Cameron Walkup will earn his B.A. in Geography and Environmental Studies, with a Legal Policy Minor, in May, 2020. He just returned from spending eight weeks in the Grand Canyon National Park as a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar.

List any Scholars/Honors programs you are a part of: Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program, Honors College

Title of your research project: Applying Lessons from Canyon de Chelly and Bears Ears National Monuments to Equitable Co-management of Grand Canyon National Park

Describe your project: Drawing from management policies at Canyon de Chelly and Bears Ears National Monuments, I proposed methods for the National Park Service and the Grand Canyon’s 11 historically associated tribal nations to co-manage Grand Canyon National Park.

Who is your mentor(s) for your project? Why did you choose them? My mentor was Dr. Melissa Mark, Director of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program (DDCSP) at Northern Arizona University. I connected with Dr. Mark after being accepted into the DDCSP, a two-year environmental leadership program which began this summer with an eight-week immersion program in the Southwest. I also worked closely with Dr. Ed Grumbine, Mr. Deon Ben, and Ms. Maria Archibald, staff members at the Grand Canyon Trust.

How did you become interested in this project? This summer I had the opportunity to interact with a variety of experts and stakeholders, including land managers and indigenous people. Learning about the history of public lands and native dispossession (every National Park/Forest/Monument, and indeed all land in the United States, was the land of indigenous people until it was taken by force or farce), led me to investigate current efforts to involve Native Americans in the management of their historic lands. I visited both Canyon De Chelly and Bears Ears National Monument during the DDCSP and learned that they are pioneering examples of federal-tribal co-management. After hearing that the Grand Canyon has similar if not more extensive connections to Native American nations, I decided to examine how Canyon de Chelly and Bears Ears could inform more equitable management of the Grand Canyon.

What has been the hardest part about your research/what was the most unexpected thing about being a researcher?  The hardest part of this research project was synthesizing the information and conducting additional research within a condensed timeframe. After gathering information and meeting with stakeholders for the first seven weeks of the program, the research project had to be completed within just the last week. Despite the time restrictions, I was happy with how quickly it came together and its clarity.

What has been the most rewarding part? The most rewarding part was being able to tie together distinct ideas and propose solutions to a critical issue. Federal-tribal co-management has only been enacted at a few public land units, so it was exciting to look into a new school of thought and suggest how it could be implemented at arguably the most well-known park in the United States.

How will you disseminate your research (URCAD presentation, conference, publication, etc?) At the end of my program I participated in a poster presentation session with the other members of my cohort. I am currently exploring opportunities to refine my research for further dissemination.

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research?  Take any opportunity you can to do research. Apply for as many programs as you can and reach out to professors on campus for opportunities here at UMBC. Even if a program or internship is not explicitly focused on research, if you take the initiative you can create a research project out of it.

What are your career goals?After graduation, I plan to pursue a dual degree in law and environmental studies. Then I hope to take on a career in environmental law, focusing on equitable public lands management. 

If you are interested in being recognized as a Researcher of the Week, please contact Dr. April Householder: aprilh@umbc.edu

Assistant Professor Position in Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering at UMBC 

UMBC Information Systems Department

Innovations in NSF Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research Workforce Development and Education Programs

Dr. Sushil K. Prasad
National Science Foundation

2:00pm Tuesday, 18 September 2018, ITE459, UMBC

The National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) has growing research and education programs, including programs for early career multidisciplinary faculty such as CAREER and CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII). OAC is pleased to announce its newest program, its core research program solicitation (NSF 18-567), with the goals of supporting all aspects of advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) research that will significantly impact the future capabilities of advanced research CI, as well as the research career paths of computer as well as computational and data-driven scientists and engineers. Through this solicitation, OAC seeks to foster the development of new knowledge in the innovative design, development, and utilization of robust research CI. The OAC core research areas include architectures and middleware for extreme-scale systems, scalable algorithms and applications, including simulation and modeling, and the advanced CI ecosystem, including tools and sociotechnical aspects.

OAC also introduced a CyberTraining program (NSF 18-516) for education and training aimed to fully prepare scientific workforce for nation’s research enterprise to innovate and utilize high performance computing resources, tools and methods. The community response in its two rounds of competition have exceeded expectations. OAC also has programs for research training of undergraduate students (REU sites).

I will introduce these and share some of the recent awards. I will also touch on other OAC opportunities in cyberinfrastructure including those on high performance computing (HPC) hardware, software, data, networking and security, and on NSF’s ten big ideas, including Harnessing the Data Revolution.

Sushil K. Prasad is a Program Director at National Science Foundation in its Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate leading its emerging research and education programs such as CAREER, CRII, Expeditions, CyberTraining, and the most-recently introduced OAC-Core research. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a Professor of Computer Science at Georgia State University. He is the director of Distributed and Mobile Systems Lab carrying out research in Parallel, Distributed, and Data Intensive Computing and Systems. He has been twice-elected chair of IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP), and leads the NSF-supported TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing for undergraduate education.

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