All posts by: Jenny O'Grady

Wild Card – Fall 2017

Henge

After a sculpture titled, Forum, by Thomas Sayre

Outside the glass wall
That separates us
From the cold and below,

Covered with an icing
Of melting snow,
Are the half arches

Formed of earth-colored stone
Placed so no two can
Connect, an almost row

Of almost arches
Among the broken gray
Of stunted columns left

As if to the wind on some acropolis;
A henge whose shadows
Rotate across the grass,

Slant across squares of paving
To remind us
That time is told

By the movement of suns,
By melting ice,
The shattered rock

Of a ruined forum which
The Gods in their irony
Destroyed, and now preserve

As warning, a monument
To vanishings

Michael Fallon, senior lecturer in English, was inspired to write this poem about Thomas Sayre’s 2014 sculpture, Forum, while gazing upon it from the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ second-floor conference room. Fallon’s fourth book of poems, House of Forgotten Names, will be published by Salmon Press of Ireland in late 2017 or early 2018. He has taught at UMBC for 30 years.

Fearless Entrepreneur

Delali Dzirasa ’04, computer engineering

With two Retriever brothers before him, UMBC was the last place Delali Dzirasa wanted to be during college. But it turned out to be a key part of his future as president and founder of Fearless Solutions, a shining star in Baltimore’s software scene, not to mention the place where he met his wife, an officer in their company.

“There’s always going to be a connection between me, Fearless, and UMBC. UMBC’s part of the story, right?” says Dzirasa.

Earlier this year, Fearless was named Maryland Minority-Owned Small Business of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration, and last year took home the Design/Dev Firm of the Year prize at Baltimore Innovation Week.

Since 2009, Fearless has taken on a diverse array of high-profile work, including everything from projects that support national security, to creating an online platform for middle school students in New York to use to track oyster habits, to building a dashboard for Baltimore City’s health department to view and track death certificates from across the city.

For Dzirasa, the common thread is using technology to change the planet. He says his employees feel likewise, indicating to him that “‘I want to feed my family but I want to do something that matters.’ That’s good, that’s part of our DNA, and it’s part of the DNA of the people that are here.”

UMBC is contributing to that team, with alumni making up 35% of the staff. Dzirasa’s wife, Letitia Dzirasa ’03, biological sciences, is among them. She is the company’s health innovation officer.

Dzirasa’s copious connections with UMBC might have come as a surprise to him two decades ago, when the Silver Spring native had to be “muscled” into applying by his mom. He had no initial desire to follow in his two older (and successful) brothers’ footsteps as UMBC students. But it didn’t take long for him to chart his own path as he advanced in his degree in computer engineering.

“I was always interested early on in really three things: tech, business, and people. I had no idea how all this would come together,” he says.

Dzirasa started building his business acumen early on by taking “every job or business known to man,” including dog walking, car washing, and even starting a barbershop in his basement. UMBC let him hone his business skills further. “I had a lot of really good opportunities while at UMBC, not just from a technical background, but also the entrepreneurship program opened a lot of doors for me,” he says.

After graduation in 2004, UMBC’s President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, gave him his first job connection through alumnus Rob Baruch ’89, computer science. Five years later, Dzirasa took the leap of starting his own company, housing his first office in the incubator at bwtech@umbc Business Park.

Today Fearless’ downtown Baltimore office is full of people working hard for his vision, some at treadmill desks, and many wearing the purple of the company brand. For anyone who wants to join their ranks or simply succeed in their business goals, Dzirasa says “you’ve got to have some sort of ‘why’ that drives you. Absolute pun intended, you’ve got to be fearless.”

Dzirasa’s fearlessness has earned him a company that continues to quickly grow and change, a process he says is not unlike the childhood of his sons (ages 15 years and 6 months).

“There’s things you love about every stage and there’s things you hate about every stage, but you love to watch them grow,” he says.

— Karen Stysley

Shared Strengths

Carol Anne Huff ’93, economics, and Julie A. Gillespie ’93, economics

On a rainy day in Chicago, the sisters cross town to meet up for lunch. They greet each other, laughing, and proceed to order their food with similar cadence and tastes. When the plates come, they split the dishes – an octopus salad, a crab cake – with the precision that comes from a lifetime of practice and shared biology.

Let’s get the obvious points about Carol Anne Huff and Julie A. Gillespie (both formerly Sennello) out of the way. Yes, they are identical twins. Yes, they often finish each other’s sentences. They’re also both fiercely smart women who motivate each other in everything from their careers to triathlon training.

“We are really close friends, so it’s always great to be together,” says Gillespie, as Huff nods in agreement.

The sisters made it into the local paper when they graduated first at the top of their class at Bel Air High School in 1989, and then again as co-valedictorians of UMBC’s class of 1993. They followed their Retriever years by attending Duke together, both earning law degrees, and then moving to Chicago – where they spent their earliest years – to lay down permanent roots and pursue their careers.

Today, both work as transactional lawyers in firms across the Chicago River from each other – Huff as a partner in the Capital Markets group at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, and Gillespie as a partner in the Securitization group at Mayer Brown – helping clients such as banks, private equity funds, and other institutions issuing securities and completing deals.

Coming out of high school, the sisters had a world of options ahead of them. UMBC offered them full scholarships and full room and board, a package too attractive to ignore, they said.

“I do think it would have been strange to go to separate colleges,” says Gillespie. The idea of living in a new place excited them, so they began their freshman year living apart – “an experiment,” they called it. By sophomore year, they were ready to room together again.

Together, they joined Phi Sigma Sigma, and participated in various student organizations, but for the most part, they studied. As emeritus economics professor Chuck Peake told the Baltimore Sun at their graduation, “They’re quiet and modest, self-confident but not at all flashy, and any time I ask a question, they know what’s going on.”

The work paid off.

“I feel like we learned a lot at UMBC. We crammed a lot into our four years,” says Huff. “Everyone was very good to us. I felt very at home there, and that people were very interested and encouraging about what we were doing.”

The confidence Peake mentioned shines through as they talk over lunch – as does the support system they’ve created for themselves over the years. Both mothers, they share the ups and downs of parenting while living blocks away from each other. They compare reading lists – Gillespie leaning toward science fiction, Huff more to fantasy.

They even talked themselves into training for a triathlon together. Which begs the question: As supportive as they are of each other, are they also secretly competitive?

“I don’t think I am,” says Huff, though her smile gives her away.

“A little bit,” chimes in Gillespie. “I think we’re competitive with ourselves.”

— Jenny O’Grady

Things Worth Saving

Although his thoughts often take him to the faraway national monuments of Utah and beyond, Ian Kennedy ’00, interdisciplinary studies, works every day to make his long-time community, Columbia, Maryland, a better place. Before becoming a Retriever, he was a Rouse Scholar at Howard Community College; upon transferring to UMBC, he found a way to make his interests in writing and environmental preservation work together as a scholar. Kennedy has worked as a newspaper reporter, a community organizer, and – most recently – as executive director of The Downtown Columbia Arts and Culture Commission, which oversees the health and well-being of the historic Merriweather Post Pavilion, which – like UMBC – recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.

I have never been to southern Utah, but it was a critical stop in my life’s journey.

When I came to UMBC after two years at Howard Community College, I had no idea what major I’d pursue and certainly no clear aspirations for a career. To the extent I had a focus for my academic pursuits it was, simply, to finish with a degree.

UMBC’s diverse and expansive catalogue of classes delighted my curious mind, and I signed up for courses in philosophy, English, American studies, Africana studies, geography, anthropology, and whatever else seemed interesting. I ultimately ended up with a self-made degree in interdisciplinary studies titled “environmental writing”.

It wasn’t intentional, but my interdisciplinary education prepared me for life and a career more than I could’ve imagined. And with the benefit of almost two decades of perspective, there was one class in particular that exemplified this fact.

The class, taught by Dr. Eugene “Sandy” Parker, focused on one, seemingly narrow problem: what to do with some federal land in southern Utah.

The debate about the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had raged in southern Utah and beyond for years among groups divided by competing visions for access and use of this land. As a young environmentalist, I went into the class with a strong bias in favor of preserving it as much as possible from human intervention. The problem, in my mind, was relatively simple.

But the class was far more than a lesson on land management and government policy; it was a case study on how communities work through disagreements.

During the semester, we studied the local context, poring over newspapers and advocacy websites, as well as the national and historical context of land preservation in the United States. It was complicated, like life, and in order to appreciate the depth of the topic, we had to look past our biases, explore matters outside our own narrow frame, and embrace the messy complexity of it all.

For me, the course ultimately taught me about how we collectively work to shape our future, despite sometimes competing visions for it.

After completing my studies at UMBC, I took a job as a reporter for a small newspaper in Carroll County and saw firsthand how communities evolve. While the details were vastly different, the dynamics and mechanics of the community’s progress mirrored those I had studied in Dr. Parker’s class. This experience ignited my own desire to participate actively in such matters and compelled me to return to school to pursue a graduate degree in public policy.

During the summer between my two years as a graduate student, the chance to shape my future—and that of my community—presented itself when the owners of Merriweather Post Pavilion, a beloved and acclaimed concert venue in Columbia, Maryland, announced their intentions to close it. With the help of a friend, I started a grassroots advocacy campaign to fight this closure, starting me on a journey that continues today.

For the last 14 years, I’ve been heavily involved in the complex, messy, and often contentious discussions about the future of a community I know far more intimately than southern Utah—Columbia, Maryland—and the amphitheater at its heart. Our fight to “save” Merriweather was successful, and today I have the honor of running the nonprofit organization that now owns the venue and is charged with expanding artistic, cultural, and civic programming at Merriweather and beyond.

Along the way, I’ve had to untangle complex problems, confront my own biases, develop a better understanding of the concerns of those with whom I’ve worked, and learn all sorts of details about all sorts of subjects that I never expected I’d have to understand. To say my work is interdisciplinary is to put it mildly.

But it is also work that, at first, seemed obvious. Of course, Merriweather Post Pavilion should be saved, just like our dwindling wilderness areas.

But what that means, and how it’s accomplished, is far more complicated. And, also, far more interesting. And that’s a lesson I learned in Utah, by way of UMBC.

Grit, Greatness…and Beyond

Throughout our 50th anniversary year, the UMBC community celebrated like it’s never celebrated before. We shared memories and images of our earliest years, and of our pioneering professors and students. We embraced the research and the relationships that make this place great. And, we tied it all up in a black and gold bow – with music and fireworks that lit up the campus night.

So, what’s next for UMBC? Well, as President Freeman Hrabowski likes to say, “Success is never final.”

That’s why in late spring, UMBC launched Grit & Greatness: The Campaign for UMBC, and made public a challenge to raise $150 million to make UMBC’s next 50 years just as amazing as its founding ones. Driven by our most distinctive traits – inclusive excellence and innovation – UMBC has already raised nearly $98 million* towards its campaign goals.

The stories that follow exemplify the values this campaign champions: making big breakthroughs, forging new partnerships, and transforming lives. We look forward to telling many more, as our community comes together to support UMBC – and Retrievers of the future.

“America needs its universities now more than ever. We live in a time of huge challenges and breathtaking discoveries. We live in a nation that is divided. We live in a time when too many young people are shut out of life-changing opportunities,” says Hrabowski.

“The UMBC community does not shy away from hard work. We show up. We show our grit. I’ve never been more excited about this University and what we can do.”

 Support UMBC Today

* Total as of 11/30/17

MAKING BIG BREAKTHROUGHS

We all know that teaching is the cornerstone of what makes UMBC such a great place to grow and learn. In fact, UMBC most recently made the 2017 U.S. News list of top 20 national universities with a particularly strong commitment to undergraduate teaching, alongside Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and UC Berkeley.

The proof of this commitment lies not only in the breakthroughs made by students when they are touched by good teaching, but also in the fact that so many alumni, families, corporations – and faculty themselves – make teaching innovation possible through gifts supporting and honoring those who have inspired them.

As a Ph.D. student in statistics in the ’80s and early ’90s, Kevin Drummey Ph.D. ’93, statistics, and his cohort met with founding professor Bimal Sinha every Sunday afternoon to discuss their progress. As tough as it was to go to school while holding down a full-time government job, Drummey was encouraged by Sinha it was worth the sacrifice to finish.

“The emphasis on teaching…may be a lost art at some schools – but not here,” said Drummey, operations researcher/technical director at the NSA, who also taught as an adjunct in statistics at UMBC for more than a dozen years, and who in recent years has supported, along with Sinha’s family, the launch of an endowed professorship in his honor.

“He was a very good at telling the story of the data,” said Drummey. “He would put things into context…and make it very interesting. He was very good at that, and I think I do emulate that in my own teaching.”

For years, John Jeffries, professor emeritus, history, and former dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, espoused the importance of bringing a global perspective to his lessons. When he retired in 2013, professors in the college created The John Jeffries International Fellowship, with the goal of supporting faculty in “internationalizing curriculum.”

“He was an exemplary dean of our college with the strongest possible commitment to students, to excellence, to inclusion, and so we wanted to create something and invite our colleagues to contribute to it that would honor him and his values,” said Carole McCann, professor and chair of gender and women’s studies, who launched the project along with Marjoleine Kars and Jason Loviglio, who chair history and media and communications studies, respectively.

“We wanted to give faculty the resources to think about how they could bring a global perspective into whatever it is they’re teaching because we honestly believe that the goal of a liberal arts education is to build good citizens, and good citizens need to have an understanding of the nation and the world and their connections to it.”

Collaborations with corporations also demonstrate the faith outside groups have in UMBC teaching. A partnership with IBM enabled the creation of the Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Lab (ACCL), which gives teachers and students a place to advance scientific frontiers in cybersecurity and machine learning.

“A big part of teaching students cutting edge topics is giving them the opportunity to push boundaries and work with advanced-level tools, and the IBM grant is making that possible, both for graduate students and undergraduates,” said Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, who leads the ACCL.

— Jenny O’Grady

Wow Moments

Who inspired YOU most as a student at UMBC? We asked, and you answered. Read about “Wow Moments” from alumni recalling their favorite professors at UMBC.

FORGING TRUE PARTNERSHIPS

You can see the spires of Downtown Baltimore from many of the windows of UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building. So when the city announced Light City, the new innovation and art festival in 2016, UMBC knew it wanted, and needed, to be involved.

The project started off like many UMBC-community partnerships, small and quiet, with an eye towards collaboration. Faculty and student artists dreamed up concepts with their signature blend of visual appeal and technological innovation applied to the present. When the announcements were made, the campus community was thrilled to see familiar names in the call – among them alumna donor Mina Cheon, M.F.A. ’02, IMDA. Designed with her partner and husband Gabriel Kroiz, Diamonds lit up Harbor East and Little Italy. A technological marvel both interactive and thought provoking, who could resist the temptation to climb in and out of them? They reflected a hope for prosperity for the city but each night turned blue at 10 p.m. to honor the death of Freddie Gray and the light it shone on the ongoing struggles endured by much of the city’s population.

“UMBC has always cheered me on. I felt so supported during Light City,” said Cheon, who appreciated seeing former professors and alumni stop by during the installation. Cheon even designed a special gold diamond – affectionately known as “Kathy” after a beloved professor – that was installed on campus during UMBC’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

When Light City returned to Baltimore in 2017, UMBC wanted to do something bigger and better – but the “something” wasn’t so clear at first. UMBC booked a space to host alumni gatherings, and even more artists started preparing their works, hoping to be chosen to display. One day, Will Backstrom ’88, political science, who works in community relations at long-time partner PNC Bank, called. Working with the Downtown Partnership, he envisioned using empty storefronts to house art and performances and expand the footprint of the festival, helping tourists and city natives alike access and patronize the businesses just north of the Harbor. From there, UMBC Spark was born.

“Combining the awesome creative energy that UMBC brings with the empty space and other businesses around it was surely the makings of a great Light City experience,” said Backstrom.

Spark ultimately became a gallery space highlighting art by UMBC students and faculty, as well as community partners like the Refugee Youth Project (headed by alumna Brooke Savage ’16), drawing almost 1,000 visitors each night. Visitors had the chance to rub elbows with artists, participate in animation workshops led by students, and watch musical and dance performances. Each piece was unique but tied into the larger Light City theme.

“Spark created a vital connection between our internationally acclaimed faculty, talented graduate and undergraduate students and the innovative, entrepreneurial arts groups in Baltimore city,” said Preminda Jacob, department chair of visual arts. “We introduced the Baltimore public to the exciting experimentation and creativity that is ongoing at UMBC.”

The team and PNC are already abuzz about next year. How do we go bigger? What more can we do? Who else can we involve? While the exact details are unknown, this they know for sure about Spark: Many Retrievers will be working together to light up Baltimore one block at a time.

— Marie Lilly

Pipeline Partners

UMBC works with many organizations on initiatives to strengthen the workforce and communities across the state.

  • T. Rowe Price Foundation: UMBC Career Month
  • Northrop Grumman: Cyber Scholars Program
  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: Science of conservation at the Walters Art Museum
  • The Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition: Preparing students to be entrepreneurs

Read about more UMBC partnerships at corporaterelations.umbc.edu.

TRANSFORMING LIVES

For any student, college is an adjustment. There’s figuring out what you’ll study, where your niche is on campus, and how you’ll pay for it. This is especially true for mature students, who arrive with more life experience…and the obligations that come along with it.

But thanks to the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, UMBC has become a place where returning women students thrive. Since 1981, the foundation has donated upwards of $500,000 to UMBC, both in annual scholarships for students and matching gifts to create three endowed scholarships: the Jodi Mister/Charlotte W. Newcombe Endowment; the Charlotte W. Newcombe Scholarship for Mature Students in STEM; and the Susan Bernstein/Charlotte W. Newcombe Memorial Endowment Scholarship.

Newcombe Scholars access supplemental programming and resources through the Women’s Center, and it is here that they find a campus home. As a transfer student with a young son, Maureen Evans Arthurs ’14, gender and women’s studies, heard about the program while interning at the American Association of University Women. She “immediately [felt] at home” at the Women’s Center, and was encouraged to apply for a Newcombe scholarship by Jess Myers, the center’s director.

“I really loved that there was a component of meeting other women, who really ended up being a support system,” she says. “We may not have ever met because we all had different majors, but we all had the common denominator of being returning women students.” Through the scholars program and the Women’s Center, Arthurs felt empowered to pursue leadership positions on campus, and she’s carried that mentality to her current role as a legislative director for a Maryland state delegate.

“Being a part of that network and that community helped me really thrive at UMBC,” she says.

Carrie Cleveland ’16, social work, a fellow Newcombe scholarship recipient, was equally drawn to that sense of community. She explains that while social work draws students from a variety of backgrounds, her gen-ed classes had a decidedly different feel: “When you’re sitting in a biology class, everybody’s 18 or 19 years old, and you really feel like you don’t belong, or you stick out.”

Like Arthurs, Cleveland found her niche, and worked in the Women’s Center to help with mature student programming. She recently finished her master’s in social work, and as she begins a full-time position at Kennedy Krieger, she hopes to continue helping women like her pursue their educational goals.

“So many women are in positions like I [was], where they don’t know how they’re going to get back to school, and they don’t know how they’re going to pay for it, and it just really seems impossible,” she says. “The support that I got through the Newcombe Foundation, and through the Women’s Center, was what really got me through my time at UMBC.”

Richard Bernstein partnered with the Newcombe Foundation two years ago to establish the Susan Bernstein/Charlotte W. Newcombe Memorial Endowment Scholarship to honor his late wife, Susan Bernstein ’03, social work, who returned to college in her forties to pursue a career as a therapist. UMBC’s Newcombe students are a part of her “living legacy,” he says, adding that he’s proud of what they’ve accomplished.

“Now that we’ve [gotten] to meet with the different students…and see what remarkable people they are, and what they have to contribute to society, we want to…basically expand what the scholarship can give, so that we can help more people,” he says.

His son, Jeff Bernstein, agrees: “We’re just continuing to hope that [we can] provide opportunities to good people that really want to be involved, and do some really special things with their degrees.”

— Julia Celtnieks ’13

Crowdsourcing Champs

  • With the help of their famously close-knit alumni community, the UMBC swimming and diving team raised nearly $40,000 on their giving day earlier this year.
  • The UMBC Mock Trial team raised more than double their semester goal through crowdfunding, for a season that saw them through to the national championship in Los Angeles.

See more examples of UMBC student crowdfunding at gritstarter.umbc.edu.

Shining a Light

In the face of a harrowing national epidemic, UMBC researchers and alumni work to break through the darkness of opioid addiction and the stigma that surrounds its victims.

By Jenny O’Grady

On a recent rainy morning, a steady stream of men and women enters and exits Riverside Treatment Services in Rosedale. They look like anyone and everyone – a neighbor, a schoolmate, a grandparent – wandering in on their way to work, leaving with steaming paper cups of coffee. They are purposeful, upbeat.

“For many of them, we’re the one positive part of their day,” says center director Chuck Watson ’12, social work, who sees his clients at their lowest points, but also as they make life-changing breakthroughs through treatment. Trying to put a face on opioid addiction is impossible; it’s a disease that can strike anyone. With recent attention from legislators at the national and local levels, the race is on to stop the deadly effects of both legal and illegal opioid abuse.

At UMBC, researchers across disciplines are answering the call to help figure out unique approaches to studying the epidemic. Together, they are working to understand its causes, to tell stories of its effects, and to offer routes to early detection and treatment.

It’s emotionally grueling work with no real endpoint in sight, but all agree – it’s important work that has to happen. Lives depend on it.

Read more about Chuck Watson: “A Second Chance at Life”

When you think about how much data is floating around about each of us, it makes sense to guess that the right combinations of it – collected, sorted, and interpreted in just the right way – might help paint a picture of victory against substance abuse. But where do you start? How do you cut through it? And how can you package it so the people who want to help – legislators, first responders, and others – have the tools to make the best decisions?

For the last decade, behavioral health researcher Michael Abrams Ph.D. ’16, public policy, has combed data collected by public health systems with these precise questions in mind. As director of special research studies for The Hilltop Institute at UMBC, a non-partisan health research organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, Abrams and others have helped entities such as the City of Baltimore Behavioral Health Authority crunch the numbers in a way that allows them to develop meaningful policy. Working with data from hospital admissions records, Medicaid, and the Maryland Department of Health’s Behavioral Health Administration, Abrams and his Hilltop colleagues have produced several reports related to opioid – use disorders and their effects on people and the systems that treat them.

“At Hilltop we do our best to use administrative data – that is, data designed to facilitate billing and payment – and other supplemental information to discern what is truly happening in the publicly financed health care marketplace,” says Abrams, who stays carefully objective in his work. “Our mission is very public service-oriented.”

In July, he and University of Maryland Baltimore School of Pharmacy professor Fadia T. Shaya, received a $50,000 Innovation Seed Grant from the UMB-UMBC Research and Innovation Partnership Grant Program to conduct a 15-month case control study of Medicaidaided youths aged 13 to 24 to explore whether prior exposure to prescription opioids is associated with subsequent opioid dependence.

“There are so many variables that go into…understanding what’s going on with something like addiction or with mental disorders more generally,” he says. “There are so many dimensions to these problems. It’s not just about biology, though biology is a big part of what makes these issues so compelling. But, addressing these problems has to consider many other factors including: income and economics, crime control, the practice of medicine, pharmaceutical marketing, interpersonal dynamics, education, and politics. This seed grant project lets us explore the medical antecedents to addiction, an important focus because many believe prescription overuse is a key driver of the overdose epidemic we are experiencing.”

Simultaneously, a UMBC-based group of interdisciplinary researchers – The Big GUI (Graphical User Interface) Data Group – has recently come together to tackle the specific problem of how to present the constellation of data related to opioid use, overdoses, and treatment in meaningful ways. Lead by Lee Boot, director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC), and joined by researchers from computer science, electrical engineering, and elsewhere, the group is figuring out how a three-dimensional digital visualization might include data on overdoses responders contribute to on the spot, and to allow for the inclusion of contextual data – such as holidays, weather, or importantly, social factors that affect people’s lives – to give users a full picture of what addiction and recovery actually entail.

“Considering all the relevant factors makes it such a complicated problem that no one can wrap their brains around it,” says Boot, whose evolving software MapTu could help in that regard. In its current format, the software takes in pieces of data and projects them as floating shapes that can be pulled together to create meaning, and modified by collaborating users who can add narratives and video to tell the story of the data.

“[With this group,] we’re changing our pursuit from getting more information to figuring out what to do with it,” says Boot, who notes that as important as it is for practitioners to focus on the here and now, it is also useful to step back and ask what might be done to avoid another similar human tragedies in the future. Asks Boot: “What if you could visualize and actually make sense of all of it in one place? Imagine what we might learn.”

Deborah Rudacille is at the very start of her research journey, but it’s already piling up noticeably on her desk.

She calls it “the fishing expedition:” the Xeroxed pile of articles, the sifting through of factoids, the hand-written notes that might or might not pay off later. Over the coming year, thanks to the Guggenheim grant she won for her science writing, Rudacille will be neck deep in the studies and personal stories that will – she hopes – turn into a book or series of articles about substance use disorders as heritable diseases that affect the whole family, not just those who are addicted to alcohol or drugs.

“I never do seem to pick cheerful topics,” admits Rudacille, an otherwise upbeat professor of the practice in the English department, who has written about everything from the use of animals in research and testing, to autism, to the history of sex and gender revolution, and the ways technology contributed to the rise and fall of the steel industry in Sparrow’s Point.

“Each one of these has been sort of a subject, a topic, something that I was really just interested in, if not obsessed with, for a time or for my whole lifetime…things that I was curious about and needed for myself to learn more about, and at one point, realized that probably other people really needed more information about, too,” says Rudacille, whose personal interest in addiction has dug at her intellectually for years.

With this new pursuit, she will interview families across the country dealing with addictions of all sorts – including opioids – to pursue a growing list of questions. Do personality traits – like impulsivity, risk taking, novelty seeking, and stress response – have genetic, or inherited, components? What role does a “family culture” play in recovery?

“It’s so very clear that this is a brain disease, that this is a family disease,” she says. “And that’s, I think, as much as anything else, the point that I would like to make and support by talking to researchers, by talking to affected people, by talking to family members, that we should not be conceptualizing addiction as a moral failing or a failure of individual control. It’s a disease.”

Although she’s just beginning her research, she’s already found some incredible statistics to jump-start her exploration. Sifting through the papers on her desk, she finds the one she’s looking for: an estimate that for every one addict, there are at least seven other people affected.

“And that makes sense to me…it’s in the family,” says Rudacille. “Because we’ve got parents, we’ve got children, we’ve got siblings, we’ve got spouses. And again, as I know from experience, it’s not just those relatives that are affected, but also aunts, uncles, cousins.”

Like Abrams, Rudacille doesn’t veer into the politics of her subjects. In the case of writing about opioids, so much of that has already been covered by other authors. But, she’s excited to contribute to a tradition of journalism that helps to shine a careful light on this particular piece of the puzzle, and the people who live it.

“I would say the big issue here is shame and stigma,” she says. “As a reporter, you feel an incredible responsibility to treat their stories with the respect and the dignity they deserve, especially when you are dealing with people who have been marginalized.”

Psychology professor Carlo DiClemente tells the story of a heroin addict who, upon hearing about a rash of people dying from fentanyl-laced heroin in Baltimore, asks, “Where can I get that? It must be good sh*t.”

In his more than 25 years of studying substance abuse and the motivations behind addictive behaviors, DiClemente has found one thing to be consistently true: If you’re not ready to change – really, truly ready – it’s just not going to happen.

“Every entry into and exit out of addiction is a personal journey,” says DiClemente, co-founder of the “Transtheoretical Model” of behavior change, and author of several books on the subject, including Addiction and Change: How Addictions Develop and Addicted People Recover. Understanding and addressing the addict’s motivations can mean the difference between success and failure.

DiClemente has seen this first hand in the substance abuse treatment programs he has run. Without knowledge of the addict’s mindset and motivation – in DiClemente’s model, he breaks motivation into the stages into pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance – a treatment provider can’t know where to begin.

“The problem is, with tobacco, and with the opiate addiction, people find it almost impossible to quit. It changes the brain. It impairs individual self-regulation, and it takes over their life,” making it difficult to know all that is really going on, he says.

“Some of the research is looking at people who are in different stages, so we can look at personal and even epidemiological data and try to understand where people are, if we ask the right questions.”

With the recent increase in opioid use, and knowing how many potential ways an addict might enter into care (or evade it), DiClemente has been developing and offering training for people in various jobs – medical providers, front desk employees at agencies and hospitals, social workers who make home visits, etc. – who could spot signs of substance abuse, and offer information about treatment as they come across it.

“A big thing is to really empower a variety of providers who come across addiction but aren’t really addiction specialists, on how to recognize and how to refer, and how to help motivate people to take the next step,” says DiClemente.

“If we can prevent someone from getting into the last stages of addiction, that’s really what we should be doing,” he says. “Early intervention is the best intervention.”

Info graphic information source: The National Institute on Drug Abuse: drugabuse.gov

* * * * *

More on this Topic:

The Big Build

Seniors in Neil Rothman’s capstone mechanical engineering class experience the ups and downs of designing for real-life clients.

By Megan Hanks

In the real world, the more projects and problems an engineer works on, the better they get at coming up with solutions that actually work. That’s why, during the final year of UMBC’s mechanical engineering curriculum, students spend a semester working through the “hard knock design experiences” they need to succeed as engineers.

Olusola Jegede ’17, mechanical engineering, makes modifications to the tricycle that his capstone group designed and built for Calvin, a young boy with curvature of the joints and mobility challenges.

The projects are presented to the class at the beginning of each semester by Neil Rothman, professor of practice of mechanical engineering, and come from a variety of places, including private companies, local nonprofit organizations, and some UMBC-affiliated teams and groups. Throughout the semester, students work in groups of three or four to design, create, test and deliver nearly a dozen high quality products – everything from a calming swing for a boy with disabilities, to a GPS-guided robot, to a machine that automatically shuffles and deals a deck of cards.

Rothman hopes the course helps students recognize how little they know, and encourages them to seek guidance from experienced engineers. “The more times you design engineer something, the better you get,” he says.

Several projects, including a swing for a boy named Brennon’s happened through a collaboration with V-LINC, a Baltimore-based organization that creates customized technological solutions for people with disabilities. Brennon, a young boy who has Type 1 lissencephaly, which causes developmental delays, seizures, and abnormal muscle tone, is calmed by the swinging motion. Swinging also helps reduce the frequency of the seizures that he experiences.

Many students face challenges and setbacks throughout the semester, including some groups who simply run out of time to complete the project. Brennon’s swing, for instance, is still in progress as of press time, so the group continues to put the final touches on the swing so that it will meet the needs of their client. Rothman says that “the design engineer’s best friend is experience.”

Ciara Davis ’17, mechanical engineering, who worked on Brennon’s swing, knew that she wanted to work on a V-LINC project. “I liked that the project we would be doing would be going to someone to help them in some way,” she says.

For Danny Joh ’17, mechanical engineering, who worked with Davis, meeting Brennon was a pivotal moment. “Every single thing I did, I had to think about Brennon. A single thing I did wrong could affect his life,” he says.

Another group developed a GPS-guided robot for the Aberdeen Test Center. The project was proposed to Jay Gordon ’17, mechanical engineering, who interned at the Aberdeen Test Center, and combined mechanical engineering with software engineering skills. The goal of the project is for the robot to be able to follow a soldier in a field and maneuver itself around obstacles, and stop and start at specific points in the field. One requirement was that the robot needs be waterproof so that it can be used outside.

Emily Casto ’17, mechanical engineering, one of the group members, explains that the project allowed her to participate in experiences that helped her grow as an engineer. “I think from this project specifically, I think the biggest takeaway is that being pushed out of your comfort zone is really scary, but it really pushes you to learn and to understand something new,” she says. “This is what engineering is. It’s never the same thing over and over again.”

[nivoslider id=”8509″]

Use the arrow buttons to the right to scroll through the slide show.
Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 and Dusten Wolff ’13

A Second Chance at Life

Chuck Watson ’12, social work, is a leader in the fight against substance abuse. In addition to co-owning two Riverside Treatment Centers in Maryland, Watson is president of the Maryland Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence.

There’s a reason Watson has dedicated his life to helping those struggling with opioid addiction. He knows what his clients are going through because, more than 12 years ago, Watson was going through it himself.

Watson began experimenting with drinking alcohol and smoking pot in middle school and high school. It was recreational, he says, until he lost interest in activities he previously enjoyed.

Soon Watson began going to treatment centers. He would go in, get clean, come out, and use again. By 19, he had been arrested for many DUIs, and in his early 20s, he began using cocaine. “Even at a young age, I understood my substance abuse was a problem,” Watson explains.

Watson got clean on his own in his mid-20s when his then-wife gave birth to their daughter, Dillan. “I wanted to do well,” Watson says. “I wanted to be a good dad.”

As with many addicts, the cycle began again and became worse when Watson got divorced. During the next decade, his life was a spiral of drugs, like pain meds and heroin, treatment centers, and psychiatrists. “Drugs were what I lived for,” says Watson.

While on probation, Watson continued to have dirty tox screens and get arrested. His probation officer gave him the option of going before a judge for probation violation – which would likely mean jail time – or trying an in-patient treatment center in Florida that had shown success with other addicts.

Watson chose treatment, and, this time, it worked.

On September 15, 2005, Watson stopped using. Since then, he has stayed clean. “I realized that I needed to make profound changes in my life,” says Watson. After 10 months in treatment, Watson returned to Baltimore, continued going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and got a home group as well as a sponsor. When he noticed the vast number of people struggling with addiction, he knew what he wanted to do – help them.

Watson worked in the field at many health services centers. He earned his bachelor’s degree at UMBC and then a master’s at University of Maryland, Baltimore. In June 2016, he and two co-workers, Crystal Pulsirisaroth and Michael Oliver, opened the first Riverside Treatment Center, a medication-assisted and client-center facility, in Rosedale. They hoped to have 70 clients in the first six months; they had that many in less than three weeks. Today, they help more than 800 clients.

In June 2017, the Edgewood facility opened. Both centers have same-day intake, which is important to Watson, now 50 and remarried with a family.

“When people make a decision to seek treatment, there is a small window of time. If they can’t get treatment immediately, they may change their minds. Once someone makes this decision, we want to be able to instantly provide the service to help them,” says Watson. “We do this because when people stop using, they get their lives back, and it’s rewarding and satisfying.”

— Michele Wojciechowski

Read about UMBC opioid research: Shining a Light

Gun Show

For decades, artist David Hess has assembled life-size sculptures of assault rifles from what he calls “rescued” objects — everything from an old black sneaker and vintage turquoise sewing machine, to a raggedy crutch and pink Barbie bike frame — to foster dialogue about one of the most volatile issues of our time. UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture hosted “Gun Show,” the first-ever display of all 112 sculptures, this fall, as curated by Kathy O’Dell, associate professor of visual arts and special assistant to the dean for education and arts partnerships.

Beyond Coding

The sun is pouring through the large windows in the Performing Arts & Humanities third floor dance studio. About 20 girls, 7th – 9th graders, are sprawled out on mats following the movements of the yoga instructor at the front of the room. They are learning about flexibility, how to “think outside the box, kind of like there’s no set answer to the question.”

These girls are not at UMBC exclusively to learn yoga, however, but rather to challenge their computing skills. How Girls Code: Mind, Body, and Coding summer camp at UMBC is an extension of the after-school program in Howard County Public Schools co-founded by Lisa Schlossnagle and Katie Egan ’94, history. In its third year, the camp operates with the goal of raising the percentage of women involved in computing work.

“Everything we do these days, everybody uses a computer somehow,” observes Claudia Pearce ’89 M.S., ’94 Ph.D., computer science, following her presentation as one of the guest speakers during the camp. “And understanding how computers work, I think, will help everybody,” said Pearce, now the senior cloud strategist and computer science authority for NSA.

The girls practice a variety of computing skills using a range of softwares and tools. In a WeDo/ EV3 Robots class, for example, the girls were challenged to program their robots to dance to music by using software to code the instructions for each robot’s movements. “We’re making a ballerina,” explains one of the girls.

How does the yoga instruction fit into this program? Yoga “brings all the benefits of stress management, and we know that computing is a difficult field,” says Schlossnagle. The girls learn to slow down and open their minds to new possibilities; they learn to be flexible, both in their physical movements and their computing abilities.

Since its beginning, the camp has grown from about 40 to 140 girls. This growth is promising, but as Tynker instructor Lorene Cannella says, the key is getting the girls “to stay in it.” “We’re just very hopeful that we can continue to raise this awareness and engage more girls and their families into seeking out these types of opportunities,” adds Schlossnagle.

— Allison Cruz ’18

Broadcast Ready

For most in sports media, working for ESPN is a dream, but UMBC has made that dream a reality for several students. Through a partnership with the America East Conference, UMBC’s Department of Athletics streams many athletic events live on the online channel ESPN 3, and students make up a large part of the broadcast team.

Starting in 2016, UMBC’s Director of Athletics Tim Hall and head of athletic communications Steve Levy ’85, interdisciplinary studies, reached out to UMBC alum Eli Eisenberg ’86, interdisciplinary studies, the president of VPC (a video production company based in Owings Mills, Md.), to create a broadcast of events that met the high-standards of ESPN. However, the endeavor became much more than just a way to bring UMBC’s games to a larger audience; it also gives students first-hand experience in the broadcasting field, and at the highest level.

According to Eisenberg, UMBC and VPC’s project started with an 80-percent professional and 20-percent student makeup of workers. Behind the professionals, the students observed and took notes. As the season continued, the students eventually took over the active duties, and the professionals became the guides in the background, “giving direction, critique, and recommendations to the student staff.” A student even produced a game – women’s basketball versus New Hampshire – from the broadcast truck last season.

Meg Giunta ’16, media and communication studies, worked as a video engineer last season. Since graduating she is already a top media coordinator for Global Catholic Network.

“This opportunity we had with ESPN3 helped open a lot of doors,” she said. “To be able to sit on the truck and work every game and have the opportunity to make it my show, it was a good learning experience.”

Senior Kevin Harris worked as an audio technician last year. While working games he connected with a member of the Baltimore Ravens organization and was set to begin an internship with them this fall.

“To get your first experience with a company like ESPN, you can’t get better training than that,” he said. “Combined with VPC, it’s just a great combination to work.”

— Corey Johns ’11 

Images and video by Dustin Roddy ’14, American studies

Space Station-Bound

A white box the size of a refrigerator, called Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (CREAM), headed to the International Space Station (ISS) in August, thanks to the work of UMBC astrophysicist Jason Link and colleagues. Inside, four scientific detectors will work together to detect cosmic rays coming from far flung regions of the universe. The instruments will transmit the data from the ISS to Earth, to scientists reckoning with the tantalizing question, “What is the universe made of?”

Link, an astrophysicist with UMBC’s Center for Space Science and Technology, part of the recently-renewed Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science & Technology consortium, is a co-investigator on the project and the technical lead for one of the detectors. Cosmic rays, particles from beyond the solar system, arrive with hundreds of times more energy than the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator can produce, Link explains. Some of these particles will pass through the detector and interact inside, where they break up into a “shower of subatomic particles.” CREAM’s goal is to measure the composition and energy of individual particles, which will help scientists deduce where the rays came from and what phenomena caused them to accelerate so much.

Link has been working for more than 15 years on hardware to detect cosmic rays, including a version of CREAM that has taken seven balloon flights above Antarctica. Sending instruments to space poses new challenges, and also creates new opportunities.

“Balloons have a relatively short mission life” of a few dozen days, Link shares. “But going up on the space station, you’re now talking about years.” Also, “when particles enter Earth’s atmosphere, they start to interact,” Link says. That means data analyses must incorporate a correction factor to account for these interactions, which introduces error. That’s much less of a problem in space.

Research instruments traveling to the ISS must reckon with constraints on size and mass, and be able to withstand extreme vibration. Link’s balloon-based instruments didn’t fit these constraints, so he and colleagues from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Penn State, and Northern Kentucky University undertook the challenge of building a new detector, based on the balloon detectors, that could safely survive the rigors of a rocket launch and deploy on the ISS.

The new detector can also collect additional scientific measurements, and distinguish between negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons, based on the way they interact inside the detector.

“Designing a new detector from scratch on the limited budget for building balloon hardware required creativity, innovation, and a bit of luck,” notes Link. Together with a detector built by colleagues from Kyungpook National University in South Korea, the machines provide a powerful way to distinguish between electrons and protons, and to quickly verify findings, specifically because they use different techniques.

Link looks forward to diving into the data the instruments send from outer space. “If we see an excess of electrons,” he says, “that suggests that there is a local source of cosmic rays. That’s not something we expect.”

Scientists are often heavily involved in designing instruments and analyzing the resulting data, but most of the time the actual construction of space instrumentation is handed over to engineers and technicians with specialized expertise. Not this time. “Yes, I actually tightened bolts and wired sensors on the detector,” Link is proud to report, “and it’s going to fly in space.”

— Sarah Hansen M.S. ’15

Image: Sunrise from the International Space Station. Photo provided by NASA, captured by a member of the Expedition 52 crew

UMBC UMBC
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 Directions & Parking

Resources

Important Contacts

Emergency Info

Contact Us

Apply

Top Stories of the Week

© UMBC: A University System of Maryland Member Institution