UMBC welcomed 50 IBM executives and research leaders to campus on Friday, April 6, for a day-long event designed to broaden the robust research relationship between the two organizations and introduce students to emerging career opportunities at IBM. Nearly 250 faculty, staff, students, and partners participated in IBM-UMBC Day.

UMBC’s work with IBM began nearly 25 years ago and has branched across a wide range of topics. The university’s most recent research collaboration with IBM connects artificial intelligence with cybersecurity, explained Keith J. Bowman, dean of UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology. Two new areas of likely future collaboration include quantum computing and blockchain.

Dave McQueeney, vice president of Corporate Technology and Community and Global University Programs at IBM (and UMBC’s executive champion), gave welcoming remarks for the company. Bowman introduced Anupam Joshi, chair and professor of computer science and electrical engineering (CSEE) at UMBC, who has completed two sabbaticals at IBM. He also welcomed Yelena Yesha, distinguished professor of CSEE, and Andy Rindos, head of IBM’s RTP Center for Advanced Studies, who were instrumental in organizing IBM-UMBC Day. The welcoming speakers set the tone for the event, highlighting a shared commitment to combining diverse perspectives to explore cutting edge research areas in new and exciting ways.

Michelle Browdy, IBM’s senior vice president for legal and regulatory affairs, and general counsel, delivered the keynote talk about the intersection of law, technology, and public policy. “It takes a village,” she said, noting that this phrase is especially important in the science and technology space, where collaboration is crucial.

Browdy emphasized that her legal team regularly works with business teams and engineers, particularly when technologies are being moved from the lab to the public. She shared how she sees engineers as developing products for people to use and enjoy, and her legal team as an essential complement, managing everything from patents to ensuring compliance with regulations.

Following the keynote, technical experts from UMBC and IBM gave brief talks on areas such as quantum computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the internet of things, and blockchain. UMBC professors Todd Pittman, physics, and Sam Lomonaco, CSEE, joined Andrew Wack, Q platform architect at IBM, in the first technical talk of the day, discussing recent developments in quantum computing and how the field is impacting other industries.

Next, Jeff Crume, distinguished engineer at IBM, and Joshi explored how institutions are making strides in addressing the kinds of cybersecurity concerns that are now making headlines worldwide. Joshi discussed his lab’s work connecting artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and he also described how combining the expertise of people from different fields is essential to creating effective and lasting solutions to cybersecurity challenges. Speaking in the realm of cyber attack prevention and response, he commented, “We have economists on our faculty who are looking at what the attack costs…and we have public policy colleagues who look at the barriers of adoption of cybersecurity.”

Also highlighted in Crume and Joshi’s talk was the Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Lab, which opened in 2016 as a collaboration between UMBC and IBM. The lab is one of many ways in which UMBC and IBM are continuing to grow their partnership, breaking ground in new research areas by combining the creativity and expertise of UMBC faculty and students with the extraordinary technical capabilities of IBM, and together preparing the next generation of computing professionals.

After a lunch break featuring technical demos, networking opportunities, and student research presentations, participants regrouped for a discussion about the Watson computer system and cloud computing. Presenters included Mac Devine, vice president of IBM Watson and Cloud Platform; Tim Finin, professor of CSEE, an expert on cloud computing; and Yesha, who has worked with IBM on computing research since the 1990s. Yesha is director of the new Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics, a $3 million NSF partnership. She described how the center will deploy next-generation computing hardware to solve significant infrastructure challenges, such as protecting massive data sets in the cloud.

Roman Vaculin, IBM research, concluded the technical talks with a discussion of how IBM is developing blockchain solutions that can be used across industries.

Throughout the day, speakers returned time and again to a core idea emphasized at the start of the day: that bringing together different perspectives is key to success in creating new technologies with the potential to change people’s lives. “We need lawyers and we need engineers,” said Browdy, in her keynote address. “We are shaped and we get opportunities to grow by being exposed to people in a lot of different areas.”

Video recordings from IBM-UMBC Day can be found on the UMBC YouTube channel.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships (GRF) to 10 UMBC-affiliated STEM students, including eight alumni and two seniors who will soon begin their graduate studies. Their awards include a $34,000 stipend and $12,000 toward tuition and fees for each of three years.

NSF also recognized three UMBC students and five alumni with honorable mentions. Of the 17 UMBC students and alumni honored, 13 are Meyerhoff or MARC U*STAR Scholars. These programs aim to increase the number of first-generation college students, students from low-income families, and underrepresented minorities in STEM.

This large number of honorees “shows the quality of student we have here at UMBC and what they’re doing,” says Keith Harmon, director of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. “It also shows the quality of their research experiences at UMBC, and the commitment of the faculty to mentoring these students as undergraduates.”

Randi Williams ’16, M24, computer engineering, received a fellowship for her work as a master’s student in the personal robots group at the MIT Media Lab. She studies children’s interactions with artificial intelligence and is developing a curriculum to help young children learn about AI by building, programming, and training their own autonomous robots. “I was drawn to this research because of my interest in developing a platform that helps decrease the technology gap for low-income and underrepresented communities in tech,” she says.

Williams finds the work rewarding because it combines her aptitude for engineering with her passion for education and social justice. “The greatest thing about receiving the fellowship is support and validation for my diverse research interests,” she shares. “I’m looking forward to chasing my dreams and being a bridge between disciplines.”

Jonathan Werner ’18, M26, bioinformatics and computational biology, has been conducting research with Rachel Brewster, professor of biological sciences, since his freshman year. By studying zebrafish development, “we aim to provide the basic research necessary for the future clinical treatment of neural tube birth defects, the most common birth defects in humans,” he says.

Werner’s interests span computer science and traditional experimental biology. “In graduate school, I’m hoping to join both a computational lab and an experimental lab to further train as an interdisciplinary scientist,” he says, “and winning the NSF GRF gives me the freedom to do so. It’s going to allow me to be as creative as I want when designing my graduate research projects, which I’m really looking forward to.”

Jamshaid Shahir ’18, M26, mathematics and statistics, works with Hye-Won Kang, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, on mathematically modeling the dynamics of cell polarization—how cells develop distinct front and back ends. That process allows cells to move and transmit information. It is particularly important for wound healing, the immune system, and embryonic development.

“Winning the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is a powerful affirmation that I can both pursue and excel in a research career,” Shahir says. “I look forward to the freedom of pursuing questions that interest me, and growing as a researcher.”

All three students spoke to the impact of their UMBC experiences on their success. Williams includes UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski among her mentors and shares, “Honestly, I wouldn’t be at MIT pursuing a Ph.D. without UMBC.” Werner adds, “I reached out to a lot of professors here asking for advice, and every single one was more than happy to help.” He also shared his gratitude for UMBC alumni mentors Keisha John ’03, M12, biochemistry and molecular biology, and Kafui Dzirasa ’01, M8, chemical engineering. Shahir is particularly thankful for UMBC’s supportive culture, including guidance he received from Kang and John. “I believe UMBC promotes a healthy balance between cooperation and competition that has motivated me to push myself harder,” he shares, “allowing me to grow as both an aspiring scientist and as a young adult.”

The honorees are pursuing graduate study at top institutions across the nation, from UMBC and MIT to Duke and Georgia Tech. Whether students receive NSF fellowships or honorable mentions, Harmon describes this level of national recognition as very meaningful validation. “I think students are always questioning, even the most accomplished,” he says. “It’s nice for them to see yes, I can do this. Another affirmation that yes, I am on the right path. I have ability. I have something to offer. There is a place for me in STEM.”

2018 UMBC-affiliated NSF Graduate Research Fellows:

William Dean ’16, chemistry
Sarah Hemler ’15, mechanical engineering
Teisha King ’16, biological sciences
Samantha McDonald ’16, information systems
Sean Najmi ’17, chemical engineering
Jamshaid Shahir ’18, mathematics
Gwenaëlle Thomas ’16, biochemistry and molecular biology
Jonathan Werner ’18, bioinformatics and computational biology
Randi Williams ’16, computer engineering
Jasmin Zarb ’16, biochemistry and molecular biology

2018 UMBC-affiliated NSF Graduate Research Fellow Program honorable mentions:

Roy Anderson ’16, mechanical engineering
Anya Byrd ’18, biological sciences
Adrian Davey ’18, chemical engineering
Skylar Fisher, ’16, biological sciences
Alvaro Fletcher ’16, mathematics
Rachael Knoblauch ’15, theatre, and current Ph.D. student in chemistry
Kori McDonald ’16, chemistry
Theresa Sheets ’18, mathematics

The award honors the legacy of Kenyan-born professor Ali Mazrui, known for his research on African history and critical analysis of western influence in Africa. It acknowledges scholars whose academic work is substantial, rigorous, and original, and has a far-reaching impact on one or more disciplines within African(a) studies.

Chuku was honored as the first woman to receive the award at a special event during this year’s TOFAC gathering, held in July at the Adeyemi College of Education, in Ondo, Nigeria. Previous recipients include Nimi Wariboko, professor of social ethics at Boston University School of Theology, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, founder of the Africa Decolonial Research Network at the University of South Africa.

Chuku’s research spans continents and explores, in-depth, complex issues related to gender, cultural, ethnic, and religious differences and their intersections. Her first book, Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria 1900-1960 (Routledge, 2005), remains the most comprehensive study on Igbo women, covering all Igbo subculture zones.

“Through my undergraduate and graduate studies I realized that not much had been written on Igbo women,” says Chuku. “I remembered my grandmother, my mother, and of course all the powerful women of Igbo descent who accomplished a great deal, and whom I see as heroes and heroines. Their histories and experiences had not been captured and recorded. I thought, that is an area I should focus on when I have the opportunity to do my doctorate degree.”

In addition to honoring influential scholarship, the award also celebrates transformative leadership in higher education, and serves as a recognition of Chuku’s commitment to mentorship and student success.

“My goal is to help students advance their knowledge, their writing skills, and their analytical interpretation of historical evidence, as well as to graduate on time, be able to appreciate cultural diversity, and become better prepared to achieve their goals in life,” Chuku shares. “If I can help in a little way to help them accomplish their goals, I’ve done something.”

Chuku also presented a paper during the TOFAC conference. Using data from Belgian, English, French, German, and Portuguese colonial and mission education policies, she discussed formal education and women’s agency in colonial Africa. In addition to presenting, Chuku chaired a panel on indigenous education and knowledge systems in Africa, exploring values, crafts, trade, skills, and knowledge acquisition before Islam, Christianity, and Western education were introduced.

Connecting all of these projects is Chuku’s underlying passion for helping scholars, students, and broader communities better understand the past, present, and future of Africa.

Toyin Falola, the namesake of the TOFAC conference, will present UMBC’s annual W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture (part of the Social Sciences Forum series) this fall. Falola is professor of history and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. The lecture will discuss contemporary African immigrant communities in the U.S. It will be held on November 8, 7 – 8 p.m., in the UC Ballroom.

When Christy Ford Chapin, associate professor of history, began teaching at UMBC in 2012, she started by connecting curious students with the history of the American health care system. Her first book, Ensuring America’s Health, was an in-depth history of the country’s health care and health insurance system. This fall, as the recipient of a prestigious Kluge Fellowship, Chapin is immersed in the banking and finance collections at the U.S. Library of Congress, rather than in conversation with her students. While the archives are not quite as action-packed as the classroom, her enthusiasm for digging into the nitty gritty of U.S. history remains contagious.

Chapin loves how historians seek answers buried in documents, archives, museums, libraries, basements, attics and forgotten filing cabinets. “We have to be like private investigators. I have to beg, borrow, and plead to get documents,” says Chapin. “I was really intimidated by the research aspect early on in my graduate career, but then I fell in love with the hunt for primary sources and the process of putting together pieces of the evidence puzzle.”

Through her current Kluge Fellowship, as well as an inaugural fellowship last spring at the Ed Snider Center for the History of Capitalism at the University of Maryland, Chapin examines how the United States shifted from an industrial manufacturing economy to a financial economy for a new book on post-WWII finance. She’s energized by seeing several of her history colleagues pursue other high impact research areas through fellowships around the globe in what has been a particularly exciting year of achievement for the department’s faculty.

While in Beijing researching her first book in 2011, Meredith Oyen, associate professor, came across documents that discussed cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the UN-affiliated International Refugee Organization well into the 1950s, when the PRC was not recognized by the UN. They dealt in part with the resettlement of Jewish and European refugees in China after WWII.

The documents reflected a great mystery. I asked myself, ‘Why did this organization stay in China all these years?’  I had to search other archives to start to figure it out.” Oyen was determined to learn more and followed the paperwork trail to Shanghai, Taipei, London, and Washington D.C. where she held a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellowship in 2016-17 that helped her find even more clues.

At the same time, Marjoleine Kars, associate professor and chair, and Kate Brown, professor, pursued Braudel Senior Fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. There, Kars worked on her book about one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in Atlantic history, which occurred in 1763 in the South American Dutch colony of Berbice. Brown continued to expand her research on the lasting health and environmental impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in new directions. 

Brown also received a highly prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to study the health effect of Chernobyl and a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin.

Prior to Brown receiving the Berlin Prize, Professor Rebecca Boehling received the prestigious award in fall 2016 for her work on denazification in post-WWII Germany, comparing the approaches of the United States, Great Britain, and France.

Kars shares how these types of intensive research and international exchange opportunities have far-reaching benefits for the individual faculty members who experience them. “Faculty come back from research leave with new ideas about teaching, research projects, new directions for their own work, and they bring that energy into the classroom,” she says. “Our students benefit from reenergized faculty who are on the cutting edge of their profession and are able to connect them with research monies, fellowships, and graduate school mentors.”

In order to reach this level of success, Kars notes, history faculty have also depended on support from each other—in terms of sharing feedback, resources, and responsibilities—and from the broader university. She particularly credits a multi-tiered support system of seed funding—in the form of summer fellowships and research money from the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, The Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research, and The Dresher Center for the Humanities—as well as the help of Rachel Brubaker, associate director of The Dresher Center, with writing and submitting grant applications.

“This kind of support has been invaluable to our faculty as they work to hone their research and explore new opportunities for growth,” says Kars. “When I think about what has made the difference in our successfully competing for such major national and international fellowships, one core aspect of UMBC comes to mind: our collaborative community of scholars. This is what make it possible for us to explore unique research opportunities around the world, and what draws us back to UMBC each time, to share what we’ve learned.”

Charissa Cheah, professor of psychology, has received a Fulbright to collaborate with  psychologists at the University of Palermo in Sicily to explore Muslim Tunisian immigrant adolescent identity development, civic engagement, positive youth development, and risk behavior engagement. The award is one of only six Fulbright awards open to all academic disciplines and specializations in the humanities, sciences, social sciences and the arts to conduct research in Italy.  

“My Fulbright will focus on religious Muslim Tunisian adolescents in Sicily. The island has a long tradition of immigration and cultural exchanges with North African countries which has resulted in higher levels of tolerance and multicultural ideology,” explains Cheah, who hopes the work will challenge people to think critically about behavior within a cultural context. “The work in Sicily will help provide greater insights and context for improving the work I do to understand Muslim American youth development and adjustment in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.”

Cheah’s cross-cultural focus is partially informed by her experience as a native Malaysian of Chinese ethnicity. “Malaysia is a multicultural society with a Muslim majority. At age 14 my family moved to Toronto and then I moved to the U.S. for graduate school. I found myself in many different contexts with various identities being salient on a daily basis.”

Learning to live among many different cultures throughout her youth and into her teen years gave Cheah first-hand knowledge of the cultural and social changes families make to create better living situations for themselves.

She carried this experience to graduate school where she had the opportunity for the first time to work with cross-cultural research in the Laboratory for the Study of Child and Family Relationships and the Center for Children, Relationships and Culture with director Kenneth Rubin, professor in Human Development & Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

“My dissertation was my first venture into doing a cross-cultural comparison where I tried to understand parenting beliefs and practices of European American families compared to mainland Chinese families. I wanted to understand the way the different families thought about developing their children’s social skills and how they interpreted negative and positive behaviors within particular cultural contexts.”

This pivotal point in her work led her to accept her first faculty position at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, where she helped to develop a program on culture and human development. Here she was able to work with Cree adolescents and study their identity development within a First Nation and the larger Canadian culture.

She was able to see how some of the issues that teenagers everywhere struggle with in terms of their own identity, their place within their peer group, and how they see themselves in relation to their family’s traditions and beliefs can present challenges when they must also learn to understand their identity within a different larger religious, ethnic, and/or racial community. Since her move to UMBC in 2004, Cheah has expanded her work to include Chinese and Korean immigrant families in Maryland, as well as families in Korea, Turkey, Italy, Malaysia and Zimbabwe.

“In my research on immigrant and minority families, I am particularly interested in what beliefs and behaviors are maintained from the heritage culture, what is changed, adapted, or given up and what new combinations of beliefs, behaviors, and practices come about in this new cultural context.”

When her graduate student Madiha Tahseen ’09, M.A., psychology, and Ph.D. ’15, psychology and applied developmental psychology, a former doctoral student and Muslim, Pakistani American, wanted to research Muslim American adolescents for her dissertation, Cheah felt it was a natural fit.

“I first delved into the field of psychology as a undergrad because I saw a lot of Muslim youth around me suffering from mental illnesses but that were not being addressed both within and outside of the Muslim community, ” recalls Tahseen.  “Clinicians were just not truly understanding what Muslim youth endure or how to treat their mental illness in a way that was supported within the cultural contexts of their lives.”

For Tahseen and Cheah, this was an opportunity to help provide context to what is often a very charged social political conversation about immigrant Muslim youth in the United States. Now she will expand the work to Muslim adolescents and their families in different contexts internationally, to further explore the roles of social, cultural, and political forces.

Cheah hopes the research will help to contribute to a body of work that helps move psychological theory beyond the traditional Western European-based data samples, and into a more culturally inclusive and relevant model.

“My colleagues and I who are cultural developmental scientists are trying to expand, diversify, and challenge people to think critically about culture and behavior. Our goal is to evolve the theory so that the standard won’t be based on just one cultural group. We hope to open doors and avenues for further investigation and self understanding. In the process, we aim to also diversify the body  of researchers doing this work and more accurately represent the world in which we live.”

The Fulbright program is designed to foster relationships between the scholars in the United States and of other countries who are needed to solve global challenges.

UMBC’s F. Chris Curran, assistant professor of public policy, has received a two-year $620,000 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) grant to lead a new research study on the role of law enforcement officers in public schools.

“Law enforcement have become an increasingly common presence in school settings, particularly after high profile events like the tragedy at Sandy Hook,” notes Curran. “Our work seeks to understand the role of these officers in promoting safety, managing student behavior, and facilitating relationships with students.”

The CSSI grant program specifically funds innovative research to help understand the root causes of school violence, develop strategies for increasing school safety, and implement research based pilot programs, policies, and practices. Curran, primary investigator for this new study, shares, “The support of the National Institute of Justice allows for an unprecedented look at the role and impact of SROs in previously understudied settings”—in this case, in two Southern U.S. suburban school districts.

This work began about two years ago when Curran co-founded the Collaborative on Adolescent Violence and Victimization (CAVV) with researchers from UMBC, University of Pittsburgh, University of Louisville, and Vanderbilt University who were interested in looking further at this issue. “We collectively started a conversation with a couple of school districts to examine issues around school safety, discipline, and how SROs intersect with that.” Curran’s primary collaborators for the current study include co-principal investigator Benjamin W. Fisher of the University of Louisville and project coordinator Samantha Viano of Vanderbilt University.

In addition to the NIJ grant, Curran has also received a one-year $20,000 grant through the American Educational Research Association (AERA) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund research in another area of education policy: science achievement in kindergarten through second grade. This new grant will enable Curran to expand his previous research on inequalities in science education that appear at a very early age utilizing nationally representative data. Curran’s previous groundbreaking work in that area appeared in publications from The Atlantic to Education Week.

“Part of what informs my work is a moral imperative,” says Curran. His sense of urgency to better understand the impacts of educational environment, resources, and pedagogy is informed by his past encounters with inequalities in the U.S. education system as a former middle school science teacher. After experiencing the challenges of teaching with outdated textbooks and providing students hands-on laboratory experiences when access to materials and equipment were limited, he decided to begin working at a policy level to more effectively meet students’ needs.

“Right now there are students being short-changed by the education system. They are not sitting in a classroom with a high enough quality teacher. They are not being provided the resources they deserve,” Curran reflects. “Too often these disparities run along racial lines, socioeconomic lines, or gender lines, and that is a problem.”

As a researcher, educator, and someone training the next generation of education policy analysts, Curran says, “I would like to think my work does something to address those problems. Policy won’t change overnight, but these issues we’re addressing are truly urgent.”

Classical computers have been getting faster, more powerful, and more compact for decades, but they may be reaching their limits, writes Sebastian Deffner, assistant professor of physics, in The Conversation. People have pinned their hopes on quantum computers for the next leap forward in computing technology, he explains, “but my recent research has revealed that quantum computers will have limits of their own, and has suggested ways to figure out what those limits are.”

The physical laws that govern quantum computers, known as quantum mechanics, are very different from the laws that govern classical computers—and everything else in the physical world with which we are familiar. For example, in the “quantum world,” where the largest objects are about the size of individual atoms, an observer can either know an object’s speed or its location—but never both at the same time.

“It is important to realize that this ‘quantum uncertainty’ is not a shortcoming of measurement equipment or engineering, but rather how our brains work,” says Deffner. “We have evolved to be so used to how the ‘classical world’ works that the actual physical mechanisms of the ‘quantum world’ are simply beyond our ability to fully grasp.”

Most people have a general, intuitive understanding of how a combustion engine burns fuel to release energy, for example. There are theoretical limits to gasoline engines that prevent cars from going at the speed of light, but other challenges to the efficiency of engines get in the way first, so in practice we don’t need to consider the ultimate limitations to combustion engines.

“Until recently, though, scholars only had a rather vague idea that quantum physics had limits too,” says Deffner, “but didn’t know how to figure out how they might apply in the real world.” Deffner has been on the cutting edge of finding those limits and defining their applications. “It’s not clear whether the quantum speed limit is so high it’s unattainable—like the car that will never even get close to the speed of light,” he writes, which means it may be important for the future of computing to figure out how the quantum speed limit affects computers that operate in the quantum world.

Fundamental physical limits impose a delay on detecting an object in the quantum world. Each delay is only a few quadrillionths of a second, but the delays accumulate across a computer’s millions of computations. That prevents a quantum computer from going arbitrarily fast and results in an overall quantum speed limit.

Deffner’s research group has found that the quantum speed limit can differ depending on a quantum computer’s design, and sometimes, “unexpected factors can help speed things up, at times, in counterintuitive ways.”

As an example of how the quantum world operates differently from the classical one, Deffner compares the speed of a quantum computer to a particle moving through water versus honey. You might expect the particle in honey to move more slowly, but in the quantum world, the displaced honey filling in the path where the particle has just traveled “can build up pressure that propels the quantum particle forward. This extra acceleration can make a quantum particle’s speed limit different from what an observer might otherwise expect.”

Growing researchers’ understanding of the quantum speed limit and how different factors may modify it will likely influence quantum processor design, Deffner says, noting, “There’s a lot for researchers like me to explore.” A pioneer in the field, Deffner has already published several papers related to the quantum speed limit, with more on the way.

“Just as engineers figured out how to shrink the size of transistors and pack them more closely together on a classical computer chip,” Deffner writes, “they’ll need some clever innovation to build the fastest possible quantum systems, operating as close as possible to the ultimate speed limit.”

As of January 18, 2018, Sebastian Deffner’s article in The Conversation has been viewed more than 40,000 times and republished in The Chicago Tribune, Live Science, RealClearScience, Space.com, Phys.org, and World Economic Forum.

Global investment management firm T. Rowe Price is supporting cybersecurity research and students at UMBC through a new sponsorship of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. The funding reinforces UMBC’s strength in cybersecurity research and talent development, and T. Rowe Price’s leadership in advancing cybersecurity for financial services.

“We are delighted to be working with T. Rowe Price,” says Anupam Joshi, director of the Center for Cybersecurity and chair of computer science and electrical engineering. “This new collaboration with T. Rowe Price’s security team will provide great opportunities for our students to be exposed to cybersecurity in financial services and prepare them for promising careers protecting critical infrastructure.”

The sponsorship from T. Rowe Price will support a graduate student conducting cybersecurity research relevant to financial services and will also support undergraduate cybersecurity students through UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program. This collaboration will enhance UMBC’s efforts to cultivate new cyber talent and increase diversity in the field. The students will have opportunities to meet, interact with and learn from members of T. Rowe Price’s security team.

“We have built a strong partnership with UMBC over the past few decades that has provided us a robust talent pipeline for the firm. We currently have over 200 associates who are UMBC alumni,” says Tom Quinn, head of information security at T. Rowe Price.

UMBC and T. Rowe Price have built a strategic partnership spanning several decades that provides support to students across disciplines and a highly skilled workforce for the company. T. Rowe Price is a top employer of UMBC graduates and student interns in areas from investment research to technology development.

“For many years, UMBC has consistently provided our firm with hundreds of exceptionally talented students that we have hired across all areas of our business. UMBC students are well-rounded and diverse in their experiences and skills, which make them strong assets to our firm year over year,” said Mindy Silverman, talent acquisition leader for university relations at T. Rowe Price.