All posts by: Sarah Hansen, M.S. '15

UMBC’s Jason Link leads development of cosmic ray detector headed for International Space Station

A white box the size of a refrigerator, called Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (CREAM), will head to the International Space Station (ISS) this month, 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 CRESST 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.

Are the particles produced by supernovae or perhaps merging binary stars? “If we get into what accelerates the cosmic rays, we’re getting into one of the murky mysteries of science,” Link says.

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,” Link shares, usually only a few dozen days. “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 International Space Station.

The new detector can also collect additional scientific measurements.  It can 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,” Link notes. “We did it and it successfully passed all of the environmental and safety requirements for deployment on the ISS.”

Colleagues from Kyungpook National University in South Korea built a detector that serves the same purpose, but with a different approach. Together, Link says, the two detectors provide a powerful way to distinguish between electrons and protons, and 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.” That discovery would spur further research into what and where the source might be.

Instruments on CREAM will also help physicists better understand the “cosmic energy spectrum,” Link says. The energy of detected rays falls along a spectrum, with many more rays coming in with lower energies, and very few at the highest energies. The number of rays at each energy level falls off in a smooth curve, but, Link says, “There’s a kink in the cosmic energy spectrum,” where there’s an unexpected bump up in the number of rays with a specific energy. Scientists are very interested in what might be causing that kink, and CREAM is intended to help explain it.

Beyond the potential for groundbreaking scientific discovery about the fundamental makeup of the universe, the CREAM launch is special for Link. “This is the first time that I’ve actually built something that’s going to go into space,” he says.

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.”

 

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

The CREAM mission is headed by Dr. Eun-Suk Seo at the University of Maryland, College Park.  NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia provided overall management of CREAM and integration for space station deployment, led by Linda Thompson. The full project team includes scientists from the United States, France, Mexico, and South Korea.

New study by UMBC’s Chris Swan finds restoration efforts more effective in small, isolated streams

A new study led by Chris Swan has found that stream restoration efforts such as bank stabilization, tree planting, and streambed manipulations have a greater impact on stream life in small headwaters than in larger streams. “Larger streams are more well-connected to populations of species that are tolerant of disturbance, but smaller streams are more isolated, so the actual manipulation for the restoration has a stronger effect on who’s there,” he explains.

The findings suggest that “restoration practices would be most effective in areas where community structure and biodiversity are driven primarily by local factors, i.e., isolated sections of networks,” write Swan, professor of geography and environmental systems, and co-author Bryan Brown of Virginia Tech, in Ecological Applications. “Our results amplify the call for a larger scale perspective on river restoration.”

The study compares adjacent restored and unrestored sections of five headwaters and eight large streams in Maryland. Over the course of a year, Swan, Brown, and lab technician Charles Wahl spent hundreds of hours at the 13 sites, kicking up the streambed to drive tiny invertebrates, just two to 10 millimeters long, into nets. Back in Swan’s lab, the researchers used microscopes to painstakingly identify each organism. Caddisfly and may fly larvae were most common, with a variety of beetle larvae and snails rounding out the catch.

Data analysis revealed that restored sections of headwaters supported 15 to 37 percent more species than unrestored sections next door. However, in large streams, the restoration had no discernible effect on biodiversity. Also, the restored headwaters were more likely to sustain stable communities of organisms, whereas large streams were more likely to gain and lose species in both restored and unrestored sections. Swan suggests the differences may exist “simply because we haven’t appreciated completely the way these organisms move around.”

Swan is also quick to point out that restorations are undertaken for a variety of reasons, and invertebrate diversity is not the only measure of success or failure. In general, “Just because invertebrates didn’t respond, doesn’t mean restoration didn’t do its job.”

Still, Swan notes, these results are important because “this is one of the few studies that finds restoration is context-dependent.” He hopes the study will encourage people to think more thoroughly about how factors like species dispersal and river network connectivity impact biodiversity, ideally trickling up “to the state level, or even the EPA level” to inform future investments in restoration efforts.

It’s notable that the small headwaters most improved by restoration are also the most vulnerable. “When we develop a landscape, the first thing we do is mow over or bury headwater streams, because it’s easy to do—or we put them in a pipe,” Swan says. Plus, “Headwater streams are 60 percent or more of all stream miles in a river network, so they’re disproportionately at risk of being lost.” The good news? “They’re the cheapest to restore, because they’re so small.”

Swan, Brown, and additional colleagues at UC-Riverside and the National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network have received a new grant from the NSF, which also funded the current study, to expand on this work by looking at species dispersal in river networks at the watershed level. If a species’ population is declining in a well-connected stream, it may be replenished (or “rescued”) by migration of individual organisms from a nearby stream. In an isolated headwater, that’s much less likely, and the species is more likely to disappear in that location. In their upcoming research, Swan and colleagues will ask, “How does that scale up to the entire watershed and help us understand how biodiversity persists through time?”

Swan hopes the team’s work on species dispersal patterns will further inform practical decisions about investments in supporting healthy streams. The current study was a step in the right direction, he says, demonstrating that “we can do this at a realistic scale,” and showing scientists as well as non-profits, citizens, and lawmakers that this work is “something that matters.”

Learn more from the complete article, “Metacommunity Theory Meets Restoration: Isolation May Mediate How Ecological Communities Respond to Stream Restoration“ in Ecological Applications.

Chris Swan is also known for his research on urban ecology. Learn more from “Urban nature: What kinds of plants and wildlife flourish in cities?” in The Conversation.

Image: Chris Swan speaks at the Green Lab at Light City in Baltimore, April 2017. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Erin Green receives nearly $1 million NIH grant for cutting-edge epigenetics research

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.”

Banner image: Erin Green. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC alumnus Jerome Adams nominated for U.S. surgeon general, to replace alumna serving as acting S.G.

The White House has announced the nomination of Jerome Adams ’97, M4, biochemistry and molecular biology, for the position of U.S. surgeon general. If confirmed, he’ll replace Rear Admiral Sylvia Trent-Adams Ph.D. ’06, public policy, who has been serving as acting U.S. surgeon general since late April. Both UMBC alumni have prioritized serving vulnerable populations and maintaining connections to local communities throughout their accomplished careers.

Sylvia Trent-Adams has worked within the U.S. Public Health Service since 1992, after attending college on a Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship and serving as an Army nurse officer. She has spent her years in the Health and Human Services Department “working to improve access to care for poor and underserved communities,” her biography reads. The Office of the Surgeon General further notes, “As a clinician and administrator, she has had a direct impact on building systems of care to improve public health for marginalized populations domestically and internationally.”

Trent-Adams’ accomplishments include managing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009, which had a $2.3 billion budget. She has also advocated for the important role nurses can play in medicine. “We can be involved in many ways: clinically, with creating policy, at the bedside, and creating innovative strategies,” she told the American Journal of Nursing in 2014. “Nurses bring common sense to solving problems.”

Jerome Adams will also bring a patient-focused mindset to the surgeon general role. In October 2014, then-Governor Mike Pence appointed him as the state health commissioner of Indiana. “He has his hands on the pulse of what’s going on in communities,” Virginia Caine, director of the Marin County Health Department, told the Indy Star. “He gets right out there at the grass roots level and really identifies with the folks he needs to serve.”

A few months into his Indiana appointment, Adams found himself dealing with an HIV outbreak driven by intravenous drug use. He advocated for a needle exchange program that Pence approved, first for a 30-day trial period and later in legislation legalizing broader use of such programs in the state. The expansion responded to the program’s demonstrated effectiveness with curbing the HIV outbreak.

During his time as Indiana state health commissioner, Adams advocated for legislation that would give the family members of people struggling with opioid addiction access to Naloxone, a drug that can reverse the effects of opioid overdose. Once confirmed as surgeon general, he hopes to expand on that work to address the rising national opioid crisis.

Adams’ supporters believe his experience working with Pence will serve Americans well as he takes the surgeon general position. As Beth Meyerson of the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention shared with WFYI Public Radio, “He will navigate [Washington] I suspect the same way that he did in Indiana, which is to listen to communities, work with several partners across the arena, and bring public health evidence to the table again as an advocate for community health.”

Reflecting on his time at UMBC as a Meyerhoff scholar, Adams shared with UMBC, “one of my biggest mentors was Dr. Hrabowski, and I still stay in touch with many of my Meyerhoff colleagues and rely on them as a professional support network.” He also pays that support forward, according to Joey Fox, Adams’ legislative director during Indiana’s HIV outbreak. “He was always willing to have his door open,” Fox told the Indy Star. “I got to see the side of him that was a compassionate leader.”

Image: Hubert H. Humphrey Building, home of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, in Washington, DC. Photo by Tim Evanson, used under CC BY-SA 2.0

.

UMBC’s Chris Shuman discusses trillion-ton Antarctic iceberg in U.S. and international media

After keeping scientists on their toes for weeks, the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula parted with a trillion-ton iceberg the size of Delaware on July 12. Chris Shuman, research associate professor at UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, closely followed the rift in the shelf leading up to the iceberg’s separation, and offered expert comments in the media about this complicated milestone.

Although the calving event is momentous, Shuman thinks an imminent collapse of the rest of the Larsen C ice shelf is unlikely. “At this time we don’t see any signs this is going to cause any further breaks,” he told Vox. “On the other hand, this is over 10 percent of the ice shelf area, so that’s not a good sign.”

Scientists will be watching for other signs of ice shelf instability, including accelerating glacier movement, new rifts, and melting pools accumulating on the glacier’s surface, Shuman explained to Buzzfeed. He told The Baltimore Sun that if any of these signs appear, “That would begin to tell us that, ‘Hey, things are probably going to change more in the future.’” Regardless, “The big picture is clear,” Shuman told WJZ-TV. “Changes are happening.”

One factor that makes the broader collapse of Larsen C less likely is that the shelf is still strongly anchored to the continent at the Gipps and Bawden Ice Rises. “If we had seen the Larsen C lose connection with these grounding points … that would have been much stronger evidence the whole shelf is becoming destabilized,” he told Vox. While signs of accelerated breakup are currently lacking, Shuman says scientists will be watching the shelf closely. If it were to collapse, it would contribute to rising sea levels.

It’s currently unclear how much climate change influenced this particular iceberg’s release. “I myself don’t see clear evidence convincing me that this [specific break] is climate change-related,” Shuman told CNN. “Yes, the Larsen C will have retreated farther west than we’ve ever known it to have retreated before. On the other hand, it has dropped large [bergs] before,” he added on CBC News, noting the last time Larsen C released an iceberg of comparable size was in 1986.

Scientists seeking greater clarity on this iceberg and the future of Larsen C will closely monitor the situation as it continues to shift over time, Shuman notes. “You can think of the Larsen C or really any ice shelf like it is a cork in the neck of a champagne bottle lying on its side,” he told NASA Earth Observatory, re-quoted in Christian Science Monitor in February. “Once you pop that cork, the wine inside – all that glacial ice sitting on land – will start flowing out. And that’s worrisome because such thinning land ice is directly increasing global sea levels.”

Moving forward, Shuman will carefully track the iceberg via satellite imagery as it travels north and east. He expects it to take a path toward South Georgia Island, a British territory east of the southern tip of South America, but that’s not guaranteed. Icebergs like this “kind of bump along over a number of years,” Shuman told the Boston Globe. “The other thing is, of course, it may run aground. It’s going to take a period of years to watch this berg’s journey from start to finish.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the uncertainties, Shuman shared with the Globe that “watching the evolution and release of this new large iceberg from the Antarctic Peninsula has been a truly humbling and awe-inspiring experience.”

Read more of Chris Shuman’s comments on the iceberg in CBC News, Buzzfeed, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, Patch, Vox, Forbes, PRI, Christian Science Monitor, KPAX-TV, La Tercera, VOA Noticias, WJZ-TV, CNN, and Motherboard. NASA’s Aqua satellite initially spotted the complete break, and the agency posted its own feature.

Image: A close-up of the rift in the Larsen C ice shelf from November 2016. Photo by John Sonntag for NASA.

UMBC’s Don Engel selected for inaugural cohort of APLU Research Leader Fellows

Don Engel, UMBC’s assistant vice president for research, has been selected as one of just eight participants nationwide in the new Research Leader Fellows program sponsored by the Council on Research within the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). The 18-month program focuses on helping emerging research leaders to develop knowledge and skills in new areas related to supporting university research today and into the future. Participants attend conferences, participate in facilitated meetings as a group, and receive direct mentorship from experienced higher education research leaders. “I think the most valuable thing about this program will be that it will expose me to things that we can do that haven’t been on our horizon, because we haven’t yet thought to look creatively in those directions,” says Engel. In his fellowship proposal, Engel outlined plans for two projects in which he’s already deeply invested. First, Engel is working with the UMBC community to develop makerspaces on campus. While many makerspaces in academic settings create opportunities for students to “learn about tech through tinkering,” Engel says, he would also like to see these spaces “conceived as…tools to advance faculty-led research.” That research could be in any field that “depends on rapid fabrication and prototyping,” such as robotics, or into fabrication techniques themselves, he explains. During the fellowship, Engel will attend the International Symposium of Academic Makerspaces at Case Western Reserve University. Case Western is the site of the world’s largest academic makerspace, and Engel intends to take advantage of the symposium’s location to learn how the university developed and now manages the facility. Engel will also travel to the 2018 World Maker Faire in California. Both trips, along with conversations with other academic institutions that house makerspaces, will inform ideas about best practices for building impactful, sustainable makerspaces at UMBC that serve a wide range of people across the university. Engel also intends to expand his current work with the National Cybersecurity FFRDC (Federally Funded Research and Development Center) during the fellowship. UMBC is a founding partner of the center with the MITRE Corporation and the University of Maryland, College Park. “All parties have been navigating uncharted territory in determining how to leverage each other’s strengths and resources toward the critical cybersecurity of our national commercial sector,” Engel says, and one of his goals is to explore “what the university system can do to better enhance academic engagement in the FFRDC.” His trip to California will facilitate visits with University of California schools—especially useful because they operate similarly to the University System of Maryland and already sustain robust relationships with several national laboratories, a subset of FFRDCs. In the case of both makerspaces and the FFRDC, Engel says, “My time as a fellow will allow me to leverage immediate questions facing UMBC as an opportunity to deeply explore what other institutions have done in the face of similar opportunities.” Broadly, Engel hopes to gain skills that will serve him and UMBC long into the future. He sees the Research Leader Fellows program as an opportunity to learn more about the expansive, cross-disciplinary areas that research leaders are expected to supervise, from research compliance to extramural partnerships. He also anticipates the program will help him, and his fellow participants, develop skills to facilitate campus-wide conversations on research issues across disciplines. “I’m very interested in finding ways to use this as an opportunity to take on new challenges and to think of ways to discover new partnerships or other sorts of resources that will allow us to do things we haven’t done before,” he says. “I want to get people excited to work together on interesting, ambitious projects that will advance human knowledge and education, at UMBC and in collaboration with other universities.” Image: Don Engel speaks at a UMBC research event. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Why do we yawn? UMBC’s Bob Provine dives into a common, but still mysterious behavior on NPR

Yawning may have the dubious distinction of being the least understood common human behavior,” UMBC’s Bob Provine told NPR’s Morning Edition this spring. Yawns can be triggered by boredom, fatigue, hunger, or stress. Although multiple theories attempt to define yawning’s purpose, researchers have yet to settle on a unified explanation of why we yawn.

Provine, professor emeritus of psychology at UMBC, says, “[Yawning] stirs up our physiology, and it plays an important role in shifting from one state to another.” Another study cited by NPR supports the changing-state theory, finding “that yawning has a similar impact on the brain as a dose of caffeine.” Provine mentions that athletes about to compete, musicians about to perform, and military about to enter combat also yawn at higher rates than expected.

However, other studies have not found yawning to have an arousing effect. Rather, their results suggest yawning is important for social bonding. That theory is strengthened by the fact that yawning is contagious—and not only among humans.

“Until the last few years, the feeling was that contagious yawning was unique to humans,” Provine told NPR, but recent studies have found that dogs and chimpanzees also yawn contagiously. Dogs even yawned more often when humans around them yawned, potentially contributing to the emotional bonds people form with their canine companions.

Provine has also been consulted recently for his expertise on another primal vocalization: laughter. In The Trumpet, he shared that his research has found laughter to be most common in “situations of emotional warmth and in groups,” suggesting laughter, like yawning, may contribute to social bonding.

In The Atlantic, Provine commented on how appropriate it was to include laughter on the “Golden Record,” which was launched into space in 1977 intended for discovery by alien life. “Laughing, like crying, is a human instinct. It’s not under conscious control,” he told The Atlantic. “Whereas crying is a solicitation of caregiving, laughter is the signal of play. It is the sound of play, literally.”

Prior to the most recent Atlantic piece, Provine discussed his two decades of laugher research in depth for a popular video produced by the publication, “Why We Laugh.”

Read more of Provine’s recent media on yawning and laughter:

Yawning may promote social bonding even between dogs and humans (NPR)

Why is yawning contagious? (Mental Floss)

A good laugh (The Trumpet)

Solving the mystery of whose laughter is on the golden record (The Atlantic)

 Image: Dog yawning. Photo by Nate Steiner, via Flickr, public domain.

UMBC researchers address diverse factors impacting U.S. schooling

UMBC researchers from across the humanities and social sciences recently earned press coverage for their work exploring factors that shape K–12 education in the United States. From inclusive language in classrooms to math pedagogy, each offers insights to spur change and further research to improve children’s educational experiences.

Christine Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture, writes in The Conversation about how language differences among students can affect student outcomes. “Studies have found that at all levels of education, instructors often favor students who sound like themselves and can be biased against those who don’t,” writes Mallinson. Compounding the problem, “As the U.S. student population continues to rapidly diversify along cultural and linguistic lines, the demographics of the teacher population remain stable at roughly 82 percent white and predominantly female,” meaning non-white students experience negative bias more often.

Mallinson explains that students who are repeatedly told their way of speaking is wrong internalize that message, which may result in students speaking up less often in class. To help educators take on this challenge, Mallinson and colleagues developed a series of webinars, a podcast, and an app called “Valuable Voices” replete with classroom exercises to help students and educators understand and value linguistic diversity.

“Ensuring that students, peers and teachers from diverse backgrounds understand and communicate respectfully with each other is often just as important as helping students understand the material in their textbooks,” writes Mallinson. “Language matters—not just for fostering mutual respect, but for making sure that every student has an equal opportunity to succeed.”

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Public School System bucked the trend in teacher demographics that Mallinson notes, with a teacher workforce that identified as 71 percent African American serving a predominantly African American student body. However, immediately following Katrina, substantial school system restructuring deeply impacted the teacher workforce, and by 2014, fewer than 50 percent of city teachers were black.

Jane Arnold Lincove, associate professor of public policy, detailed how teacher demographics changed in New Orleans after Katrina in a new study featured in The Hechinger Report. The study, published by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University, noted that 4,300 fired teachers “were replaced with teachers who were paid less, had less experience, and were more likely to be white and from out of state.” The restructured school district also no longer offers pensions.

These changes have the potential to negatively affect the city’s student body, including having a disproportionately negative impact on black students, given “a bevy of research showing that black kids benefit from having black teachers,” achieving higher referral rates to advanced classes and higher graduation rates, the Report notes. Lincove’s study data only extended to 2013, so it’s unclear what effect a push after that to hire more local teachers may have had.

Christopher Rakes, assistant professor of education, argues in The Conversation that a “culture of over-testing” in the last two decades is another factor that’s shaped teaching. Specifically, Rakes believes testing has contributed to the persistence of math lessons based on rote memorization of procedures to solve specific problem types. These methods are “so common that [they’re] seldom even questioned,” although there is evidence to suggest that concentrating on teaching conceptual understanding is more effective, Rakes says.

With rote learning, Rakes writes, “Children can become dependent on tricks and rules that don’t hold true in all situations, making it harder to adapt their knowledge to new situations,” but with a more conceptual framework, “less information has to be memorized, and students can translate their knowledge to new situations more easily.”

Rakes acknowledges that teaching conceptually “may require additional time commitments both in and outside the classroom,” but, “research has provided evidence that teaching conceptually has benefits not offered by traditional teaching. And students who learn conceptually typically do as well or better on achievement tests.” That means even if testing continues to be the norm to gauge learning, switching to a more concept-focused math curriculum would benefit student success.

More important than any test, “Teaching [conceptually] is a critical first step if students are to begin recognizing mathematics as meaningful,” writes Rakes. “Conceptual understanding is a key ingredient to helping people think mathematically and use mathematics outside of a classroom.”

The article has generated substantial public interest and discussion, and has so far been read over 17,000 times worldwide.

Image: Christine Mallinson, third from right, meets with graduate students. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s John Rennie Short discusses globalization and urban issues in U.S. and international press

John Rennie Short, an expert on globalization, urban and environmental issues, and political geography, recently shared his research and perspective on current global trends in several U.S. and international publications. Most recently, the professor of public policy has commented on topics from shifting political parties to the rapid growth of cities and their roles in society.

In Christian Science Monitor, Short addressed recent seismic shifts in global politics. In this spring’s French election, neither one of the two traditionally-dominant parties’ presidential candidates advanced to the second round of voting, demonstrating “a rupture of the traditional political establishment,” Short said, and reflecting a larger trend in politics seen in Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory.

Short added that “we are in a new political era,” where leaders who hope to preserve Western values must address voters’ very real “economic pain, their cultural uncertainty, and their political anger at the system” and be “aware of the new sensibilities that have been brought to the surface.”

On Radio Sputnik, Short discussed another course change in politics. The Philippine president announced that the Filipino military would begin to occupy certain islands in the South China Sea, an area to which China lays claim. “This is very strange, because [President] Duterte had spent the last few months encouraging closer ties with China,” Short said, adding that the action was a “provocative move” that would label the Philippines an unpredictable ally for China.

In Smithsonian Magazine, Short addressed a historical issue in political geography, commenting on the construction of early maps of North America, where trade priorities could supersede political considerations. In these early maps, “the coastlines were accurate, but they weren’t as concerned about the interiors,” says Short. The attitude was, “as long as you keep bringing the beavers, we don’t care.”

Short has also produced several new publications related to contemporary urbanism, including A Research Agenda for Cities. This volume, which he edited, features case studies from around the world addressing topics such as gentrification, gender, creative economies, and sustainability.

In a piece for the Elgar blog, Short says it’s crucial to research cities because “we are living in an urban moment. The majority of people now lives in cities. Cities are at the very heart of transformations of political economy, civil society and governmentality. They are the setting for progressive politics and the context for new human–nature relations.”

Short also explores how cities can illuminate broader global shifts as “nodes in a global network of flows of people, ideas and practices.” Cities are highly fluid places, Short suggests, constantly “learning from each other and testing policies, with the more successful ones diffused, adopted, and adapted around the global network.”

In Global Citizen, Short adds, “Technology is transferable, knowledge is transferable, consultants move around, there’s a global circulation.” That’s part of the reason he believes cities have a major role to play in combating climate change, the focus of the Global Citizen piece. The other reason is much more practical: “Emotionally you can think of the polar bears and the warming Arctic, but when push comes to shove it still seems a bit distant,” he says. “But the air quality in your city is definitely a real issue,” and, he suggests, it can motivate cities to take action to curb pollution.

Short also addresses reasons that public transportation in U.S. cities lags far behind our European counterparts on The Academic Minute. He suggests the relevant factors include an American “love affair with the automobile,” suburban sprawl, and a large-scale dismantling of privately-owned mass transportation companies in the 1950s. However, he also sees younger Americans as more interested than previous generations in accessing public transit options, and less interested in owning cars, which he suggests could soon cause a sea change in U.S. transportation trends and investments. The interview followed up on a previous article Short wrote for The Conversation (“Why is the U.S. unwilling to pay for good public transportation?”), which was republished by Business Insider, Quartz, Slate, Newsweek, and others, and has been read nearly 300,000 times worldwide.

Reaching this kind of a broad public audience is a commitment Short considers central to his work as university researcher and educator. “Research and knowledge needs to be circulated widely and freely available to as many people as possible. If it is just for a small privileged elite it loses its moral center and social purpose,” he suggests. “Those of us lucky to teach in the academy have the responsibility and obligation where, when, and how we can to advance civic debates and enlightened discourse.”

National media coverage of UMBC leadership highlights collaboration as key to inclusive campus culture

For 25 years President Freeman Hrabowski has led UMBC’s growth as a teaching and research powerhouse with a reputation for inclusive excellence, in partnership with colleagues across the university, the state, and the nation. Recently, several media outlets have asked him to share what he’s learned along the journey, and how UMBC can serve as a model for other institutions at various stages of their evolution.

Above all, Pres. Hrabowski emphasizes how creating a campus culture that effectively supports all students requires close collaboration with all university stakeholders. “It’s only when there is a cultural difference, focusing on everybody from faculty, staff to administration, saying the success of students from different backgrounds is a top priority on campus—only then can you make a difference,” Hrabowski said in The Hechinger Report.

Michael Summers, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring, shared with Hechinger how the Meyerhoff Scholars program, founded at UMBC in 1988, catalyzed a transformation in campus culture, eventually creating an environment where students from all backgrounds are expected to excel. When faculty members are consistently exposed to large numbers of high-achieving minority students, he said, “it changes what that faculty member expects from all students of color.”

Harvey Mudd College is among numerous institutions nationwide to find inspiration in UMBC’s philosophy of inclusive excellence—achieving excellence through (rather than in spite of) welcoming a diverse range of voices to build community together. “Freeman is extraordinary,” Harvey Mudd President Maria Klawe told Inc., in describing how Pres. Hrabowski helped the college rethink their approach to supporting women and minority students in STEM. “After a 20-minute talk, the language just changed,” she recalled. “Unsurpassed excellence and diversity at all levels became part of the strategic plan.”

In EducationDIVE, Hrabowski stressed how important the representation of diverse perspectives is on university leadership teams for those teams to be most effective and to provide role models for diverse students. To accomplish this, he says it’s important to create more pathways for non-traditional candidates to enter university leadership roles, and also necessary to prioritize diversity among staff and faculty at all levels.

These factors come into play not just in broad ways across university administration, but also at the highest levels of campus leadership, Hrabowski told Inside Higher Ed, in their coverage of an Aspen Institute report on the future of the college presidency. He noted, “We have to ask ourselves and our boards, are we developing and identifying talent, faculty and staff who can move into high-level positions, and are we getting them the experience to prepare them for the presidency?”

Additionally, Hrabowski told Inside Higher Ed, as some critics question the value of higher education today, “We have to be able to show our institutions have a particular mission and role to play in our communities and nation and beyond.”

Part of that role is “to prepare our students to understand the importance of the word ‘citizen,’” he further explained in an interview for The New York Times. “The challenge is to make sure that educated people have a good understanding of all the different disciplines and how they connect,” he told “Corner Office” columnist Adam Bryant. “It’s about critical thinking.”

Pres. Hrabowski also emphasizes in his New York Times interview the importance of a sense of critical self-awareness, for both individuals and institutions. “Even when I was a grad student, I would always speak up and say what I thought was not working well,” Hrabowski shared. “So people would tell me, ‘Then you do it.’ I was always working with other people and saying, ‘Let’s figure out how to make this better.’” After all, he has reflected in interviews throughout the spring, critique becomes effective when it is paired with a community’s willingness to continually work toward growth, with a shared vision of excellence in mind.

Image: Pres. Freeman Hrabowski and students on the Administration Building green roof. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Christy Ford Chapin recalls lost history of the U.S. health care system in New York Times op-ed

As U.S. lawmakers consider possible paths forward in reshaping health care and health insurance, UMBC’s Christy Ford Chapin has published detailed analysis of historical health care models to inform today’s discussions. Chapin, assistant professor of history, is the author of the award-winning book Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Insurance System. Since its publication, she has commented in numerous media outlets on the history of health insurance and factors to consider in developing effective reform.

In a New York Times op-ed, published just ahead of Senate Republican’s release of proposed new health care legislation, Chapin suggests that both Republicans and Democrats “have stumbled to enact comprehensive health care reform because they insist on patching up a rickety, malfunctioning model.” The Democrats’ Affordable Care Act only “added a cracked support beam or two,” and a Republican bill recently passed by the House “will knock those out to focus on spackling other dilapidated parts of the system,” she writes.

But Chapin’s piece isn’t just a critique. She also offers fresh ideas for consideration, based on often forgotten historical models. Reflecting on the perspective she brings to the conversation, Chapin notes, “Historians can use narrative to explain seemingly complex issues, add nuance to national conversations, and highlight overlooked facts.”

Chapin explains that in the early 20th century, a variety of models to organize and pay for health care existed in the U.S. “Unfortunately,” however, “the leaders of the American Medical Association (AMA) saw early health care models…as a threat,” and, she suggests, exercised their power with hospitals and on state licensing boards to retaliate against physicians who participated in them.

After World Word II, President Harry Truman proposed a government-managed universal health care system, similar to some in post-war Europe. In response, writes Chapin, “AMA officials decided that the best way to keep the government out of their industry was to design a private sector model: the insurance company model.”

Chapin argues in the Times that over the years, “because of the perceived threat of reform, insurers weathered rapidly rising medical costs and unfavorable financial conditions to expand coverage from about a quarter of the population in 1945 to about 80 percent in 1965. However, she writes in a related piece for Dissent, “Despite the extraordinary growth of private insurance, high policy costs prevented insurance companies from extending protection to a politically satisfactory percentage of the elderly.” In response, the federal government introduced Medicare in 1965.

Medicare was also designed around the insurance company model, because at the time “the private health care sector had far more capacity to manage a large, complex program than did the government,” writes Chapin in the Times. With more seniors insured, demand for health services spiked. This led insurance companies to introduce cost-containment efforts like standardizing which procedures would be covered for which health conditions, and “shaping the practice of medicine”—exactly what the AMA originally feared would result from government involvement.

Chapin contends in the Times that “to actually bring down costs, legislators must roll back regulations to allow market innovation outside the insurance company model.” In Dissent she further argues, “Only fundamental reforms that reduce corporate influence over health care can make generous universal coverage possible.”

Looking toward the future, Chapin points out that innovative plans are starting to re-emerge in pockets of the country, though they are limited by insurance regulations designed to prevent such practices. Rather than piecemeal workarounds across the country, she suggests a “universal system that grants individuals subsidies to purchase coverage from any medical plan—not just insurance companies.”

“It’s a simple plan for universal care,” Chapin suggests in Dissent. “But it’s also a plan that will drastically reduce costs, encourage doctors to find innovative health care solutions, and liberate the system from corporate control.”

Chapin’s ideas have already sparked conversations across the country, with her New York Times op-ed quickly climbing to top spot as the paper’s most-shared article on its publication day. Learn more about Christy Chapin’s historically-informed perspective on health insurance in The New York Times, Dissent, Forbes, Process, on WYPR, and on EconTalk, one of the nation’s most popular academic podcasts. Read her response to a critique of her work at NewsMax.

Image: Christy Ford Chapin gives a presentation about her work. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Lipi Mukherjee receives NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship for atmospheric physics research

Lipi Mukherjee, Ph.D. student in atmospheric physics at UMBC, has received the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF), which will provide funding to support her research for up to three years. Mukherjee is focused on creating a model to more quickly and precisely detect particles dissolved in large bodies of water that can reduce survival of local aquatic life, cause algal blooms, and modulate global climate.

Satellites in space collect data that describe the light reflected by the ocean’s surface. Current analysis methods allow scientists to use the ocean’s reflectance profile to infer what kind of particles the light interacted with in the water, the water’s depth, and the sea floor’s structure. Although valuable, these methods are slow, require a great deal of computer power, and can’t always distinguish between situations that produce similar data output for different reasons.

Mukherjee’s model will significantly speed up the analysis process by streamlining it to a single equation, while at the same time incorporating additional parameters to improve precision. Specifically, the model will detect the presence of colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM, mostly dead plants) and phytoplankton (tiny photosynthetic organisms), which contribute to dangerous algal blooms. Phytoplankton themselves have highly complex impacts, playing a role in global carbon regulation (by absorbing large volumes of carbon dioxide) while also posing direct threats to marine life by producing toxic compounds.

New in Mukherjee’s model will be the ability to detect water’s turbidity, or choppiness, by measuring polarization of the light returning to the satellites’ sensors. Light in calm water is generally polarized, meaning every light wave is heading in the same direction. In choppy water, the light gets bounced around, changing its polarization. Her model will also take advantage of UV light data for the first time, useful because dissolved organic matter and plankton absorb UV light. The structure of her equation will also make it easier to determine which parameter is responsible for changes in reflectance.

The project requires strong computer programming skills, which Mukherjee has picked up since moving to the United States in 2010, after completing undergraduate and master’s degrees in India in physics, with an electronics concentration. She found a welcoming environment in The Graduate School at UMBC and shares that from the beginning “everyone was very helpful and open.” In particular, Todd Pittman, professor of physics, and Michelle Massey, assistant director of International Education Services, provided a great deal of support as Mukherjee transitioned to UMBC.

Earning the NESSF fellowship is especially noteworthy for a non-U.S. citizen, because preference is given to proposals of equal caliber from American scientists, meaning Mukherjee’s proposal had to go above and beyond the high bar set by proposals from American colleagues. Mukherjee almost didn’t apply for that reason, but her advisor, Pengwang Zhai, assistant professor of physics, encouraged her and provided key support throughout the application process.

Mukherjee shares that she is thankful for the “close-knit community” in the physics department, including faculty and fellow graduate students. Even before moving to the U.S., she says, “I always wanted to do a Ph.D. in physics, and I always dreamed of working for NASA.” Now, she is one step closer.

Image: An algal bloom on the Bering Sea, captured by a NASA satellite and edited by Stuart Rankin. Used under Creative Commons License 2.0.

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