In fall 2022, the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at UMBC and the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) received a five-year, $13.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enhance recruitment and training of junior faculty and promote inclusive excellence at UMBC. Since then, UMBC and UMSOM teams have been planning programming for the incoming FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) cohort, undertaking faculty searches, and otherwise preparing for their new colleagues’ arrival.
As of this fall, four new UMBC faculty members and three new UMSOM faculty have been selected, with three more to be added at UMSOM. Two of UMBC’s hires are busy doing research, recruiting students, and settling into their new positions. The other two will officially assume their roles in January, but they are already visiting campus and starting to set up their laboratory spaces.
In November, the leads on the grant from both institutions and all the new hires gathered at UMBC for a reception to celebrate their first semester and build community among the cohort.
A talented group
“Although I have only been on board for three months, I already feel the leadership’s dedication to supporting early-career faculty, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds, through professional development and tailored resources,” shared Cheng-Yu Li, a new assistant professor of biological sciences at UMBC hired through the program. “I am excited to work alongside this talented group of scientists and contribute to advancing neuroscience research, education, and outreach.”
Left: Manfred Van Dulmen, UMBC’s provost, addresses attendees at the reception to celebrate the FIRST faculty. Jim Kaper, professor of microbiology and immunology and the UMSOM lead on the grant; Roger Ward, UMSOM provost; and Valerie Sheares Ashby, UMBC president, look on (from left to right). Right: Valerie Sheares Ashby, UMBC president, addresses the FIRST reception attendees. (Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17)
Li’s research straddles neuroscience and behavior. His model system, African cichlid freshwater fish, is useful for studying reproductive and social behaviors, such as courtship rituals and aggression. Many of the mechanisms involved are applicable across a wide range of species.
Carmen Muñoz-Ballester, another new assistant professor of biological sciences at UMBC, is finding her department colleagues and the FIRST cohort to be helpful resources as she navigates her first year.
“The Department of Biological Sciences at UMBC provides a very supportive environment for building a scientific career, and I am very happy to be part of this thriving community,” Muñoz-Ballester says. “Life as a faculty member can be overwhelming at the beginning, and having the opportunity to share challenges and small wins with people in similar situations makes it much better. I am very glad to have my peers to count on in my daily life, and I am committed to making the most of this opportunity and paying it forward to future trainees and colleagues.”
Muñoz-Ballester’s work focuses on sex differences in the response to traumatic brain injury. Severe or repeated brain injuries (such as seen in football players) are getting more attention today, and men suffer more traumatic brain injuries overall, but she notes that women tend to have worse outcomes than men after sustaining less-severe brain injuries. Muñoz-Ballester will work to unpack the neural mechanisms behind the effects of these injuries in both sexes, potentially leading to more effective treatments.
William R. LaCourse, dean of UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and UMBC lead on the FIRST grant, addresses attendees at the reception. (Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17)
Tackling the biggest challenges
Diana Elizondo and Gretchen Alicea will round out the FIRST cohort at UMBC. Elizondo is an immunologist who uses mice to study signaling pathways involved in inflammation and metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity. Alicea focuses on how metabolic changes in the environment immediately surrounding malignant tumors are related to the risk of metastasis. Jose Lemme, Alisha Blazer, and Amed Outtara have been brought on board at UMSOM.
William R. LaCourse, CNMS dean, is thrilled to welcome these new members of the faculty to UMBC. Their research interests include some of the most pressing issues society faces today, like cancer and obesity. These researchers are also approaching study areas that may deserve more attention from innovative angles.
“Thank you for choosing our institutions to be a part of your academic careers. We want you to know that your success goes beyond the UM FIRST program and even beyond tenure. Your success is that you always find joy in research, mentoring, teaching, and life,” LaCourse said at the reception. “This room is full of individuals who are there for you.”
African cichlids, a group of thousands of freshwater fish species, present a wide range of distinctive mating and parental care behaviors. However, the mechanisms that drive these behaviors are poorly understood. Cheng-Yu Li, assistant professor of biological sciences and a member of the UM FIRST faculty cohort, and colleagues have discovered a new clue in this mystery and published their results in Current Biology. A wide range of vertebrate species exhibit versions of these behaviors, so Li and colleagues hope their research will contribute to a broader understanding of the neural mechanisms that are behind them.
Cheng-Yu Li (courtesy of Li)
Using an African cichlid species, Astatotilapia burtoni, asthe model organism, the authors identified that a group or neurons called ciliated olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) are the key type of cell responsible for detecting female reproductive pheromones. They further pinpointed a specific pheromone receptor, Or113a, that regulates males’ reproductive behavior.
In male cichlids, sensory neurons expressing the Or113a receptor detect cues derived from a pheromone called prostaglandin F2ɑ, or PGF2ɑ. PGF2ɑ functions both as a female hormone that regulates female mating behavior and as a pheromone that attracts males when females are reproductively receptive. Knocking out their Or113a receptors limited males’ preference for water taken from near a sexually receptive female. Silencing the males’ relevant sensory neurons by knocking out a protein called Cnga2b eliminated the preference entirely.
PGF2ɑ on its own is attractive to males in some fish species, such as zebrafish and goldfish, however, but male A. burtoni cichlids are insensitive to PGF2ɑ. This suggests that PGF2ɑ must be converted into a different chemical in reproductive females or that more than one pheromone is involved in the male attraction response. That makes evolutionary sense, Li explains, because many species of cichlids and other fish living in the African Great Lakes may use PGF2ɑ for pheromone signaling. If it was the only signal, there would be a high probability of interbreeding between cichlid species, or a male could mistakenly approach females of predator species. Using more than one signal would solve this problem. Li and colleagues are actively working on finding additional pheromone clues to further unravel this complex signaling system.
A puzzle worth brooding over
Discovering a neurological mechanism driving males’ attraction to females was exciting for Li, but an unusual observation during their trials added to the study’s impact. Many cichlids “mouth brood,” or carry their eggs in their mouths for several weeks until the larvae can swim on their own. In most species, including the one used in Li’s study, the female is the exclusive mouth brooder. However, Li’s study found that males with mutations in the genes of cnga2b or or113a would take eggs into their mouths as a female would. But only 30 percent of the males who picked up eggs would mouth brood them until hatching; the other 70 percent immediately swallowed the eggs.
Li and colleagues had expected the males with mutated receptors to alter their preference for water containing female pheromones, but the mouth brooding was a surprise. “That was kind of outside of our expectations,” Li says. “It’s something that we had never heard before, and we didn’t even predict that would happen.”
Left: A female A. burtoni holds eggs in her mouth. Right: A male A. burtoni, the cichlid species Li studies, carries eggs in his mouth and ignores nearby food pellets. (Photos courtesy of Li)
To explain the male mouth brooding, “Our first guess is that the PGF2ɑ-derived pheromone cues play dual roles,” Li says. “The first role is to attract males during mating. But it may also inhibit male mouth-brooding behavior. So once you knock out this receptor, this circuit turns on in the males, and they become mouth brooders as well.” In other words, mouth brooding may be the default behavior in both species, but some mechanism driven by pheromones normally turns it off in males.
Supporting this hypothesis, Li and his colleagues found that in blackchin tilapia, a different cichlid species where males normally mouth brood the eggs until hatching, the males may have a naturally occurring mutation in the same Or113a gene. That supports the idea that the phenomenon of male mouth-brooding, and the mechanism that regulates it, “ is a regular mechanism in the field, not just some weird example we saw in the lab,” says Li.
The next question is what additional cues may be required to induce full-term mouth brooding. Li and colleagues are investigating.
Connections across species
Cichlids have a complex social status system, demonstrate significant parental care, and present a diverse set of distinctive mating behaviors, traits they have in common with a wide range of species. Even some of the mechanisms are shared across large evolutionary distances. For example, the hormone prolactin drives parental care in fishes, mice, and even humans.
“We are using this simple model in cichlids, which are easy to breed and easy to study in the lab, and exploring mechanisms that may have broader biological relevance. It’s a wonderful model where we can bridge ecology and evolution concepts with neuroscience,” Li says. “By gaining deeper insights into what regulates parenting behavior, we can identify key neurons and genes in the brain involved in this process, with the goal of uncovering mechanisms that may be shared across various species.”
UMBC at the Universities at Shady Grove finds itself uniquely situated—at home within the country’s third largest biotech hub where the demand for highly skilled workers is growing. These Retrievers are filling specialized roles after graduating with the training they need to succeed in this booming industry.
It’s an early Friday morning in the Biological Sciences and Engineering Building and nine students, working in small groups, are bustling back and forth between fume hoods and a large centrifuge. They carefully swish flasks containing cells and growth medium. The smell of sanitizing alcohol pervades the space. Neon orange test tube racks and turquoise tube caps stand out within the sterile white look of the work benches, hoods, and lab coats.
As the cells use oxygen to release energy, they produce carbon dioxide. The CO2 turns the solution yellow, indicating successful cell growth. After the experiment, students sterilize their solution with bleach for disposal; in response to the alkalinity, it blooms to a brilliant magenta. In another room, one student offers tips to her classmate on how to use a pipet more effectively, and the instructor flits between groups, answering questions as needed—but for the most part, the students operate confidently on their own.
This is a regular day in Biotechnology 303: Applied Cell Biology in UMBC’s Translational Life Science Technology (TLST) program. The program, offered by UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS) exclusively at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG), a multi-institution education facility in Rockville, Maryland, is designed to offer hands-on training to prepare students for careers in the booming biotech industry in USG’s backyard.
Elizabeth Friar (left) and Samantha Petros ’23 have stayed in touch since Petros graduated.
A clear direction
It was the promise of experiential work with real-world applications that drew Samantha Petros ’23 to the TLST program. “I really liked the convenience of the USG campus, and a lot of the courses were really focused on hands-on learning,” she says. Without really knowing what the work would look like before she started the program, “I was able to try out a lot of different things in a very low-stakes environment and get an idea as to what I found interesting.”
That turned out to be cell culture work. Applied Cell Biology with Elizabeth Friar, lecturer and undergraduate program director in TLST, “cemented that benchwork is what I enjoy doing,” Petros says. From then on, “There was a clearly defined arrowhead in the direction I wanted to go.”
That was a big shift from where she started, as a film major at Montgomery College (MC). A virology course to meet her science requirement turned her on to MC’s biotech associate degree, and then she transitioned to the TLST program at UMBC. After learning some basic lab techniques in TLST classes, she landed a part-time job, where she carried out entry-level manufacturing tasks for malaria vaccines. Today, Petros is thriving as a cell culture specialist studying malaria at Axle Informatics, a contractor for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The position she’s in now traditionally requires a master’s degree, which she doesn’t have—yet, anyway. “Knowing that I have valuable skill sets from TLST—working in manufacturing, getting good connections with my professors, and going to the networking events that TLST offers—all of that compounds and has got me to where I am now,” Petros says. “I genuinely believe that I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all of those factors, with TLST obviously being the biggest one.”
Location, location, location
TLST is a young program, but it is growing quickly. The first class—just two students—arrived in fall 2019. Friar joined in summer 2020 and began laying the groundwork for the program’s eventual growth. Today, “It’s humming along,” she says. There are currently 50 students who have declared TLST as their major. “Now we’re thinking about what we can do next. How can we expand?”
TLST is unique as the only undergraduate STEM program at UMBC without a footprint on the main campus. The location choice at USG is intentional. The Capital Biohealth Region, encompassing the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland, is the third most competitive biotech hub in the country—and Montgomery County, Maryland, is the hub of the hub, boasting more than 350 life science companies and located a stone’s throw from the NIH, FDA, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For TLST alumni, the employment options are seemingly limitless: 80 percent of American pharmaceutical companies are within a two-hour drive, and they can expect a nearly 23 percent growth rate in the biotech industry over the next 10 years—well above the national average.
As Friar puts it, “Regenxbio is down the street. MacroGenics is down the street. MilliporeSigma is opening their new lab right next door, and they’ve now hired eight of our alumni. Soon we’ll have an NIH vaccine lab right down the street. ATCC is right down the street.” All these biotech companies need qualified workers—and TLST is providing them.
Steven Schaffer (right) and Princess Nyamali work under a biosafety cabinet in Elizabeth Friar’s Applied Cell Biology course.
Training lifetime learners
Jeff Galvin, CEO of American Gene Technologies (AGT), has hired TLST alumni and would hire more. “The TLST program seems to provide a great overview of not just biotechnology techniques,” he says, but it gives students “an understanding of the business in general. I find that UMBC students lean toward being self-motivated problem-solvers. It seems that the administration from the top all the way down promotes that idea of creating value through creative, hard work.”
Titina Sirak ’20, TLST, had a major impact at AGT. She established a brand-new laboratory certified to handle human cells from scratch, Galvin says, “And that’s not easy—there’s a lot of regulations associated with that, even economics.” While she wasn’t an expert at first, “she was able to do enough things right that the project came to life.”
Galvin emphasizes the importance of “learning how to learn,” saying, “Things are changing so fast, that it’s the folks who can adapt and become lifetime learners who are going to be the most successful.And that’s something I saw from the students coming out of TLST.”
A vision fulfilled
So far, TLST has graduated 25 students, and 94 percent of them were employed in the biotech industry within three months of walking across the Commencement stage. “We’ve had a number of really standout students who have gone on to do really great things, so I’m very excited about how it’s going,” Friar says.
Merryll Kallungal ’24 works under a biosafety cabinet at ATCC. Interns Jason Bose (left) and Tamilore Akinde (second from left) and an ATCC lead scientist observe.
So is William R. LaCourse, CNMS dean, which offers the TLST program. He envisioned the program years before the first two students walked onto the USG campus, and it came together with input from faculty at Montgomery College and five departments at UMBC.
“TLST is an innovative and practical education that combines ‘know-what’ and ‘know-how,’” says LaCourse. “It is a highly flexible program with various pathways to serve the ever-changing needs of a growing industry. TLST is where the silos of disciplines break down and cross-disciplinary knowledge is the goal—both in content and practice.”
The program is shaping up just as LaCourse and Annica Wayman ’99, mechanical engineering, and former associate dean for Shady Grove Affairs in CNMS who led TLST’s launch, had hoped. The state of Maryland is growing its biotech hub while UMBC students are gaining the skills they need to succeed in the workplace and getting well-paying jobs, and the student population is growing.
Connections that build confidence
Just as important as high-demand lab skills, students and alumni value the relationships they’ve formed with faculty. “Every teacher I had was very supportive, very understanding, very willing to work with me,” Petros says. “I think it’s important to get your money’s worth out of college, and I definitely feel like I got that and more in TLST because of the support network that I had there and my teachers.”
Petros is still in touch periodically with Wayman and Friar. “Dr. Wayman was a shining inspiration. She’s just a wonderful person. She’s so knowledgeable and always willing to help,” Petros says. The support she has and the success she’s found now have inspired Petros to look back and help those coming up behind her. In addition to USG resources, as a student Petros attended networking events offered by BioBuzz, a community resource for biotech industry professionals and job seekers in the Capital Biohealth Region. In fact, it’s how she found her current role.
Today Petros is a BioBuzz Ambassador. “I wish I had known about BioBuzz when I first started in biotech,” she says. “Now I want to be that advocate for younger students or people who are just starting in science.”
A strong foundation
“Our students come to us because they want to make a difference in people’s lives, but they don’t necessarily want to go to medical school,” Friar says. It doesn’t hurt that “we have some really spectacular facilities that are a real draw for students,” she adds.
The Biological Sciences and Engineering Building opened at USG in fall 2019 and boasts beautiful modern laboratories and classrooms plus plenty of comfy nooks for meeting with a study group or just relaxing. TLST has also received over $1 million dollars from the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals, some of which has supported further upgrades and additions to the teaching laboratories.
A flow cytometer, a machine that can detect properties of interest in up to 10,000 cells per minute, will enable a new mixed undergraduate/graduate course in flow cytometry launching next spring, for example. And equipment to practice skills like protein purification, biomanufacturing processes, and cell culture create rare opportunities for undergraduates. A required TLST course covers the wide range of instrumentation you might find in a modern biotech laboratory.
It’s normal for students to start off nervous when they use complicated and expensive equipment or work with human cells for the first time. “But by the end, they are old hands, and I think they would feel comfortable tackling anything in that lab on their own,” Friar says. “And it’s because the curriculum is really well scaffolded. We add skills as they go along, and then we repeat the old skills. The program is set up to foster growth and independence.”
Princess Nyamali stepped away from the centrifuge for a moment during Biotechnology 303 to share that the TLST coursework “is a really good foundation.” She’s currently completing an internship at NIST, and “everything I’m learning in this cell culture class is stuff I’m doing at NIST.” While it might have been daunting at first, trying so many different things across the TLST curriculum “helps you know that you want to do it,” she says, in addition to showing potential employers that you can.
TLST student Fae Switzer works at the microscope with guidance from her mentor, Emma Todd, at ATCC.
Thinking ahead
Although the two-year program initially targeted transfers from regional community colleges, “we were getting so much interest from students on the Catonsville campus, we went ahead and put it on the list of majors for freshmen applying to UMBC,” Friar says. “That’s been the fastest growing cohort in our major.”
Steven Schaffer transferred to TLST after starting on the main campus in bioinformatics. Now he is in the bioinformatics track within TLST; the other option is a biomanufacturing track. Schaffer likes that there is a strong cohort connection because everyone takes mostly the same classes together. “I would recommend TLST. It’s a growing field and the skills you learn are very versatile,” Schaffer adds.
Schaffer hopes to eventually take on a role that leans into engineering at a place like Northrop Grumman. But before that, he’s eyeing UMBC’s Master of Professional Studies in biotechnology. The M.P.S. degree offers advanced instruction in the life sciences, plus coursework in regulatory affairs, leadership, management, and financial management. Friar describes it as “a cross between a science master’s and an M.B.A.”
Academic decathletes
Soon, the confident students in Friar’s cell biology class will arrive in labs across Montgomery County, the capital region, and beyond. They will contribute to drug discovery and production, design manufacturing processes, and, eventually, lead teams and make strategic decisions for major biotech companies.
Jeff Galvin, the ATG CEO, referred to TLST alumni as “academic decathletes.” Like decathletes, they have an array of skills and perform all of them admirably. But rather than medals, they’re seeking an opportunity to contribute to positive change through their work. They’ll translate basic science into diagnostic tests, treatments for disease, and more to improve the lives of their neighbors in Maryland and those in need around the world.
ATCC’s SPARC internship program offers opportunities for TLST students to conduct meaningful work in the biotech industry. Merryll Kallungal (far left) transitioned from her internship to a full-time role at ATCC this summer.
SPARC-ing Rewarding Careers
Just 10 minutes from USG in Gaithersburg, Maryland, biotech company ATCC has capitalized on the TLST talent pipeline. Their Student Partnership and Research Collaboration (SPARC) Program requires USG enrollment and offers qualified students paid, part-time career opportunities throughout the academic year at ATCC’s research facility. As the leading developer and supplier of authenticated cell lines, microorganisms, and associated data for academia, industry, and government, a successful internship at ATCC is a feather in the cap for students pursuing a TLST degree.
Of the seven interns selected for the SPARC program this year, four are TLST students—and they are thriving. The interns praised their SPARC experience while donning lab coats, shoe booties, safety glasses, and gloves in one of ATCC’s labs—where keeping employees safe and protecting lab samples and products from contamination is mission critical.
“I love the TLST program!” exclaimed Fae Switzer, who has wanted to pursue a career in biotech since she learned about CRISPR, the gene-editing platform, as a child. Switzer, a SPARC associate biologist in the microphysiological unit, notes that things she learned in her UMBC classes prepared her for the internship, and things she’s learning at ATCC now are helping her in her classes.
Jason Bose, a SPARC associate biologist on the microbiology team, knew he was interested in biology, but not medical school. When Bose learned about TLST, he thought, “Wow, this aligns with what I want to do,” he says. “It’s been really great so far.” He even uses the basic coding skills and tricks for Excel spreadsheets that he learned in class—which at the time he wasn’t so sure about. “Yep, I use them all the time at ATCC,” he says.
Tamilore Akinde completed an internship last summer at ATCC’s headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, and now she is a SPARC intern. “I like that TLST teaches multidisciplinary skills,” she says. Being able to pivot toward different opportunities that come her way is valuable, she adds.
“The hands-on lab training provided by the TLST program has prepared students for impactful careers at ATCC,” shares Ruth Cheng, general manager and senior vice president for research and industrial solutions at ATCC. “Witnessing students like Merryll Kallungal transition from the SPARC program to a full-time role in cryobiology R&D is a testament to the power of this collaboration.”
After interning at ATCC, Kallungal graduated from TLST in May and assumed a full-time associate biologist role in the cryobiology group in June. The lab techniques she learned in TLST came in handy at ATCC, and she has already learned a lot of new things, too. “I absolutely love what I do,” she says.
Yonathan Zohar, professor of marine biotechnology, has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Fish Endocrinology. Zohar’s work at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor has produced fundamental discoveries in fish reproductive biology and applied the findings to the aquaculture industry, resulting in major advances. In 2020, the Binational Agricultural Research Development (BARD) Fund, a partnership program between the U.S. and Israel, also recognized Zohar for the outsize economic impact of his research.
In addition to Zohar’s core work in fish reproductive physiology, he has led a decades-long effort to develop land-based aquaculture methods that could bring fresh seafood to inland areas of the United States. Land-based fish production operations avoid pitfalls of open-water aquaculture such as disease, polluted water, and escapes. Land-based aquaculture could also limit the need for long-distance seafood transportation.
Maryland Farm and Harvest on Maryland Public Television (MPT) recently featured Zohar and his colleagues’ work. The aquaculture industry is the world’s fastest growing sector of agriculture, Zohar told MPT. American demand for seafood is rising, and currently, most of it is imported. With a $10 million grant from the USDA, Zohar has been working with team of scientists and government and industry stakeholders from the U.S. and abroad to help move land-based aquaculture toward commercial viability.
“We here at IMET, at the Aquaculture Research Center [ARC], are trying to address all these challenges, bottlenecks, hurdles to this industry so it can become economically feasible as well as—obviously as much as possible—environmentally responsible,” Zohar told MPT.
Yonathan Zohar stands next to a tank full of fish in the Aquaculture Research Center. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Addressing aquaculture’s hurdles
One of those hurdles is figuring out how to bring salmon to market size year round. Typically, salmon only reproduce once per year, Zohar explained. “We are using environmental manipulation to phase shift—to change the time of the spawning of the fish—so the farmer can get good quality eggs all year round,” he said. The team at the ARC has had success spawning salmon six months after their typical spawning time, Zohar told MPT, as a tray of red-orange salmon eggs spawned at IMET showed on the screen. And “if you can do it six months, you can do it four months, three months, all year round,” he said.
Another challenge to land-based systems is the accumulation of sludge—otherwise known as fish poop—in the tanks. Kevin Sowers, professor of marine biotechnology and a microbiology expert, explained that as the water in the fish tanks passes through a filter to be reused, bacterial colonies living on the surface of what look like pieces of wheel-shaped pasta break down the sludge. One of the products is methane gas.
“The goal here is to get rid of that waste, reduce it, and turn it into a product that can be used,” Sowers said. “And the product we produce, the biogas, will actually help power about 10 percent of the energy costs here in the facility.”
Still swimming along
All of these advances represent years or decades of effort by Zohar, Sowers, and additional colleagues to first understand the fundamentals of fish biology and reproduction, and then to find ways of tweaking it that serve the aquaculture industry and address the rising consumer demand for fish.
Zohar may have been doing this for a while, but with the industry on what feels like the cusp of a breakthrough, his continued enthusiasm for his work was obvious on Maryland Farm and Harvest.
“For someone who has been working on aquaculture for over 40 years, well, I have a lot of energy still to make sure that we make this happen,” Zohar told MPT—“that we stop overfishing our oceans and we satisfy the increasing demand of seafood in the United States and in the world.”
Color in Nature, co-authored byThomas W. Cronin, professor of biological sciences, covers the world of color from the first principles of physics to the use of color in art and design. An even mix of text and beautiful images, Color in Nature (Princeton University Press, November 2024)is written in an accessible style for any reader who harbors curiosity about color in our world, without sacrificing technical accuracy.
“The book is a comprehensive look at the roles of color in the biology of plants and animals, but also its role in human society and art,” Cronin says. The authors consider the roles of color in mating, hunting, fighting, deceiving, and hiding, and call upon disciplines such as physics, genetics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology. The book’s images support concepts in the text, but they “are also intended to be beautiful and to show off the diversity of colors and patterns in the natural world,” Cronin says.
Cronin contributed to the new book alongside six other authors from England, New Zealand, and the U.S. Contributors include experts in evolution, optical sciences, neuroscience, marine science, and the creative use of color.
Tom Cronin, fourth from left, with current and former members of his research group at the International Conference on Invertebrate Vision in 2019. (Courtesy of Cronin)
Cronin’s four-decade career at UMBC has been primarily spent studying the unique visual system of mantis shrimp—unusual, wildly colored crustaceans with astoundingly capable eyes and a nasty punch. Cronin’s research group has also studied the chromatophores—light-sensing and color-changing cells—on the skin of cephalopods like squid, octopuses and cuttlefish.
According to the The Wall Street Journal, “Color in Nature provides an accessible scientific entrée into the colors of our world, with bold, glossy images and detailed diagrams.”
David Gascoigne, an expert birder and nature blogger at Travels with Birds, found Color in Nature to be “an eminently fascinating book covering an eminently fascinating topic which has relevance to every aspect of life on Earth. I will be referring to it often, and I will cherish its wisdom. I suspect you will, too.”
Nearly a year ago, a group of engineers and scientists including UMBC physicists became one of 10 teams to successfully submit a proposal to NASA to develop the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS). In October, the AXIS team learned that they were one of the final two instrument designs selected for further development. Over the next year, each of the two teams will receive $5 million to flesh out their plans as part of what NASA calls a “Phase A study.” Then NASA will review the proposals and select one of these two instruments for construction and testing, with plans to launch in the early 2030s.
Adi Foord, assistant professor of physics, andEileen Meyer, associate professor of physics, serve on the AXIS leadership team, and during the proposal development phase, Foord co-led the sub-team focused on supermassive black hole evolution. The AXIS team is led overall by Chris Reynolds at the University of Maryland, College Park and deputy lead Erin Kara at MIT.
Adi Foord is on the AXIS leadership team. (courtesy of Foord)
X-rays come from extremely hot processes such as exploding stars or the accretion of black holes, so tracing them back to their source can paint a picture of galactic formation. As scientists search for life beyond Earth, X-rays could even offer clues about potentially habitable planets.
“We’re extremely excited that AXIS has been chosen for Phase A study! AXIS represents a huge leap forward in high-resolution and high-sensitivity imaging that will allow us to study the early universe and trace the growth of the earliest supermassive black holes,” Foord says. “It’s a unique opportunity to answer some of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics. With AXIS, we’ll have the sensitivity and resolution to detect faint X-ray signals from galaxies in the early universe, offering unprecedented insight into how supermassive black holes formed and evolved over cosmic time.”
A new kind of explorer
This simulated image shows how AXIS would see the sky. It shows a five million-second stare into space, and some of the earliest-detected supermassive black holes are visible. (Stefano Marchesi)
AXIS and the other satellite design selected for further study, PRIMA—also led by scientists in College Park—are competing to be the first in the new Probe Explorer class of NASA missions, which fit neatly between its flagship missions and smaller missions.
“Both of the selected concepts could enable ground-breaking science responsive to the top astrophysics priorities of the decade, develop key technologies for future flagship missions, and offer opportunities for the entire community to use the new observatory, for the benefit of all,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.
“In observational astronomy we are now in the era of big and sensitive surveys of large portions of the sky,” Meyer adds. “AXIS is not only 10 times more sensitive than its predecessor, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, it also has the ability to make high-resolution images over a much larger sky area, or field of view. This is transformative for deep surveys, and AXIS will synergize with a lot of other missions and observatories operating in the 2030s.”
The PANTHYR instrument system is on the upper platform of the Chesapeake Bay Tower on the corner out of view. (Kevin Turpie, GSFC/UMBC)
Climbing 30-meter ladders and avoiding osprey nests might not sound like typical activities for scientists who usually work with equations and models—but it’s all in a day’s work for Kevin Turpie’s team, which includes an international group of scientists and engineers from UMBC, NASA, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) and the Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ), also known as the Flanders Marine Institute, also in Belgium. Over the last 15 months, they have collaborated with Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) staff, with the blessing of the U.S. Coast Guard, to install, monitor, and repair a new instrument on top of a Coast Guard navigation tower in Chesapeake Bay near Tolchester, Maryland.
The instrument, called the Pan-and-Tilt Hyperspectral Radiometer (PANTHYR) and developed by VLIZ, is one of multiple PANTHYRs deployed worldwide. Each is part of the WATERHYPERNET—a growing network of automated instruments that provide measurements to validate observations from space. The WATERHYPERNET concept was developed by RBINS and VLIZ and supported by the European Space Agency (ESA). Another instrument called the HYPSTAR is installed at some other WATERHYPERNET sites, and the Chesapeake Bay station may add one in the future.
The Chesapeake Bay PANTHYR station is the first WATERHYPERNET station installed in North America; others operate off the coasts of France, Italy, Belgium, and Argentina. The new station “will provide a wealth of information regarding water quality and the environmental and ecological conditions in the Upper Chesapeake Bay,” says Turpie, a research associate professor with the Goddard Earth Science Technology and Research Center (GESTAR II), a UMBC partnership with NASA.
A “rigorous test”
The blue dot marks the location of the new Chesapeake Bay WATERHYPERNET station. (Courtesy of Kevin Turpie)
The Chesapeake PANTHYR will also help validate data coming from the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) aboard the recently-launched NASA PACE satellite, which also carries HARP2, an instrument designed and built by UMBC researchers. The station will also provide data to validate many other satellite missions, including NASA’s future Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission, part of the upcoming Integrated Earth System Observatory.
“Observations from space are critical to understanding how our planet functions as a system and how that system is changing. But such measurements are done in the harsh environment of space, looking through the entire atmosphere, and always from several hundred kilometers away,” Turpie explains. “So, we need to compare those data against the same kind of measurements taken at the surface. PANTHYR offers a rigorous test for PACE and its ability to glean vital information about our world’s most critical coastal resources.”
PANTHYR is the newest instrument in the WATERHYPERNET, a global network of instruments managed by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and supported by the European Space Agency.
A challenging work location
The Chesapeake Bay PANTHYR station was installed in July 2023, but encountered challenges due to winter weather, complex logistics, and the collapse of Baltimore’s Key Bridge and subsequent environmental threat assessments. However, after a repair mission in September 2024, PANTHYR is up and running again, and data are streaming in.
Arranging each trip to service PANTHYR is complicated. MDE staff pilot the boats that take the researchers to and from the site, and only tower climbers with special training can access the instrument. Calm weather is a necessity. Plus, in the spring, there’s always a risk that ospreys or eagles will choose the tower for nesting. That makes the instrument inaccessible if young birds are present.
But the team is committed, because the data PANTHYR produces are valuable. Every 20 minutes, PANTHYR measures the intensity of light encountering the surface of the water, the brightness of the sky, and how much light is reflected back from the water’s surface. PANTHYR detects visible and near-infrared light. These are some of the same data collected by satellites like PACE. WATERHYPERNET instruments also help scientists develop improved algorithms for processing the data and monitor phenomena like harmful algal blooms.
A closer view of the PANTHYR instrument on the tower’s upper platform. Components of the station instrument system include (a) solar spectral irradiance instrument, (b) sky and surface radiance instrument, (c) robotics package (with the “pan/tilt” device), (d) cellular antenna, (e) instrument control box, (f) photovoltaic panel, (g) power control box. (Photo by Dieter Vansteenwegen, VLIZ)
“Autonomous stations like this collect a wealth of validation information—more than we get from science cruises or other means, which can be very expensive,” Turpie says. “It’s exciting to get multiple observations a day of the changing water quality and ecosystem conditions of this important coastal estuary. For surface radiometry, this is very important in order to build up as many match ups with satellite observations as possible.”
Moving forward, UMBC is responsible for the maintenance and operation of the PANTHYR station. Turpie and his colleagues will be working hard to keep the station in tip-top shape so that it can continue to produce useful data and inform future satellite missions—with or without the “help” of neighborhood ospreys.
Matthew Fagan led development of the forest patches database that the current study relied on. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
A new study in Naturefinds that up to 215 million hectares of land (an area larger than Mexico) in humid tropical regions around the world has the potential to naturally regrow. That much forest could store 23.4 gigatons of carbon over 30 years and also significantly help enhance biodiversity and water quality. The study showed that more than half of the area with strong potential for regrowth was in five countries: Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, China, and Colombia.
“Tree planting in degraded landscapes can be costly. By leveraging natural regeneration techniques, nations can meet their restoration goals cost effectively,” says the study’s co-lead author, Brooke Williams, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and the Institute for Capacity Exchange in Environmental Decisions. “Our model can guide where these savings can best be taken advantage of,” she says.
A culmination of decades of work
Brooke Williams co-led the new research study. (Courtesy of Williams)
Matthew Fagan, associate professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC and second author on the new study, developed a data set the authors relied on.
In that work, “We used satellite images to identify millions of small areas where tree cover increased over time. We then excluded the areas planted by humans with machine learning, focusing on natural regrowth,” Fagan says. The study tracked regrowth between 2000 and 2012, and then checked if the regrowth was maintained through 2015. “Those natural patches were the input data for this novel study,” he says, “the first to predict where future forest regrowth will occur, given observed past regrowth.”
The study, co-led by Hawthorne Beyer, head of geospatial science at Mombak, a Brazilian startup which aims to generate high-quality carbon credits through reforestation of the Amazon, and director of science at Institute for Capacity Exchange in Environmental Decisions, also pulled in global data sets describing factors like soil quality, slope, road and population density, local wealth, distance from urban centers and from healthy forest, and more. “Any time you build one of these global studies, you’re standing on the backs of so many other scientists,” Fagan says. “Each one of these studies represents years of work.”
The study found that the factors most strongly associated with high regrowth potential were a patch’s proximity to existing forest, the density of nearby forest, and the content of carbon in the soil. Those factors in particular “seem to do a really good job explaining the patterns of regrowth we see across the world,” Fagan says. Being close to existing forest, for example, is key to supplying a variety of seeds to the area to support diverse regrowth, Fagan explains.
Keeping it local—by supplying a global map
The end product of the study is a digital map of the global tropics, where each pixel—representing 30 x 30 square meters of land—indicates the estimated potential for regrowth. That map, made possible by n extensive international collaboration of researchers, is a boon to environmentalists worldwide hoping to advocate locally for their efforts.
“Our goal and our hope is that this is used democratically by local people, organizations, and localities from the county level all the way up to the national level, to advocate for where restoration should happen,” Fagan says. “The people who live there should be in charge of what happens there—where and how to restore really depends on local conditions.”
An example of forest regrowth in the state of Parana, Brazil. (Photo by Robin Chazdon)
Fagan points out that some of the potential regrowth areas the study identified are unlikely to be restored for a variety of reasons, such as being in active use for ranching or crops or located on prime real estate near roads and urban centers. However, a meaningful portion of the 215 million hectares is abandoned and degraded cattle pastures or previously logged forests, where encouraging natural regeneration would have minimal cost to local economies and a long list of benefits.
“If you restored that to rainforest, the benefit to water quality, water provision, local biodiversity, and to soil quality would be immense,” Fagan says. “It would also be an immense benefit for pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, so really it’s just a question of, ‘Where can we do this most efficiently?’ That’s what this paper is all about.”
On October 18, nearly a hundred mathematicians gathered at bwtech@UMBC South for the “Finite Element Circus.” “The circus,” as it is affectionately known by attendees, brings together a global group of mathematicians with research interests in the finite element method (FEM), a numerical technique for solving complex differential equations with its roots in engineering. FEM can be used to solve problems related to structural stress, heat transfer, fluid flow, and more.
In some ways, the circus is a typical academic conference: It’s packed with talks presenting fresh research results. But it is also so much more.
For example, at each circus, attendees add to the multi-volume “Finite Element Circus Book,” a handwritten booklet with a list of talk titles, signatures of attendees, yearbook-style comments, and even humorous math-themed poems penned for the occasion. Posters celebrate each circus—some hand-drawn—and researchers who run over their allotted speaking time get a friendly ribbing from the “ringmaster,” who keeps things running smoothly.
A handwritten poem from one of the earliest iterations of the Finite Element Circus.
Conceived by three mathematicians at a shopping center in Hyattsville, Maryland in 1970, at a time when the finite element method (FEM) was gaining momentum among mathematicians, the circus was first hosted later that year at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since then, it has grown into a tradition among FEM researchers and has been hosted at a range of institutions up and down the East Coast, including at UMBC in 1989, 2006, 2017, and 2024. Inspired by the East Coast circus, there is now also a Finite Element Rodeo held in Texas.
The finite element family
Andrei Draganescu, associate professor of mathematics, organized the UMBC circuses in 2017 and 2024 after attending regularly since 2011. His two Ph.D. advisors at the University of Chicago, Todd Dupont and Ridgway Scott, were among the first generation of circus attendees.
“So we are part of the history,” Draganescu says. “The circus really brings people together. It’s great that UMBC is part of the circuit.”
Manil Suri, professor of mathematics at UMBC, organized the 1989 circus. One of his Ph.D. advisors, Ivo Babuska, was a circus founder and served as the ringmaster for many years. Well known for his wit and high expectations, he kept the talks on schedule and encouraged younger mathematicians. Suri remembers giving one of his earliest research talks at the 1989 circus.
“Fortunately, my talk went well—one of many I’d give in the years to come,” Suri remembers. “The camaraderie was amazing, and after being an organizer, I truly felt I’d been initiated into the finite element family.”
The 1989 Finite Element Circus poster, drawn by Manil Suri. (Courtesy of Suri)
Like going fishing
After attending a couple of times, Draganescu quickly realized that “this was a fairly stable and very friendly crowd, and the meeting was small enough (50 to 100 people) that you had a chance to meet and talk to everybody. And then you could see them again in six months if you wanted to,” he says.
“One should not neglect the social aspect of this conference series, where you get to interact with people outside your immediate circle. We are certainly not math-creating machines, but normal people who thrive professionally and personally on these connections,” Draganescu adds. “I made a number of good friends through these conferences, and working together on some math problem with them is for us like going fishing together or playing together in a band is for others.”
For FEM researchers and colleagues in adjacent fields, the Finite Element Circus is a semiannual anchor point. It’s an opportunity to share research, strengthen personal connections, integrate new researchers into the family, and just have fun. There’s no tightrope or clowns, but if you’re into solving equations, it just might be the “greatest show on Earth.”
Most people wouldn’t guess horseshoe crabs—ancient arthropods with hard, round carapaces and long, spiky tails—when asked what animals you might find in a K-12 classroom. But Jessica Baniak ’23, biological sciences, is collaborating with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to shift kids’ perspectives of the alien-looking critters and create opportunities for inquiry-based learning.
Today, Baniak is a student in the ICARE program, an environmental science master’s program led by UMBC biology professor Tamra Mendelson. ICARE students study local environmental issues and include community partners on their master’s thesis committees.
Horseshoe crabs congregate on Maryland and Delaware beaches to mate each spring, and the last two years Baniak has collected some of their eggs with a research permit from the Maryland DNR. Each female can produce upwards of 20,000 eggs. Baniak takes the eggs back to a lab at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), a multi-institution research facility on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and raises them until they’re about a centimeter across.
Then Baniak delivers the baby crabs to elementary, middle, and high school classrooms in Howard, Carroll, and Baltimore counties. This year, 10 schools received crabs. Some teachers use the crabs in their curriculum, and some crabs are tended by student environmental clubs. Students run basic experiments that develop their science reasoning skills, like comparing growth rates in different hatchery setups.
Finding the sweet spot
These baby crabs are about six months old, and Baniak grew them at the highest temperature in her study—so they are a little larger than average. (Courtesy of Baniak)
It’s tricky to successfully raise the crabs to adulthood. Baniak visits each classroom a couple of times a year and makes suggestions to improve the crab habitats. Factors like feed, temperature, salinity, and more play a role in their survival. For her master’s research, Baniak is working out the ideal setup for successful crab-rearing with a focus on temperature. Higher temperatures produce faster growth, but some baby crabs perish in the heat. Cooler temps cut the mortality rate, but slow growth.
Baniak’s goal is to find the sweet spot that produces the most healthy crabs in a short amount of time. Why does efficiency matter? Because eager students aren’t the only ones interested in raising crabs.
Companies extract a compound from horseshoe crab blood that is used to detect bacterial contamination in pharmaceuticals. The blood can’t be harvested until the crabs are about 10 years old, Baniak explains, so raising them in captivity isn’t economical (it’s also challenging). Instead, reintroducing young crabs to their natural habitat is “a way that companies can help mitigate how much they’ve taken out of the wild,” Baniak says. Baniak’s work will help optimize these reintroduction programs for the industry—and at the same time, give kids a unique learning opportunity.
‘Everything all at once’
As a child, the National Aquarium in Baltimore—directly across the pier from IMET—inspired Baniak to pursue marine biology. Today her experiences range well beyond horseshoe crabs. As an undergraduate, she had a summer internship at an oyster hatchery. “During the breeding season—that’s when you work really long hours,” she says. “You have to do everything all at once.”
Counting surviving oysters, mating specific oyster pairs, and cleaning tanks—all while squeezing in work on experiments running at the hatchery—filled her days. One project involved developing a protocol to anesthetize oysters, which made it possible to collect tissue samples without killing the oyster. Baniak also assisted with the hatchery’s softshell clam initiative.
For another internship, she worked at the Maryland Pesticide Education Network, which promotes safer alternatives to harmful pesticides. During the academic year, she found time to participate in UMBC’s tae-kwon do club and play club volleyball.
Sharing the joy in science
Jessica Baniak ’23 (Courtesy of Baniak)
After she graduates with her master’s next spring, Baniak hopes to move on to a role in a federal agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She wants to continue to contribute to outreach programs like the horseshoe crab project.
“That’s my motivation for continuing in science, because I want to make more programs like that,” Baniak says. “I like ICARE because you’re working with other people in the community and not just researching a really niche subject.”
After she transferred to UMBC during the pandemic to be closer to home, UMBC faculty members helped her stay committed to her biological sciences degree. Maggie Holland, professor of geography and environmental systems, “brought back the joy into science after returning from online learning,” Baniak says. “She seemed to genuinely care about me as a student and about the subject she was teaching.”
Mendelson, too, made an impact. “She’s put a lot of effort into the ICARE program and wants to see all of us succeed,” Baniak says.
At the end of the school year, Baniak will travel with the students to release their horseshoe crabs at Sandy Point State Park and watch them wriggle across the sand and swim into the Chesapeake Bay, heading for life’s next phase.
Kaitlyn Sadtler ’11, biological sciences, has been selected for the TIME100 Next list. In its fifth year, the list aims “to recognize rising leaders in health, climate, business, sports, and more—and by doing so, not just show the stories that are capturing headlines in 2024, but also introduce you to the people who we believe will play an important role in leading the future.”
Since 2019, Sadtler has been a tenure-track researcher and chief of the Section on Immunoengineering at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Her interdisciplinary research straddles bioengineering and immunology.
“I’m super excited and absolutely surprised to be included on the TIME100 Next list. Working in regenerative medicine, our lab gets to look forward to where we could build therapies to help regrow our damaged tissues after traumatic injuries,” Sadlter shared. “I’m also thrilled that there is excitement for bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health. Biomedical engineering is a field that’s able to connect the basic fundamental biology discoveries with clinical translation and application of those discoveries.”
In 2020, Sadtler led a study published in Science Translational Medicinelooking for undiagnosed COVID-19 cases in more than 9,000 blood samples that never-diagnosed participants mailed in. The study found that during the first several months of the pandemic, for every diagnosed case of COVID-19, an estimated 4.8 cases went undiagnosed. That suggested a total of 16.8 million undiagnosed (and therefore mild or asymptomatic) cases by July 2020.
Undiagnosed cases were more likely in certain demographic groups, including younger people, people in urban areas, and people without risk factors for severe disease. The findings provided important insights for the pandemic response by suggesting that immunity acquired from infection among the young and healthy population and in dense areas was higher than previously understood, meaning herd immunity might be reached faster than first anticipated.
After graduating summa cum laude from UMBC, Sadtler completed her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. Sadlter has received numerous awards, and her 2018 TED Talk was one of the 25 most-viewed TED talks that year. Sadtler also presented at UMBC’s GRIT-X speaker series in 2022.
Some organisms are better than others at surviving without oxygen. “Humans don’t do very well without oxygen, but even humans have adaptive mechanisms,” says Rachel Brewster, professor of biological sciences. Zebrafish, however—the model organism Brewster studies—are champs at surviving with little or no oxygen. In fact, zebrafish embryos can last up to 50 hours under anoxia—that is, no oxygen at all.
Brewster’s lab includes wall-to-wall freshwater fish tanks, where two-inch zebrafish with blue and gold horizontal stripes swirl. Her team has been working with zebrafish for years, painstakingly figuring out just how they mitigate the effects of reduced oxygen (“hypoxia”) at a molecular level. “What we’re really interested in discovering is what adaptive molecules we might share in common with some of these highly hypoxia-tolerant organisms like zebrafish,” Brewster says. “And if we share those molecules, how can we control or modify their activity to improve outcomes?”
Solving the zebrafish puzzle
Being able to keep human tissues alive and undamaged under hypoxia for longer stretches of time has a range of potential benefits. Notably, it would expand the ability to deliver donated organs to transplant recipients most in need, in less developed geographic areas, or even in war zones—which is the reason the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) previously funded Brewster’s work.
Over the last several years, her DoD-funded work and subsequent research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have led Brewster’s group on a swimmingly successful journey of discovery. Twists and turns, creative thinking, and challenging lab work have allowed them to place one puzzle piece after another to reveal the bigger picture of how zebrafish survive so long without oxygen. Brewster hopes other researchers will take her group’s work a step further, translating the fundamental knowledge they’ve brought forth into treatments that save human lives. In recognition of her group’s contributions, Brewster has just secured a five-year, more than $1.9 million grant from the NIH to continue solving the puzzle.
Rachel Brewster makes mentoring students the cornerstone of her work as a UMBC faculty member. Left to right: Rachel Brewster, Gabriel Otubu, and Felix Rene Siewe. Otubu and Siewe are senior biochemistry and molecular biology majors. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
Equally important to Brewster, her research program creates opportunities for emerging scientists to learn the practical skills and habits of mind that will enable them to pursue their own scientific questions in the future. Her current team includes graduate students and several undergraduates, all of whom have contributed to creating new knowledge. “Research and training go together for me,” Brewster says.
The journey begins
Some organisms, including animals that fly at high altitudes, dive deep in the ocean, or live underground, excel at adapting to low oxygen. They typically reduce their metabolic activity when oxygen drops, therefore reducing demand as supply dwindles. “They reach a new status quo,” Brewster says.
Brewster initially expected that the molecules inducing that new status quo must be quick-acting metabolites—small molecules already present in cells—rather than large proteins that are energy-intensive to produce. So in 2016 she teamed up with Johns Hopkins scientist Young-Sam Lee, who has expertise in metabolites. She asked Lee, who is now at the Kentucky University School of Medicine, to identify which metabolites were more or less abundant in zebrafish embryos raised without oxygen compared to embryos that developed under normal conditions. Austin Gabel ’17, biological sciences, worked closely with Lee in summer 2016 to uncover the relevant metabolites.
The results showed that embryos raised without oxygen had, among other metabolites, more lactate. Lactate is a byproduct of glycolysis—the energy-producing process cells must rely on when oxygen isn’t available. That was “kind of a ‘duh’ moment,” Brewster says, but there was more to the story: Around the same time, other researchers were showing that high lactate levels in cancer cells triggered cell growth and blood vessel development via a protein called NDRG3. Brewster was surprised to see such energy-intensive processes triggered by low oxygen—but she wondered if members of the NDRG protein family functioned differently in healthy cells.
A surprising connection
Curious, Brewster and Jong Park, Ph.D. ’21, biological sciences, searched a database for NDRG genes in zebrafish, and found six. (There are four in mammals.) NDRG1a caught their attention, because it is involved in a process that requires an enzyme called a sodium potassium ATPase. That enzyme is one of the most energy-intensive enzymes in the cell, and organisms frequently reduce its production when oxygen is low. Interesting, Brewster thought.
Also, the ATPase and NDRG1a were expressed in exactly the same areas of the fish’s body—the kidney and skin cells called ionocytes, which are arrayed in a polka dot pattern on the surface of zebrafish embryos. Could NDRG1a be regulating the ATPase? Sure enough, a database of protein-protein interactions revealed that NDRG1a could interact with the ATPase. Now they were getting somewhere!
Rachel Brewster’s office is a welcoming space for students to come and ask questions. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
A long and winding road
To check whether NDRG1a actually did regulate this ATPase, her team tested how normal zebrafish and zebrafish without functional NDRG1a performed with normal oxygen and no oxygen. Under normal conditions, they both behaved normally. But the zebrafish without NDRG1a died at much higher rates without oxygen, providing compelling evidence that NDRG1a is required for the fish to adapt to low oxygen.
That was exciting, because at that time, “NDRG had no distinctive regions that could help researchers infer its function,” Brewster says—in fact, its molecular function was hardly understood. “But the fact that it can bind to a lot of different proteins suggests that it can function as an “adapter protein.” Just like an adapter that allows you to connect a USB to a wall outlet, adapter proteins connect molecules that otherwise wouldn’t interact. In this case, NDRG1a connects the ATPase with proteins that carry it off either to be stored in the cell for later use or destroyed—both outcomes that stop its activity and eliminate its demand for energy.
Brewster’s lab then showed that NDRG1a can, indeed, bind directly to the ATPase. Plus, the interaction increases when there is more lactate present, independent of how much oxygen is available. “That was really exciting for us,” Brewster says, “because it suggests that the rise in lactate is functioning via NDRG to promote the downregulation of ATPase.”
An important implication of this finding is that lactate or a similarly-shaped molecule could potentially be used to alter NDRG1a’s activity, and therefore artificially induce an energy-conserving state, Brewster explains. That could potentially help retain organs in viable condition for longer between collection and transplant—and that could save lives.
To further demonstrate that point, Brewster’s lab showed that if cells don’t have functional NDRG1a, ATPase activity does not decrease even with high levels of lactate. That means lactate doesn’t regulate ATPase on its own, but requires NDRG1a as an intermediary.
Joy in the process
Based on all the evidence they’ve collected—in their own lab via experiments and through research in the literature and genetic databases—the Brewster lab’s current model of the system is this: When oxygen is low, lactate and NDRG1a increase. Lactate binds to NDRG1a in such a way that allows it to interact with the ATPase, guiding it either to storage or to the cell’s “garbage can,” which improves the organism’s ability to survive low oxygen by reducing demand from the ATPase for energy.
Briana Young, a senior biological sciences major, works in Brewster’s group. Here she stands near a device used to control the oxygen level for experiments. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
While it might sound complicated (and sometimes it is!), this process is the joy of a biologist—untangling how molecules interact, using logic to define long chains of reactions, and designing laboratory experiments to fill in knowledge gaps. It’s incremental work like Brewster’s that takes science to new heights step by step. Brewster’s research group has already meaningfully moved the needle on understanding how organisms adapt to oxygen deprivation, but there is still so much more to do—and Brewster is wasting no time.
Filling in the picture
“While hypoxia is damaging, what is even more damaging is the return to normal oxygen,” she says. “You cannot be hypoxia tolerant if you are not also tolerant to reoxygenation. That had us wondering if NDRG is also involved in the reoxygenation phase.”
Brewster’s group has determined that as oxygen returns, NDRG1a continues to interact with the ATPase. That suggests NDRG1a is also important for the transition to reoxygenated conditions. The next experiment the team needs to do to determine whether NDRG1a is indeed critical for reoxygenation is complicated: They need to allow zebrafish to experience hypoxia with normal NDRG1a, and then remove functional NDRG1a just prior to reoxygenation.
“And that is not a trivial experiment,” Brewster says. “So that is one big aim of the new NIH proposal—to try to address the undoing of the hypoxia response.”
Another big goal of Brewster’s upcoming work is to look at other proteins that NDRG1a interacts with and explore their potential roles in hypoxia response. She also wants to investigate other members of the NDRG family. For example, muscle cells produce more NDRG1b under hypoxia, which occurs during intense exercise along with an increase in lactate. Ph.D. candidate Prableen Chowdhary is investigating NDRG1b’s role now. And other NDRG family members are known to be abundant in tissues that require a lot of energy, like the heart.
Lilian Gonzalez is studying the role of the protein NDRG1 in organisms’ response to hypoxia. (Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)
“It takes energy to save energy”
Curiously, Brewster also noticed that in the research literature, hypoxia is associated with hearing loss: Pilots, people who live at high altitudes, and people with oxygen-depleting diseases like sickle cell anemia or chronic sleep apnea all suffer from hearing loss at higher-than-average rates. Even more intriguingly, NDRG1 is expressed in the inner ear during hypoxia, and Ph.D. candidate Lilian Gonzalez is currently studying its role.
“NDRG seems to be protective, so it may be protective in the inner ear just like it is in the kidney and ionocytes,” Brewster says. “It might be down-regulating ATPase somehow to preserve those cells.”
Beyond NDRG, one of Brewster’s former students, Tim Hufford, Ph.D. ’23, biological sciences, discovered that cells begin producing larger quantities of many different proteins when oxygen drops. That finding officially sunk Brewster’s original hypothesis that metabolites, rather than new proteins, must be the first responders when reduced oxygen strikes. It also demonstrated that “it takes energy to save energy,” she says.
Hufford’s work “opened up a huge area of research, as we now know of hundreds of additional molecules that may play a critical role in hypoxia adaptation in addition to NDRGs,” Brewster says. “It’s more research than my lab could pursue in a lifetime,” she adds, encouraging the next generation to pick up the torch.
Finding purpose in student mentoring
Much fascinating research is in Brewster’s future—but she is far from alone in the endeavor. Brewster’s students are the drivers of the research, she says, and with the new grant, she might add a postdoctoral fellow as well.
“I am deeply committed to the students’ success,” Brewster says. More and more undergraduates in her laboratory are authoring academic papers, which will give them a leg up as they apply to graduate school or seek careers.
As a full professor, Brewster plans to dedicate her time at UMBC to “doing more of what I passionately care about,” she says. “And providing opportunities for people to truly excel in science is completely linked to the research. Because they are the people doing the research. And the students in my lab have done great things.”
Anya Viswanathan presents her research from a summer internship at MIT. (Courtesy of Viswanathan)
She’s not exaggerating. Gabriel Otubu, a senior biochemistry major in Brewster’s lab, received the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship earlier this year. Last year, Soujanya “Anya” Viswanathan ’24, biological sciences, was also named a Goldwater scholar as was Dominique Brooks ’21, biological sciences, in 2019. Brewster also mentors graduate students as director of the G-RISE Program, an NIH-funded initiative that offers mentorship and training for STEM careers in academia, industry, or government to graduate students from a wide range of backgrounds.
It’s this commitment to mentoring that underpins Brewster’s research success, and she also sees it as one of her fundamental roles as a faculty member. “I want to be very intentional with the time I have left, and student training is something I care deeply about,” she says. “Anyone can be excellent in science. And that is what I strive for in my lab—to support every student to reach their potential, no matter where they’re coming from.”
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