This story was written by Sarah Hansen and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

The supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are the most massive objects in the universe. They range from about 1 million to upwards of 10 billion times the mass of the Sun. Some of these black holes also blast out gigantic, super-heated jets of plasma at nearly the speed of light. The primary way that the jets discharge this powerful motion energy is by converting it into extremely high-energy gamma rays. However, UMBC physics Ph.D. candidate Adam Leah Harvey says,“How exactly this radiation is created is an open question.”

The jet has to discharge its energy somewhere, and previous work doesn’t agree where. The prime candidates are two regions made of gas and light that encircle black holes, called the broad-line region and the molecular torus.

A black hole’s jet has the potential to convert visible and infrared light in either region to high-energy gamma rays by giving away some of its energy. Harvey’s new NASA-funded research sheds light on this controversy by offering strong evidence that the jets mostly release energy in the molecular torus, and not in the broad-line region. The study was published in October in Nature Communications and co-authored by UMBC physicists Markos Georganopoulos and Eileen Meyer.

Far out

The broad-line region is closer to the center of a black hole, at a distance of about 0.3 light-years. The molecular torus is much farther out—more than  3 light-years. While all of these distances seem huge to a non-astronomer, the new work “tells us that we’re getting energy dissipation far away from the black hole at the relevant scales,” Harvey explains.

“The implications are extremely important for our understanding of jets launched by black holes,” Harvey says. Which region primarily absorbs the jet’s energy offers clues to how the jets initially form, pick up speed, and become column-shaped. For example, “It indicates that the jet is not accelerated enough at smaller scales to start to dissipate energy,” Harvey says.

Other researchers have proposed contradictory ideas about the jets’ structure and behavior. Because of the trusted methods Harvey used in their new work, however, they expect the results to be broadly accepted in the scientific community. “The results basically help to constrain those possibilities—those different models—of jet formation.”

On solid footing

To come to their conclusions, Harvey applied a standard statistical technique called “bootstrapping” to data from 62 observations of black hole jets. “A lot of what came before this paper has been very model-dependent. Other papers have made a lot of very specific assumptions, whereas our method is extremely general,” Harvey explains. “There isn’t much to undermine the analysis. It’s well-understood methods, and just using observational data. So the result should be correct.”

A quantity called the seed factor was central to the analysis. The seed factor indicates where the light waves that the jet converts to gamma rays come from. If the conversion happens at the molecular torus, one seed factor is expected. If it happens at the broad-line region, the seed factor will be different.

Georganopolous, associate professor of physics and one of Harvey’s advisors, originally developed the sed factor concept, but “applying the idea of the seed factor had to wait for someone with a lot of perseverance, and this someone was Adam Leah,” Georganopoulos says.

Harvey calculated the seed factors for all 62 observations. They found that the seed factors fell in a normal distribution aligned almost perfectly around the expected value for the molecular torus. That result strongly suggests that the energy from the jet is discharging into light waves in the molecular torus, and not in the broad-line region.

Tangents and searches

Harvey shares that the support of their mentors, Georganopoulos and Meyer, assistant professor of physics, was instrumental to the project’s success. “I think that without them letting me go off on a lot of tangents and searches of how to do things, this would have never gotten to the level that it’s at,” Harvey says. “Because they allowed me to really dig into it, I was able to pull out a lot more from this project.”

Harvey identifies as an “observational astronomer,” but adds, “I’m really more of a data scientist and a statistician than I am a physicist.” And the statistics has been the most exciting part of this work, they say.

“I just think it’s really cool that I was able to figure out methods to create such a strong study of such a weird system that is so removed from my own personal reality.” Harvey says. “It’s going to be fun to see what people do with it.”

Header image: The remnants of a star torn apart by a black hole form a disk around the black hole’s center, while jets eject from either side. Artist’s rendering courtesy of NASA.

This story was written by Megan Hanks and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

This fall, the student-organized TEDxUMBC gave ten speakers the opportunity to share their stories, experiences, and expertise with the world. Surprisingly, the theme, “Unmasking Uncertainty,” was actually conceived far before COVID-19 surged globally.

Tirzah Khan ‘20, information systems, led the TEDxUMBC team in organizing the event. When the planning committee chose their theme, she says, they did not anticipate the global pandemic, the resurgence in demands for racial justice, and a divisive election. “In these unprecedented circumstances, TEDxUMBC seeks to provide answers and build community,” Khan reflects. 

A bumpy road to study in the U.S.

One of the speakers was Sahara Ali, Ph.D.‘26, information systems. She shared her path from Pakistan to the United States for graduate study and explained how it changed the way she approaches challenges. 

At age 21, Ali had graduated with her bachelor’s degree in computer science in Pakistan. She was eager to begin pursuing her Ph.D. at UMBC and to marry her U.S.-based fiancé. But it took over a year for Ali to obtain her visa from the U.S. Embassy. The delay changed her marriage plans and she feared it would make international graduate study impossible as well.

Facing a long and uncertain wait, Ali dedicated herself to her work in Pakistan. But just days after deciding to move on, she received her visa. She had to start over with her U.S. plans, rethinking how she would get to Maryland, where she would live, and what the experience would be like.

Ali says this situation taught her about her resilience and using creativity to work through unexpected obstacles. “Uncertainty can lead to something exciting, something innovative,” she shared, even if it means learning something “in an unconventional way.”

Today, Ali is pursuing her Ph.D. in information systems full-time at UMBC. She is working alongside Jianwu Wang, assistant professor of information systems, and collaborating with NASA scientists to study the causal effects of climate change. 

Moving theater to a virtual space

Asif Majid ‘13, interdisciplinary studies, shared his passion for community theater and how he has adjusted his work (which previously depended on live, in-person audiences) to fit online formats. 

Majid works at the intersection of Islam, media, marginality, and politics, and develops plays that focus on stories of racially and religiously marginalized communities. His TEDxUMBC talk took the audience back to the second week of March, when the COVID-19 pandemic first began impacting nearly every aspect of life.

At the time, Majid was in the final stages of producing a new play with a theater in Washington, D.C. Work had been underway since July 2019, and the show was scheduled to debut in front of an audience for the first time at the end of March 2020. 

Majid was living with his older family members and became quite concerned that continuing to work in face-to-face settings could put his family members at risk. He decided that while the show needed to go on, it had to move to an online space. 

In collaboration with the creative team, Majid figured out how the actors could perform from their own homes, and how attendees could watch the play remotely from around the world. “Over the course of two weeks, we learned about new technologies, rehearsed the tech to performance, and developed a new approach to making theater,” he said. 

Ultimately, the performance attracted nearly eight times the number of people who would typically see a show in one night, and people tuned in from 18 countries. 

Moving forward in uncertain times

Also featured in the event was Evangeline Kirigua ‘21, political science, who discussed the importance of empowering foreign-born nationals to engage in their communities without being able to vote. Haleemat Adekoya ‘23, political science, talked about being present in the moment, and how to face “what ifs” that can cause fear and uncertainty. Karis Barnett ‘21, chemistry, shared how to identify and address your internal critic to discover self-worth. 

Other speakers gave a window into different fields. John Hebeler, a part-time lecturer in information systems, spoke about machine learning, including the impact that it is having on people now and will continue to have in the future. Maryam Elhabashy ‘21, anthropology, discussed the challenges around integrating ethnic studies into school curricula, and how attempts to celebrate diversity may inadvertently lead to otherization. Mike Spano ‘21, psychology, talked about theories related to sleep and dreams, and how to mold your dreams into reality. 

Like Ali and Majid, speakers reflected on personal experiences. Rojin Najmabadi ‘21, biological sciences, discussed the decision to invest in herself on her path to success, even when that decision went against how she was raised by her family. Zareen Taj, Ph.D. ‘26, language, literacy, and culture, shared her personal story of empowerment and achievement as an Afghani woman who grew up in refugee camps. 

Tess McRae ‘21, individualized studies, concluded the event by encouraging attendees to use the lessons and insights shared by the presenters in their own lives. The event coordinators plan to share the event recording on the TEDx YouTube channel so that the presenters’ messages can continue to be shared. 

Banner image: UMBC’s campus in the fall. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This story was written by Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

UMBC’s Marjoleine Kars has published a new book examining accounts of a nearly successful rebellion of enslaved people just over 250 years ago. Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (The New Press, 2020) chronicles a rebellion by enslaved people in the Dutch colony of Berbice, 1763 – 1764. This uprising took place thirty years before Toussaint L’Ouverture led a successful rebellion by enslaved people in Haiti against French colonizers. 

“It is important that people know that there is a long history of African people, people of African descent, and in the African diaspora, fighting against oppression and putting their lives on the line like they are today,” says Kars, associate professor of history. “There is also a long tradition of people having different ideas about how to fight oppression and what life should look like at the other side.”

Unexpected archival find

Kars traveled to the National Archives of the Netherlands in the Hague many times to study primary documents about the uprising that had not been researched before. The archives house colonial documents about the rebellion, including the journals of the governor, military reports, and correspondence between officials in Berbice and the government in the Netherlands. She also came across a rare find in colonial research that became the basis for her book: first-hand accounts by enslaved people. 

The archive stores 500 pages of personal accounts from judicial investigations of people who were enslaved when the rebellion was suppressed. While these first-hand accounts are unique and essential to the book, Kars acknowledges their limitations. 

The fifteen-month rebellion

“These accounts are problematic records because they were obtained under duress, translated from Creole to Dutch, summarized by the clerk, and done in third person,” shares Kars. “However, they still provide a unique and important perspective that breaks from the racist accounts of the colonial government.”

Kars uses these documents to weave an untold story about the uprising led by Coffij against the colonial government of Berbice. Like many enslaved people in the European colonies, Coffij was captured in his home of West Africa as a child and enslaved to work in the sugar plantations of the Dutch colony. 

A decade before the rebellion, Berbice suffered from drought, crop failure, and the Seven Years War, which slowed the shipment of food. Enslaved people fought to stave off starvation and to survive raging epidemics, while also experiencing torture at the hands of Dutch slaveholders. As deaths rose, surviving enslaved people were at even greater risk of death through overwork.

Coffij led 4,500 enslaved African and people of African descent and 350 enslaved indigenous people in rebelling against 350 Europeans spread over five plantations. While he was leading a fight for independence from the Dutch, he was not fighting to create a democracy. Rather, Coffij sought to found a similar authoritarian government led by him and dependent on the plantation system. The rebellion lasted fifteen months. 

Ideas of freedom

Kars also examines the motivations and experiences of the many people she describes as remaining neutral in the conflict. “Rebellions are suicidal. And neither side was offering a life free from slavery,” she explains. In this way, enslaved people who wanted to be independent subsistence farmers, and be free on their own terms, faced painful choices in the rebellion. 

“Blood on the River is a story about the complex political internal dynamics of a rebellion and this anticolonial fight between former slaves and former masters,” Kars shares. It’s also about “the many ideas of what freedom means.”

Award-winning scholarship

Kars’s first writing on this research topic was an article focusing on the women of the rebellion. It was published in the American Historical Review in 2016. “Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763” earned four prizes in 2017. She received the Vanderwood Prize, which is awarded for a distinguished article on Latin American history. She also earned the Kimberly S. Hanger Article Prize for the quality and originality of research and writing. 

The Carol Gold Best Article Award seeks to promote women’s history and to support women in the historical profession. Kars received the prize in 2017, which acknowledged her article as the best peer-reviewed journal article of the year. 

The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, affiliated with the American Historical Association, also gave Kars their biennial article prize. This prize recognizes “outstanding and path-breaking scholarship that furthers historical understanding of the circumstances, causes, and consequences of increased global interaction, worldwide exchanges, and cross-cultural connections in the early modern period.”

Funding for research

Research for the book spanned over a decade. During this time Kars received major funding from various organizations. Kars was a Huntington Library Fellow in 2018 – 2019. She was a Fernarnd Braudel Senior Fellow at the European Institute in Florence, Italy between 2016 and 2017. She also received a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers, and a Mellon InterAmericas Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library over the course of five years. 

UMBC also supported Kars’s research for this book. Kars received a College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Research Fellowship. She also received a Dresher Center for the Humanities Residential Faculty Fellowship and a Dresher Center for the Humanities Summer Fellowship, and a UMBC summer fellowship. 

To learn more about the book, see the reviews in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and The Washington Post. 

Banner image: Marjoleine Kars. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11.

This story was written by Megan Hanks and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

Nearly 100 industry experts and entrepreneurs gathered virtually for Cybertini 2020, hosted by bwtech@UMBC, UMBC’s research and technology park, on October 15. The annual event offers a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn from industry professionals and experts in academia, and this year focused on cybersecurity related to elections. This is the second of three Cybertini events scheduled for this year.

UMBC’s Rick Forno, assistant director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, joined Ron Gula, president of Gula Tech Adventures, and Sarah Lenti, executive director of the Lincoln Project, for the panel discussion. In the context of a highly contentious 2020 U.S. election season, panelists shared their perspectives on the particular cybersecurity challenges the U.S. electoral system faces today. 

Gula grounded the conversation with a key point: that elections are now considered to be part of critical infrastructure, but that challenges to its security are unique. Megan Wahler, director of entrepreneurial services at bwtech@UMBC, moderated the event. 

Continuous attention to security

Forno and Gula both argued that it’s important to continuously look at the security of information sharing broadly, rather than focusing on security when an election comes around. 

“I think you don’t look at it in the context of securing an election,” said Forno. “I think you need to look at it as securing an information ecosystem over time, not just every two or four years.” This means there will always be a need for expertise and innovations related to securing information, he noted. 

Gula similarly emphasized that it is important for leaders to take cyber hygiene and data security seriously in order to protect companies, governments, and elections from vulnerabilities in the long term. “If we can educate [people running for office] before they get into office, then they’re going to make better cyber policy decisions for all of us,” he said. 

Electronic voting and misinformation

The speakers also discussed how to ensure the security of future electronic voting platforms, a particularly hot-button issue in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gula explained that it’s possible to develop a secure electronic voting system, but that this security might be dependent on maintaining a paper trail. Forno cautioned that the U.S. electoral system also poses particular challenges, given that each state and territory has its own process for running elections. 

Returning to the present election, Forno discussed how securing information shared on social media also plays a role in elections, even if people are still voting through traditional means. He suggested that social media companies must play a major role in identifying and preventing the spread of misinformation. By blocking inaccurate information from being posted or shared online, these companies can thwart efforts to bad actors to influence elections. UMBC faculty, students, and alumni are currently working on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity technologies to address these issues.

Further discussing vulnerabilities of the current election, Lenti described her organization’s work to track voter suppression efforts, to hold leaders accountable to maintaining a secure and accessible electoral process. The Lincoln Project recently announced a partnership with See Say 2020, which allows people to report acts of voter suppression and election interference in real time. 

“The Lincoln Project’s role is to basically shine a light on these activities with the hopes of it leading to some remedy and creating a deterrent,” Lenti said.

Forno reflected that looking at the broad ways in which cybersecurity plays a role in current and future elections shows how “cyber touches every aspect of society.”

Banner image: The entrance to bwtech@UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ‘11 for UMBC.

This story was written by Sarah Hansen and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

The Binational Agricultural Research Development (BARD) Fund, a partnership program between the U.S. and Israel, has recognized Yonathan Zohar for the economic impact of his research. In a review of more than 1,300 projects funded by BARD in its 40-year existence, the selection committee found Zohar’s to be the project with the greatest impact.

Zohar’s research has enabled high-value commercial fish species such as Mediterranean seabream, European seabass (bronzino), salmon, and striped bass to be grown through hatchery-based aquaculture. This has resulted in an estimated $12 billion in economic growth. A virtual ceremony on November 10 recognized Zohar and representatives of two other projects.

Zohar, professor and chair of marine biotechnology at UMBC, received his first BARD grant in 1985 to investigate how fish reproduction is biologically controlled. Hatchery-based aquaculture was largely impossible at the time, because commercial species would not spawn in captivity. Instead, fish farmers relied on egg-bearing females collected from the wild to supply an often-unreliable source of eggs. Zohar’s work sought to help the aquaculture industry address this bottleneck by enabling captive reproduction.

“Without being able to complete the life cycle of the fish in captivity, namely producing eggs and juveniles, it is impossible to develop a reliable, reproducible, and cost-effective aquaculture industry of the species,” Zohar explains.

Never give up

A suite of environmental conditions initiates reproduction in the wild by triggering a series of hormonal responses. Rather than try to replicate a complex set of environmental factors in captivity, Zohar’s research aimed to determine how the necessary hormones were failing to initiate spawning in captive fish.

The result was surprisingly simple: He found a single hormone was responsible for jumpstarting a cascade of physiological processes that leads to reproduction, and this hormone malfunctioned in captivity. However, simply injecting captive fish with this hormone proved not enough to trigger reproduction.

Zohar was undeterred. Through painstaking, labor-intensive experiments (technology was much more limited in the 1980s), he found that the fish quickly degraded the injected hormone. It wasn’t staying in the fish’s system long enough to stimulate reproduction. 

After additional years of difficult work, Zohar was able to generate versions of the hormone that wouldn’t degrade in the fish. With this treatment, some females produced eggs, but the results still weren’t reproducible enough to be viable on a large scale.

Transforming an industry

At this point, Zohar began to collaborate with Robert Langer, a chemical engineering professor at MIT and a pioneer in drug delivery systems. With a second round of funding from BARD in 1989, together they developed a delivery mechanism for the hormone that creates an extended-release effect, keeping the hormone in the fish’s system longer and—finally—reliably triggering reproduction.

For Langer, seeing his typically biomedical-focused work applied to the aquaculture industry is rewarding. “Now I’ve seen the drug delivery work that we started 46 years ago impact everything from the COVID-19 vaccine, to new treatments for cancer and heart disease, to cosmetics—and now aquaculture,” Langer says. “I’ve always felt the technology we developed would have a very broad impact and affect many fields, but the effect it has had on aquaculture would never have happened without the collaboration with Yoni.”

After developing the delivery system in Mediterranean seabream and Atlantic salmon, Zohar and colleagues successfully tweaked it for many other species. These advances enabled rapid growth and transformation in the aquaculture industry, delivering large amounts of a protein source and reducing overfishing of wild stocks.

Keeping the mission in mind

Zohar is originally from Israel and has been in the United States since 1990, and he has been both the Israeli and American collaborator on grants from BARD. “I was always interested in developing collaborations between the U.S. and Israel, so for me, it was a priority to apply for BARD grants over the years,” he says.

For three decades, Zohar has been a mainstay of the marine biotechnology research community in Maryland. He first took a role at the former Center of Marine Biotechnology (COMB) housed in the Columbus Center in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Later, he served as COMB director for 14 years. When COMB restructured into the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) in 2011, Zohar joined the UMBC faculty while also serving as IMET’s director for its first year. Today he is professor and chair of UMBC’s marine biotechnology department.

Throughout his career, Zohar has kept his mission in mind. “When COMB was founded, the mission was always research, education, and economic development. And IMET is the same. This has really been my emphasis, my focus, for all of my professional life,” he says. “I was always involved in research that addressed societal benefits. As one of the early directors of COMB, I really worked to develop this philosophy of basic to translational research.”

What has kept Zohar in Maryland for thirty years, working to address societal needs and support a growing economy through science? “I found the environment here very conducive to that mission, and very supportive of it,” Zohar says. “So, I stayed.”

Header image: Yonathan Zohar at the Aquaculture Research Center at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This story was written by Megan Hanks and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

Last Thursday, UMBC’s Lee Blaney was honored for his impact as a chemistry educator and mentor who closely involves students of all levels in collaborative research. Blaney is an associate professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering. He received the 2020 George L. Braude Award from the Maryland section of the American Chemical Society. Blaney was nominated for the award by Mark Marten, chair of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering at UMBC. During the virtual meeting of the society, Blaney presented his research on the occurrence of contaminants of emerging concern in the Chesapeake Bay. 

Blaney said that he was honored and humbled to receive the 2020 George L. Braude Award for his efforts to mentor undergraduate and graduate students in research. During his lecture, Blaney emphasized the impact of his own mentors on his mentoring approach, and said that his mentors Arup SenGupta (Lehigh University), Desmond Lawler (University of Texas at Austin), and Lynn Katz (University of Texas at Austin) changed his life. Blaney has incorporated their advice and his own experiences into his mentoring approach at UMBC. “Seeing my students succeed is the most gratifying aspect of being a professor,” he says. 

Even though the event could not be held in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Blaney’s students were able to attend the virtual lecture. Blaney noted that the presence of his students made the celebration even more special. Upon receiving the Braude Award, Blaney emphasized that “this is our award” to his students. 

Mamatha Hopanna Ph.D. ‘22, environmental engineering, who conducts research in Blaney’s lab, the virtual lecture. “I am amazed by how much he cares to support each student’s learning style and needs. I have always felt his sincerity, commitment, and enthusiasm towards his students’ success,” she said. “It is so encouraging to see Dr. Blaney celebrate each of his achievements as our achievements. I, personally, aspire to be a mentor to inspire and motivate other students in the same way as Dr. Blaney has inspired me.” 

Combining research and student success

The Braude Award honors professors from institutions in Maryland who involve students and postdoctoral fellows in exceptional research in particularly notable ways. The award was created in memory of George Braude, who served as chair of the Maryland section of the ACS. 

This latest award follows several other honors which have enabled Blaney to further his innovative research. In 2017, Blaney received an NSF CAREER Award, which focuses on how contaminants of emerging concern impact the environment. Later that year, he was recognized by the Maryland Science Center with the 2017 Outstanding Young Engineering Award.

Blaney is the third UMBC faculty member to receive the Braude Award. In 2006, then-UMBC professor Catherine Fenselau, former chair of chemistry and biochemistry, received the award. Michael Summers, distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring, received the award in 2010. Summers is internationally known for his HIV research and his work with UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program.

Banner image: Lee Blaney. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This story was written by Sarah Hansen and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

Data archives from NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), which collects data from satellites, aircraft, and ground instruments, currently contain about 31 petabytes (PB) of data. That’s 31 followed by 15 zeros, or 31 million billion bytes. Within three years, the archives are expected to hold more than 150 PB, and keep adding nearly 50 PB every year.

“Now we have so much raw data. So how do we analyze it? How do we make it useful for the research community?” asks Jianwu Wang, assistant professor of information systems and affiliated faculty at UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), a partnership with NASA. 

While Earth scientists are encountering this glut of satellite data, researchers in computing fields are rapidly increasing the capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. At the same time, there is an increasingly urgent need to better understand Earth’s systems as they shift due to climate change.

All of these factors drove Wang and his collaborators to find ways to help researchers access useful information collected by Earth-observing satellites much faster. A new $1.4 million award from NASA’s Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS) program will make their work possible.

Taking computers to cloud school

The ACCESS project focuses specifically on improving how algorithms process and learn from the data satellites collect about clouds. At any moment, clouds cover about two-thirds of Earth’s surface, and yet understanding of their role in global climate is still lacking. Zhibo Zhang, associate professor of physics and a co-PI on the project, and his research group have been working to enhance knowledge about clouds’ role in regulating the global energy balance and precipitation.

To understand how clouds work in the global system, scientists need the data that instruments orbiting Earth on satellites collect. But the data needs some analysis before it’s useful. For example, when an instrument in a satellite looks at the Earth, it can detect things like brightness and color. But it can’t decide if it’s looking at a cloud or a clear sky. That’s the job of computer algorithms that scientists apply to the data after it’s collected. 

Clouds can vary greatly in their appearance, so the computer needs to learn what different kinds of clouds look like. That way it can report “cloud” when its data meet the definition. That process of teaching the computer to learn from examples is called “machine learning.”

To train the computer algorithm, researchers feed the computer data that’s already labeled as “cloud” or “not-cloud.” Eventually, the computer learns to tell the difference on its own, and can report accurately whether an image it’s never seen before is a cloud or not. A good algorithm can learn to tell the difference between a cloud, smoke, dust, and other kinds of particles found in the atmosphere.

It’s all connected

One goal of the new project is to generate these training data sets. At the most basic level, it is somewhat similar to asking humans to complete captchas asking them to “click the boxes that include clouds,” but millions of times, and with significant added challenges and complexity. 

For example, clouds cast shadows on each other and interact in other ways. So when the computer is trying to make a judgment about a given pixel in an image, it actually needs information about the surrounding pixels as well. Those interactions can extend far beyond what’s right next door. When looking at a spot in Maryland, for example, “You don’t only need to know about Maryland, you need to know about New York,” Zhang says.

To address this challenge, the team will generate numerical simulations, as opposed to direct observational data collected by the satellite, to help define in computer code the ways clouds and other particles interact with each other in the atmosphere.

Using those complex simulations, “We can know which pixels are affecting their surroundings or being affected by their surroundings. That way, we’ll have a totally connected network that we can use to train the algorithms,” Zhang says. “Even observations cannot tell us which pixel is affecting which pixel. Only numerical simulations can do that.”

Decoding the data

Another important part of their work will make it possible to transfer knowledge between two different categories of instruments. The first type, active sensors, are extremely accurate but only observe a very small portion of the sky: All of them together only watch about 10 percent of Earth’s surface. Passive sensors, on the other hand, are a little less accurate but, combined, look at nearly the whole globe.

“These sensors collect different kinds of data,” and all of it is valuable, says Sanjay Purushotham, assistant professor of information systems and another co-investigator on the project. A major challenge for the team is coming up with algorithms that allow computers to use all of the available data—from both kinds of sensors—to define clouds and their interactions in ways a computer can understand.

“You cannot use any off-the-shelf machine learning or deep learning model to solve this problem,” Purushotham says.

The magic of AI

All of this algorithm development takes a lot of resources and human energy. However, the team is working to automate some parts of the process. Right now, “It’s always difficult to duplicate an algorithm designed for one instrument for other, similar instruments, or even for the same instrument on a different platform,” explains Chenxi Wang, a co-PI on the project and an assistant research scientist with JCET. “Even subtle changes in the instrument or the platform’s orbit can cause the original algorithm to fail.”

“You have to develop almost a brand new algorithm,” C. Wang adds. “You have to adjust parameters, check the stability of the algorithm,  and do evaluation… You have to do everything again. And that can take from six months to several years.”

C. Wang hopes to help the computer learn to do the translations itself, based on an understanding of the fundamental physics. All a human would have to do is give the program certain parameters about the instrument and the satellite it’s traveling on.

“I think that’s the magic of machine learning and artificial intelligence,” says C. Wang. “The hope is that instead of years, it will take only a few days or at most a week. It will save a lot of time and resources.”

“We’re developing this process so it can be universal and applied to any instrument,” adds Zhang. “It’ll liberate some scientists from repeating the same things again and again to fine-tune the algorithms.” It will also get data to scientists like him much faster. As he notes, “If you have to wait for many years to get that useful data, it’s harder to make progress.”

The power of partnership

UMBC’s long-term partnership with NASA has helped make this project possible. “The special connection between UMBC and NASA through JCET has definitely prepared us better for this kind of proposal,” Zhang says.

In addition, a confluence of advances has given fresh impetus to this kind of work. For one thing, demand for climate data is on the rise, given the increasing visibility of the climate emergency. “Cloud observation is a high priority for NASA today. No one knows just how much clouds are contributing to climate change and other things,” J. Wang says. “That’s why we chose this topic, because it’s so important to understand Earth.”

Parallel advances in machine learning and data collection further fuel the effort. “Even two or three years ago we couldn’t have done this,” J. Wang reflects.  

In the end, though, it comes down to collaboration. Each member of the team of data scientists and atmospheric physicists brings a unique perspective and knowledge base.

“We have good synergy among the team members, so we can speak the same language even though we come from different disciplines,” Purushotham says. “That helps us understand what the real problems in the data are, and what innovations we need to solve them.”

Banner image: The VIIRS instrument captured this image of bands of cirrus clouds off the southwest coast of Australia in 2019, which portend intense weather. Photo: NASA.

This story was written by Sarah Hansen and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

Cell migration—how, when, and why cells move—has important implications for understanding development and diseases such as blood cell disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, and metastatic cancer. Michelle Starz-Gaiano, associate professor of biological sciences, has learned a great deal about cell migration from observing Drosophila melanogaster, the humble fruit fly, in her lab. She’s also learned that experimental tools have their limitations.

“We have fantastic genetic tools in Drosophila, and we have great live imaging, so we can get pretty far doing that,” Starz-Gaiano says. “But then we encounter things that we can’t explain.”

That’s where her decade-plus collaboration with Brad Peercy, associate professor of mathematics, comes in. In their partnership, Peercy develops mathematical models to represent the movement of cells across developing eggs in the fly ovary. Now, a three-year, $370,000 NSF grant will support the duo as they combine their expertise to further explore the regulation of cell movement.

“I think this project has really big implications for how we think about development and how organs and tissues function,” Starz-Gaiano says, “because it’s looking at aspects that people haven’t yet paid attention to.”

A fresh perspective

Scientists can learn a lot about cell migration through experimental approaches like those Starz-Gaiano employs. However, some experiments are too complex or too expensive to attempt without a powerful reason to believe they will reveal new and useful information.

Turning to mathematical modeling has been particularly helpful for pointing wet lab scientists in the right direction before they invest in complicated experiments. “The collaboration has been incredible in making the best predictions for how to explain confusing results. It’s enabled us to narrow down the set of things to test,” Starz-Gaiano says.

For example, cell migration in the fruit fly ovary happens in several complex stages. Chemical signaling and the geometry of the ovary both play a role in regulating the process. “There are lots of different interesting features that are ripe for having a mathematical framework put around them,” Peercy says, “and the math can sometimes point to looking at something a little bit differently than biologists might otherwise.”

Now the challenge is that the math has pointed to certain attributes of the migration process that may be impossible to test in a live organism with today’s technology. “The models that Brad’s group has made are so compelling that now we have to figure out if we can show that biologically,” Starz-Gaiano says. “That’s a big focus of some of the work in the lab now.”

Uncharted territory

This new grant focuses on the math side of the work. Peercy and Starz-Gaiano have been collaborating since 2008, when they partnered to work with undergraduates as part of the former, NSF-funded Interdisciplinary Training for Undergraduates in Biological and Mathematical Sciences program.

Since then, Peercy and his team have developed several models for different aspects of the cell migration process. The next step is “integrating some of the models that we’ve already developed into a more comprehensive model of the system,” he explains. For that, Peercy and Starz-Gaiano will benefit from the computational expertise of Matthias Gobbert, professor of mathematics, who is another co-investigator on the grant. He will help make the computational processing more efficient, and therefore feasible in a reasonable amount of time.

Another aim of the project is to further investigate a set of chemical reactions, known as a signaling cascade, involved in triggering cell migration. “The signaling cascade that the model is for is very well conserved across species, and it’s implicated in a lot of human diseases,” Starz-Gaiano says. “The model pointed to a certain kind of regulation that hasn’t been very well explored, so we want to follow up on that.”

The team will also work to better understand how the restricted space of the egg chamber affects how cells and chemical signals move, and how that affects cell migration. “Being able to map that complicated geometry into a computational framework is something we’re interested in,” Peercy says. For this part of the project, they’re collaborating with Tagide deCarvalho, director of UMBC’s Keith R. Porter Imaging Facility.

Looking at the space between cells is a new area of research. “People haven’t done that,” Starz-Gaiano says. “They just think this one sends a signal and that one gets it and it’s over, and we’re saying, well, what happens in between?” Failure of a signal to reach its final destination can contribute to some birth defects, Starz-Gaiano explains. She also wonders if the same could be true for some cancers.

A new approach

As scientific discovery marches onward, researchers in fields that were once seemingly disparate find themselves relying on each other more and more. “The biology is insufficient to capture what’s going on, so we need different approaches,” Starz-Gaiano says.

Collaborations between researchers in different fields can be tricky to navigate, as each side learns to speak a new language and engage in different ways of thinking. But when everyone involved is on board, the results can be groundbreaking.

“You see strong collaborations between experimentalists and theoreticians when they are willing to sit in uncomfortable situations,” Peercy says. That might mean a biologist thinking about differential equations or a mathematician trying to understand the reproductive process of a fruit fly.

Peercy and Starz-Gaiano’s easy rapport and long history of working together makes it clear that they’ve crossed that bridge and are comfortable taking on the unknown together. They recognize the benefits that combining their unique research skill sets can offer.

“The only way that you can solve complex problems now is to use multiple strategies at the same time,” Starz-Gaiano says. “And increasingly, that’s what we’re faced with in biology—these problems are too complicated for one method to tackle them.”

Banner image: Michelle Starz-Gaiano (right) works with Jeffrey Inen ’18 in her lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This story was written by Sarah Hansen and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

Tara LeGates, assistant professor of biological sciences, has been named first runner-up for the prestigious, international Eppendorf and Science Prize for Neurobiology, a competition for researchers under 35 that recognizes outstanding neurobiology research. Science published her winning essay today, which describes LeGates’s research for a 2018 paper published in Nature.

Experiments for her work took more than four years and resulted in groundbreaking discoveries about the neurological basis for reward-seeking behavior. LeGates’s work may pave the way for new, more targeted treatments for mental health disorders including depression and addiction.

“I’m really interested in how the brain integrates a lot of different kinds of information to regulate complex behaviors, such as seeking rewards,” LeGates says. “A number of different processes all have to come together to successfully obtain rewards, which requires that different brain regions communicate with each other.”

A new approach to more targeted treatments

LeGates’s 2018 paper explored the details of a specific communication pathway between two brain regions: the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens. She found that this particular synapse (a connection between the two) is pivotal to reward-seeking behavior in mice. This mechanism is highly conserved across species, including in humans. 

When reward-seeking behavior goes into overdrive, addiction can occur—where an individual continually seeks a particular reward, even if there are harmful consequences. If reward-seeking behavior is inhibited, however, depressive symptoms can result. That can manifest as someone no longer enjoying activities they used to find rewarding, such as spending time with friends or exercising.  

The most common treatments for depression rely on drugs that indirectly target neurons involved in reward seeking, LeGates explains. Because they work indirectly, these drugs often take weeks to show any effect. They can also upset the chemical balance elsewhere in the brain in undesirable ways. 

A better understanding of the specific brain regions and synapses involved in reward seeking could make feasible much more direct forms of treatment, such as targeted deep brain stimulation or, eventually, new medications. That kind of advance could bring relief to more people, more quickly, and avoid some of the most dangerous side effects of current treatments.     

“There’s this increasingly popular hypothesis in the field that the strength of synapses, like ones between the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens, are really what underlies depression,” LeGates says. “In depression, you have a weakening of these synapses, and antidepressants currently on the market act indirectly to restore them. By identifying the specific synapse involved, it would allow for a more targeted approach to treating disorders like depression.”

Peeling back the layers

Moving forward, LeGates would like to further explore the way the brain works to regulate reward-seeking behavior. Her Nature paper found that several things have to go right for a mouse to find something rewarding, remember where it experienced the reward, and then seek it out again, but the relationships between the components of the rewards-seeking process are still a bit murky.

For example, a stimulus such as the company of a fellow mouse may be rewarding in the moment. If the connection between the nucleus accumbens and the hippocampus is blocked during the interaction, however, the mouse won’t remember where it had that rewarding experience. On the other hand, if that brain connection is stimulated even without the presence of a physical reward, the mouse will prefer the location where the brain stimulation occurred.

“The nucleus accumbens receives input from the hippocampus, and that’s important for conveying those contextual cues,” LeGates says. Her further work will continue to tease out the complexities of reward seeking.

Helping students flourish

In addition to her contributions to neurobiology, LeGates is committed to creating an inclusive lab environment for UMBC students.

“I’m working on building a really strong research program where students are flourishing,” she says. Her work as a researcher and educator focuses on “not only making significant scientific contributions, but building young, independent scientists” who can both have a positive experience and achieve their goals.

LeGates joined the UMBC faculty in 2019. “Overall, UMBC, and especially the biological sciences department, has been incredibly supportive ,” she says. “I am truly grateful to work in such a wonderful environment amongst amazing colleagues and brilliant students.”

One of those colleagues, Phyllis Robinson, professor of biological sciences, is a champion for LeGates and is confident she will continue to make a major impact in her field. “UMBC is fortunate to have such a rising star in the field of neuroscience. Tara did groundbreaking work as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and as a postdoc at the University of Maryland School of Medicine,” Robinson says. “I am certain she will bring the same intelligence and insight to her own lab at UMBC.”

Banner image: Tara LeGates in the UMBC Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building. Photo by Melissa Penley-Cormier.

This story was written by Megan Hanks and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

Mark Marten, professor and chair of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, is collaborating with researchers at the University of Connecticut and the University of Manitoba to study how fungal cells respond to stress and repair their cell walls. Marten and his collaborators identified three coordinated pathways involved in the response to cell wall stress in filamentous fungi. 

Numerous species of filamentous fungi are pathogens that can make people sick, especially people who are immunocompromised. Different species of fungi play an important role in the development of pharmaceuticals and enzymes, and agriculture, where fungi can help improve the quality of soil and make nutrients more readily available for crops, explains Marten. By understanding how cells work and respond to stress, researchers can reverse-engineer processes that could have a broad range of applications.

Understanding how cells respond to stress

Marten and his collaborators Ranjan Srivastava, University of Connecticut, and Steven Harris, University of Manitoba, recently received over $1.2 million in grant funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to further explore how filamentous fungi repair their cell walls when exposed to stressors. This work will build upon previous NSF-supported research completed by the team. Molecular and Cellular Proteomicshas just published their findings on critical cellular processes triggered when cells respond to environmental stress. Cynthia Chelius, Ph.D. ‘19, chemical engineering, is the first author on the paper.

To understand how the fungal cell walls respond to environmental stressors, Marten and his team studied what he describes as the cell’s “software”—rules that control how the cell behaves. When fungi experience stress, Marten’s team found an increase in the number of  septa created. Like bulkheads in a ship, septa prevent catastrophic loss of cellular cytoplasm if there’s a break in the cell wall. “When you stress cells, they sense it and try to protect themselves,” Marten explains. He adds that fungi try to repair damage to their cell walls so that they can resume normal growth and function. 

The study used a multi-omic methodology, which researchers say can be applied to studying how signaling networks in cells work in general. The methodology allowed researchers to get a more detailed understanding of how cells respond to stressors. They found that when cell walls experience stress, there is a coordinated response through various pathways. By combining short time-scale phosphoproteomic sampling and longer scale transcriptomic sampling, the researchers were able to see a broader view of how cells respond to stress.

Gene regulation 

Moving forward, the team looks forward to examining how the parts of the fungal cell are assembled and how fungal gene regulatory networks function. They hope to understand how proteins in cells interact with each other, and how cells can turn on and off certain parts of their DNA to respond to stress. 

“We were excited to see the results from this paper, as they both revealed a novel connection between different aspects of gene regulation in fungi and served as the basis for a new hypothesis regarding gene regulation in our most recent NSF Collaborative Research Award,” says Marten.

Banner image: UMBC’s Engineering building, left, and ITE building. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.