Recently, both the Department of Energy (DoE) and NASA awarded Zhibo Zhang, associate professor of physics, significant grants to pursue projects in atmospheric science. 

Zhang’s lab has established itself as a powerhouse at UMBC since his arrival in 2011. The lab published groundbreaking findings such as the discovery that dust from the Sahara Desert provides critical nutrients to the Amazon Rainforest in Geophysical Research Letters, and the surprising result that smoke from African wildfires may have a cooling effect on climate by reflecting sunlight back into space in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Zhang’s Aerosol, Cloud, Radiation, Observation, and Simulation (ACROS) research group focuses on how small particles in the atmosphere—such as dust, smoke, and other pollutants—interact with clouds and sunlight. His team’s end goal is to better understand how the particles affect global climate and use that information to improve climate models, so we have the best information possible to plan ahead for climate resilience.

Clouds up close

The DoE has awarded Zhang’s group $600,000 over three years to improve how climate models incorporate the effect of clouds. “DoE is very interested in how climate change will influence U.S. and global energy consumption,” Zhang says, and having accurate climate models is critical to that effort. The UMBC project is one of 27 atmospheric research projects the DoE funded with a total of $13 million.

Scientists model the global climate as a grid, with each grid square being 100 to 200 kilometers on a side. “We have all the equations to model the whole system based on these discrete grid boxes and how they interact with each other, but what happens on a more granular level, below that grid size, our models can’t say,” Zhang explains. “That’s 200 km—from here almost to New York—and what happens inside this grid box can be very important.”

“Our whole study is to investigate the sub-grid scale—how clouds change from about 5 to 100 kilometers,” Zhang says. The team plans to analyze data collected by ground-based instruments and research aircraft at the DoE’s site on the Azores islands, about 1500 km west of Portugal, to help “check the model’s assumptions and improve them using observational data.”

The team will investigate, for the first time at high resolution, how the total water content of clouds varies. They’ll also look at the number of individual droplets within grid squares that are measurable from airborne sensors flying near the ground-based instruments. The researchers will also track environmental factors within the grid squares, such as wind, humidity, and the overall density of airborne particles. 

Several members of Zhang’s team are involved in the project, including Olivia Norman ‘21, physics. “We’re depending on her to solve some really tough equations,” Zhang says, “and she’s doing very well.”

Externally, Zhang is collaborating with David Mechem, professor of geography and atmospheric science at the University of Kansas, for this project. “We have a very strong team. We complement each other,” Zhang says. “Also, we’ve been thinking about this problem independently—they from the modeling side and us from the observation side—for a long time.”

Dusting off climate models

The NASA-funded project will analyze data collected from instruments on aircraft and NASA’s orbiting CALIPSO and MODIS satellites to better understand whether dust in the atmosphere warms or cools the planet overall. Combining information from the different data sources “is like putting a puzzle together,” Zhang says. “Each one provides one piece of the puzzle, so when you put them together you get the larger picture.”

Considerable research has looked at how dust interacts with light in the visible spectrum—light waves that humans can see. Those findings suggest that dust has a slight cooling effect. “What hasn’t been studied in detail is the warming effect of the dust,” Zhang says. It can absorb some of the radiation reflecting off the Earth’s surface—specifically, the infrared radiation with longer wavelengths. “It’s basically a greenhouse effect of the dust.”

Qianqian Song, a Ph.D. student in Zhang’s research group, has led some of the first work looking at the warming effect of dust when it interacts with long-wave infrared radiation. “In our study we found the long-wave warming effect could cancel 30 percent of the cooling effect in the Atlantic region during summer,” she says.

Climate models are valuable, but only as good as the assumptions they make. “You can look at the data and you see discrepancies between the climate models and the observations,” says graduate student Kylie Hoffman. “Some of it we can explain, and some of it we can’t. Identifying the discrepancies and being able to modify the climate models to be more accurate down the road is very important.”

Currently, the effect of infrared radiation is completely absent from models, because so little is known. But, “If our research shows the infrared radiation effects of dust are important, then we can add this effect into climate models,” Zhang says. “Actually, dust is going to change a lot in the future as the climate changes, so it’s important to consider the more comprehensive effects of dust in climate models.”

Moving forward, graduate student Kevin Zheng will take the lead on this work. He’ll develop computer code that can process the years and years of data collected by CALIPSO and MODIS and determine the altitude, thickness, and other properties of dust in the atmosphere, which can be used to determine how much radiation it blocks or lets pass through. In the end, he says, “We’ll have a global map of the dust’s infrared radiation properties in different locations at different times.” 

Chamara Rajapakshe, another Ph.D. student in the lab, emphasizes that the team plans to share its data to support work in other labs around the world. “Everything is archived and available to any scientist,” Rajapakshe says—including not only the raw data, but also the tools for processing it. “That will benefit a lot of other research groups.” The Zhang lab is making it possible for researchers everywhere to help communities tackle the uncertainties of climate change—starting with better climate models.

Banner image: Clockwise from lower left: Qianqian Song, Chamara Rajapakshe, Kevin Zheng, Zhibo Zhang, Olivia Norman. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This spring, Stephen Freeland, director of individualized studies and associate professor of biological sciences, received the Texas A&M Trotter Prize in Information, Complexity, and Inference, an endowed lecture series seeking to reveal connections between science and religion. He traveled to Texas A&M University in April to deliver two talks about his research on the origins of life.  

From Freeland’s perspective, the prize creates a space to “honor and debate about where evolution intersects with deeper, multi-dimensional concepts about the purpose of us being here, or what science is telling us about our place in the universe.” While not structured as a formal debate, the prize is given to two winners each year with contrasting views, and they present their talks at the same event.

Freeland’s research has always centered on how and why living things evolved a system of genetic coding, which has taken him from biology to astrobiology and has inevitably led him to grapple with one of the big questions many people ask themselves: “Where do we come from?”

Freeland said he was proud to add UMBC to the list of winners’ institutions, which in the prize’s 17 years has included many renowned bastions of scholarship in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and Cornell.

Specifically, Freeland said he was thrilled to follow in the footsteps of previous winners and scientific giants, such as Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader in the Human Genome Project, and Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. “These are people whose names have influenced profoundly my career and thinking,” Freeland says, “and I respect them highly.”

Asking the right question

In his talk, Freeland called on his own research and standard evolutionary theory to argue that information flows from the environment into organisms, resulting in an organism storing information about its environment in its DNA. That makes sense in the context of natural selection: organisms that are more suited to their surroundings (in other words, whose genetic material stores more information about the environment) will be more likely to survive and reproduce, creating more organisms with the same helpful traits.

“That was a very useful point to counter the fundamental claim from intelligent design that evolution requires a degree of complexity that is different from anything science knows how to explain,” Freeland says. “No it doesn’t—organisms absorb information from the environment. That’s what we’ve been saying for 150 years.”

Intelligent design (ID) is a theory outside mainstream science claiming organisms that are strikingly well-tuned to their environment or lifestyle could not have arisen by natural processes alone. Thinking deeply about ID over the last several years has led Freeland to appreciate its usefulness as a foil for evolution.

“Thinking about why my own education and research cause me to disagree with ID’s claims has given me clarity about how that applies to the origin of life,” he says, “and this same deeper thinking has helped advance my own research, and examine how it does or, in some cases, does not, align with  current scientific paradigms.”

One of the most popular paradigms in the origin-of-life field, the “RNA World Hypothesis,” posits that RNA, a slightly different form of genetic material that is present alongside DNA in all organisms, arose before the first living things and eventually made life possible. Based on this hypothesis, many researchers are currently struggling to determine how RNA could have come to exist before life.

However, after a great deal of study, including contemplating the claims of ID, Freeland thinks, “We should be looking for what chemicals information from the environment is flowing into, pre-RNA. What is this curious molecule that preceded RNA, that may look nothing like it? Are we asking the wrong question if we’re trying to make RNA’s existence before the first living things plausible?”

Seeing the truth

Freeland took the stage this year as the orthodox scientist of the winning pair, because he espouses the traditional scientific view of evolution and natural selection. So, the fact that he is also a committed Christian may have taken some listeners by surprise. In fact, efforts at the intersection of science and religion have been a core part of Freeland’s work for decades.

In March, he helped organize UMBC’s events sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science focused on the intersection of science and religion. He also  serves on the advisory board for Biologos, an organization seeking to show Christians that science, and specifically evolution, need not conflict with their worldview. In addition, he has spoken internationally and taught courses on the topic at UMBC for many years, and is excited this summer for the first time to work directly with a Muslim youth organization on an environmental stewardship project, in collaboration with individualized studies instructor Tabassum Majid ’10, interdisciplinary studies, M.A. ’18, management of aging studies.

As a scientist and a Christian, Freeland explains that in his worldview, truth extends beyond science, to frameworks such as spirituality and religion.  Science and religion influence each other over time, and they are not mutually exclusive, he says.

“There are worldviews that shape what we believe, and it’s not clear to me that it’s science that drives those worldviews. Science sometimes catches up to that worldview by saying yes, when we measure by science we do find that truth.” And sometimes, “changing worldviews will revolutionize what truths science is capable of seeing.”

Banner image: Steve Freeland accepts the Trotter Prize. Photo credit: Texas A&M University College of Science.

UMBC has again been named one of the top universities in the world for 2019-2020. Rankings released this week by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) place UMBC in the top 3.3% of universities worldwide, as well as among the top 170 U.S. universities.

“As this ranking shows, UMBC is truly a world-class university. Our researchers not only make a positive impact within our state and nation, but around the globe as well,” says David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education.

The CWUR evaluated twenty thousand universities based on four distinct areas. These include: quality of education (number of alumni who have won major international awards), alumni employment (number of alumni who have held CEO positions at top companies), quality of faculty (number of faculty who have won major international awards), and research performance (research output, high-quality publications, influence, and citations). In a change from previous years, the measures of learning environment and research are now given equal weight.

“I am pleased that the impact of our faculty research continues to be recognized on the national and global scale. As one of the top 170 U.S. institutions in this CWUR review, we find ourselves in good company with many other well-known institutions,” says Karl Steiner, vice president of research.

Steiner notes, “With the opening of our new Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building, we will be able to significantly enhance our footprint and impact in interdisciplinary life sciences, while continuing to expand our other programs in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and environmental sciences. This is complemented by impactful UMBC scholarship in the public humanities and public policy.”

UMBC’s ranking also speaks to the achievements of alumni, and the strong foundation they developed and opportunities they accessed during their time at UMBC.

“UMBC continues to produce alumni who are leaders in all facets of society, including civic leaders and CEOs of some of the world’s top companies,” says Stanyell Odom, director of alumni engagement. “We are proud of our alumni. The grit—hard work, courage, and commitment—they exude in their work across different fields has such a powerful impact on our nation and the world.”

All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Each year, UMBC’s Baja SAE team designs and constructs a vehicle that is built to withstand challenging terrain and weather, while also keeping budget, vehicle weight, and agility in mind. The team ended this year’s season strong, finishing in the top 12 overall at each of three competitions across the country.

“After placing eighth in the world in 2018, the team aimed to build a lighter, faster car that would allow us to finish the year with a higher overall finish,” says Rob Sherwood ‘20, mechanical engineering, a member of the team. “The biggest challenge we faced this season was the increased level of competition among the top-tier schools.”

UMBC’s team, now celebrating its 30th season, competes against institutions from across the country that have strong Baja SAE teams and innovative vehicles. While many of the students who have worked with Baja SAE over the years come from engineering backgrounds, team have also included members from other majors, making it a truly interdisciplinary project. 

Leading up to the first competition, the team dedicates hours to making adjustments to the vehicle to prepare for the season. At each competition, teams are scored based on a range of criteria including cost, design, sales, and endurance. Their performance in the cost categories at each competition proved to be their strongest.

“While we know the car had the potential to do even better, we are still extremely happy with our results,” says Sherwood. “We had the second most successful season since our establishment in 1989.”

The first competition of the 2019 season was held in Tennessee, April 11-14. The team finished fifth overall, and earned first place in the cost category.

On the west coast, the team competed in California in May. The team’s strength in developing a cost-effective vehicle was recognized again, earning them second place in the category, and 11th overall out of the 99 teams from across the country that participated.

The final competition of the season was held in Rochester, NY, in June. UMBC’s team again earned second place in the cost component of the competition, and 12th overall. 

Sherwood shares that the team finished the season with 2,337 points, the second highest number of points in the history of the UMBC Baja SAE team. “The team is young and has a lot of potential,” he says, adding that he is looking forward to next season. 

Banner image: A member of the Baja team working on a part of the vehicle. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.