RESEARCH

While preparing for an online semester, our faculty were still hard at work at research, and I’d like to highlight some newly awarded grants. These new awards follow closely on the heels of our college’s most successful year in research expenditures, which was substantially driven by research growth in CSEE and IS. As of the moment, we have had the best ever start to a new year in terms of awarded grants.  Dr. Claire Welty (CBEE) is PI for a new NSF Earth Sciences network cluster grant to study “Urban Critical Zone Processes along the Piedmont-Coastal Plain Transition” with anticipated funding of $2.3M.  And Dr. Carlos Romero-Talamas (ME) is leading a new $4M Department of Energy grant to advance nuclear fusion energy production.  We also have a number of colleagues who received recent research awards that are particularly timely, this is just a partial list: 

• Dr. Foad Hamidi received an NSF grant that will have pivotal impacts on internet connectivity in Baltimore City.
• Dr. Dipanjan Pan received two NIH grants on improving COVID19 testing.
• Drs. Andrea Kleinsmith, Anita Komlodi, and Helena Mentis (IS), in collaboration with Dr. Christinee Yee from UMBC’s Department of Economics, obtained an NSF grant for “Telemedicine at Scale: Expanding the Healthcare Workforce and Healthcare Access.” 
  
• Drs. Aaron Massey, Carolyn Seaman & Sreedevi Sampath will use their new NSF grant to study “SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Enabling Regulatory Compliance for Software Engineering.”
  
• Dr. Danyelle Ireland (CWIT and ECEP) received a BCSER NSF award to study the experience and major-switching patterns of undergraduate women in engineering majors.
• Drs. Cynthia Matuszek and Frank Ferraro will explore human robot interaction using grounded language learning in a new grant from NSF NRI.
• Drs. Aryya Gangopadhyay, Yelena Yesha, and Yaacov Yesha are exploring the use of CT Scans for early detection of COVID19 in a grant from NSF RAPID.
  

• Dr. Ahmed Aleroud, Lecturer in Information Systems.  Dr. AlEroud received his PhD from UMBC, and his area of expertise is cybersecurity and entrepreneurship.
• Dr. C. Augusto Casas, Lecturer in Information Systems.  Dr. Casas received his PhD from Nova Southeastern University, and his area of expertise is applications of computational intelligence to solve investment management problems.
• Dr. Lujie (Karen) Chen, Assistant Professor in Information Systems.  Dr. Chen received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, and her area of expertise is machine learning, data science, data mining and multi-modal analytics and machine learning with applications in healthcare and education.
• Dr. Sanorita Dey, Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.  Dr. Dey received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her area of expertise is cognitive dissonance, biased assimilation, persuasion theory, change of belief, spatial learning and mental mapping.
• Dr. Md Osman Gani, Assistant Professor in Information Systems.  Dr. Gani received his PhD from Marquette University and his area of expertise is artificial intelligence, data science and pervasive computing, with application in healthcare and smart cities.
• Dr. Murat Guner, Lecturer in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and Assistant Graduate Program Director in Data Science.  Dr. Guner received his PhD from the University of Rochester, and his area of expertise is data science and machine learning.
  
• Mr. Ethan Ide, Undergraduate Academic Advisor. Mr. Ide earned his BA in Psychology from UMBC.  Ethan joined Undergraduate Student Services as a full time advisor in June after working as a part-time advisor in COEIT. Previously, Ethan served as an Intern Advisor with the Office of Academic and Pre-Professional Advising.
• Dr. Tyler Josephson, Assistant Professor in Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering.  Dr. Josephson received his PhD from the University of Delaware, and his area of expertise is quantum chemistry, molecular simulation and symbolic regression.
• Dr. Maya Larson, Professor of the Practice in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.  Dr. Larson received her PhD from George Washington University, and her area of expertise is data structures, lower level programming and software engineering.
• Mr. Bill Ryan, Lecturer in Information Systems.  Mr. Ryan received his MS from Central Michigan University, and his area of expertise is information resource management.
• Mr. Gerald Tompkins, Lecturer in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.  Mr. Tompkins received his MS from the Johns Hopkins University, and his area of expertise is computer science, operating systems, cybersecurity, instruction and course development.
• Dr. Erin Van Dyke, Professor of the Practice in Information Systems and Graduate Program Director for the MPS in Health Information Technology.  Dr. Van Dyke received her PhD from UMBC and her area of expertise is health information technology.
• Dr. Ramana Vinjarmuri, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.  Dr. Vinjarmuri received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, and his area of expertise is designing and controlling high-dimensional brain-machine interfaces, applying biomimetic control algorithms for prosthetics and rehabilitation and modeling movement control and movement disorders.
• Dr. Woodrow Winchester, III, Professor of the Practice in the Engineering & Computing Education Program and Graduate Program Director for the college's interdisciplinary graduate programs in Engineering Management, Systems Engineering and Technology Management.  Dr. Winchester received his PhD from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and his area of expertise is in human-centered design and human-computer interaction with an emphasis on promoting and developing more inclusive and equitable approaches to systems design and deployment.
• Dr. TseHuai (Roy) Wu, Professor of the Practice in Mechanical Engineering.  Dr. Wu received his PhD from the George Washington University, and his area of expertise is robotics, linear and nonlinear control theory.
  

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