It also serves as a rallying point for others to join in giving and volunteering at participating schools. To date, says Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04,  and vice president of Institutional Advancement, “our school partnership work is our most robust community-based philanthropic effort given the scope and range of donors involved.” In addition to the Shermans’ foundational gift, other organizations—like the Richmond Family Foundation and Northop Grumman, just to name two—and many individual donors have supported this endeavor with their own time and resources.

“I see the legacy of the Sherman program as a seed,” says Haleemat Adekoya ’22, political science, a Sherman STEM Teacher Scholar. “It’s been planted and people will continue to water that seed…it will be one of those trees in a folk tale that does not die out because the community and the people who have benefited from its impact see the importance of that tree living beyond generations.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

Forging True Partnerships

The Snowball Effect

Sandy Geest ’72, English, knows the power of how a little can go a long way. When she graduated, she immediately started giving to the department that shaped her UMBC experience, “even if it was just 10 or 15 dollars a year,” she says. 

Now, 50 years later, Geest and her husband Jay have an endowed scholarship for English majors that has supported 10 students since 2017.

Geest spent most of her career as conference and event planner for James Rouse’s Enterprise Foundation, using her organizational skills to plan ribbon cuttings at the White House and pull together the 1992 U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials held in Baltimore. She says it was through the company’s matching shares program that she began to realize the power investments could have—if they could help her savings accrue over time, she wondered how her donations might increase as well.

Geest recounts how her office was located across from the then new Columbia Mall. On lunch breaks, her other coworkers would frequently go shopping. “And I told them, ‘No, you need to be putting your money into this fund because it will grow. When you’re old and gray, you’ll be glad you did that. These shoes will be all worn out by then.’”

Over time, Geest realized the same logic applied to her giving to UMBC. As she got raises and advanced through her career, she upped her giving. “I didn’t do it all at one time, [but] as it grew over the years I gave more and more,” she says, knowing the power for sizable change hinged on an endowment that would be invested by the university and able to sustain its monetary output. 

Her scholarship eventually snowballed to support up to four Retrievers a year. Her scholars’ success is the biggest reward, says Geest. At on-campus events, they tell her what a difference her giving made to their UMBC experience—it allowed them to explore career options through internships or it provided a lifeline when they thought they might have to drop out.

“It’s a very good feeling,” says Geest, “to know that you have put a hand back to help somebody behind you.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

The Competition Is Strong

Vanessa Mann, head coach for women’s soccer in her fifth season, has the mindset of leaving things better than you found them and uses the competitive spirit inherent in athletics to teach the power of giving back. This philosophy has led to 100 percent participation in UMBC’s annual Black & Gold Rush Giving Day among her student-athletes. 

The itch to compete motivates the other teams as well. Women’s lacrosse goalkeeper Isabella Fontana ’24, economics, sees it as the perfect way to get student-athletes engaged. “Not only do I want to support the women’s lacrosse team because everyone loves to support our team,” she says, “but as athletes, we always want to win. So if there’s something on the line, we’re like, ‘Oh, let’s do it.’”

Fontana’s competitive spirit earned her a year-long prime parking spot in front of the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena after she won UMBC’s 2022 Giving Day student ambassador challenge. By calling on her enthusiastic network of friends and family, Fontana generated the most donors (104) out of all the ambassadors and brought the lacrosse team’s total to 335, almost double the amount from the previous year. Curious what that looks like by the numbers? It’s the difference between $5,045 in 2020 and a whopping $40,040 in 2022.

The lacrosse team isn’t alone in getting people hyped for giving—in fact, Athletics is responsible for bringing in the most donors and dollars for UMBC’s annual Black & Gold Rush. Even so, they’re always striving to top themselves: in 2020, women’s soccer more than tripled their goal for donors. 

Both Fontana and Mann would be the first to remind you that good competition is nothing without cooperation. “So it wasn’t that we were really competing with anyone, like any outside entity,” Mann sums up. “We define competition as competere, which means to strive together. That’s actually the Latin translation. So it’s not me versus you, it’s actually me with you.”

— Levi Lewis ’23

Bridge-Building Alumni

Anwesha Dey came to UMBC from Singapore for a summer research internship. She ended up staying much longer, completing her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 2004. “In many ways, I think of the entire experience being one of the turning points in my life,” says Dey. “The sense of community and belonging and the focus on excellence at UMBC would go on to define my career.”

Now, as director and senior principal scientist of Discovery Oncology at Genentech, a groundbreaking biotechnology company, Dey is dedicated to bringing in UMBC students to her own lab and research community. Early in 2022, that meant inviting her former mentor, Mike Summers, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring, along with then president Freeman Hrabowski to Genentech to discuss the company’s ongoing support of UMBC. “We’re all mutually invested in the same thing,” says Dey. “When we first started this fellowship about five years ago, it was really one step at a time. And so it’s great to see where it is now. The trajectory is really strong.”

Dey is far from alone in bringing her enthusiasm for her alma mater to the workplace, and as more Retrievers go on to work in the upper echelons of the scientific community, they are finding ways to connect their industries to the campus that shaped them.

Bobby Allen ’99, M7, computer science is clear that he has a lot to be thankful for because of UMBC. He met his future wife Frances Allen ’99, M7, computer science, and many of his closest friends as teenagers in the Meyerhoff Program’s Summer Bridge. But aside from his personal connections, as a product manager at Google, it’s Allen’s personal mission to connect UMBC’s proven pipeline of talented Retrievers to his workplace. “At Google, we know we need to have underrepresented populations as managers, champions, executive support, and mentors so that as we hire graduates and interns, they see people who look like them and know what is possible.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

Transforming Lives

Rising to the Top 

It’s no accident that when visitors arrive on campus from the west entrance, they’re greeted by the radiant reflection on the silver slope of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building (PAHB). This LEED Gold-certified building, which opened in 2014, is a symbol of UMBC’s investment in the performing arts and humanities. But, it’s the students and activities inside the facility that really shine. 

Deven Fuller ’23 is a case in point. Double-majoring in dance and math, Fuller is a Linehan Artist Scholar—part of a selective program endowed by Earl and Darielle Linehan that has launched the careers of more than 300 Linehan Artist Scholar alumni in dance, music, theatre, and other creative disciplines. 

Fuller is focused on commercial dance—a highly competitive field that’s principally centered in New York and Los Angeles— which would put a career in his chosen field effectively out of reach were it not for the Linehans.

Thanks to the scholarship, Fuller said, he was able to join a New York–based dance training company in his sophomore year, take classes at local studios with accomplished touring commercial dancers, and enjoy other unique opportunities. The fact that the Linehans are “recognizing dance as a serious career…is just such an amazing thing,” Fuller said.

Most recently, with a Linehan Summer Research Award, “I was able to travel and do a certificate program at one of the most prestigious studios in the world for commercial dance. … I was very lucky to have the grant to be able to branch out in that direction.” 

Fuller is far from the only student to benefit from philanthropists’ investment in UMBC’s arts-focused students. Todd Carton ’77, interdisciplinary studies, has created the Carton Family Endowed Scholarship to support talented students in the performing arts who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Along with a gift that helped to fund the PAHB, Carton has included UMBC in his estate plan so that the endowed scholarship can grow and benefit even more arts students far into UMBC’s future.

Fuller hasn’t had the opportunity to meet the Linehans, but if he could, he said, “I would thank them for the opportunities that I’ve been able to have because of them …and let them know how much they are positively affecting the community of artists.”

— Scott Cech

A Family That Gives Together

Professor Bimal Sinha and his family weren’t content to let his 30-plus years of pioneering academic contributions to UMBC be his only professional legacy. Even though neither he nor his sons Jit and Shomo Sinha attended the university, they decided to collectively donate $750,000 to create the Dr. Bimal Sinha Professorship in Statistics at UMBC.

The professorship permanently funds a new statistics faculty position at the university, which seems especially fitting, considering that Sinha founded the statistics department in 1985 and helped transform UMBC into a national leader in statistics education.

But Sinha’s sons remember that beyond his academic accolades, the way their father has always interacted with his mentees is what made the deepest impression— whether meeting international students at the airport or inviting groups of students to their family home for dinner.

Creating community has been a hallmark of Sinha’s career: The professor successfully spearheaded the African International Conference on Statistics, held in a different African country each year since 2014. In 2018, UMBC signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Limpopo in South Africa to foster collaboration and exchange. A number of graduate students from African countries have also flourished with Sinha’s mentorship.

“Bimal has not only engaged in groundbreaking research for decades but has also produced and championed an impressive number of influential Black statisticians throughout Africa,” noted Freeman Hrabowski, UMBC president emeritus. 

In fact, the family’s dedication to continuing Sinha’s legacy has already inspired others: Forty alumni and friends of the university pitched in a combined $150,000, and the Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative Fund committed to a matching grant, bringing the professorship’s total endowment to $1.8 million.

“I feel honored and fortunate to have played a small role in the evolution of this beloved institution,” Sinha said. “Through this gift, I want to ensure that future generations of leading scholars will view UMBC as an attractive home to advance their contributions to the field of statistics.”

— Sarah Hansen, M.S. ’15

Gesture of Gratitude

When Felicia Sanders moved into Susquehanna Hall in the early ’90s as part of the fourth cohort of Meyerhoff Program Scholars, she found herself experiencing a series of firsts. It was her first time living in a mixed-gender dorm; the first time she understood the power of study groups; and she was a member of a scholarship program so new it hadn’t yet graduated its first class of scholars. “I thought I was just making friends, but this setup was really part of an ecosystem, a very effective one that set us up for success.”

The Meyerhoff Scholars Program fosters a collective spirit from day one—when students tackle Summer Bridge together. So when it came time to celebrate the program’s 30th anniversary and thank Robert Meyerhoff, the philanthropist who founded the program with President Emeritus Freeman Hrabowski, the graduates decided to give together, with an initial half-a-million dollar gift. 

“When we give collectively, we keep the continuity of the culture that was built by the program,” says Sanders ’96, M4, chemical engineering, and a leadership level giver. “We keep the family bond that was built by the program. It doesn’t become something that is piecemeal or start-stop or becomes intermittent because it is something that was fun for someone one year and then wasn’t supported the following year.”

The word Meyerhoff Scholars most often use to describe themselves is family. Not just a family of 1,300+ alumni who have gone on to use their gifts as industry leaders and academic powerhouses, but including the students who have yet to join their ranks as scholars, the future generation of Meyerhoffs. 

Jason Dixon ’02, M10, computer science, and Rhea Brooking-Dixon ’02, M10, biological sciences, whose origin story began in Summer Bridge, give together because “we know that our successes are never truly our own,” they share. “We are confident that our gifts to UMBC and the Meyerhoff Scholars Program will help other young scholars the same way the program has helped us and more.”

“It’s important for the family to be engaged in the program’s continuity,” says Sanders. “Now that Doc [Hrabowski] has moved on to the next chapter of his life, it’s important that the Meyerhoff Program is something we’re still talking about in another 30 years. And that can’t happen if the family doesn’t continue to reinvest.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

It’s only been a few months since she took the helm, but it feels like President Valerie Sheares Ashby has been at UMBC for years. She can often be seen engaged in lively conversation as she makes her way across campus, treating each new face not as a stranger, but simply as a friend she hasn’t met yet. She’s already a familiar face at sporting events, cheering on #RetrieverNation as a fan in the stands. And her first Homecoming felt just like that–coming home. You already know she’s a chemist, a former dean, and now a president, but we’re going to tell you how she’s so much more.

Finding a New Home

From the moment Valerie Sheares Ashby started her tenure as the new president of UMBC, we wanted to make sure she knew what a special community she was joining. At the opening of the semester, we asked community members to share some advice for our new president, and the answers didn’t disappoint.

These words of wisdom from Constance A. Pierson ’90, M.A . ’92, associate vice provost for institutional research, analysis, and decision support, sum up who we are as a campus best: “Take the time to get to know the people. You will likely meet some of the most extraordinary individuals who will change your world. And be sure to find the joy in every moment that you can. Laugh a lot—it’s contagious.” It looks like President Sheares Ashby has that one down already.

Ear to Ear

Flipping through photos of Sheares Ashby’s first Homecoming, it’s almost impossible to find a photo of her without a grin on her face. Though she met numerous members of #RetrieverNation during the festivities, each interaction held something special.

Dancing in the Streets

On one of her first days in the office, President Sheares Ashby found this group of students dancing together in the walkway outside of the Admin building. They couldn’t resist snapping a pic!

Fast Friends

The real GOAT of UMBC gave Sheares Ashby his paw of approval as soon as he met her. As any Retriever knows, True Grit is the real one you have to win over around here.

Photo courtesy of President Sheares Ashby.

Photo Op

Talk about a family affair! Sheares Ashby’s whole family decked themselves out in black and gold to celebrate her appointment as UMBC president.

Learning from the Community

For Sheares Ashby, the best way to learn about our community is to immerse herself in it. In her first few weeks and months, she’s made it a point to attend meetings, get to know constituents, and turn a simple walk down Academic Row into an informal meet and greet. Each of these interactions serves as another piece of the puzzle that makes up UMBC . At a welcome reception with University System of Maryland (USM) Chancellor Perman, Sheares Ashby addressed the audience and said, “People keep thanking me for coming to UMBC, and I don’t understand that because the gift is all mine.”

Joining the USM

“It has been a pleasure getting to know President Sheares Ashby. She fits right into the UMBC community and readily meets with students, faculty, and staff. Her commitment to developing UMBC’s culture of inclusive and academic excellence is evident in her priorities and appreciated by everyone,” says Farah Helal ’24, global studies and political science, USM student regent. She joined Chancellor Perman in welcoming Sheares Ashby.

Addressing the Crowd

One of the hallmarks of Sheares Ashby’s conversations is the reminder to “take care of yourself.” At this year’s new-faculty meeting, she assured the audience, “You are a human being and what you bring to us is more than enough.”

Golden Girls

Making her rounds on the first day of classes, Sheares Ashby encountered the UMBC inevitable—unintentional matching outfits. Jasmine Lee (center), director of inclusive excellence, and Samantha Smith (right), director of health promotion, joined Sheares Ashby for a photo op we couldn’t have planned better!

Family Ties

When you think about a university, you think about students, faculty, staff, and alumni. But families are the support system that keep UMBC going. Sheares Ashby stopped by the Family Breakfast during this year’s Homecoming to meet some of these integral members of our community.

Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You

We know that Sheares Ashby loves getting to know our community, but if possible, we love getting to know her even more—as evidenced by the fact she is the most flagged-down person on campus for a selfie (we have to accept campus comfort dog Chip is still #1 overall). To further your presidential education, here are five fast facts straight from the source.

What has been your favorite spot to do work on campus?
I’ve really only had the chance to work in the Administration Building, but what I consider my job and what people call work are interesting. Sitting in my office and having meetings, that’s work. But it’s also my job and my joy to be out amongst people.

Do you have a favorite theatre production?
My mother instilled in me The Sound of Music. My whole family can sing and quote almost every word.

What’s your go-to coffee order?
I haven’t had coffee in years because, I don’t know if you could tell, I have a little energy so I don’t need caffeine. Occasionally I’ll drink tea, chamomile or Earl Grey. I love a good Earl Grey.

When given 15 minutes for self-care, what do you reach for?
If you gave me three hours, I would take a nap. But for 15 minutes, I’m probably going to call my friends and just laugh. I love talking to my friends. They keep me grounded.

What advice would you give someone getting ready to start their first year of college?
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the whole plan. Don’t worry about it. You’re going to be fine.

UMBC recently partnered with the government of Japan’s Kanagawa prefecture to host the seminar “New Frontiers in Healthcare Management,” examining innovative approaches to an aging society. The UMBC organizers included the department of sociology, anthropology, and public health (SAPH), Erickson School of Aging Studies, and doctoral program in gerontology. The event brought together researchers, government leaders, and practitioners to discuss leading practices and new research on the management of healthy aging in Kanagawa and in Maryland.

Kanagawa has a population of over nine million people and is known as a “super-aging society,” with the largest aging population in the world and the highest number of centenarians. In 2017, Kanagawa Governor Yūji Kuroiwa developed and implemented the Kanagawa Prefecture’s Healthcare New Frontier health policy package to address the myriad needs of this population by embracing past and present methods of proactive healthcare management. 

The seminar’s participants from Japan shared how these policies can inform the future management of aging societies and the development of impactful life science technologies across the world, with Maryland as a leading partner.

“This event has been a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the 40th anniversary of our partnership as a sister state with the Kanagawa Prefecture,” said Luis E. Borunda, the Maryland Deputy Secretary of State, at the event. “Yūji Kuroiwa, governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, has always been at the forefront of what it means to age well. He is transforming the world to be a better place to grow older with the concept ‘ME-BYO.’”

ME-BYO is a state of being where a person is defined as neither sick nor healthy, but living in a continual state of maintaining good health wherever they are in the spectrum of personal wellbeing. Governor Kuroiwa’s Healthcare New Frontier health policy combines the traditional concept of ME-BYO with advanced technology, regenerative medicine, robotics, and information and communication technologies.

“When we think of our health, we think that we are either healthy or sick, but in reality, there is no cut line. Our state of health gradually changes between healthy and sick every day. This is the state of ME-BYO,” said Governor Kuroiwa. “To manage and improve our health is to manage ME-BYO.” 

The purpose of the prefecture’s new health policy is to prevent illness and minimize illness progression through programs that promote healthy behaviors such as a balanced diet, exercise, and social activities. This includes fostering age-friendly living communities that can improve physical and mental health. The ME-BYO approach also encourages monitoring vital signs using biomedical life science technologies. 

“By integrating the ME-BYO concept with advanced medical technologies we aim for healthy longevity as well as create new industries and markets,” said Governor Kuroiwa. “We hope to strengthen partnerships between Maryland and Kanagawa Prefecture to further the development of the life science industry in both.”

At UMBC, aging research can be found across a broad range of disciplines, using different approaches. Some faculty focus on lifelong learning and education or trauma-centered care. Others take novel approaches to data collection, management, and analysis to develop insights on healthy aging and the life course and the social determinants of health, such as access to quality healthcare, living environments, social networks, and economic forces. 

Research by UMBC’s Taka Yamashita, a professor of SAPH, has revealed that individuals with high educational attainment are more likely to pursue education activities later in life. Preliminary findings have found that lifelong learning has a strong correlation to long-term health and wellbeing. However, further research is needed to understand why this link exists.

“The optimal goal of my research is to create a situation where we can actually prescribe lifelong learning just like we do physical activities today, to maintain and promote health and wellbeing later in life,” says Yamashita. 

Statistical models to improve health outcomes

In order to engage more people in lifelong learning and other activities that promote well-being, communities need help to prevent or minimize their risks of adverse health events, the speakers also noted. Ian Stockwell, an associate professor of information systems, spoke about the potential of statistical models to support healthy aging and the ongoing community engagement of older adults. 

Stockwell is the associate director of healthcare research in UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology and also a liaison to The Hilltop Institute at UMBC, which develops predictive analytics related to healthcare. Stockwell was previously chief data scientist at Hilltop and his current research focuses on the use of data to improve healthcare systems. 

For the last three years, Stockwell and a team of Hilltop researchers have been building statistical models incorporating the characteristics that influence the health and wellbeing of a person, like chronic conditions and access to food, transportation, and housing. Their models can measure not only the risk of a population for adverse health events—such as avoidable hospital visits, complications due to diabetes, or premature death—but also the role of factors and characteristics associated with their daily environment.

Often, people who are most at risk of negative health outcomes are not able to seek care. One goal of this research is to use the information from the models to inform the creation of an intervention outreach team that can identify those individuals with the highest risk and get them the services that they need. 

“These models currently predict avoidable hospitalization, avoidable long-term admission to nursing homes, complications due to diabetes, and opioid overdoses,” says Stockwell. “I love helping people and these models have served two-million Marylanders who are covered by Medicare and Medicaid.”

Trauma is an important event in the life course that can impact health and health outcomes for people in any population. For residents of long-term care and nursing homes, trauma-informed care is essential to psychosocial well-being, UMBC researchers shared. UMBC’s Nancy Kusmaul, an associate professor of social work, and Brandy Wallace, an associate professor of SAPH, are working to help nursing homes implement trauma-informed care practices.

“Trauma-informed care is a perspective and organizational model that presumes residents, staff, caregivers, family members, and anyone who might be at the nursing home, might have experienced some kind of trauma that we might not know,” said Kusmaul at the event. 

Traumas that people experience because of gender, age, location, discrimination, and oppression can be perceived differently around the world, she explained. Trauma-informed care increases the compassion and empathy that caregivers can provide and helps them focus their care in a way that reduces retraumatization for everyone, supporting wellbeing.

Trauma-informed practices may look different across cultures, but they are important to explore deeply whether someone is in Maryland or Kanagawa, noted Kusmaul. “They are part of the human experience,” she said. “No matter who you are, where you are, or your nationality, trauma-informed care is essential to the wellbeing of all populations.”

Madhav Thambisetty, a senior clinical investigator at the National Institute of Aging, also spoke at the seminar, sharing research on pharmaceutical advances in aging care. Manabu Seo, chief executive officer at Elixirgen Scientific, and Rama Modali, chief executive officer of Reprocell USA, discussed advances in drug discovery and regenerative medicine.

The seminar concluded with a panel including Yamashita, Kusmaul, Stockwell, and Governor Kuroiwa, led by Dana Bradley, dean of the Erickson School, as well as a poster presentation featuring work by doctoral students from the UMB/UMBC Doctoral Program in Gerontology and the UMB School of Social Work .

The consensus for the future of healthy aging was that no single perspective or narrow approach will be successful. Supporting the health and wellbeing of the aging population depends on international innovation and collaboration in life science biotechnologies, novel clinical approaches, effective data management and analysis, and thoughtful approaches to care and wellbeing centered on human experiences.

“UMBC played an important role in connecting Kanagawa and Maryland, through education and research, to develop this unique international seminar,” said Yamashita. “I hope that this seminar inspired policymakers, researchers, and students to critically examine how the ME-BYO concept and policy may contribute to our current views on aging and healthcare.”

Students come to UMBC for many reasons—to find community, to explore a passion, to make change in the world. Once they figure out the “why” that truly drives their interests, the Retriever community is ready to kick in with the “how” to help make those plans a reality. Part of that looks like the traditional classroom experience with a professor, of course—but just as important are the experiential-learning moments that help many students actively connect the knowledge to careers they hope to pursue after graduation. 

UMBC students pursue applied learning in huge numbers. Despite the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of our recent graduates engaged in applied learning, including internships, research, co-ops, and service learning during their time at UMBC. An impressive 91 percent of new grads head directly to a job, advanced degree, or both within six months of graduating—and of those, more than half interned or worked for their employer as a student. 

“When it comes to impact, there is nothing more valuable than engaging in applied-learning opportunities to help clarify one’s career direction, build professional skills, and increase one’s professional network,” shares Susan Hindle, the Career Center’s assistant director of internships and employment. 

For students pursuing experiential learning through internships, campus jobs, research, and community engagement, it’s not just about learning how to do the thing they want to do. It’s about connecting the work to the passions that brought them to UMBC in the first place. These students and alumni working in their chosen fields tell the whole picture—what hands-on learning looks like when it comes full circle.

Essential connections 

The desire to help people comes from deep within. But knowing how to do it successfully on a large scale—and understanding the systems and politics that  can make the job more or less challenging—takes more than just compassion. 

On the morning of the monthly food delivery from the Maryland Food Bank, the brigade of students who keep the Retriever Essentials food pantry running see all sides of the work. Together, they unload and shelve staples like rice, pasta, and huge crates of broccoli for the more than 2,100 visits to the pantry so far this year. At the same time, they connect with community members to understand what might make life better—halal meats, for one; more campus job opportunities, another biggie—and then put their heads together to try to make those changes happen.

For Ariel Barbosa, a grad student in UMBC’s community leadership program, working in this space is part of a journey that started with her trying to understand her Brazilian father’s immigrant experience better. As she works with Retriever Essentials, she’s learning about the complexities of these experiences in a way that will help her as she carves out a career in service.

“There are so many signs showing me that I’m supposed to be right here, right now. I feel like I’m preparing,” she says. “Right now, I feel like I’m in a confidence-building, skill-building phase where I’m just trying to pick up as many skills as I can to be able to create what I feel I need to create at the right time.” 

As a student, Matthew Dolamore ’08, modern languages and linguistics, caught a first glimpse of what would later become a service-based career when he tutored Spanish-speaking clients for an immigration services office in Baltimore. After graduating, he went on to serve with AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and earned a master’s degree in community planning before pulling all of those skills together into a full-circle career in Baltimore. 

Today, Dolamore is program director for the Esperanza Center, a project of Catholic Charities that assists more than 3,000 individuals each year with walk-in immigration services, including healthcare, legal assistance, and education tools. Dolamore serves as a connector between people and solutions, helping people get what they need when they need it and looking for ways to help improve the system. 

“Among our managers we have a nurse practitioner, a managing attorney, a licensed social worker, an individual who got their master’s in teaching English from UMBC, and a woman who oversees our one-touch client services desk who’s a former immigrant and just has a really dynamic background. And just those five people alone is symbolic of what I love about my job,” says Dolamore. 

“I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a legal professional. I’m not a social worker. I’m something myself of a generalist nonprofit manager at this stage in my career, but I get the opportunity every day to come in and out of these really focused professional engagements and try to help all five of them think of each other as teammates, and that’s the part of my job I really enjoy.” 

Lydia Sannella, a Peaceworker and grad student in applied sociology at UMBC, also enjoys the organizational aspect of her job with Retriever Essentials. As she looks ahead to her post-academic career, she’s already thinking about how she can continue to marry her values with her career—knowing that it won’t likely be quite the same as what she’s experiencing at UMBC. 

“I find that, whenever we want to do something, there are supportive, knowledgeable experts who want to help,” she says. “There’s just hoards of students who want to be involved and engaged and do any variety of work, from physical lifting to technical projects. And it’s just this canvas for creativity and possibility. It’s very reciprocal. What I’m able to contribute ends up being more significant and then what I get ends up being more significant.” 

— Jenny O’Grady

Becoming part of the solution

Students come to higher education for a variety of reasons, and among them, many have the goal of learning to create new things—from innovative water-quality solutions to entire companies. For many students, in fact, learning while doing is an integral part of going to college. 

If you ask Premal S. Shah ’98, biochemistry and molecular biology, however, he’ll tell you that there’s a world of difference between learning while doing and learning from doing. 

That’s not to say that Shah, who earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology on his way to founding and leading a string of successful healthcare-related companies, doesn’t believe in academics. But from his vantage point as CEO at MyOme, a genomics firm based in northern California, classroom-based learning is only a part of the puzzle. 

Shah said he’s always had a practical streak, but he found out how much experiential learning can boost classroom learning thanks to a hands-on internship and fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, beginning while he was a student at UMBC.

“When I got to grad school, there were a lot of people who hadn’t really worked in a lab or done stuff,” he said. “I had a huge head start, just because I was able to pick up a pipette and actually use it. I knew what a DNA extraction protocol was. I knew how to use certain machinery.” 

It was a vivid object lesson—one Shah has carried forward into his career. “When you start building companies, there’s always that challenge…of analysis paralysis, right?” he said. “There’s a notion of, ‘We could do this or that. Let’s read and learn more or get additional inputs in search of the perfect answer.’ Or we can actually go build something that will benefit people and iterate even faster as we learn more to make it much better.” 

That’s the big difference between studying science and, for example, running science-based companies, Shah says: “The hypotheticals are great. The theories are great. But you’ve got to get [things] done.” 

Getting things done is Matt Stromberg’s perennial modus operandi. Being a Ph.D. student studying environmental engineering means he is very much both an environmental scientist—someone who studies environmental problems—and an engineer: someone who works to solve those problems. “I always knew I was a passionate environmentalist, but I also knew I liked to build things,” he said. 

In fact, Stromberg, who graduated in 2019 from the University of Virginia with bachelor’s degrees in both environmental engineering and environmental science, is a literal embodiment of learning while doing. Working as both a graduate research assistant and a researcher in the jointly run University System of Maryland Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), he sometimes finds himself simultaneously running experiments and keeping the experiments running. 

A few months ago, Stromberg said, the night before an experiment was scheduled to start, a pump failed in IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center, a 1,800-square-meter facility with hundreds of fish tanks. 

“It was a large pump, and it needed to be replaced—and it was eight o’clock at night,” Stromberg said. “I had already worked 12 hours that day, [but] I realized that there’s no way this experiment is going to run if I don’t have a pump tomorrow. So…I got the wrenches and I got all the fittings I needed,” and found a way to fix it. 

Stromberg’s ability to save that experiment is part and parcel of his approach. One of his main research projects is unclogging a major bottleneck that prevents more farm-raised fish from getting to market: purging them of an unsavory flavor that’s sometimes characteristic of fish that aren’t caught in the wild. As Stromberg put it, “You’re not going to sell the fish if it tastes like dirt.” 

That’s a problem not only for aquaculture companies—which have to use lots of water, time, money, and energy to purge the fish of this taste—but also for the planet. That’s because the only alternative to aquaculture is fishing in the wild, which can destroy ecosystems but is still cheaper than aquaculture, due to the expensive purging process. 

He’s working with advanced oxidative processes and a technology of his own that would effectively create a shortcut, making it more cost-effective to farm fish and thus helping to protect wild habitat in the process. And Stromberg aims to eventually put his Ph.D. to work in a similarly practical way: His goal is to create a company that performs chemical analysis and remediation of water contaminants. 

“I’ve learned a lot from my time here,” he says. “Especially not to over-engineer things!” 

— Scott Cech

Community-centered art

Visual art is all around us—in flyers, television commercials, and even clothes. And while many of us may never know the artists creating work behind the scenes, their lives and experiences certainly do shape their work. 

For instance, earlier this year, Jennifer White-Johnson ’08, visual arts, designed a collection for Target’s national Latino Heritage Month campaign, including a tumbler with stacked text reading sonando vivamente vividly dreaming and a T-shirt proudly proclaiming piel canela pelo rizado (brown/cinnamon skin curly hair). As a disabled, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina designer from Baltimore, White-Johnson sees her inclusion as an opportunity to highlight and provide a voice to communities that often aren’t heard or represented.

“I am really honored to have been chosen and included in this year’s Target Latino Heritage Month collection and campaign,” says White-Johnson. “Using art and design to celebrate and elevate my cultural stories, the strength, and legacy of my ancestors, felt like something that was meant to be!” 

Living with undiagnosed ADHD as a student, White-Johnson often felt like her intensity, excitement, and point of view were unwelcome or just too much. That changed when she transferred to UMBC, where she immediately felt at home. In particular, her time as director of promotions for the Student Events Board [(seb)] gave her her first taste of how graphic design could marry with communit-ycentric work. 

Working closely with the Office of Student Life, White-Johnson and other members of (seb) volunteered during an alternative spring-break trip to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. White-Johnson also designed the T-shirts. 

“This was in 2007, so we could help offer some sort of relief from Hurricane Katrina,” says White-Johnson. “It was life-changing because I was able to surround myself with other like-minded scholars that were serious about academic life but who also understood that school is about self-discovery.” 

Enter Patch Hatley, a sophomore visual arts major with a concentration in animation. Fresh from a session learning how to create stop-motion animation puppets from paper, she is excited to test out some of what she’s learned on the job at commonvision, the student-driven print and design center in The Commons. On any given day, one might find her working on anything from animating cute countdowns for student activities to designing stickers. 

“I’m always constantly learning in an environment like commonvision,” she says. “Each new skill helps transition to the next project, and each project creates new and exciting opportunities. You’re always surrounded by a team who are all community-driven, so I always feel like I can ask for help or constructive criticism. commonvision supports, drives, and motivates me to keep reaching for the stars and will always be an important part of how I’ve grown—not just as an artist but as a team player.” 

Hatley finds work at commonvision particularly helpful because it stretches her creative muscles and opens up her craft to new programs, tools, and mediums, and also because other creators surround her. After spending a decade in animation and illustration before becoming a Retriever, Hatley loves the opportunity to expand her craft in a place that has fostered the foundation for budding designers for years—and getting to bring her personal perspective into work for clients. 

“At the end of the day, you’re drawing for yourself and for the people around you whether you realize it implicitly or not,” says Hatley. At the core of both artists’ practices is community. Both White-Johnson and Hatley recognize that their art doesn’t live in a vacuum but exists as a letter of inspiration, solidarity, and encouragement to their respective communities. Both artists, years apart in their practice, found similar communities to nurture and invest in them. 

“Being given the space to bring visibility to themes of cultural intersectionality, specifically the parts of our natural beauty that aren’t always celebrated, our caramel brown, cinnamon skin, and our natural curls,” says White-Johnson. “I hope my work can culturally inspire others to center what they want to see more of.” 

— Sharéa Harris

Taking experiential learning to the next level

Developing high-level skills in a highly technical field like computer science is difficult enough. But the ability to both master and successfully teach those skills to others takes the challenge to a whole new level. 

Fortunately, Amina Mahmood and Zach Margulies thrive at that level. With their dedication to passing along computer-science knowledge, these Retrievers amply demonstrate that doing while teaching and learning while doing are just different parts of the same equation. 

As Mahmood ’21, computer science, tells it, she started learning while doing quite literally. Just weeks into her first year at UMBC, Mahmood found herself working 20 hours a week as a junior malware analyst at Huntress, a cybersecurity firm that was then still in the startup phase at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

“I didn’t really have any experience, but I was pretty ambitious, so I learned everything on the job,” she said.

Mahmood, part of UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, quickly learned how to run different types of malware on a virtual machine, dissect the particulars of each, and create mitigation reports. The nascent company’s culture also helped boost her confidence. If she ran into a problem, she said, the people she worked with were glad to bring her up to speed. 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you don’t know this—let me teach it to you.’ And then I picked up on it and then I was like, ‘OK—I can do this,’” Mahmood said. Mahmood was quick to apply such on-the-job learning to her academics, even persuading an academic advisor to allow her to add her to his overenrolled, graduate-level software reverse-engineering course at the same time she was enrolled in an undergraduate prerequisite class. 

Mahmood not only aced the graduate-level class, she also started using what she had learned to complete the experiential-learning cycle at her new part-time job at Parsons Corp., a technology-focused defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructure engineering firm. 

“One of my mentors at Parsons—he really supported me, and he said, ‘You know a lot about reverse engineering. Why don’t you just make a course and teach coworkers?’” That’s exactly what Mahmood did— and now does for new summer interns as a full-time reverse engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. 

Recently she found herself completing the circle, coming back to UMBC for the same kind of career fair where she’d found her first job as a first-year student. “But [this time] I didn’t go as a student,” she noted. “I went as an employer.” 

Margulies ’14, biological sciences, is completing his own trajectory: Nearly a decade after earning his first bachelor’s degree, he has returned to UMBC to earn a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in education, with the goal of teaching computer science to Baltimore high school students when he graduates in 2024. 

Margulies started his career pivot before diving back into academics immersing himself in on-the-job data science and programming—including a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing internship at the Maryland Department of Health after starting in the computer science program. Because of this, he’s able to pursue his studies with a greater sense of perspective.

“I feel like it inspires confidence and it builds your self-esteem, taking what you’ve learned in the class and not even a semester later applying it in a real-world setting,” he said. 

Margulies noted that, as a teacher, he’ll also be able to fully address high schoolers’ perennial classroom question: ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’ 

“It’s really important for teachers to know what the practical application of [schoolwork] is going to be and what working in a computer science job will look like,” he said. 

A case in point, Margulies said, was the work he did as part of a Maryland Department of Health internship last summer, reviewing and finding improvements for data collection, including the creation of a data dashboard. 

“Last semester, I took Computer Science 201, and we learned the programming language Python, and I really wanted to start applying that language at the internship,” he said. Because he’d had both practical experience and formal training, Margulies said, he was able to see that he’d have to adapt what he’d learned to suit the task at hand. 

“[I had] to figure out a way that I could take Python and apply it to developing the database because that’s not something we necessarily learned in the class,” he said. “I had a lot of fun taking the thing that I learned academically and not just applying it, but also taking it to the next level.” 

— Scott Cech

Students come to UMBC for many reasons—to find community, to explore a passion, to make change in the world. Once they figure out the “why” that truly drives their interests, the Retriever community is ready to kick in with the “how” to help make those plans a reality. Part of that looks like the traditional classroom experience with a professor, of course—but just as important are the experiential-learning moments that help many students actively connect the knowledge to careers they hope to pursue after graduation. 

UMBC students pursue applied learning in huge numbers. Despite the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of our recent graduates engaged in applied learning, including internships, research, co-ops, and service learning during their time at UMBC. An impressive 91 percent of new grads head directly to a job, advanced degree, or both within six months of graduating—and of those, more than half interned or worked for their employer as a student. 

“When it comes to impact, there is nothing more valuable than engaging in applied-learning opportunities to help clarify one’s career direction, build professional skills, and increase one’s professional network,” shares Susan Hindle, the Career Center’s assistant director of internships and employment. 

For students pursuing experiential learning through internships, campus jobs, research, and community engagement, it’s not just about learning how to do the thing they want to do. It’s about connecting the work to the passions that brought them to UMBC in the first place. These students and alumni working in their chosen fields tell the whole picture—what hands-on learning looks like when it comes full circle.

Essential Connections 

The desire to help people comes from deep within. But knowing how to do it successfully on a large scale—and understanding the systems and politics that  can make the job more or less challenging—takes more than  just compassion. 

On the morning of the monthly food delivery from the Maryland Food Bank, the brigade of students who keep the Retriever Essentials food pantry running see all sides of the work. Together, they unload and shelve staples like rice, pasta, and huge crates of broccoli for the more than 2,100 visits to the pantry so far this year. At the same time, they work with community members to understand what might make life better—halal meats, for one; more campus job opportunities, another biggie—and then put their heads together to try to make those changes happen.

For Ariel Barbosa, a grad student in UMBC’s community leadership program, working in this space is part of a journey that started with her trying to understand her Brazilian father’s immigrant experience better. As she works with Retriever Essentials, she’s learning about the complexities of these experiences in a way that will help her as she carves out a career in service. “There are so many signs showing me that I’m supposed to be right here, right now. I feel like I’m preparing,” she says. “Right now, I feel like I’m in a confidence-building, skill-building phase where I’m just trying to pick up as many skills as I can to be able to create what I feel I need to create at the right time.” 

As a student, Matthew Dolamore ’08, modern languages and linguistics, caught a first glimpse of what would later become a service-based career when he tutored Spanish-speaking clients for an immigration services office in Baltimore. After graduating, he went on to serve with AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and earned a master’s degree in community planning before pulling all of those skills together into a full-circle career in Baltimore. 

Today, Dolamore is program director for the Esperanza Center, a project of Catholic Charities that assists more than 3,000 individuals each year with walk-in immigration services, including healthcare, legal assistance, and education tools. Dolamore serves as a connector between people and solutions, helping people get what they need when they need it and looking for ways to help improve the system. 

“Among our managers we have a nurse practitioner, a managing attorney, a licensed social worker, an individual who got their master’s in teaching English from UMBC, and a woman who oversees our one-touch client services desk who’s a former immigrant and just has a really dynamic background. And just those five people alone is symbolic of what I love about my job,” says Dolamore. 

“I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a legal professional. I’m not a social worker. I’m something myself of a generalist nonprofit manager at this stage in my career, but I get the opportunity every day to come in and out of these really focused professional engagements and try to help all five of them think of each other as teammates, and that’s the part of my job I really enjoy.” 

Lydia Sannella, a Peaceworker and grad student in applied sociology at UMBC, also enjoys the organizational aspect of her job with Retriever Essentials. As she looks ahead to her post-academic career, she’s already thinking about how she can continue to marry her values with her career—knowing that it won’t likely be quite the same as what she’s experiencing at UMBC. 

“I find that, whenever we want to do something, there are supportive, knowledgeable experts who want to help,” she says. “There’s just hoards of students who want to be involved and engaged and do any variety of work, from physical lifting to technical projects. And it’s just this canvas for creativity and possibility. It’s very reciprocal. What I’m able to contribute ends up being more significant and then what I get ends up being more significant.” 

— Jenny O’Grady

Becoming part of the solution

Students come to higher education for a variety of reasons, and among them, many have the goal of learning to create new things—from innovative water-quality solutions to entire companies. For many students, in fact, learning while doing is an integral part of going to college. 

If you ask Premal S. Shah ’98, biochemistry and molecular biology, however, he’ll tell you that there’s a world of difference between learning while doing and learning from doing. 

That’s not to say that Shah, who earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology on his way to founding and leading a string of successful healthcare-related companies, doesn’t believe in academics. But from his vantage point as CEO at MyOme, a genomics firm based in northern California, classroom-based learning is only a part of the puzzle. 

Shah said he’s always had a practical streak, but he found out how much experiential learning can boost classroom learning thanks to a hands-on internship and fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, beginning while he was a student at UMBC.

“When I got to grad school, there were a lot of people who hadn’t really worked in a lab or done stuff,” he said. “I had a huge head start, just because I was able to pick up a pipette and actually use it. I knew what a DNA extraction protocol was. I knew how to use certain machinery.” 

It was a vivid object lesson—one Shah has carried forward into his career. “When you start building companies, there’s always that challenge…of analysis paralysis, right?” he said. “There’s a notion of, ‘We could do this or that. Let’s read and learn more or get additional inputs in search of the perfect answer.’ Or we can actually go build something that will benefit people and iterate even faster as we learn more to make it much better.” 

That’s the big difference between studying science and, for example, running science-based companies, Shah says: “The hypotheticals are great. The theories are great. But you’ve got to get [things] done.” 

Getting things done is Matt Stromberg’s perennial modus operandi. Being a Ph.D. student studying environmental engineering means he is very much both an environmental scientist—someone who studies environmental problems—and an engineer: someone who works to solve those problems. “I always knew I was a passionate environmentalist, but I also knew I liked to build things,” he said. 

In fact, Stromberg, who graduated in 2019 from the University of Virginia with bachelor’s degrees in both environmental engineering and environmental science, is a literal embodiment of learning while doing. Working as both a graduate research assistant and a researcher in the jointly run University System of Maryland Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), he sometimes finds himself simultaneously running experiments and keeping the experiments running. 

A few months ago, Stromberg said, the night before an experiment was scheduled to start, a pump failed in IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center, a 1,800-square-meter facility with hundreds of fish tanks. 

“It was a large pump, and it needed to be replaced—and it was eight o’clock at night,” Stromberg said. “I had already worked 12 hours that day, [but] I realized that there’s no way this experiment is going to run if I don’t have a pump tomorrow. So…I got the wrenches and I got all the fittings I needed,” and found a way to fix it. 

Stromberg’s ability to save that experiment is part and parcel of his approach. One of his main research projects is unclogging a major bottleneck that prevents more farm-raised fish from getting to market: purging them of an unsavory flavor that’s sometimes characteristic of fish that aren’t caught in the wild. As Stromberg put it, “You’re not going to sell the fish if it tastes like dirt.” 

That’s a problem not only for aquaculture companies—which have to use lots of water, time, money, and energy to purge the fish of this taste—but also for the planet. That’s because the only alternative to aquaculture is fishing in the wild, which can destroy ecosystems but is still cheaper than aquaculture, due to the expensive purging process. 

He’s working with advanced oxidative processes and a technology of his own that would effectively create a shortcut, making it more cost-effective to farm fish and thus helping to protect wild habitat in the process. And Stromberg aims to eventually put his Ph.D. to work in a similarly practical way: His goal is to create a company that performs chemical analysis and remediation of water contaminants. 

“I’ve learned a lot from my time here,” he says. “Especially not to over-engineer things!” 

— Scott Cech

Community-centered art

Visual art is all around us—in flyers, television commercials, and even clothes. And while many of us may never know the artists creating work behind the scenes, their lives and experiences certainly do shape their work. 

For instance, earlier this year, Jennifer White-Johnson ’08, visual arts, designed a collection for Target’s national Latino Heritage Month campaign, including a tumbler with stacked text reading sonando vivamente vividly dreaming and a T-shirt proudly proclaiming piel canela pelo rizado (brown/cinnamon skin curly hair). As a disabled, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina designer from Baltimore, White-Johnson sees her inclusion as an opportunity to highlight and provide a voice to communities that often aren’t heard or represented.

“I am really honored to have been chosen and included in this year’s Target Latino Heritage Month collection and campaign,” says White-Johnson. “Using art and design to celebrate and elevate my cultural stories, the strength, and legacy of my ancestors, felt like something that was meant to be!” 

Living with undiagnosed ADHD as a student, White-Johnson often felt like her intensity, excitement, and point of view were unwelcome or just too much. That changed when she transferred to UMBC, where she immediately felt at home. In particular, her time as director of promotions for the Student Events Board [(seb)] gave her her first taste of how graphic design could marry with communit-ycentric work. 

Working closely with the Office of Student Life, White-Johnson and other members of (seb) volunteered during an alternative spring-break trip to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. White-Johnson also designed the T-shirts. 

“This was in 2007, so we could help offer some sort of relief from Hurricane Katrina,” says White-Johnson. “It was life-changing because I was able to surround myself with other like-minded scholars that were serious about academic life but who also understood that school is about self-discovery.” 

Enter Patch Hatley, a sophomore visual arts major with a concentration in animation. Fresh from a session learning how to create stop-motion animation puppets from paper, she is excited to test out some of what she’s learned on the job at commonvision, the student-driven print and design center in The Commons. On any given day, one might find her working on anything from animating cute countdowns for student activities to designing stickers. 

“I’m always constantly learning in an environment like commonvision,” she says. “Each new skill helps transition to the next project, and each project creates new and exciting opportunities. You’re always surrounded by a team who are all community-driven, so I always feel like I can ask for help or constructive criticism. commonvision supports, drives, and motivates me to keep reaching for the stars and will always be an important part of how I’ve grown—not just as an artist but as a team player.” 

Hatley finds work at commonvision particularly helpful because it stretches her creative muscles and opens up her craft to new programs, tools, and mediums, and also because other creators surround her. After spending a decade in animation and illustration before becoming a Retriever, Hatley loves the opportunity to expand her craft in a place that has fostered the foundation for budding designers for years—and getting to bring her personal perspective into work for clients. 

“At the end of the day, you’re drawing for yourself and for the people around you whether you realize it implicitly or not,” says Hatley. At the core of both artists’ practices is community. Both White-Johnson and Hatley recognize that their art doesn’t live in a vacuum but exists as a letter of inspiration, solidarity, and encouragement to their respective communities. Both artists, years apart in their practice, found similar communities to nurture and invest in them. 

“Being given the space to bring visibility to themes of cultural intersectionality, specifically the parts of our natural beauty that aren’t always celebrated, our caramel brown, cinnamon skin, and our natural curls,” says White-Johnson. “I hope my work can culturally inspire others to center what they want to see more of.” 

— Sharéa Harris

Taking experiential learning to the next level

Developing high-level skills in a highly technical field like computer science is difficult enough. But the ability to both master and successfully teach those skills to others takes the challenge to a whole new level. 

Fortunately, Amina Mahmood and Zach Margulies thrive at that level. With their dedication to passing along computer-science knowledge, these Retrievers amply demonstrate that doing while teaching and learning while doing are just different parts of the same equation. 

As Mahmood ’21, computer science, tells it, she started learning while doing quite literally. Just weeks into her first year at UMBC, Mahmood found herself working 20 hours a week as a junior malware analyst at Huntress, a cybersecurity firm that was then still in the startup phase at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

“I didn’t really have any experience, but I was pretty ambitious, so I learned everything on the job,” she said.

Mahmood, part of UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, quickly learned how to run different types of malware on a virtual machine, dissect the particulars of each, and create mitigation reports. The nascent company’s culture also helped boost her confidence. If she ran into a problem, she said, the people she worked with were glad to bring her up to speed. 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you don’t know this—let me teach it to you.’ And then I picked up on it and then I was like, ‘OK—I can do this,’” Mahmood said. Mahmood was quick to apply such on-the-job learning to her academics, even persuading an academic advisor to allow her to add her to his overenrolled, graduate-level software reverse-engineering course at the same time she was enrolled in an undergraduate prerequisite class. 

Mahmood not only aced the graduate-level class, she also started using what she had learned to complete the experiential-learning cycle at her new part-time job at Parsons Corp., a technology-focused defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructure engineering firm. 

“One of my mentors at Parsons—he really supported me, and he said, ‘You know a lot about reverse engineering. Why don’t you just make a course and teach coworkers?’” That’s exactly what Mahmood did— and now does for new summer interns as a full-time reverse engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. 

Recently she found herself completing the circle, coming back to UMBC for the same kind of career fair where she’d found her first job as a first-year student. “But [this time] I didn’t go as a student,” she noted. “I went as an employer.” 

Margulies ’14, biological sciences, is completing his own trajectory: Nearly a decade after earning his first bachelor’s degree, he has returned to UMBC to earn a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in education, with the goal of teaching computer science to Baltimore high school students when he graduates in 2024. 

Margulies started his career pivot before diving back into academics immersing himself in on-the-job data science and programming—including a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing internship at the Maryland Department of Health after starting in the computer science program. Because of this, he’s able to pursue his studies with a greater sense of perspective.

“I feel like it inspires confidence and it builds your self-esteem, taking what you’ve learned in the class and not even a semester later applying it in a real-world setting,” he said. 

Margulies noted that, as a teacher, he’ll also be able to fully address high schoolers’ perennial classroom question: ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’ 

“It’s really important for teachers to know what the practical application of [schoolwork] is going to be and what working in a computer science job will look like,” he said. 

A case in point, Margulies said, was the work he did as part of a Maryland Department of Health internship last summer, reviewing and finding improvements for data collection, including the creation of a data dashboard. 

“Last semester, I took Computer Science 201, and we learned the programming language Python, and I really wanted to start applying that language at the internship,” he said. Because he’d had both practical experience and formal training, Margulies said, he was able to see that he’d have to adapt what he’d learned to suit the task at hand. 

“[I had] to figure out a way that I could take Python and apply it to developing the database because that’s not something we necessarily learned in the class,” he said. “I had a lot of fun taking the thing that I learned academically and not just applying it, but also taking it to the next level.” 

— Scott Cech

With Jess Presuel ’23, biological sciences, an international student from Mexico

Jess Presuel’s route to UMBC was not a direct flight from Mérida, Yucatán—her home state in Mexico—to UMBC. She originally arrived in Maryland in 2015 as an au pair to a family with five children. There, she immediately felt accepted and as she cared for the children, they helped her learn English. Over time, Presuel realized she was ready to pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon, starting in fall 2021 working toward a degree in biological science. At UMBC, Presuel knew that she wasn’t just on campus to take classes; she wanted to bring her Mexican and Mayan heritage to her time as a Retriever. Now, as a global ambassador through the Center for Global Engagement and through other connections on campus, Presuel has found platforms to bridge her two homes and she wants to share how she’s going about it.

Tools of the Trade

1. A sense of adventure
2. Backpack of study skills
3. Openness to joining clubs and volunteering
4. Grandma’s recipe book

Jess Presuel (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

Step 1: Find your family

For Presuel, this was both easy and hard. When she arrived in the U.S., still using Google Translate to communicate with her au pair family, she found the parents and kids eager to help her learn English and navigate life in Maryland. Most importantly, she says, they supported her personally when she shared that she was gay. “Part of the rough patch of my life in Mexico,” Presuel shares, “was that at the time, my mom didn’t accept me as being gay. So when I first got here, the family was welcoming to me. Just for me, I began to experience how American culture, especially in Maryland, can be welcoming to the LGBTQ community. It made me feel safe.”

Presuel would later meet her fiancée, Lyana Cortes, in D.C. and over time, she says, her mother has grown to accept her daughter and love her future daughter-in-law. “My mom was a single mom, so she was always working. At the time, she sustained three jobs and I raised my siblings. So when I left, she felt my absence. Now, we’ve patched things up and she’s finally accepted me. She adores Lyana,” says Presuel. In fact, the couple got engaged on their most recent trip to Mexico, building stronger family ties internationally.

Step 2: Share your favorite things from home

“For me, being a Latina means always taking the time to cook something from my hometown,” says Presuel. “In addition to being Mexican, I’m Mayan too. Not many people know that the Mayan community is still alive. So I’m spreading the word, we’re here.”

Presuel uses any opportunity to make food for her communities on campus, including her medical fraternity Phi Delta Epsilon. For her Mayan dishes, she incorporates pumpkin seeds into many different recipes, and on Mexican Independence Day, September 16, she made pozole, a rich stew.

In addition to food, Presuel wants to share a sense of Latina empowerment. She’s currently in the process of replicating Harvard’s Latina Empowerment & Development (LEAD) conference at UMBC. “I am trying to get more Latinas involved in any type of workshops and educational settings,” says Presuel. “I want to showcase Latina leadership.”

Step 3: Get the lay of the land

Higher education in the States is a convoluted process for someone coming from outside of the system. For international students in particular, specific and important paperwork must be submitted to the right authorities. At UMBC, staff in International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) help handle this bureaucratic burden. “I knew that when I finally picked UMBC as my university, ISSS was the first office I needed to connect with.”

In addition to ISSS, Presuel says, she doesn’t hesitate to ask her advisor Philip Farabaugh, professor in biological sciences, endless questions, even things she might be able to find online, because inevitably the conversation ends up being so useful to her. “He always gives me good advice. And he’s so funny, that makes me feel like, ‘Okay, I got this. I definitely can do this.’”

Step 4: Tell your story

After a year taking classes at UMBC, Presuel felt like she was ready to start offering advice to other international students. She’s now a global ambassador through the Center for Global Engagement.

“It’s such a rewarding role,” says Presuel, “because I finally get to share my experience. When you first get here from another country, you likely feel lost, so having someone who can help or speak your own language, it’s so relieving.”

Presuel, center, has fun with other global ambassadors at a Welcome Week event. Photo courtesy of CGE.

Step 5: Find ways to give back to your community

“As an international student, it’s important to have a community even outside of campus,” says Presuel. She wanted to find a way to give back to other Mexicans and Spanish speakers in the area and found a home at the Esperanza Center in Baltimore City. This nonprofit is a comprehensive resource center for immigrant communities. “I do absolutely anything that’s possible for me to do,” says Presuel, who has been volunteering there for the past year.

“I help from the front desk. I’ve been assisting dentists. I translate for doctors. So being part of the immigrant community in Baltimore, it has filled my heart,” says Presuel. “I wouldn’t call it a hole, but something was missing from Mexico. I needed to have that link between my American culture, my Mexican culture here.”

Ellicott City, founded 250 years ago this year, holds more than its share of history. The lore of the old mill town is dense with pioneers, millers, astronomers, abolitionists, fires, floods, and firsts, including the nation’s first national road and railroad.

Writer Ellen Nibali ’90, English, wanted to tell the history of the town. But how could she condense all those years into something that would both enlighten and entertain? Then she thought of the magic of the musical.

“The underlying thing is that I love stories,” Nibali said. “And I always enjoyed music. Then I realized that a musical was a great medium for storytelling.”

As a girl, Nibali played piano in her family’s chilly basement, finishing up practice when the timer dinged, then making up ditties. But she never imagined herself writing a musical, despite a life of putting pen to paper. After two years of college, Nibali took time off to get married and have children. But she continued writing—novels, children’s books, poems, even a bicentennial history of a Baltimore County community.

In her 30s, Nibali went back to college, attending UMBC. Nibali remembered writing a poem for class, and UMBC senior lecturer Michael Fallon telling her, “You’re on fire.” “That meant a huge amount to me,” Nibali said.

Ellen Nibali (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

“I loved every second of it, the intellectual stimulation,” she said. This year, she endowed a scholarship for students transferring from community college. “I’m impressed with how UMBC has built its reputation and excellence,” Nibali said. “I’m proud to be an alum and want to give that opportunity to others of modest backgrounds. What UMBC does is transforming on so many levels, and it keeps on giving for generations.”

Back to the town’s roots

After graduation, Nibali wrote the weekly horticulture column in the Baltimore Sun. The column was part of her job at the University of Maryland’s Extension Service, answering hometowner’s garden questions.

She began writing the musical more than 25 years ago, for her son’s school history project. She composed songs for him and his classmates to perform, about the National Road, about the revolutionary tea party in Annapolis, and about the Underground Railroad.

Over the years, she wrote more songs, about the B&O Railroad, then one about astronomer, mathematician, and surveyor Benjamin Banneker.

Over the years, Nibali ended up with 15 songs and took the idea for her musical “On National Road” to EC250, the nonprofit formed to spearhead celebration of Ellicott City’s sestercentennial.

“Being a lover of history and especially Ellicott City history, I was immediately taken with the concept and the songs,” said Ed Lilley, president of EC250 and fondly known as the city’s informal mayor. “The finale song, ‘Sing Me a Memory,’ immediately brought tears to my eyes, reminding me of what a special place Ellicott City is.”

The board agreed to put on the show. Nibali wrote a libretto and four new songs at their request, then worked with Wilde Lake High School choir teacher Kevin Crouch, who composed and recorded the songs, from marches, folk, and rock to classical and ragtime.

The thrill of songs come to life

Nibali attends every rehearsal of “On National Road,” which opens at Howard Community College December 8.

“This is my baby,” Nibali said. “I want to watch it be born. It’s just been a fun adventure. The first time I heard them do the songs, each one was thrilling.”

“On National Road” spans, of course, 250 years. It starts with the three Quaker Ellicott brothers who first saw the Patapsco River’s potential as a force to power their mills through the race of the horse and the Tom Thumb train, to more recent history, including when 19-year-old Babe Ruth was married in Ellicott City because it had lax laws about youngsters marrying.

“I wish I could convey even better how revolutionary and earth-shaking and exciting these things are,” Nibali said of the history. “The theme is freedom, about being free to be who you are in the time you are in.”

One Saturday this autumn, Nibali and 50 other audience members gathered at the Museum of Howard County History to watch a preview song, a ragtime tune about Babe Ruth’s marriage at St. Paul Catholic Church, less than a half a mile away.

An actor playing Babe, in a baseball uniform, sang out Nibali’s rhyme of “Ruth” and “uncouth,” and then warbled the song’s final line, “I’m gonna take a swing at, gotta take a swing at, get to take a swing at life,” and Nibali clapped enthusiastically as the last note faded into the rafters.

— Susan Thornton Hobby