Maryland Governor Wes Moore has appointed Yaakov “Jake” Weissmann ’06, social work and psychology, as acting secretary of the Maryland Department of Budget and Management (DBM). Weissmann, UMBC’s vice president of government relations and community affairs since December 2023, joins an impressive group of UMBC alums serving in state and federal leadership roles.

In a statement on the governor’s website, Moore called Weissmann “an experienced public servant and one of the most effective policy minds in our state. His deep understanding of the Maryland budget, developed over years in both the legislative branch and in local government, makes him uniquely qualified to lead DBM.” 

Weissmann, a proud UMBC alumnus, called the move “exciting, but bittersweet.” Coming into his role at UMBC from an already full career of public service, he helped spread the word of UMBC’s impact among legislators and across the state, and nurtured relationships with the communities surrounding UMBC. He was among President Valerie Sheares Ashby’s first executive hires.

“It has been an enormous gift to work with Jake and to benefit from his counsel as we have built and strengthened relationships with elected officials and government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels,” Sheares Ashby said in a message to campus. “He has positioned us not only to be well-known among our public officials, but also to be well-supported; he believes deeply in UMBC’s distinctive value and conveys that value to others in ways that resonate meaningfully and build lasting connections.” 

Weissmann called Sheares Ashby “a singular leader” who believes deeply in the people and mission of UMBC.

“UMBC really is a special place,” he said. “And part of what makes this position work so well is that President Sheares Ashby has a true understanding that our communities matter…and of the importance of making sure UMBC’s goals align with the goals of the state.”

After graduating from UMBC, Weissmann went on to earn his master’s in social work from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, as well as his juris doctor from the University of Baltimore. He served for two years as the assistant chief administrative officer in Montgomery County, where he helped steer the county’s economic development strategy and was responsible for several county departments. Prior to that, he spent 14 years with the Maryland General Assembly, including two years working in the House of Delegates, and 12 years with the Office of the Senate President. During his time in the Senate, Weissmann served in many roles, including as chief of staff for Senate President Bill Ferguson and former Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, Jr. He has also served on the state Board of Elections for the last two years.

Weissmann joins an impressive list of UMBC alumni who occupy prime positions in state and federal government, including Adrienne Jones ’76, psychology, the first Black woman to serve as speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates, Congressman Johnny Olszewski, Ph.D. ’17, public policy, and many others.

Looking ahead to the new role, Weissmann said he was excited about the “incredible opportunity to serve,” and shared a quote from the late United States Representative Elijah Cummings to capture their shared philosophy on the work: “Public service is the rent we pay for our space on this earth.”

Another dog-tastic weekend is in the books with the conclusion of UMBC’s 2025 Homecoming celebration. Past, present, and future Retrievers enjoyed more than 40 events this year, participating in popular UMBC classics such as the Homecoming Bonfire, GRIT-X, the Carnival, and especially, the Puppy Parade.

Check out the festivities at this year’s—thankfully, not rainy—Homecoming!

Firing up Homecoming

UMBC’s annual Homecoming Bonfire was a perfect way to kick off the Homecoming festivities and create a nice warm welcome for attendees. The UMBC Down and Dirty Dawg Band brought the spirit as family and friends gathered around the Bonfire.

Retriever Madness returned to hype up the Retriever community for all the athletics teams playing during Homecoming and beyond. UMBC’s athletics teams came together with the campus community to introduce themselves before the basketball season began, and volunteers played games—including a dance battle—to win amazing prizes and Retriever swag. 

Also hot this Homecoming celebration were the UMBC GRIT-X presentations. This annual series of presentations celebrates the passion and achievements of UMBC’s alumni, faculty, and graduate students. The TED-style talks invite the community into ongoing research on campus, as well as invite alumni experts to share about their work in cutting-edge fields. 

Tents were set up along Erickson Field with different clubs, departments, organizations, and vendors. At the Division of Professional Studies booth, Gowtham Karaka, M.P.S. ’24, played six simultaneous games of chess, against six different opponents, for nearly four hours straight. In total, he faced 28 challengers, and not one managed to beat him.

In order for all these events to work smoothly, volunteers from across campus worked to help create a fun and welcoming atmosphere for Homecoming guests. Gavin Gilliland, assistant director of first-year academic programs, explained his eagerness to help out: “I chose to volunteer at Homecoming because it’s so community focused. It’s a way to connect with the UMBC community broadly and interact not only with current students, faculty, and staff, but alumni, parents, guests, friends of UMBC, community members, and more.” 

Gilliland, who helped check people into the Alumni and Friends Welcome Tent on Saturday, said that “being a small part of such a big day is an easy way to make an impact. I’m a people person and I love making small talk and helping people find their way, not just in my day job but at events like Homecoming as well. My favorite part of the day was seeing it all come together and seeing all of the friendly faces enjoying the celebrations.”

Fun, family, and friends

A “phun” and out of this world event at Homecoming was Phun Phamily Physics. Attendees got to explore the UMBC Observatory with a rotation of family-friendly physics and astronomy demonstrations, as well as tour the control room and dome of the UMBC Observatory—the largest optical telescope on the East Coast! 

Bringing folks back down to Earth, a record number of runners and walkers participated in this year’s sold-out Retriever 5K and Family Fun Run, exploring the highs and lows of aptly-named Hilltop Circle. This event’s emphasis was on camaraderie, bringing together all paces and styles to enjoy the fun.

At a more sedate pace later in the day, furry friends, big and small, showed off their costumes in the Puppy Parade! After strutting their stuff, it was time for the costume competition. From mermaids to spaghetti and meatballs, dog breeds of all kinds showed their true “Retriever” spirit!

The Homecoming Carnival is one of UMBC’s main events. Jenn Harvey Miranda ’09, modern languages and linguistics, M.A. ’11, TESOL, celebrated this year’s Homecoming by bringing her family for the first time to enjoy all the festivities. “It was pretty incredible being back on campus, especially since this fall marks exactly 20 years since I started there as a freshman! I was surprised at how being physically back in the space where so many memories took place transported me so completely back to my college days,” says Miranda. 

“It was really special thinking back on the many friendships that were forged over my years there, and I’m so grateful I got to share the day with two of those very friends who I joined at Homecoming. And my 4-year-old is still talking about all of the rides he got to go on, so he had a lot of fun too.” 

On a recent Wednesday in September, thousands of people filled the arena of the Retriever Activity Center for the UMBC 2025 Fall Career and Internship Fair. At the booth for pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, Mark Benesch ’08, chemical engineering, eagerly engaged with students, some of whom waited in a line 30-odd people long at times for their chance to ask questions and exchange contact information. 

Benesch has regularly brought his enthusiasm and energy to UMBC career fairs, first as a recruiter for ExxonMobil, where he worked immediately after graduating, and later for the Columbia, Maryland-based chemical company W.R. Grace. But it was after starting at AstraZeneca as the senior director of the capital projects portfolio for the Americas region in January 2023 that Benesch spotted the opportunity to take his connections with the university to the next level. 

AstraZeneca employs thousands of people across the state of Maryland, including at a large scientific campus in Gaithersburg, a center in Frederick that manufactures a diverse class of drugs called biologics, and a newly opened facility in Rockville that will manufacture immunotherapy drugs to treat cancer. The company has announced plans to invest $50 billion in America by 2030 for medicines manufacturing and research and development. 

From the hundreds of UMBC alumni at AstraZeneca, Benesch has recruited and inspired a team of eight dedicated to forging stronger links to their alma mater. They, together with partners in AstraZeneca’s Early Career Programs, have built a strong alumni-driven network linking UMBC students with opportunities at the company. 

“Mark is always thinking about innovative ways to connect,” says Christine Routzahn, the director of the Career Center at UMBC who has worked with Benesch to expand the UMBC-AstraZeneca partnership. “He’s very passionate about UMBC and ensuring our students are successful.”

Benesch’s efforts will be recognized when he receives the 2025 Distinguished Service Alumni Award this October. 

A growing partnership 

The work of the AstraZeneca-UMBC recruiting team has gone far beyond career fairs. Under Benesch’s stewardship, AstraZeneca played a key role at the UMBC-hosted 2024 Mid-Atlantic Student Conference for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The company sponsored the event and Pran Patel, the vice president of global engineering and real estate at AstraZeneca, served as a keynote speaker. Benesch met monthly with student organizers of the conference, helped lead a popular conference workshop, and mobilized other AstraZeneca employees to volunteer.

“From a five-minute conversation at the career fair, Mark took the initiative to follow up and create real collaboration opportunities,” says An Dang ’24, a student organizer who led the fundraising efforts for the conference.

Benesch and his team have also worked with UMBC to launch new collaborations such as dedicated on-campus information sessions and recruiting events, alumni happy hours, and tours and networking at the AstraZeneca Gaithersburg campus.

The efforts have paid off, as the number of UMBC students applying to summer internships at AstraZeneca has increased by 31 percent in the past year, and the number of students accepting internships has grown from one in summer 2024 to seven in 2025.

On the research side, Benesch attended the College of Engineering and Information Technology’s recent Research Day and is facilitating discussions of ways AstraZeneca may partner with UMBC faculty on joint projects. 

“Mark’s ongoing dedication to serving his alma mater has been nothing short of extraordinary,” says Mariajosé Castellanos, a teaching professor in the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering who first met Benesch in her thermodynamics class in 2006. “As a faculty member who has been in the department for 20 years and served as the AIChE UMBC Chapter advisor for the past nine, I can confidently say that I have never seen this level of consistent engagement and support from any other undergraduate alumnus.”

Building community and empowering individuals 

Benesch, who was the first from his family to go to college, credits his UMBC education with empowering him to realize his own potential. 

“At UMBC, I was exposed to so much, and from that I gained confidence. Technical confidence, yes, but also the confidence to navigate the diversity of the world and the opportunities that come from that,” he says. “So I’m inspired to help today’s students receive that same kind of support, and even more so.” 

“Mark is so animated when he’s connecting with people. He listens well and he really brings out the best in students,” says Miriam Friedman, assistant director of alumni professional networks.

On his part, Benesch says the students give him energy. “They are curious and smart and I see their enormous potential,” he says. “To give them opportunities to realize it for themselves is really gratifying.”

Abi Postus, a junior in chemical engineering who interned this summer on Benesch’s AstraZeneca team, says she was impressed by his efforts to connect her to resources and make sure she got the most out of the experience. 

“I remember one piece of advice he told me,” she says, “which was: ‘Don’t be afraid to take up space.’ I found that very helpful because this was my first internship and it was kind of daunting. That made me feel more confident.”

Mark your calendars for the 2025 Alumni Awards on Wednesday, October 29, at 6 p.m., and consider joining the UMBC community at the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena to celebrate Mark Benesch and the many remarkable individuals receiving awards. The event will be livestreamed for those unable to join in person. You can learn more at alumni.umbc.edu/alumniawards.

For tech-savvy individuals like Eric Stokan, artificial intelligence, programming languages, and open-source software are powerful tools that can turn once-impossible ideas into reality. Researchers can use human language processing to analyze historical documents or legal texts. Through collaborative platforms, global organizations can collaborate quickly without incurring travel costs. In the social sciences, open-source tools provide students with unique opportunities to work with experts developing projects that address community needs. However, to take full advantage of these revolutionary technologies, these tools often require advanced computing skills or access to expensive software, which can limit their impact and exclude those without the necessary resources or training.

Stokan, director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3), is committed to removing these barriers for faculty and students in computational social science, which uses computers, data, and algorithms to study human behavior and social systems. His research lies at the intersection of urban policy, economic development, and computational social science, with a focus on how local governments make policy decisions and how those decisions impact equity, economic growth, and environmental sustainability. 

The University System of Maryland (USM) William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation has awarded Stokan the Elkins Professorship for Academic Transformation to address this gap with his project “Computational Social Science and Generative AI: Scalable, Modular Training for Teaching, Research, and Public Impact.”

The Elkins Professorship is named after Wilson H. Elkins, a former Rhodes Scholar and president of the University of Maryland, College Park from 1954 to 1978. This prestigious award is for faculty within USM who are working on innovative projects focused on the use of generative AI to advance academic transformation, foster improvements in access, affordability, quality of outcomes, and/or stewardship of people’s time, money, and other scarce resources.

“The professorship will allow me, through the Center for Social Science Scholarship, to first assist faculty and students in understanding how to leverage advances in computing and AI to address new research questions and scale their research in ways that were unfathomable during Dr. Elkins tenure,” says Stokan, associate professor of political science, who earned one of three $10,000 awards. He will use the funding to complete Computational Public Administration—his first book written with R, a free programming language used for statistical computing and graphics—about computational social science methods focused on addressing public policy and administration topics, such as climate change and economic development. 

The funding will also support the design and implementation of five hands-on training modules and workshops tailored for faculty, students, and community organizations. Participants will learn to use generative AI large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT and R. The goal is to help participants answer novel and important research questions, develop marketable technical skills, to work more effectively with data, and better communicate the results of their analyses with the broader community.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Elkins Professorship, in honor of the late Wilson H. Elkins, who was a transformational leader, administrator, and educator,” says Stokan. “This award is important to me because it not only provides support but also affirms my commitment to accommodating learners at all levels of experience in computational social sciences, promoting accessibility, equity, and methodological transparency.”

Initial support for the project came from the UMBC’s Faculty Development Center, the AOK Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, iHARP/Data Science Scholars, and the Institute for Public Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The workshops will be offered through CS3 in collaboration with CGC-SCIPE, the UMBC Division of Information Technology, and ScaleS. A lecture series component, which will include external speakers, is being co-sponsored with the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health, and the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications. 

Register for the fall semester’s workshop series on AI, LLMs, and computational methods.

For tech-savvy individuals like Eric Stokan, artificial intelligence, programming languages, and open-source software are powerful tools that can turn once-impossible ideas into reality. Researchers can use human language processing to analyze historical documents or legal texts. Through collaborative platforms, global organizations can collaborate quickly without incurring travel costs. In the social sciences, open-source tools provide students with unique opportunities to work with experts developing projects that address community needs. However, to take full advantage of these revolutionary technologies, these tools often require advanced computing skills or access to expensive software, which can limit their impact and exclude those without the necessary resources or training.

Stokan, director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3), is committed to removing these barriers for faculty and students in computational social science, which uses computers, data, and algorithms to study human behavior and social systems. His research lies at the intersection of urban policy, economic development, and computational social science, with a focus on how local governments make policy decisions and how those decisions impact equity, economic growth, and environmental sustainability. 

The University System of Maryland (USM) William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation has awarded Stokan the Elkins Professorship for Academic Transformation to address this gap with his project “Computational Social Science and Generative AI: Scalable, Modular Training for Teaching, Research, and Public Impact.”

The Elkins Professorship is named after Wilson H. Elkins, a former Rhodes Scholar and president of the University of Maryland, College Park from 1954 to 1978. This prestigious award is for faculty within USM who are working on innovative projects focused on the use of generative AI to advance academic transformation, foster improvements in access, affordability, quality of outcomes, and/or stewardship of people’s time, money, and other scarce resources.

“The professorship will allow me, through the Center for Social Science Scholarship, to first assist faculty and students in understanding how to leverage advances in computing and AI to address new research questions and scale their research in ways that were unfathomable during Dr. Elkins tenure,” says Stokan, associate professor of political science, who earned one of three $10,000 awards. He will use the funding to complete Computational Public Administration—his first book written with R, a free programming language used for statistical computing and graphics—about computational social science methods focused on addressing public policy and administration topics, such as climate change and economic development. 

The funding will also support the design and implementation of five hands-on training modules and workshops tailored for faculty, students, and community organizations. Participants will learn to use generative AI large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT and R. The goal is to help participants answer novel and important research questions, develop marketable technical skills, to work more effectively with data, and better communicate the results of their analyses with the broader community.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Elkins Professorship, in honor of the late Wilson H. Elkins, who was a transformational leader, administrator, and educator,” says Stokan. “This award is important to me because it not only provides support but also affirms my commitment to accommodating learners at all levels of experience in computational social sciences, promoting accessibility, equity, and methodological transparency.”

Initial support for the project came from the UMBC’s Faculty Development Center, the AOK Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, iHARP/Data Science Scholars, and the Institute for Public Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The workshops will be offered through CS3 in collaboration with CGC-SCIPE, the UMBC Division of Information Technology, and ScaleS. A lecture series component, which will include external speakers, is being co-sponsored with the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health, and the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications. 

Register for the fall semester’s workshop series on AI, LLMs, and computational methods.

The west wing of George and Betsy Sherman Hall is open to students and staff again after 18 months undergoing extensive renovations and modernizations. While the renovation on the building’s east wing (adjacent to Academic Row) begins in earnest this semester, west wing residents are settling into their colorful and versatile office set ups and classroom spaces.

Walking into the Sherman Hall atrium, a floating staircase dominates the entryway, but if you take a right and a left and walk past a few brightly colored sitting areas, you’ll find the new offices of Division of Undergraduate Academic Affairs (UAA) and Academic Transition Programs. It’s no longer just the offices of ATP, it’s now also home to the Individualized Study Program (INDS) and the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) as well.

Relocation inspires collaboration

With this exciting new phase for campus, comes disruptions to some normal operations. Laila Shishineh, a new resident in Sherman Hall’s office suites, and the assistant vice provost and assistant dean for UAA, understands the disruption better than most. Shishineh and her team were relocated two years ago because of the renovations to temporary offices that were shared with them by the Academic Success Center. Now as they settle into their new office space—shared with two offices who await their new space in the east wing—Shishineh celebrates the infrastructural improvements and also the new opportunities for collaboration that weren’t possible before.

Under a plan developed by Shishineh alongside Facilities Management, ATP, UIA, and INDS, the new suite space in Sherman Hall’s west wing will be shared by these offices, with hoteling space available for days when employees overlap. This collaboration of 17 people allows flexibility for people to work in the office some days and work from home on other days.

This physical proximity to other departments allows for unique opportunities of collaboration between them. “It’s so nice to have a suite space,” says Shishineh. ”People get to build new relationships and support each other in different ways as opposed to just being ‘doors in a hallway’ somewhere on campus.”

As a former resident assistant in college, Shishineh thought of creating an office-mate agreement, based on the concept of a roommate agreement. Across the three departments, people were paired up based on schedule, personalities, and types of roles. A meet and greet was held so everyone could get to know their officemate, and outline an agreement. The agreements include everything from what days each person is working in the office or from home, to how much shelf space they each get.

Student-centered design

The new physical structure of Sherman Hall not only allows for more collaboration among the faculty and staff working there, but also for students. A noticeable difference in the layout is the student-centered design: with plenty of collaborative spaces including lounges, conference/study rooms, vending machines, and TVs broadcasting events happening on campus.

“I hope it becomes a place where students come not just for classes, but to hangout, study, and congregate,” says Shishineh. Improvements have also been made to make wayfinding easier in Sherman Hall, since the two wings make some things difficult to find. New signage, room numbering, general space layouts and color-coding help everyone more easily find their way to the other occupied offices in the west wing, including the George and Betsy Sherman Center, which is home to the umbrella of programs that help train up teachers in urban schools that will transform lives in the communities they serve.

A feature to look forward to is the courtyard between the east and west wings of Sherman Hall. This multi-tiered green space with new ramps and stairs will provide gathering places and outdoor classroom opportunities at each level when the entire renovation is complete.

Construction and cost, with a mind for sustainability

At the beginning of the project, UMBC evaluated tearing down Sherman Hall and rebuilding it, versus a significant renovation. It was determined that the structure was still very solid and the cost of a new structure could be as much as 40 percent of the cost of a building, says Stacy Brian, the Facilities Management project manager for the renovation. By renovating instead of starting new, money was saved on excavation, underground utilities to serve the building, new foundations, new steel structure, new stair and elevator shafts and new floor slabs, and more.

But to complete the job, Sherman Hall needed to be gutted down to the bones of the building, with only concrete floor slabs and steel structure remaining. Just about everything else is brand new, says Brian: New elevators, HVAC systems, plumbing, electrical, walls, ceilings, roof, fire alarm and protection systems, finishes, IT/AV, etc.

Besides the bottom-line cost, there were more considerations for taking on the renovation. Believe it or not, but “tearing this building down completely in the heart of campus would also have been much more disruptive than what we are experiencing now,” says Brian.

The campus utility tunnel wraps all around Sherman Hall, so a significant amount of money would have been spent on protecting the tunnel so that heating, cooling, and power across all of campus wouldn’t be disrupted.

There were also considerations regarding the environmental sustainability of the project. “It was definitely ‘greener’ (more sustainable) to use as much existing structure as possible to save those items from the landfill, the generation of more embedded carbon, etc.,” says Brian.

Additionally, Sherman Hall is now much more energy efficient, greatly reducing not only UMBC’s carbon footprint but also saving money on utilities. These savings can provide UMBC the opportunity to spend that money on other important upgrades across the campus. Some of the new features include much larger windows, which bring more daylight into the rooms. Students, staff, and faculty can all benefit from more daylight for their mental health and general well-being.

“This project has been a shining example of how all of the different departments from many different UMBC divisions can come together and accomplish a very difficult task,” says John Zahor, assistant vice president for Facilities Management.

From sharing offices, providing earbuds to get through the noise of construction, and putting up with all the other disruptions necessary for a project like this, Zahor says that the building’s returning occupants have remained open and flexible, and that’s made all the difference.  Zahor says without the cooperation of many folks across campus, an already difficult task would have been impossible. Thanks to Craig Goodwin, the director of design and construction, Molly Power, UMBC’s campus planner in charge of the temporary space planning and Elyse Clegg, manager of facilities support services, and Joe Washington, moving/logistics coordinator and the student workforce supervisor,  “This was a job well done,” says Zahor.

“We hope to be done by the beginning of the 2027 spring semester to give this wonderful building back to the campus community without fences and temporary signs, ready for full use,” says Zahor.

As a high schooler, Emily Brown ’14, M.S. ’14, computer science, dreamed of a future in STEM. Searching for a community to support her aspirations, she found the Center for Women and Technology at UMBC. Brown became a CWIT Scholar and ended up earning her bachelor’s and her master’s degrees one semester apart. After graduation, she was hired at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. This October, Brown will receive the 2025 UMBC Outstanding Alumna Award. In this Q&A, she shares how her time at UMBC—and the support she found there—helped get her to where she is today.

Q: What brought you to UMBC?

A: Initially, I was looking into other schools, but UMBC kept making its way back to the top of my list because I was looking for schools that explicitly had programs and communities for women in engineering.

Eventually, I applied for the CWIT (Center for Women and Technology) Scholars Program. As I kept coming back to UMBC for tours and meetings, I figured out this was a community that I really wanted to be a part of. At the time, Dr. Penny Rheingans was the director of the CWIT program, and hearing her talk about the program and what it would offer made UMBC one of my top two school choices. The in-state nature of UMBC meant that I would come out of school debt-free, with the kind of support that I wanted as a woman in STEM.

Q: What did you enjoy about the computer science program?  

A: I graduated from my master’s degree in the winter. I have a picture of myself and the four other people who graduated with a computer science master’s that December, and I had taken classes with all of them. At my undergraduate graduation in May, there were nine women who graduated from the computer science program. I knew all nine, which is exactly what I had attended UMBC for—to be part of a community of other women in STEM, it meant a lot to me.

Right: Emily Brown along with fellow CWIT Scholars pose to spell out CWIT.

Q: You graduated with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in the same year. How did you decide to pursue that and is there any advice you would give another student who may consider doing the same?

A: I wasn’t sure at first that I wanted to do computer science after graduation, but by my junior year I decided to stick to a computer science career. I realized then I could either graduate early or I could start taking graduate classes with the combined B.S./M.S. program. After finishing my undergraduate degree that May, I took summer and fall classes and finished my master’s in December, and that’s how I was able to graduate twice in one year.

There are both upsides and downsides to having done that. On the upside, I started my professional career with a graduate degree, which does come with more pay and professional respect. On the downside, my computer science master’s was a general master’s degree as opposed to specialized. But this has actually proven to be useful: I started my career thinking I wanted to focus on cybersecurity and now I do more AI work and I have some graduate coursework in both of those things.

Q: Is there a faculty or staff member who helped you on your UMBC path? 

A: There are three faculty members who stand out when I think of my time at UMBC. Dr. Marie desJardins, who has since retired, was an AI and machine learning professor and the professor that I completed undergraduate research with. Her passion for teaching aligned with my desire for a community that encourages women in engineering. The undergraduate research I did with her was working on the new AP computer science curriculum for the College Board. 

Dr. desJardin’s argument was that with computer science you should submit a portfolio rather than take a test. She worked with the College Board to develop what that curriculum for submitting a portfolio would look like and I worked alongside her. My former high school computer science teacher from Howard High School was also on that team, so that was really great. My younger sister has since taken the course and I said, “Did you know I wrote that course that you’re taking in high school now?” Her response was, “I’m not telling anyone that—that’s the most embarrassing thing ever.” I thought it was very exciting.

The second professor who had a huge impact on me is Dr. Tim Oates. I found his teaching style to be one that I deeply resonated with. I always tell people, when you take a class with Dr. Oates, you need to take paper without lines because he draws a lot of pictures to explain things.

He had an example where he would walk around the classroom floor and each tile was a different square and he would say, “All right, I’m an AI, and I’m using reinforcement learning and I physically step here.” He wasn’t just lecturing, he taught by physically moving his body around the classroom. 

One example he used was if a $10 bill drops from the ceiling here, I’m incentivized as the AI to keep going back to that corner of the room, where if a $1 bill drops over there, then I know that’s not as useful of a place to go. Even if you don’t have a computer science background, you intuitively go, that makes sense. I followed him to whichever class he would teach because I knew his teaching style broke it down in a way I would deeply understand. In my final class with him, I rigged a $10 bill to drop from the ceiling because he had done this example over and over. 

The third is Dr. Anupam Joshi. He was my master’s advisor and he’s now the vice provost and chief AI officer, but at the time he was a professor teaching cybersecurity classes. He is largely the reason that I work the way I do here at the Applied Physics Laboratory. He introduced me to the type of work that got me my first job at the lab. I wrote my final research paper for my master’s degree about my APL internship experience, which was combining all of my passions.

Q: Can you share your involvement in CWIT (Center for Women in Technology), both as an alum and mentor, and what your experience was as a student? 

A: I lived in the CWIT Living Learning Community my freshman and sophomore years and then lived in an on-campus apartment with other CWIT students. I met my best friends in the CWIT program. We had a CWIT alum virtual happy hour during the pandemic, and I think there were a number of us who said, “I walked into that CWIT office and just cried and then walked out and passed my classes because there was that kind of support for me.”

I have been involved as an alum since day one. After undergrad, I participated in the career fairs and networking dinners with the talent services recruiting department from APL. 

I’ve done industry mentoring nearly every year for the past six years. When I was a CWIT student, my industry mentor was from Lockheed Martin. She did a mock interview with me where she asked me the same questions she would ask a candidate interviewing for their summer internship. She then brought me on a Friday afternoon to the Lockheed Martin office facilities for a lab tour. Those two things were both extremely memorable to me, and I carried that forward with my mentees, some of whom then got internships at APL. That was the experience I sought to replicate and produce for my CWIT mentees.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about your current job at APL? What do you enjoy most about it? 

A: I’m currently the assistant group supervisor for the analytic capabilities group. The group is really known for a space at APL called the Live Lab, which was started as a response to a 2009 cyber attack that APL was victim of. The lab watches cyber data coming into the lab and processes it in real time to try to be more proactive about the next attack. I actually toured the Live Lab as part of a CWIT Scholars and Cyber Scholars visit day my senior year and thought to myself, ”This place is really cool. I would really like to work there someday.” The staff member running the tour that I attended was Dr. Elisha Peterson, who is my direct boss now. It took a while, but I made it to where I wanted to work my senior year of undergrad.

I’m so proud of UMBC. Being recognized as someone who UMBC is proud of also is incredible.

Emily Brown ’14, M.S. ’14, computer science

Q: How did your UMBC degree help prepare you for your professional career?

A: It wasn’t just what I learned at UMBC that was valuable, but how I learned how to learn. I came into my career already knowing that I valued community and diversity of thought because I had valued it and been taught to value it from my time at UMBC. 

UMBC also prepared me to anticipate that there are things that will be interdisciplinary in nature [in my career]. I was able to quickly understand at APL that the value of interdisciplinary teams is really important.

For example, I’ve worked with a psychologist colleague on the concept of a moral foundation. There is, of course, a computing component to parsing out the information, but there’s also a psychological component: Why does this message resonate with you, but not with me? Everybody has their own semi-unique moral foundations profile and a message that aligns to your moral foundations is more likely to resonate with you. That’s something I didn’t study in my computer science coursework at UMBC and I do need to make sure that I’m taking my psychologist colleagues’ opinions and thoughts about this into account as we’re building a project.

Q: What does winning a UMBC Alumni Award mean to you?

A: My sister, who I already mentioned finds me embarrassing, has told me in the past, “You know, there’s such a thing as too much school spirit.” And I refuse to believe that. Having been given so much by UMBC and being so passionate about what I experienced in that circle on that campus, I’m so proud of UMBC. Being recognized as someone who UMBC is proud of also is incredible.

Left: Emily Brown with her younger sister at Homecoming.

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to a current UMBC student, what would it be?

A: Try to do something different. I got a computer science degree, but I was also on The Retriever Weekly editorial staff, which for a CS major was super unusual. But that was my something different. I can’t tell you how many times I have been told in my professional career, “Wow, finding an engineer who is a decent writer is rare.” But that’s because I was on a student newspaper in undergrad. That ability to communicate has taken me pretty far in my career.

Mark your calendars for the 2025 Alumni Awards on Wednesday, October 29,at 6 p.m., and consider joining the UMBC community at the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena to celebrate Emily Brown and the many remarkable individuals receiving awards. The event will be livestreamed for those unable to join in person. You can learn more at alumni.umbc.edu/alumniawards.

At a young age, Jacqueline Smith ’06, chemistry, already knew what she wanted to study in college. What she wasn’t quite sure about was where that would take her. She interned at several different companies, including L’Oreal, McCormick, and Walgreens, but it wasn’t until she found herself in Katherine Seley-Radtke’s chemistry lab that she found her true passion—academic research. 

Today, Smith is an associate professor of chemistry at Howard University. 

Her research on drug discovery and delivery has been supported by prestigious national awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER award, as well as the NSF Excellence in Research award. And in October, she will receive a 2025 UMBC Outstanding Alumni Award. 

She recently had an opportunity to reflect on her journey from UMBC to Howard, and everything in between.

Q: What initially brought you to UMBC?

A: I’m a native of the DMV area. I graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County. I came to UMBC as a Meyerhoff scholar, the M13 cohort, as a chemistry major in 2003. In high school, I didn’t really know much about UMBC, to be honest. It was my guidance counselor who told me to check it out. And then when I came to campus for Meyerhoff selection weekend, it was a different atmosphere than I had ever experienced. The idea of people getting their Ph.D. was kind of new to me. That was attractive and interesting to me as a high-achieving student from the Eleanor Roosevelt Science and Tech program. 

Q: What do you love most about the Meyerhoff Scholars Program?

A: The Meyerhoff program really helped me because, even though I was a pretty strong student, I didn’t necessarily have the best study skills. The Meyerhoff Program helps you get organized and get focused, so that when you meet challenges, you have the tools to overcome them. And then personally, the Meyerhoff program has always been very supportive of me throughout my academic and professional career.

Q: You had your daughter while at UMBC. What was that experience like, and where did you find support?

A: It was challenging, of course. But I think that because of the strong foundation I had through the Meyerhoff program, I was able to continue on and eventually complete my degree. I remember vividly that sometimes I had to bring my daughter to class. The teachers were not like, “Oh, no, what are you doing here?” I didn’t get that vibe at UMBC. Even when I had to bring my daughter to the library with me for a study group, my colleagues were very welcoming. So, there was tons of support..

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to a current UMBC student, what would it be?

A: What I would say to current UMBC students is to take advantage of all the wonderful opportunities and support found on campus. Sometimes when you’re young, you think you don’t need to go to a study group or utilize the Writing Center, but they’re valuable. 

Pictured right: Jacqueline holding hands with her daughter and one of her Meyerhoff M13 cohort.

Q: How did your time at UMBC shape your career aspirations?

A: Coming into UMBC, I knew I wanted to study chemistry, but I really didn’t know what type of chemistry or, really, what different varieties were out there. I was able to explore that at UMBC. In addition to the whole Meyerhoff program experience, which was pivotal to my academic growth, I had a lot of wonderful internship experiences at UMBC, including L’Oreal, McCormick, and Walgreens.

I also worked in Katherine Seley-Radtke’s lab in the chemistry department. Faculty research was a new thing to me, and it intrigued me. And so I decided that I wanted to explore this idea of academic research further. When I graduated from UMBC, I continued on to the University of Maryland, College Park to do my Ph.D. in chemistry, specializing in organic synthesis, which is what Dr. Seley-Radtke had done. Then, I went to do my postdoc at Georgetown University in the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Q: Can you tell us more about your career in higher ed?

A: After my postdoc, I got a faculty position at Bowie State University, which is a primarily undergraduate institution. I think what really attracted me to Bowie is that it’s an HBCU (Historically Black College or University), but it also felt similar to UMBC in a lot of ways. It was a smaller school, and I felt like there was that whole family environment. 

However, when I got to Bowie in 2016, they did not have a chemistry department. I played a big role in developing the chemistry program at Bowie, developing the curriculum, developing the proposal for the Maryland Higher Education Committee, and, eventually, defending that proposal. And I am happy to say that we officially launched the chemistry department at Bowie in 2019.

While I was working on the chemistry program, I was also trying to develop a research program with undergraduates, similar to what I saw done at UMBC. Ultimately, I was able to secure National Science Foundation funding through the HBCU-UP program. Initially, I got a research initiation award, which allowed me to procure some high-tech equipment, like a microwave reactor and an automated column chromatography instrument.

These tools allowed students to do their research within the confines of their academic schedule. The microwave, for example, allowed students to do reactions very quickly—in about 20 minutes—and then they could purify the compounds very quickly using automated chromatography.

In 2023, I became the first-ever Bowie professor to earn an NSF CAREER grant. This is an unusual achievement for an HBCU. When I was at College Park in my Ph.D. program, I remember seeing everybody working on their CAREER award applications. It was like a benchmark when they got it. So, being the rebel that I am, I decided that I was going to go for it at this primarily undergraduate HBCU institution. 

It just so happened that UMBC president Valerie Sheares Ashby (herself a chemist) was at Bowie shortly after I received the CAREER award. She was very happy for me, especially after learning I was a UMBC alum. She shared that information with UMBC president emeritus Freeman Hrabowski and the Meyerhoff program, who also reached out to congratulate me.

Receiving the CAREER award was really a game-changer for my research. I was able to hire a postdoc. And then, I received the NSF Excellence in Research award the next year.

Now, I felt like I had the tools I needed to take my work to the next level. So, that’s what brought me to Howard University in 2025. It was a hard decision to leave Bowie, but I really wanted to work with and support graduate students at the Ph.D. level.

Q: How have you given back to the community throughout your career?

A: I’ve had the opportunity throughout my career, really starting in my Ph.D. program, to work with the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE). I was the student chapter president at College Park, and that was a really supportive organization for me. Then, upon starting my career at Bowie, I joined the NOBCChE board. I am entering the last year of my term as the Northeast Regional chair for NOBCChE.

However, I still plan to assist with programming and outreach in the local areas and with Howard University’s chapter. So, I’ve been really fortunate to come full circle and now be in a position to offer the same support to graduate students that I received. I was also lucky enough to help approve the UMBC chapter of NOBCChE recently.

While at Bowie, I also worked with the science and technology program at Flowers High School to have students come into my lab and do their research practicum project, just like I did when I was a student at Eleanor Roosevelt. Then, several times a year I try to do some K-12 STEM activities with local elementary, middle, and high schools.

Q: What does winning a UMBC Alumni Award mean to you?

A: Winning this award means a lot to me because it validates that I have continued the Meyerhoff and the UMBC tradition of excellence. I know UMBC’s reputation is world-renowned, and I know the high standard that is there. So, it makes me feel proud to be selected. It makes me feel like the work I’m doing is good work, and it’s contributing to the scientific community, to the chemistry community in a tremendous way.

Mark your calendars for the 2025 Alumni Awards on Wednesday, October 29,at 6 p.m., and consider joining the UMBC community at the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena to celebrate Jacqueline Smith and the many remarkable individuals receiving awards. The event will be livestreamed for those unable to join in person. You can learn more at alumni.umbc.edu/alumniawards.