Dr. Rheingans has been the Director of UMBC’s Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) since the summer of 2009. Since then, she has mentored over a hundred students within the CWIT and SITE scholarship programs.

Congratulations to Dr. Penny Rheingans, the recipient of one of this year’s University System of Maryland (USM) Regents’ Faculty Awards for Mentoring.

Awarded to no more than four USM professors each year, the USM Regents’ Faculty Award for Mentoring is regarded as the highest honor that the Board gives out to recognize outstanding faculty achievement. Mentoring is one of the five award categories, which includes Teaching, Scholarship, Research, or creative activity, Public Service, and Innovation.

“I feel humbled by being honored this way,” says Dr. Rheingans. “Most of the things I'm being honored for are the result of the inspiration and hard work of a whole team of people. I could not have done nearly so much without them.”

Each year, nominees for the mentoring award are chosen who have not only fulfilled their university-sanctioned obligations, but have “clearly exceed[ed] ordinary expectations,” says the USM website. Mentoring nominees are recognized for their influence in areas like developing their students’ careers, aiding with retention and graduation rates, and improving post-baccalaureate progression and employment rates. After being nominated by the Regents’ Faculty Awards Committee, nominees are ultimately chosen by the Board of Regents.

Dr. Rheingans’ most notable mentoring contributions have been her work as the Director of UMBC’s Center for Women in Technology (CWIT). In 2008, troubled by the obstacles facing women in the field and the fact that they made up a mere 10% of Computer Science majors at UMBC, Dr. Rheingans accepted an invitation to become Interim Director of CWIT. The position was a good fit, and in the summer of 2009, she became Director.

“My core goal has been to make the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) a more welcoming place for a broad array of students, in particular for women and those who support them,” wrote Dr. Rheingans in an essay to the award’s Institutional Faculty Nominating Committee (IFNC) that details her mentoring contributions. “My role as CWIT Director is to continue to inspire ripples of positive change, reaching well beyond my personal grasp.” 

As Director, Dr. Rheingans has helped scholars succeed by serving as a personal mentor and maintaining an infrastructure for student support. She will soon take on a similar role with the Transfer-Scholarships in Information Technology and Engineering program (T-SITE). Debuting next Fall, the T-SITE scholarship program targets transfer students majoring in technology fields.  

 “I chose to become a professor, in large part, because I wanted to help students learn new things, explore new fields, and develop new skills,” says Rheingans, who has been teaching in some capacity since high school. Teaching was something that always interested Rheingans, who came to UMBC in 1998 as an assistant professor. 

“Mentoring just seemed like a natural extension of teaching,” says Rheingans. “A good teacher inspires individual interactions beyond the classroom — that's the heart of mentoring.”

Dr. Rheingans will be recognized for this honor at UMBC’s Annual Faculty and Staff Awards Ceremony on April 4.

UMBC Computer Science Ph.D. student Adrian Rosebrock and the company he founded and heads, ShiftyBits LLC, were recently awarded a competitive research contract from the National Cancer Institutes (NCI/NIH) to conduct research and development in the use of image processing and machine learning techniques to automatically analyze histology images of the breast.

Through the awarded research contract, Adrian will be helping NCI researchers with the design and development of automatic identification techniques for terminal duct lobular units (TDLUs) of the breast, the structures from which most breast cancers arise. This work will also create standard metrics for TDLUs that will aide researchers working within cancer research.

Data suggests that the morphology of TLDUs is related to several breast cancer risk factors, including mammographic density. In addition, TDLU morphology may represent an independent risk factor for breast cancer among women with a biopsy for benign breast disease. For this research project, Shiftybits will be given access to a large NIH dataset of breast biopsies as well as the Komen histology datasets.

Adrian received a B.S. in Computer Science in 2010 from UMBC and founded Shiftbits, LLC in 2011. He is continuing his studies as a Computer Science Ph.D. student at UMBC student, focusing on the combination of text and image retrieval systems.  One research project he  at UMBC involves the automatic identification of pills in images.  At UMBC, Adrian is and working with Professor Tim Oates and Dr. Jesus Caban  who is a researcher at Naval Medical Center and NIH and also teaches at UMBC.

Still looking for a summer internship? The 2012 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) starts accepting application from students on Monday March 26.

GSoC is a global program funded by Google that pays undergraduate or graduate students a $5000 stipend to write code for open source projects. GSoC has worked with the open source community to identify and fund exciting projects for the upcoming summer. Last year over 1,100 students were funded by the program. The FAQ is a good place to find out more.

A set of open source projects (aka mentoring organizations) has been selected. Students apply to work on one of more of these and each mentoring organization ranks the students interested in working with them. Google facilitates the final selection and pairing. The mentoring organization works closely with the student to define tasks, check progress, help solve problems, etc. Typically the student works remotely, interacting with his or her mentor via email, chat, skype, etc.

Students can submit applications via the Google Summer of Code 2012 site from March 26 to April 6. Google says that that the best applications they receive are from students who took the time to interact with one of the participating mentoring organizations and discuss their ideas before submitting an application. So your first step should be to look at the list of 2012 GSoC Mentoring Organizations and contact some that have projects that interest you and for which you have the right skills and background.

See the GSoC 2012 Program Timeline for a complete schedule. You might also check out the information on the Advice for GSoC Students Page and the GSoC forum.

Stipend Volunteers are sought for the Chesapeake Conservation Corps

The Chesapeake Bay Trust is proud to announce that applicants are being sought for the Chesapeake Conservation Corps Program.  The purpose of the Corps is 1) to enable stipend volunteers to work with host organizations and communities throughout Maryland to implement on-the-ground restoration and energy conservation projects, and 2) to provide leadership and training opportunities for young adults pursuing environmental and conservation careers.  Corps volunteers will work on projects in the realms of environmental restoration, energy conservation, agriculture and forestry, and environmental education.

Applications for CORPS VOLUNTEERS, ages 18-25, are currently being solicited throughout Maryland, with a deadline of May 14, 2012.  Successful Corps Volunteer applicants will be matched with Host Organizations by the end of June, with the one-year service term to begin in late August, 2012. Potential Host Organization placement sites occur throughout Maryland.

Congratulations to Dr. Marie desJardins, who placed 44th out of 593 competitors in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn, New York last weekend. The tournament—directed by New York Times Crossword Puzzle Editor Will Shortz—is the nation’s oldest and largest crossword competition.

Competitors are judged based on their accuracy and speed while solving eight original crossword puzzles. Dr. desJardins placed 5^th of the 87 Mid-Atlantic competitors, she was the 8^th ranked woman in the entire tournament, and the top-ranked woman from the Mid-Atlantic.

Dr. desJardins was also awarded an “I Beat Dr. Fill” button for scoring higher than Dr. Fill, a crossword-solving program designed by software engineer Matt Ginsberg. The program pulls answers from databases of old crosswords, dictionaries, and sources like Wikipedia, but can sometimes get caught up on tricky clues, says a Boston Globe article.

Photo Courtesy www.crosswordtournament.com