Kafui Dzirasa ‘01, chemical engineering, has been named a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He will be presented with the award during a White House event in spring 2016. This award is the highest honor that the U.S. government presents to science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers.

Dzirasa’s award is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

While he was a student at UMBC, Dzirasa was a Meyerhoff scholar. He is now an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, where he received both his MD and his PhD in neurobiology.

Duke’s announcement of this award describes: “Dzirasa’s research uses multiple small electrodes in the brains of mice to measure interactions of genes and environment. Ultimately, he would like to develop a ‘pacemaker’ for the brain to restore neural circuits affecting mood and cognition.”

Learn more about  PECASE and this year’s recipients in the White House press release and read about previous PECASE recipient Justin Jacobs ‘14 Ph.D., statistics, who received his award while a graduate student at UMBC.

Three UMBC students in the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) have been named Barry Goldwater Scholars for the 2016-2017 academic year. The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program seeks to provide the United States with “a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.”

As Goldwater Scholars, Daniel Ocasio ‘17, Naomi Mburu ‘18, and Andreas Seas ‘17, all chemical engineering majors, will receive substantial scholarship funding.

This highly competitive national scholarship has a major impact on each recipient’s educational path. Ocasio shares, “As a first generation college student, I feel extremely fortunate to be pursuing higher education, let alone a career in scientific research. To me, earning the Goldwater Scholarship is recognition of all those who made it possible for me to further my academic development.”

This year, a new initiative coordinated by Mitsue Wiggs, assistant director of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, allowed UMBC students interested in applying for a Goldwater Scholarship to receive feedback on their applications before formally submitting the materials. Applicants shared early versions with alumni of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, who reviewed the draft applications and provided advice before the students submitted their official applications to UMBC’s Goldwater Scholarship Selection Committee.

David Eisenmann, associate professor of biological sciences; Lee Blaney, assistant professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering (CBEE) and Simon Stacey, director of UMBC’s Honors College, served on the UMBC Goldwater Scholarship Selection Committee this year. The committee reviewed applications, and provided advice and feedback to nominees on their essays.

At UMBC, Seas is involved with both the Meyerhoff Scholars Program and MARC U*STAR Program. He has also worked closely with faculty mentors at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Collaboration for Advanced Surgical and Engineering Applications. After pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, he would like to become a professor and do vascular mechanobiology research. “I am honored that my contributions to science have been recognized by the Goldwater Committee,” he said. “My only hope is that I continue to learn from the world around me and contribute to the advancement of human knowledge.”

Ocasio has worked as a student researcher in Lee Blaney’s lab for over a year, and credits Blaney with helping to push him beyond his expectations for his undergraduate experience, and to pursue research as a career. Ocasio would like to pursue a Ph.D. in environmental engineering with the goal of conducting research related to water treatment and quality.

Mburu began research as a high school student with Lasse Lindahl, professor of biological sciences. She says that early exposure to research sparked her interest and encouraged her to join other labs and explore a variety of research areas. As an undergraduate at UMBC, she has worked with Gymama Slaughter, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, who has inspired Mburu to pursue research on energy sources. Mburu also worked with mechanical engineering faculty at Vanderbilt University, producing research that formed the basis of her Goldwater Scholarship application. Mburu’s goal is to pursue a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, and then teach physics and do nuclear energy development research.

“Being chosen for this prestigious scholarship as a sophomore is such an honor,” says Mburu. “I thank God for this amazing opportunity, and I am incredibly grateful for the wealth of opportunities UMBC had provided for me to make my goal of making an important contribution to the scientific world a reality.”

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Securing the Cloud: The Need for Quantum Network Security
Brian Kelley, Senior Member IEEE
Associate Professor of ECE
The University of Texas at San Antonio

11:15am-12:30pm Friday, 22 April 2016, UMBC, ITE 227

A significant trend in cloud data centers virtualization has been the migration away from virtual machines (VMs) with multiple guest operating systems (OS) to containers with a single Host OS. Whereas VMs incorporate a hypervisor manager layer enabling the Host OS to spawn multiple guest OSs, containers support all the code, run-time tools, and system libraries to run workload applications from a single Host OS.

While all cloud-based platforms posses security vulnerabilities, the additional security challenges with container systems stem from the sharing of the Host OS among independent container applications.

In this presentation we pose the question, “Can we use quantum information concepts to protect the cloud?” We introduce Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols. We present schemes for cloud container security based upon concepts drawn from QKD and related concepts in quantum teleportation. We also propose a new framework for Quantum Container Security drawing upon concepts of quantum entanglement. We will also present information the Cloud Academic Research Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Dr. Brian Kelley is Associate Professor of ECE at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is a leading researcher on communication systems, 4G and 5G cellular, cloud communications, and smart grid communications. He is also a member of the Cloud Academic Center at the University of Texas. Dr. Kelley is currently on sabbatical leave as a consultant with the DoD in Washington D.C. His current research focus is on the intersection of software-defined networks, 5G communications, and cloud systems. He is Senior Member of the IEEE, was an Oak Ridge National Laboratory Summer Faculty Fellow in Quantum Information Science during the summer of 2015, was Globecom 2014 Chair for the High-Level Technical Program Committee, Associate Editor and Editorial Board of IEEE System Journal, 2011-2012, and Associate Editor of Computers & Electrical Engineering, Elsevier, 2008-2011; he founded the San Antonio IEEE Communications and Signal Processing Chapter, in 2008. From 2000-2006, he was Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Motorola and a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 2007, he has been Associate Professor of ECE and Director of the Wireless Next Generation Systems (WiNGS) Lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Dr. Kelley received his BSEE from Cornell University and his MS/PhD in EE from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992, where he was an ONR Fellow. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu. Contact: Dr. Brian Kelley, (210) 706-0854 Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays (May 6: Enis Golaszewski, Hash bit sequences)