All posts by: UMBC News Staff

Emerald Christopher, graduate student, at 50th anniversary of March on Washington

UMBC graduate student, Emerald Christopher, joined tens of thousands of other supporters to acknowledge the importance of women leaders in the March on Washington at the 50th anniversary of the movement, held last week.

Christopher wore a shirt emblazoned with the names “Audre & Gloria & Angela & bell” – a nod to the famous feminist and womanist thought leaders Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, and bell hooks. Having women political figures address the rally was great, Christopher said, but she questioned where the African-American women thought leaders were.

UMBC Celebrates Present, Future During Fall Opening Meeting

At the Fall Opening Meeting on Thursday, August 22, President Freeman Hrabowski and Provost Philip Rous celebrated the present and future of UMBC.

Hrabowski outlined recent university achievements during his annual State of the University address.

“We are increasingly known as a national model of inclusive excellence and innovation in American higher education,” he said. “We have built strength in research across the disciplines.  We can take great pride in knowing that the rest of the nation is beginning to understand what we already know – that we are a very special place.”

The full text of his speech can be read here.

Rous discussed the UMBC strategic planning process, entitled “Our UMBC: A Strategic Plan for Advancing Excellence.”

“This is an incredible time of opportunity for ourselves and UMBC,” he said. “We are standing at a threshold where we can extend our vision for the University.” Rous also emphasized that there will be opportunities for campus involvement as the plan is being created. More information can be found at planning.umbc.edu.

Speakers at the Fall Opening Meeting also included incoming freshman Evan Leiter-Mason, a Sondheim Scholar majoring in economics and political science; incoming transfer student Sophia Venero, who will be majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies with a minor in biological science; and incoming graduate student Adegboyega “Ade” Akinsiku, who will be studying in the Human-Centered Computing program.

Production by Susan McCully, Theatre, Reviewed by NY Theatre

McCully in Inexcusable Fantasies

The Fringe NYC performances of Inexcusable Fantasies — written by Susan McCully, theatre, and directed by Eve Muson, theatre — received praise in a NYTheatre.com review released last week.

Read the article here: “Inexcusable Fantasies”

The review of the “masterfully-written two-woman piece,” written by Andrew Rothkin, details the comedy as an honest, intelligent coming-of-age story that invites the viewer into McCully’s “baring [of] her very soul.” Rothkin says, “I was awed by McCully’s wordsmithery, her intricately woven stream of words whose meanings and allusions seemed three steps ahead of me.”

He also commends the acting and chemistry of both McCully and Rachel Hirshorn ’04, theatre, as incredibly solid performance, and says that the “beautiful” staging by Muson “highlight[ed] the theatrical as much as the real, the touching as much as the funny.”

 

Congratulations to the 2013 UMBC Outstanding Alumni of the Year Recipients

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents Outstanding Alumni of the Year Awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. The UMBC Alumni Association proudly honors these distinguished alumni for their accomplishments and dedication to UMBC:

2013 Outstanding Alumni of the Year Award Winners

Engineering and Information Technology
Jeehye Yun ’97, Computer Science
CEO, Secured Sciences Group, LLC

Humanities
Ricardo Zwaig ’77, Spanish
Judge, District Court, Howard County

Natural and Mathematical Sciences
Dr. Mary Loeken, M.S. ’80, Biological Sciences
Research Investigator, Joslin Diabetes Center
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School

Social and Behavioral Sciences
Dr. Sherece West-Scantlebury, Ph.D. ’07, Public Policy
President and CEO, Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation

Visual and Performing Arts
Brigitte Pribnow Moore ’05, Acting
Executive Director, Young Playwrights’ Theater

The 2013 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 10, 2013, at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus. If you’d like to attend the ceremony and celebrate with us, please register through the Homecoming website. 

To learn more about the awards, past winners, and chances to sponsor this event, please click here.

Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Maxwell ’02, LLC, Appointed CEO of Prince George’s Schools

Kevin Maxwell ’02, Ph.D., language, literacy, and culture, was recently appointed chief executive officer of Prince George’s public schools. Maxwell has a long history in public education, having spent more than 20 years as a teacher, principal and chief educational administrator of Prince George’s County. Most recently, he was superintendent of Anne Arundel County.

From the Baltimore Sun article:

“This is a homecoming for him. He is truly one of our shining sons of Prince George’s County,” County Executive Rushern Baker III said before a gathered crowd Friday, June 28 at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville. “We are so lucky we can stand here today and welcome back one of our best.”

Maxwell received his Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). In 2002, he was recognized by UMBC as its Outstanding Alumnus-Humanities.

You can read more on the UMBC Insights blog.

Ruben Delgado, JCET, in the Baltimore Sun

What do you need to do to put up offshore wind turbines? You need to know where the wind is. That’s what Ruben Delgado, a faculty research assistant in UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), is working on.

Timothy Wheeler at the Baltimore Sun wrote:

“Also aboard are scientists from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who are gathering data on atmospheric conditions and winds high above the water, where the giant turbine blades will be.

Ruben Delgado, a faculty research assistant at UMBC, said the data gathered using remote sensing gear on board as well as old-fashioned weather balloons launched from the deck will help scientists and potential wind developers ground-truth the government’s wind-speed estimates, which are generated by computer models using mostly land-based data. The cruise also may provide information on how winds can vary from day to day and hour to hour.

“You need to know what the variation is,” Delgado said, “because if you have a windmill and all of a sudden have a gust, that means it’s going to produce more power.”

On Friday afternoon, the windspeed aloft where the turbine blades would spin was a steady 10 meters per second, he reported.”

Read more: http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/green/blog/bs-gr-offshore-wind-survey-20130819,0,7275793.story#ixzz2cWNbJgFc

Kabish Shah in the BelAir Patch

“After touring the construction site for his school’s new performing arts building, Kabish Shah could see himself working at the construction management and general contracting company and applied for a summer internship through UMBC’s Shriver Center,” writes Sonia Su.

The story goes on to profile Shah’s internship.

bwtech@UMBC in the Baltimore Sun

“At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s incubator for cybersecurity start-ups there’s a definite government focus. Companies can participate in a federal contracting institute, and some have scholarships from contracting giant Northrop Grumman that cover their rent.

But incubator leaders are emphasizing the importance of going after the “huge and growing” commercial market, said Ellen Hemmerly, who oversees all of the university’s incubators as executive director of bwtech@UMBC,” writes Jamie Smith Hopkins.

 

 

 

Alan Sherman receives two NSF awards for cybersecurity

Professor Alan Sherman received two research awards from the National Science Foundation to support work at UMBC on cybersecurity.

Sherman is a co-principal investigator on a two year, $300K Eager award to foster research cooperation among four successful and mature Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research: Purdue University, UMBC, UC Davis, and Mississippi State. The project will provide opportunities for students to work on problems proposed and mentored by practitioners in the real world rather than just faculty led research. As a result, more pressing and urgent problems will be addressed, the students will benefit from the guidance of multiple and interdisciplinary research faculty from multiple institutions and the student-lead research may produce solutions for pressing national problems.

Professor Sherman also received a supplement of $271K to his UMBC Cybersecurity SFS Program award to support graduate research assistants who will work on two new projects. One will develop new algorithms for verifiable randomness that can generate random bits in a way that the recipients will have verifiably high assurance that the bits were generated in a truly random fashion. The work will improve upon the (unverifiable) NIST random beacon project. The second project will develop a new security education game, inspired by the UMBC-developed classroom game SecurityEmpire, to be fielded as a Facebook application for free use by anyone. This is joint work with UMBC faculty Marc Olano and Linda Oliva.

The research will be carried out in the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance under Professor Sherman’s supervision.

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