The Department of Physics is hosting a special colloquium featuring Dr. Donna Strickland, Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and one of only four women in history to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Dr. Strickland’s groundbreaking work on Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) revolutionized laser technology, enabling advancements like laser eye surgery and micromachining. Her talk, "Generating High-Intensity, Ultrashort Optical Pulses," will explore the breakthroughs that have reshaped modern science and technology.

This is a rare opportunity to hear from a pioneering scientist whose discoveries have had profound real-world impact. We proudly endorse this event and encourage faculty, researchers, and students to attend and be inspired.

Wednesday, March 12th
12 - 1pm
Physics Building 101

Liang Zhu (Mechanical Engineering) was selected as a recipient of the 2024 University System of Maryland Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring, the highest honor that the Board of Regents bestows to recognize exemplary faculty achievement. Congratulations, Liang! 
As an internationally recognized expert in biotransport, Dr. Zhu has successfully established and sustained an extramurally funded research program in heat and mass transfer in biomedical systems. In 2015, Dr. Zhu was elected as a fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a rare honor reserved only for the most influential mechanical engineers. As a mentor with a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, Dr. Zhu has been a defining factor in the success of students and junior faculty at UMBC. 
Retention in engineering has been a nationwide challenge in higher education, especially for public institutions. To enhance retention and graduation for undergraduate mechanical engineering students at UMBC, Dr. Zhu single-handedly established the ME S-STEM Scholars Program in 2010. The program uses evidence-based mentoring practices to enhance students’ research skills, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and applied experience. In the past 13 years, the program has provided intensive mentoring and scholarships to 135 students from diverse backgrounds. The success of this program is unparalleled by every measure:

• 86% of the scholars were retained in mechanical engineering, which is 46% higher than students not in the scholarship program at UMBC, 
• 35% of the scholars moved on to pursue graduate STEM degrees, which is 25% higher than students not in the scholarship program at UMBC, 
• 65% of the scholars were employed in the industry, including top-notch employers like Applied Physics Laboratory and Northrop Grumman, and
• 100% of the scholars earned degrees in 4 or 4.5 years, which is significantly higher than the ASEE national benchmarks of 40% completion within four years and 65% within six years. 

Dr. Zhu is also an excellent mentor to graduate students and junior faculty at UMBC. Many of her graduate students have become leaders in industry and academia to conduct innovative work of societal significance. She has devoted a tremendous amount of her efforts to mentoring junior faculty within and outside of her home department. In addition to one-on-one mentoring, she leads campus-wide efforts in recruiting and advancing women and minority faculty. These efforts having been transforming the inclusive culture at UMBC and beyond.   
Congratulations again, Liang! You are an inspiration! 

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Phyllis Robinson, Professor of Biological Sciences, for being named as the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences. This three-year appointment honors Dr. Robinson for her many valuable contributions to gender equity issues across UMBC as well as for her exceptional service to the Department, the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, and the University. Known for her efforts to increase the participation of women and minorities in science, Dr. Robinson co-founded the university’s Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) group and served as a Co-PI on the UMBC NSF ADVANCE Grant, which is nationally recognized as an exemplary model for institutional transformation programs. She was honored by the UMBC President’s Commission on Women in 2012 and recently received the 2018 Marilyn E. Demorest Faculty Advancement Award for her advocacy work at UMBC.

Dr. Robinson continues to be a dedicated mentor to undergraduate and graduate students as she explores her research interests in vision science, signal transduction, and neurobiology with grant support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  She succeeded Dr. Lasse Lindahl as the program director of UMBC’s NIH-funded Maximizing Access to Research Careers Program, a preeminent undergraduate scholars’ program with over 100 alumni who have earned Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. degrees. A former Graduate Program Director, Dr. Robinson was recognized for excellence in mentoring by the University System of Maryland Board of Regents in 2002 and by the Leadership Alliance in 2006. Prior to joining the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences in 1992, the Boston-native did postdoctoral work at Brandeis University, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. in Biology from Wellesley College.

Over the past 26 years, the UMBC community has benefitted from Dr. Robinson’s many gifts that include her passion for research, her talent for mentoring, and her compassion for others. She is eminently qualified for the honor of being a Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair. 

Congratulations are in order for many of UMBC's WISE Women for Spring 2016: 

Picture Perfect

Quick: Women make up what proportion of biologists in the United States? According to federal statistics, the answer is almost exactly half: 50.1 percent. If you search for “biologist” on Google Images, however, only 35 percent of the top results are images of women.

The Google algorithm serves up similar distortions for computer programmers (23 percent in real life, but only 17 percent of top Google images) and chief executive officers (27 percent in real life, but only 11 percent of top Google results, one of which is “CEO Barbie”).

Those were among the findings of a much-discussed study released this spring by Cynthia Matuszek, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC, and two colleagues from the University of Washington, where Matuszek recently completed her doctorate. Matuszek and her colleagues wanted to explore the ways in which algorithm-generated image-search results both reflect and reinforce popular stereotypes about how men and women should spend their lives.

The germ of the project, Matuszek says, came when she attended a conference presentation by a scholar working on robot caregivers for children. “He was referring to all of the grad students in his lab with male pronouns, even when he had pictures of his female grad students on the screen,” Matuszek recalls. “And when he introduced the concept of ‘caregiver,’ he used a clip-art image of a stereotypically motherly looking, smiling woman in a pink skirt suit. And I just thought to myself, ‘Really?’”

As she sat there, Matuszek started to wonder if image databases act as vectors for lazy gender stereotypes. With two University of Washington colleagues – Matthew Kay, a doctoral candidate in computer science, and Sean A. Munson, an assistant professor of human-centered design and engineering – she decided to put Google Images to some empirical tests.

The three scholars examined 45 occupations for which reliable data exist from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They found that, on average, men were overrepresented across Google image search results relative to their actual prevalence in the work force. In highly female-dominated professions, however, Google image results tend to be even more skewed than the reality. (Ninety-five percent of image results for “librarian” are women, for example, versus 87 percent of the actual librarian work force.)

Matuszek’s team also examined gender differences in the degree of competence and professionalism portrayed in the Google search results. To explore that question, the team recruited a few dozen participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system and asked them to rate workers in the images along eight different scales: “attractive,” “trustworthy,” and so on. It turned out that the workers in the images were rated as appearing more professional, competent, and trustworthy if they matched the profession’s gender stereotype. Female nurses, for example, were rated as more competent-appearing than male nurses; the opposite was true for construction workers.

In a final study, Matuszek and her colleagues examined whether image-search results could actually alter people’s perceptions of an occupation’s real-world gender balance. To test that question, they asked participants to estimate a profession’s gender balance, rate the profession’s prestige, and say whether they believe the profession is growing – all without viewing Google’s image-search results. Then, two weeks later, the same participants were shown Google’s search results and asked the same questions.

They found a small but significant effect: The image results did indeed tend to sway the participants’ estimates by at least a small degree. Here’s one example: In the real world, 55 percent of technical writers are women. But in Google’s image-search results for “technical writer,” only 35 percent of the images are of women. One of Matuszek’s participants initially estimated that 40 percent of technical writers are women – but then, two weeks later, after viewing the image search results, estimated the proportion at 35 percent, in line with what Google was showing. In this case, Google had led the participant deeper into error.

Does any of this matter? And, if so, what should be done about it? “We don’t make any recommendations in the paper,” Matuszek says. “We don’t necessarily say anything should change. We just want people who are designing these algorithms to be aware of the choices they’re making, and to know what kinds of effects these things can have.”

— David Glenn

The Engineering Deans Council of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) seized the opportunity to outline tangible steps to improve the inclusiveness of engineering education at the first White House Demo Day, hosted by President Barack Obama on Tuesday, August 4, in the White House East Room.

UMBC Dean Julie Ross, College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT), is one of more than 100 deans who signed on to the ASEE letter of commitment to diversitypresented at Demo Day, which was designed to highlight “why we need to give every American the opportunity to pursue their bold, game-changing ideas.”

The deans’ powerful statement outlines specific steps to increase the participation and success of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering and IT degree programs.

“The world’s most challenging technological problems demand creative solutions,” Ross shares. “Our best hope is to foster inclusive excellence in our engineering and IT schools and to bring to bear the diverse perspectives, ideas and talents of our nation’s youth.”

Her words echo the spirit of the ASEE letter, which emphasizes that innovation is core to engineering, and “diversity and inclusiveness are essential for the development of creative solutions to the world’s challenges.” The letter continues, “While gains have been made in the participation of women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans in engineering in recent decades, significant progress is still needed to reach a level where the engineering community fully embraces all segments of our increasingly diverse and vibrant society.”

UMBC and the other signing colleges and universities specifically commit to develop and implement: (1) a diversity plan for engineering programs, including priorities, goals, and assessment plans to ensure accountability; (2) activities partnering with K-12 schools and/or community college to increase the diversity of students in the engineering education pipeline; (3) strong partnerships between research-intensive engineering schools and non-PhD granting engineering schools serving populations underrepresented in engineering; and (4) proactive strategies to increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities as engineering faculty.

UMBC’s numerous new and longstanding STEM collaborations with K-16 partners form a strong basis for this work. One example is the Transfer Scholars in Information Technology and Engineering (T-SITE), funded by NSF to support the success of students transferring from Maryland community colleges to UMBC to study computer science, computer engineering and information systems.

Ross has received a multi-million NSF grant for the project INSPIRES: Increasing Student Participation, Interest and Recruitment in Engineering and Science. Collaborating with education faculty Jon Singer and Chris Rakes, she is helping Baltimore County high school biology and technology teachers feel prepared to effectively integrate engineering into their teaching.

Ross’s motivation for engaging talented students from all backgrounds in the field of engineering is simple: “We must work to ensure equal opportunity and access to all who seek it if we are to find the creative solutions we need.”

CSEE professor Jian Chen recently received an award from Department of Defense to to develop new techniques to visualize health informatics data. The award will support two UMBC research students for two years and be done in collaboration with Jesus Caban, Gerard Reidy and Joseph Bleiberg from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center's National Intrepid Center of Excellence.

The research will the support temporal exploration and analysis of traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder from patient cohorts. The group will design interactive visualization to move beyond using a small subset of data from the wealth and breadth of clinical information to improve diagnostic accuracy.

The project will help clinicians obtain new insights about the underlying conditions of patients, analyze complex hidden clinical patterns, and visually explore the correlations between many assessment techniques and imaging modalities including neuroimaging, neuropsychiatric measures, patient history, demographic information, and clinical tests).