UMBC’s Eileen Meyer, assistant professor of physics, argues that recent technological advances in the big data era are changing how astronomers learn about the universe.  In an article published in outlets from Popular Science to Smithsonian Magazine, Meyer describes recent research that discovered thousands of black holes near the center of the Milky Way. The research team found them not with a new telescope, but “by digging through old, long-archived data,” she writes. “Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day—so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.”

Over the past several decades, advances in communications have allowed astronomy research to shift away from being conducted largely by individual scientists working with the instruments available at their own institutions. Today, large, international research teams collaborate on projects, often using instruments shared by several institutions across multiple countries.

The research instruments themselves are also vastly more powerful today than in the past. Older instruments could only detect visible light (with wavelengths from about 400 to 700 billionths of a meter). New instruments examine everything from gamma rays (extremely high-energy waves with wavelengths less than a trillionth of a meter) to radio waves (with wavelengths as big as a meter).

Newer equipment can also quickly process more data—a lot more. Meyer writes that the Hubble Space Telescope has made 1.3 million observations since its launch in 1990, and it transmits 20 GB of data per week, “which is impressive for a telescope first designed in the 1970s.” Compare that to the Square Kilometer Array, scheduled for completion in 2020. “In just one year of activity,” Meyer notes, “it will generate more data than the entire internet.”

“These ambitious projects will test scientists’ ability to handle data,” Meyer writes. Archives will need to have capacity to store, and then make accessible, a million times more data than can be stored on a typical 1 terabyte external hard drive.

Although it poses challenges, “the data deluge will make astronomy become a more collaborative and open science than ever before,” Meyer says. Whereas before you had to be “an academic or eccentric rich person with access to a good telescope” to do this kind of research, Meyer says, that’s no longer the case. “Thanks to internet archives, robust learning communities and new outreach initiatives, citizens can now participate in science.”

Meyer has taken advantage of huge, stored data sets in her own work studying the jets of high-speed plasma that spew from black holes. She collected 400 raw images taken over 13 years by Hubble to reveal the structure of these jets for the first time.

“This kind of work was only possible because other observers, for other purposes, just happened to capture images of the source I was interested in, back when I was in kindergarten,” she says. “As astronomical images become larger, higher resolution and ever more sensitive, this kind of research will become the norm.”

UMBC biologist Erin Green has received a five-year, nearly $1 million grant from the National institutes of Health to examine how cells respond to environmental signals at the molecular level. Her work could provide clues to understanding processes as broad as how cancers take hold, the causes of autism, and aging.

“Any cell, in any species, is constantly bombarded with different signals from its environment,” says Green, assistant professor of biological sciences. Those signals, she explains, “have consequences for how the cell grows, whether it lives or dies, or if it stays as it is or turns into something else, like a cancer cell.”

Green studies epigenetic modifications—changes to DNA that do not involve a change in the sequence of bases (A, T, G, and C). Inside cells, long strands of DNA are wound tightly around proteins called histones. The modifications Green studies involve adding or removing small groups of atoms to the histones, influencing which sections of DNA are “unwound” and eventually translated into protein.

Epigenetic modifications can impact how genes are expressed within minutes, making them one of the fastest ways a cell can respond to environmental signals. “One challenge in the field, though, is directly linking specific modifications to environmental changes,” Green notes. There are many studies that correlate certain epigenetic changes with diseases or environmental conditions—from air pollution to in utero alcohol exposure—but figuring out exactly how the changes lead to complex health conditions has been much trickier.

Green’s work will explore the mechanism of a particular enzyme that adds methyl groups to histones, one of the most common epigenetic changes, using budding yeast as a model organism. Her enzyme is within a class of proteins that is also found in humans, and so far, she says, “many of the things that we know about them in humans started out in yeast research.” The human version of the enzyme Green is studying, a gene called MLL5, is already known to be expressed differently in some cancers, mutated in some cases of autism, and required for male fertility.

Why use yeast in her research? With yeast, Green explains, “we can test many conditions and look at the direct biochemical and molecular outcomes, which is much harder to do in other systems.” She’ll start by looking at how exposure to certain toxic oxygen compounds, a situation known as oxidative stress, affects the enzyme’s activity.

Green’s earlier work, supported by a UMBC START award, looked much more narrowly at a specific enzyme activity, but this new grant will allow her lab to paint with a broader brush. “We’ve been looking in a very targeted way,” she says. “By doing this bigger, more open-ended experiment we might uncover other things that would be good to look at. Are there other stress response pathways that this enzyme might be controlling?”

“I think having a system where we can directly answer these questions in a more controlled and easily manipulated environment is really powerful,” Green says. “If we’re able to…learn more about the function of this enzyme in yeast, that’s likely to give us a handle on what it might be doing in humans.”

By Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque for news.umbc.edu

Evan Avila ‘20, economics and political science, is a millennial with retirement on his mind, and his fresh ideas are now capturing the interest of policymakers. Avila recently won first place in the national 2018 iOme Challenge, which asked students across the United States to innovate policies to help millennials save for retirement. Avila presented his winning paper, Rethinking Millennial Retirement: Policy Recommendations for a Gig Economy, to policymakers on June 20 at a symposium on Capitol Hill.

This year’s iOme (“I Owe Me”) Challenge asked participants to imagine they were invited to join a bipartisan task force to address a growing retirement crisis in the U.S. What policies might they propose on issues relating to gig economy workers or using social media to increase awareness about saving for retirement?

Avila had dealt with these topics before, in the classroom and through volunteering with tax assistance and financial counseling. Avila has served as a certified volunteer in the federal Volunteers Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program at UMBC, which provides tax return filing support for eligible people no cost to them. He’s also offered financial literacy clinics for fellow college students and was familiar with their common questions and concerns about how to make smart financial decisions.

Avila applied this knowledge and experience to creating an iOme Challenge entry that contest judge David Wegge, interim dean of Schneider School of Business and Economics at St. Norbert College, said, “demonstrated great policy depth, a keen understanding of the challenges millennials face, and creativity in devising solutions that are achievable for this age cohort.”

Cindy Hounsell is president of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER), which sponsored the competition. She shared, “We are impressed by Mr. Avila’s response to the more complicated challenges and deterrents millennials face in preparing for their future retirement.”

UMBC economics professor Doug Lamdin mentored Avila as he developed his three-part policy proposal and transformed his essay into a video. He shares that typically students enter the contest as teams, but he wasn’t surprised that even competing as a team of one Avila emerged the winner.

“That Evan won the competition is not exactly a surprise. He had a very strong proposal,” said Lamdin. “Evan balanced the demands of the competition, usually placed on a team, exceptionally well in addition to a full class schedule, working as a teaching assistant, a research assistant, presenting at the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Day (URCAD), volunteering at the Esperanza Center teaching English, and his activities as a Sondheim Scholar.”

Avila, who recently completed his fourth semester with a 4.0, is currently serving as an intern in the Office of Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, D.C. This follows an internship in 2017 at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he worked in the Economics Indicators division, focusing on how to efficiently process massive quantities of survey data in a precise way.

Looking ahead, Avila plans to pursue a career in tax or administrative law. “I came from a Peruvian and Mexican household. I saw how hard my parents worked and the challenges they faced to have financial security,” says Avila. “In college, I see my peers trying to make sense of personal budgets, savings, loans, credit, and retirement. It is very rewarding to help people be financially literate and understand the laws and policies that affect their wallet.”

Six finalists pitched creative business ideas to a panel of judges during UMBC’s fifth annual Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition (CBIC), held on April 25, 2018 in the new UMBC Event Center. The business ideas ranged from online tools and apps to products with medical applications.

The Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition is for undergraduate and graduate students who are serious about starting a business, explains Vivian Armor ’73, American studies, director of the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship at UMBC. Throughout the course of the competition, each team is paired with an industry mentor who provides guidance and professional advice ahead of a final Shark Tank-style event. The structure of the event and its focus on mentorship are inspired by the vision of entrepreneur Greg Cangialosi ‘96, English, reflecting on his own undergraduate days at UMBC and what he has learned in the years since then about moving from an idea to a successful company.

Miranda Marvel, Ph.D. ‘19, marine estuarine environmental sciences, shared SensorFish, which took third place in the competition. She explained how fish mortality due to stress is a common problem that fish owners face. SensorFish are special type of zebrafish bred to change color based on common stressors that fish commonly encounter, such as poor water quality or particular illnesses. Because the fish change color immediately when they are experiencing a problem in the tank, their owners can more quickly work to fix the problem, keeping the fish healthy.

Second place was awarded to Matrix Cast, an idea presented by Flo de Sande ‘18, mechanical engineering. Matrix Cast is a plastic cast that can be altered to fit all arm shapes and sizes. de Sande explained that Matrix Cast offers a low-cost cast option for physicians working in remote or low-resource locations, such as communities served through Doctors Without Borders or military installations in conflict zones. The cast is a “pressure vessel” type design, which, while made from plastic, is very sturdy, explained de Sande during her business pitch.

GermoSense, a rapid sepsis-detection test developed by Mustafa Al-Adhami, M.S. ‘15, mechanical engineering, Ph.D. ‘19, mechanical engineering, received first place in the competition. Sepsis is a life-threatening blood infection that, if not treated promptly, can lead to serious complications and even death in mere days. Currently, the test that medical professionals rely on to determine antibiotic efficacy for sepsis patients can take several days to yield results. Because of this challenge, physicians often start patients who they suspect have sepsis on broad spectrum antibiotics, which can possibly help if the patient has sepsis but might be unnecessary and ineffective for people facing other medical conditions that are presenting similarly to sepsis, or in the case of antibiotic resistance.

Al-Adhami explained that GermoSense is able to determine whether a patient has sepsis within one hour, which can lead to shorter hospital stays, help prevent antibiotic resistance by avoiding unnecessary antibiotic use, and reduce medical costs. GermoSense costs approximately $100 to use, compared to comparable tests that can cost $170 or more. At last year’s CBIC, Al-Adhami presented GermoSense, then at an earlier stage of development, and took third place in the competition.

The contest’s additional three finalists included UniVerse by Allison Gross ‘18, certificate in English as a second language; Frey Custom Cues by Christopher Bodan ‘19, interdisciplinary studies, and Michelle Barrow ‘08, gender and women’s studies, and marketing coordinator in the division of professional studies at UMBC, and James Baker; and Skanaroo by Vincent Celebrado-Royer ‘17, business technology administration, and Tyler Little ‘20, computer science. 

For Cangialosi, the event was not just about identifying top projects, but, more broadly, about helping young entrepreneurs move toward success one step at a time. Taking in the creativity and energy of the event, he reflected, “This room is filled with dreams and entrepreneurial spirit.”

A UMBC faculty member and a UMBC alumnus were recognized by the Maryland Science Center for their outstanding work in engineering and science. Lee Blaney, associate professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, was one of two people to receive the 2017 Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and Phillip Graff ’08, physics, was awarded one of two 2017 Outstanding Young Scientist Awards. The ceremony, hosted annually by the Maryland Science Center and the Maryland Academy of Sciences, highlights the work being done by young scientists and engineers in Maryland to advance the fields.

In his work, Blaney develops technology used to recover nutrients, such as phosphorus, from poultry litter. The phosphorus found in poultry litter often saturates the soil on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, making the water that runs off into the Chesapeake Bay a hazard for aquatic life. The technology he is testing in his lab could reduce the amount of phosphorus that ends up in the Chesapeake Bay from manure by about 90 percent.

“I was extremely delighted to receive the 2017 Maryland Outstanding Young Engineer Award. Of course, this award reflects a much larger team, and I would like to acknowledge my graduate and undergraduate research assistants for their hard work in the laboratory. This award is theirs as much as mine,” Blaney says. “Much of our research focuses on environmental issues in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and so it was a particular honor to be recognized by the Maryland Academy of Sciences. One of my mentors likes to say that every award comes with a great responsibility to live up to the associated expectations. So, we are looking forward to continuing our research to ensure environmental quality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed for the coming decades.”

Earlier this year, Blaney received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to address contaminants of emerging concern, from personal care products and pharmaceuticals, found in the Gwynns Falls watershed.

“Dr. Blaney is a dedicated professor with unique and innovative research ideas. He is a great mentor who encourages his students to think about research problems from multiple angles and asks tough questions to push us to reach for the best solution,” says Mamatha Hopanna, Ph.D. ‘22, environmental engineering, who works in Blaney’s lab.

Blaney is the faculty advisor of the UMBC’s Engineers Without Borders student organization. He has led several trips to Kenya, where he and his students developed a clean-water supply for a village with a population of 500.

Graff currently works as a data scientist and astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore. He has industry experience in many fields including cybersecurity. Previously, he worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and helped develop an algorithm for the Laser Interferometry Gravitational Wave Observatory. He has also developed algorithms to protect the nation’s computer networks for the Department of Homeland Security National Cyber Protection System.

The Outstanding Young Scientist Award and Outstanding Young Engineer Award have been presented each year since 1959 and 1988, respectively. To be eligible for the award, nominees must be 35 or younger if working in academic settings, or younger than 40, if working in industry.

Banner image: Lee Blaney. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. Videos courtesy of the Maryland Science Center.

UMBC’s George Karabatis, associate professor of information systems, and Ahmed AlEroud M.S. ‘12, information systems, Ph.D. ‘14, information systems, recently launched the cybersecurity startup Cyves through $150,000 in grant funding from TEDCO, an organization create by the Maryland State Legislature to support tech entrepreneurship, and an investment from InnovativeTech Ventures, led by Gerard Eldering.

George Karabatis, center, with Gerard Eldering and Wendy Martin at the signing.

With the launch of the company, Karabatis and AlEroud enter phase three of TEDCO’s tech commercialization process, after completing robust market analysis and business planning to ensure a solid launch (in part through AlEroud’s dissertation research). Phase three will focus on commercializing the research, hiring officers and employees to run the company, and refining the technology behind Cyves’s cybersecurity product.

“This work is important because it reveals a new way of identifying incoming cyber attacks and actually stopping them, based on intrinsic features of the attacks and how these features correlate with each other,” says Karabatis. “In addition, this research is capable of identifying not only well-known attacks, but most importantly unknown attacks that have not been identified yet.”

Karabatis explains that the Cyves technology detects cyber attacks by analyzing characteristics of these intrusions at a high level, and comparing them with incoming traffic. By relying on semantic and contextual information, the Cyves technology is able to analyze existing attacks and behaviors and extrapolate findings that can be used to identify patterns and flag future attacks quickly after they occur. This approach to detecting cyber attacks not only identifies possible intrusions, but also reduces the number of false alarms that are raised.

In testing, Karabatis says, the technology accurately identified not only known cyber attacks, but also 90% of unknown (0-day) attacks that previously would have likely gone unnoticed. Identifying such attacks can play a significant role in protecting sensitive information like social security numbers, credit card numbers, and birthdates, stored in vulnerable databases.

“Technology transfer is just one piece of the continuum of support that is needed to advance new concepts developed by our researchers. Investment in research projects that have commercial potential, assistance in obtaining state proof-of-concept funding, and access to business incubation and mentoring all play a part,” says Wendy Martin, director of the office technology development. “We encourage entrepreneurial researchers, like George Karabatis, to start their own companies, so they can continue their involvement in bringing their innovations to the marketplace.”

UMBC’s Weihong Lin is helping to close a major gap in knowledge about e-cigarettes, with a focus on flavorings. The National Institute for Drug Abuse has awarded Lin, associate professor of biological sciences, a two-year, approximately $400,000 grant to supply much-needed objective data that can help inform regulation of flavorings in electronic cigarettes and protect the consumers of today and tomorrow, especially children and teens.

The dangers of nicotine are fairly well understood, but today’s e-cigarettes also include ingredients that are not well known. “A primary concern about e-cigarettes right now is that they use a huge number of flavoring components,” says Lin. A 2014 study found that 460 e-cigarette brands used 7,760 different flavorings. It also connected “e-juice” flavors—from “cotton candy” to “double chocolate”—to a rise in e-cigarette use by young people.

Scents and flavorings “tap into our mood and our motivation,” Lin explains. She also notes that the feelings that come along with scents and flavors can actually pose challenges to doing research on the safety of e-cigarettes.

The positive emotional associations people have with certain aromas and tastes, like eating cotton candy at an amusement park or coming home to the smell of chocolate brownies in the oven, can override the warning sensations caused by high levels of artificial flavorings or nicotine, says Lin. This means that asking people about irritation levels in their mouths and throats after using e-cigarette products with familiar or pleasant tastes may not provide an accurate picture of e-cigarettes’ actual negative effects.

E-cigarettes usually include a heating coil, solvents, nicotine, and flavoring components, all of which reach extremely high temperatures during the device’s vaporization process. Even if flavorings are considered safe for food products, they can be irritating when inhaled at higher levels. Plus, the extreme heat could change the components’ chemical make-up and convert benign substances into toxic ones. “But if you have the flavoring to mask physical irritation,” says Lin, “it becomes a more tolerable or pleasurable experience.”

To push past that mask, Lin will go to a deeper sensory level, with the help of sensory systems in mice’s nasal passages, which are responsible for the sense of smell and detecting airway irritation.

Lin’s lab will explore how specific sensory systems that detect irritation respond in the presence of e-cigarette flavorings. “It’s an objective way to measure to what degree the e-juice will activate this system,” explains Lin. “We’re asking, ‘At what level will these flavorings cause an acute, irritating sensation?’”

Lin’s group will study popular flavors used in various electronic cigarette liquid brands. The results could inform future regulations on chemicals used as e-cigarette flavorings. Lin hopes to eventually extend this work to also explore the longer-term effects of low-dose exposure to these chemicals.

As a neurobiologist, Lin says, “I’ve always been curious about how chemicals affect humans’ daily choices,” from the foods we eat to the people we choose to date. But this current research project is also personally meaningful for her, as a teacher of young people.

“You see so many young kids experimenting with e-cigarettes, and they don’t necessarily know the harm,” says Lin. “If we can give them a science-based warning and help protect them from respiratory illnesses and nicotine addition, it’s going to be good for science and for society.”

UMBC is one of three leading academic institutions collaborating on a new research initiative focused on cybersecurity for critical national infrastructures, including information technology, public transit, and financial services. University leaders signed the three-nation agreement in a ceremony at the sixth International Cybersecurity Symposium in Japan.

UMBC, Keio Research Institute (KRIS) in Japan, and Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) in the UK will partner to investigate the use of common system simulation tools for modeling critical national infrastructure. This partnership is part of a broader international collaboration, the International Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (INCS-COE). It will also involve Hitachi, an international operator in power systems, telecommunication, railways, and other core infrastructure areas.

Because cybersecurity attacks may not be limited to national borders, this collaboration argues that defense against such attacks should not be siloed either.

“Cybersecurity can no longer be treated as a national issue,” emphasizes Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC. “Long-term and productive international collaborations are needed to make significant progress.”

Jun Murai, professor of environment and information studies at Keio University, notes, “We look forward to working with our research colleagues in the UK and U.S. to help address the increasingly challenging cyber threats to the security of our respective critical national infrastructures.”

Working with a common toolset will enable mixed nationality teams to run simulations together. This will help cybersecurity experts learn how to more effectively address human factors, including cultural differences, in predicting how attacks and responses to those attacks might play out across different geographies.

“We are excited to participate in this new research collaboration with our colleagues in Japan and the UK to help us better understand and address some of the key cybersecurity challenges that our nations face from increasingly aggressive international adversaries,” says Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity.

The partners in this research see the modeling of system security as increasingly vital for industry and government, for both training purposes and vulnerability analysis.

“This initiative creates many future opportunities including, for example, the opportunity to address the impact on critical national infrastructure security of the exponential growth of the internet of things, and for potential exchanges of expert staff and students,” explains Keith Mayes, head of the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway University.

Steiner shares Mayes’s excitement about expanding opportunities for both established and emerging researchers in this growing field. Thanks to leading academic programs in cybersecurity, the bwtech@UMBC Cyber Incubator, and UMBC’s internationally-known Center for Cybersecurity, he says, “UMBC is uniquely positioned in Maryland to become a major global force for research in cybersecurity.”

“This partnership,” says Steiner, “builds important connections to move this essential work forward.”