All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Kim Berghaus ’14, Earns Second Career America East All-Academic Team Honor

UMBC senior tennis standout Kim Berghaus (Offenbach, Germany) was named to the 2014 America East Women’s Tennis All-Academic Team, the conference announced on May 23.

Through the fall 2013 semester, Berghaus had posted a 3.84 grade-point average in physics and with minors in economics and mathematics. She earned President’s List honors by posting a 4.0 GPA during three of her first seven semesters as a Retriever.

The co-captain of the 2014 squad received the athletic department’s Matt Skalsky Female Outstanding Scholar-Athlete Award, which goes to the highest-performing scholar-athlete.

Berghaus, who earned her degree at UMBC’s Commencement last week was accepted to the physics graduate programs at Johns Hopkins and U. Texas, but will defer enrollment to work in research at Harvard medical school for one year.

She won six consecutive matches at the top flight down the stretch to lead the squad to the conference semifinals and earned America East first team honors as a result.

Berghaus earns her second All-Academic Team award, having received the honor in 2012. She missed the 2013 season due to injury, but returned to post a 9-6 singles mark in her final campaign.

Kate Drabinski, Gender and Women’s Studies, on The Marc Steiner Show

In response to the tragic shootings last week in Santa Barbara, California, WEAA’s The Marc Steiner Show hosted a segment discussing issues of male entitlement, misogyny and violence against women after reports surfaced that the gunman had acted in part out of intense frustration over rejection by women.

Kate Drabinski

Kate Drabinski, a Lecturer of Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL) program, participated in the discussion and commented on how masculinity may have played a role in the violence.    

“One thing that I think is really important in this moment is to also interrogate masculinity because this is about misogyny, but it’s also about the construction of masculinity,” Drabinski said. “What is it about the construction of masculinity that would make him feel like he wasn’t a real man?”

Other panelists included Igor Volsky, Managing Editor of ThinkProgress.org, John Bullock, Professor of Political Science at Towson University and A. Adar Ayira, Project Manager of the More in the Middle Campaign for Associated Black Charities and Facilitator and Analyst at Baltimore Racial Justice Action, a program of Fusion Partnerships.

To listen to the full segment that aired May 28 on The Marc Steiner Show, click here.

Donald Norris, Public Policy, Comments on Maryland’s Race for Governor

Maryland’s Democratic primary in the race for governor is less than a month away, and Public Policy Professor and Chair Donald Norris has been in the news frequently commenting on several aspects of the race.

Donald Norris UMBC

Updated campaign finance reports were released showing Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown’s campaign raising more than $1.2 million since the General Assembly session ended in April with $4.15 million total in cash on hand. Attorney General Douglas Gansler and Del. Heather Mizeur’s campaigns were reported at having $3.1 million and $961,000 in the bank respectively.

Norris told The Washington Post that the disparity in fundraising among the candidates reflects the disparity in the polls: “It tells me that the folks that give money have already picked a winner,” he said.

Norris also told WJZ 13 that there has been little interest in this year’s governor’s race and commented on what it will take to win the Democratic primary: “Whoever is going to be able to turn out the vote in his or her campaign in an election that’s going to have a very, very low turnout,” he said.

Below is a complete list of media coverage:

Big Draw of Democratic Race for Governor Still Falls Short in Voter Interest (WJZ 13)
Brown leads Gansler, Mizeur in money race, latest Md. campaign finance reports show (Washington Post)
Brown raises more than $1 million in 6 weeks (Baltimore Sun)
Frosh holds big lead in money in bank in AG race (Baltimore Sun)
Gubernatorial Primer (Baltimore Jewish Times)
Attack ads running in Gansler and Brown Primary Campaigns for Governor (WJZ 13)

Thomas Schaller, Political Science, Op-Ed in The Baltimore Sun

In a column published May 27 in The Baltimore Sun, Political Science Professor Thomas Schaller writes about increasing political campaign contributions from the country’s super wealthy and growing income inequality between members of Congress and those who they govern.

Tom Schaller 1

“Adjusted for inflation, a million dollars isn’t what it was a century or even a decade ago. So sure, at some point the Congress was bound to have a majority of millionaires,” Schaller wrote. “Yet, in a country where the 2012 median household income was $51,017 — and fell between 2011 and 2012 — there is something truly perverse about not only the rising inequality between the incomes and wealth of the masses and the elites who govern them, but the rising political inequality that follows.”

Schaller noted rising income inequality is becoming increasingly dwarfed by campaign contribution inequalities: “Last November, Americans celebrated the sesquicentennial of what is arguably the greatest political speech in our nation’s history: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But President Lincoln’s closing line is increasingly obsolete. For we are fast transforming from a democracy that prides itself on a government of, by and for the people into a plutocracy based on government of, by and for rich people,” he wrote.

You can read the full column in The Baltimore Sun by clicking here.

Work by Tim Nohe, Visual Arts, Travels to Two New Venues

Nature in the Dark, which features work by Tim Nohe, Visual Arts, CIRCA, and originally screened in Melbourne at Federation Square in 2012, will appear in new venues soon: at the Gertrude Street Projection Festival in Melbourne, Australia (18-27 July 2014), and at the Visual Arts Centre in Bendigo, Australia (14 August – 5 October 2014). Nohe’s piece, At The Wall of the Anthropocene, is an animation set to an original film score created in collaboration with Tim Bubb, IMDA.

Nature in the Dark is a collaborative program produced by the Centre for Creative Arts, La Trobe University and the Victoria National Parks Association.

CIRCA is currently collaborating with the Centre for Creative Arts, Marnie Benny of the MICA Curatorial Practices Program, Australian/German curator Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier, UMBC visual and performing artists and multiple partners in the Inner Harbor to produce a second edition of the program focused on marine life. This program will debut in Spring 2015.

NEH Extends ‘For All The World to See’ through 2019

The traveling tour of For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, curated by Maurice Berger, CADVC, has been extended by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), due to it’s popularity and success as an “NEH on the Road” exhibition. 

With six venues for the larger version of the exhibition and additional venues for “NEH on the Road,” the exhibition tour will exceed 40 venues in well over 25 states. Symmes Gardner, executive director of the CADVC says, “With nearly 800,000 visitors for the big show, we now anticipate at least 1 million visitors by the time the smaller exhibition closes in 2019.”

For All the World to See was presented at UMBC in 2012.

Work by Kelley Bell, Visual Arts, in Northern Spark

Garden of Earthly Delights, an animation by Kelley Bell, visual arts, will be presented in the 2014 Northern Spark Arts Festival in Minneapolis. The piece, which uses characters from the Hieronymus Bosch triptych of the same name, will be projected onto architecture of Minneapolis. In the animation, “the characters from Bosch’s famous painting depicting creation, an earthly paradise, and hell are revealed by a meandering spotlight that captures these creatures in midflight, slowly tracking them across the landscape—and then they vanish. They are ephemeral, like the sudden revelation of an unnoticed detail in a cityscape that comes to define the city.”

Northern Spark is a one night arts festival presented by Northern Lights.mn, a nonprofit arts organization with the mission to transform our sense of what’s possible in public space. Northern Spark will take place June 14, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Zhibo Zhang receives $710K grant from NASA

Zhibo Zhang, an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department, and his collaborators received a three-year grant of $710K from NASA’s Sciences of Terra and Aqua program to study the Marine Boundary Layer (MBL) clouds.

The MBL clouds cover about 20% of Earth’s surface. They play a pivotal in Earth’s radiative energy budget. Prof. Zhang’s research will help us understand the horizontal and microphysical structure of MBL clouds and provides guidance for the development of future NASA satellite missions.

As PI, Zhang will lead a group of researchers from UMBC, NASA GISS, and the Univ. of Illinois.

Zhang was also recently selected to receive the NASA New (Early Career) Investigator Program (NIP) awards in Earth Science. The NIP is a highly competitive and prestigious award established by NASA in 1996 to encourage integrated environments for research and education for scientists and engineers at the early stage of their professional careers. This year more than 130 scientists nationwide applied for this program and only 21 were selected.

The NIP will fund Zhang and his graduate student for three years to investigate the climatic effects of above-cloud aerosols (e.g. soot and dust) using data from NASA satellites. When elevated above clouds, aerosols can generate strong warming effect on the climate due to enhanced absorption. Dr. Zhang’s research is aimed to understand the size of this effect and its potential implications to global warming.

UMBC scientist receives Maryland Innovation grant from TEDCO to advance the development of a vaccine to combat a deadly fish virus

Professor Vikram Vakharia, Professor of Marine Biotechnology at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) in Baltimore, received a $100,000 grant from the Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII). Vakhria will use the funds to develop a vaccine against viral infections in fish populations. Such viruses can be devastating to fish populations world-wide. A vaccine could have tremendous implications for hatcheries and rearing ponds that provide high-protein fish to tens millions of people.

Many viral diseases in fish have been reported worldwide. Of particular concern is infections caused by nervous necrosis virus (NNV). This virus is of concern because it impacts both warm- and cold-water fish in marine environments. The virus has resulted in severe economic losses in many Asian and European countries, Australia and North America. It is estimated that 5% of loss in the finfish aquaculture industry is due to disease and translates into over $1 billion global annual loses. The disease is associated with high mortality (up to 100 %) particularly in larvae and juvenile fish species. Therefore, technologies are needed to immunize large populations of fish with vaccines that are efficient and economical.

“The health of fish is critical to the aquaculture industry and the countless number of people who consume fish in every corner of the world,” said Vakharia, a global leader in viral diseases of aquaculture. “Nervous necrosis virus (NNV) infects more than 40 fish species and currently, there are no commercial vaccines available to prevent this disease,” Vakharia added.

The goal of Vakharia’s research is to develop and evaluate the efficacy of a recombinant NNV vaccine.

“Dr. Vakharia’s research is critically important from both an environmental and economic perspective,” noted Russell Hill, Director of the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET). “The development of a new vaccine will support the aquaculture industry and help provide food for millions of people. We greatly appreciate TEDCO’s support and foresight in addressing this important work through the Maryland Innovation Initiative.”

MARYLAND INNOVATION INITIATIVE (MII)
The Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII) was created as a partnership between the State of Maryland and five Maryland academic research institutions (Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, University of Maryland College Park, University of Maryland Baltimore and University of Maryland Baltimore County). The program is designed to promote commercialization of research conducted among the partnership universities and to leverage each institution’s unique strengths.

TEDCO
The Maryland State Legislature created TEDCO in 1998 to facilitate the transfer and commercialization of technology from Maryland’s research universities and federal labs into the marketplace and to assist in the creation and growth of technology-based businesses in all regions of the State. TEDCO is an independent organization that strives to be Maryland’s lead source for entrepreneurial business assistance and seed funding for the development of startup companies in Maryland’s innovation economy.

INSTITUTE OF MARINE AND ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY
Located in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology is a strategic alliance involving scientists at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the University of Maryland Baltimore and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Scientists are engaged in cutting-edge research in microbiology, molecular genetic analysis and biotechnology, using marine resources to develop new drug therapies, alternative energy and other innovations to improve public health and economic opportunities. IMET also contributes to sustainable marine aquaculture and fisheries in the Chesapeake Bay and other marine ecosystems.

Rebecca Adelman, Media and Communication Studies, on WYPR’s Maryland Morning

On Friday, May 23, WYPR’s Maryland Morning aired a segment that focused on the role that visuals have played in citizens’ understanding of the military and terrorism since September 11th. Rebecca Adelman, an assistant professor of media and communication studies and author of Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror, participated in the discussion along with MaryAnne Golon, director of photography at The Washington Post.

Beyond the CheckpointAdelman opened the conversation by discussing the role security camera footage of the September 11th highjackers played in the public view after they were released several years after the attacks.   

“What’s really interesting to me is the way that those images mark a limit of those visual systems that are designed to keep us safe,” Adelman said. “As surveillance cameras, they functioned perfectly,” she added. “But they did nothing to keep the country safe.”

Adelman also discussed what the future may hold for citizens’ perception of images of war and terror: “The relationship between state and media and citizen is going to get a lot more complex, particularly as the role of the visual in fighting the war itself changes as we talk about things like drones which have everything to do with visibility and invisibility. We’re going to hear a lot more about questions of transparency.”

You can listen to the full interview on Maryland Morning by clicking here.

Kimberly Moffitt, American Studies, on The Marc Steiner Show

On Monday, May 19, WEAA’s The Marc Steiner Show hosted a panel discussion remembering the life and legacy of Malcolm X. The day would have been his 89th birthday. American Studies Assistant Professor Kimberly Moffitt participated in the discussion and shared her thoughts on why Malcolm X might not play as significant a role with young learners as other activists during his time.

“A lot of that has to do with him not fitting the paradigm of what we consider to be acceptable activism,” Moffitt said. “At that point in time, even in the midst of a very radical period in our country’s history, he was seen as an extremist by many.”

Other panelists in the discussion included Karsonya Wise Whitehead, an assistant professor of communication and African and African American studies at Loyola University Maryland and Ray Winbush, Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University.

To listen to the full segment that aired on The Marc Steiner Show, click here. Moffitt is co-editor of Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities.

Marie Spiro, Marilyn Goldberg Honored by UMBC’s Ancient Studies Department

GoldbergSpiro-1154

After five decades of collecting ancient artifacts, Dr. Marie Spiro wanted to donate her collection to an institution that would continue her approach of interactive learning, and she selected UMBC three years ago. Spiro, an associate professor emerita of art and archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, recently visited UMBC to attend Ancient Studies Associate Professor and Chair Marilyn Goldberg’s retirement party.

The Spiro Artifact Collection features Greek, Roman and Byzantine artifacts and contains mosaics, pottery, figurines and other pieces that date back as far as 15,000 years. The collection has provided a hands-on learning opportunity for ancient studies students and enables them to physically interact and study ancient artifacts without leaving campus.

During the celebration, Goldberg thanked Spiro for her donation and presented her with a gift from the ancient studies department. The Spiro Artifact Collection is expected to be housed in the new Art and Archaeology Lab in the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. During the retirement party, research projects presented at URCAD were on display that students conducted on artifacts as part of the archaeological museum studies course. Marilyn Goldberg was honored by colleagues for her service as a professor and chair of the department and for her enthusiasm and dedication to her students since the Ancient Studies Department began at UMBC.

You can read an article about Dr. Spiro’s donation in the Fall 2011 edition of UMBC Magazine by clicking here.

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