Meet Vicki,

She is a Media and Communications Studies major and summer researcher. She graduated cum laude this past spring and currently works for Burness Communications, a public interest communications firm in Bethesda, MD. 

Her research investigates how to better understand and define what constitutes the “language” of television and involved a cross-cultural comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis of episodes from a Greek adaptation of the British medical series, Doc Martin. This research is particularly relevant due to the increasing volume of deterritorialized and localized narratives circulating within the global television format trade. She will conduct a cross-cultural analysis of components like narrative structure, sound, music, camera, lighting, and dialogue and demonstrated how these contribute to adapting for cultural proximity in the new setting. This comparative methodology led to an analysis of cultural components such as gender, masculinity, and community. 

Read more about her research here…

Meet Markus,

He is an Technology Entrepreneurship and Organization Management major and a summer researcher. His main focus is to bring technology to the masses - mainly into elementary schools. During his senior year he was the Vice-President for the Interdisciplinary Studies Council of Majors. Markus was also a speaker on the panel “Youth and Diversity in Entrepreneurship” at Baltimore’s inaugural Light City U Creative Innovation Conference in April 2016.

His research explores the technological world of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). MOOCs has the potential to provide education to billions across the globe at little to no cost to learners. However, most individuals who start these free online courses do not watch the first video or complete the course at all. The purpose of my study is to compare the approach to MOOCs by American and Switzerland institutions and what practices are being used to address these issues and how the quality of distance education impacts the completion rates of online courses.

Read more about his research here…

Meet Jamshaid,

He is a Mathematics and Statistics major, Meyerhoff Scholar and MARC U*STAR Scholar. Jamshaid was also a participant of UMBC’s Young Scholars program, which allowed him to take classes as a high school student and earn credit. After graduation, he plans to attend graduate school focusing on either applied mathematics, bioinformatics, or computer science. He is interested in a career that involves mathematical modeling, statistics, and computer science.

His research will explore the world of microscopy; one of the main tools in cell biology. The overall goal of his research project is to quantify the differences between image features computed by several feature extraction tools. His approach to this project will be to identify implementations of the same image features across multiple software packages, extract numerical values of image features, and compute statistical variance of image features. 

Read more about his research here…

Meet Joelle,

She is a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology major and a URA Scholar. Joelle is a premed student, a TA for Biology 142 and was also a Woolie for the new students during Welcome Week 2015. After graduation, she plans to pursue an MD (hopefully, at University of Maryland School of Medicine) and would like to specialize in oncology. She feels that the field of oncology would allow her to be able to have the opportunity to treat patients and promote health wellness and prevention within the community while also opening the doors to do research on genetic diseases and to continue studying how mutations of genes found in DNA can cause and affect cancer.

Her research will examine the toxin Crotamine that is present in the venom of Crotalus durissus terrificus, the South American rattlesnake. Crotamine has been shown to have a preference for targeting rapidly proliferating cells, such as malignant cancer cells, and displays numerous other functions, including DNA delivery and localization to the nucleus upon penetrating the cell. 

Read more about her research here…

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