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

By combining their expertise in physics and chemistry, Matt Pelton and Marie-Christine Daniel are working toward the next big leap in computing. Both are engaged in photonics research, which is “the idea of using light—photons—to do information processing instead of using electrons like you do in electronics,” explains Pelton, associate professor of physics at UMBC.

Using light rather than electrons, as in fiber-optic telecommunication cables, is “faster, and you can send a lot more information,” Pelton says. However, no computer today runs exclusively on photons. “The huge pipeline of data coming down optical fibers all has to be converted to an electrical signal and then distributed to all the different processors in the computer. That’s the big power and time bottleneck,” Pelton says.

“If you could do as much of the function of the computer chip as possible using photons instead of electrons, then you would be able to use less power and do things more efficiently,” he says. “So there’s a big push to try to bring photonics down to the single chip scale.”

That’s where this interdisciplinary duo comes in. They’re working to develop a unique combination of existing chemical structures to enable photon-driven computer functionality even in the computer’s most fundamental building blocks. A new three-year grant from the National Science Foundation will enable Pelton and Daniel to make faster progress on their project and involve more students.

Marie-Christine Daniel (right) and UMBC chemistry Ph.D. student Chanda Lowrance in Daniel’s lab. Photo by Diane Zeenny.

A new kind of switch

Daniel and Pelton’s novel technique depends on being able to reliably create very specific chemical structures. By binding two types of known structures in a particular arrangement, they can create a kind of on-off switch. 

At its most basic level, a computer is just a lot of these switches. Whether they use ones and zeros, light and dark, or something else, the pattern of the switches encodes information. The new kind of switch that Daniel and Pelton are devising is different from what computers use now, because it relies on photons rather than electrons.

The light-driven structures Daniel and Pelton are working to build are made of quantum dots and metal nanoparticles. Quantum dots are tiny crystals only about 20 atoms in diameter. They’re made of semiconductor elements, similar to the silicon that powers electronics, and they can be designed to emit certain wavelengths (colors) of light. They’re even used in some televisions. The metal nanoparticles are larger, usually a few thousand atoms in diameter. They also appear as different colors based on the light they reflect and absorb, but they don’t emit their own light.

Through computer simulations, Pelton and Ph.D. student Vijin Veetil have demonstrated that by binding two rod-shaped nanoparticles (“nanorods”) and a quantum dot together in a specific way, their interaction can produce a structure that allows light to pass straight through both the dot and particle, when it would normally be scattered. Transmitting the light creates a transparent state rather than an opaque one. That switch from transparent to opaque, which can be controlled by an external beam of light, is exactly the kind of switch that could encode information in a computer.

Matt Pelton in the lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Getting it just right

For this to work, Pelton and Daniel need to successfully construct molecular structures consisting of a single quantum dot stuck between two nanorods.

“It needs to be that configuration,” says Daniel, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who is bringing on chemistry Ph.D. student Chanda Lowrance to help her tackle this project. “The quantum dot alone, or the nanoparticles alone, will not induce the transparency effect.” 

And just any quantum dot bound to any nanoparticle is not sufficient. They need to have specific sizes and shapes, so that the wavelength of light that the quantum dot absorbs, and the wavelength that the nanoparticle scatters, are very similar, Daniel explains. Then, “they can interact very efficiently and create that transparency.”

“That’s essentially the goal of this project—to take these structures from a cartoon to something we can actually make,” Daniel says. “And making this is not easy.” If Daniel, Pelton, and their students can do it, though, they’ll be setting the stage for a revolution in computing.

From random to reliable

Previous research has shown that it’s fairly straightforward to get the nanoparticles and dots to clump together in groups. “But we need to get just one of them. And we don’t want it to bind just anywhere. It has to be right there,” Pelton says. “That’s the big challenge.”

A procedure that allows metal particles and dots to bind together randomly does result in a very small number of structures in the desired configuration. When scientists tested those lucky few for the transparency effect, they matched results predicted by Pelton’s simulations, proving this technique can work.

Now, the challenge is producing a larger number of these structures. “When we’re synthesizing these things, we don’t want just a few of them to be the right structure; we want the majority of them to be the right structure,” Pelton says. “We need the ability to make them in much larger numbers, in order to be able to optimize them.” 

This is what the team is working on now. Their goal is that “by the end of the project we’ll have shown that we can make these things reliably, in larger numbers, and that we can use them as an on-off switch,” Pelton says.

Marie-Christine Daniel (left) and Renee Suzich, an undergraduate from St. Mary’s College of Maryland at UMBC for a summer research experience, at work in Daniel’s lab. Photo by Diane Zeenny.

The power of teamwork

“I didn’t know if this was going to work when we started,” Pelton says. But considering their progress so far, and the impact this new funding will have on accelerating their work, today Daniel and Pelton are optimistic about the future of light-based computing and other applications for their joint research.

While the work poses significant challenges, “of course it’s a big opportunity, too,” Pelton says. In addition to the duo’s goal to create light-driven computer chips, there could be other scenarios where it would be beneficial to combine nanoparticles. Different configurations could generate new and useful physical and chemical properties for all kinds of applications. 

Daniel and Pelton recognize the importance of their collaboration for the success of this work. Pelton’s theoretical and simulation expertise as well as his ability to do single-particle measurements, and Daniel’s in-depth knowledge of the chemistry and ability to find a way to make specific structures, have all been critical. 

“This is not something that any physicist or chemist could do alone,” Daniel reflects. “It takes both.”

Banner image: Matt Pelton (right) and Haixu Leng, Ph.D. ’19, physics. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This story was written by Kait McCaffrey and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

UMBC is again one of the top 500 universities in the world, according to the QS World University Rankings. In their recently released subject area rankings, UMBC is #362 worldwide in the broad category of life sciences and medicine, performing particularly well in biological sciences. The world rankings also recognize UMBC for strengths in computer science and information systems and in physics and astronomy.

“UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) has been incredibly successful in recruiting great teachers and researchers as faculty,” says Keith J Bowman, dean of COEIT. “It is gratifying that employers and our colleagues recognize the quality of our programs and our people.”

UMBC performed among the top 8.8% U.S. universities in the global ranking and ranked #68 among U.S. doctoral universities. 

The newly released U.S. Newsgraduate program rankings highlight UMBC as having some of the best engineering programs in the U.S. The publication recognizes a broad range of UMBC engineering focus areas, including environmental, computer, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering.

In the humanities and social sciences, the UMBC School of Public Policy is listed as offering one of the top 100 public policy graduate programs in the nation.

Business First also just released its annual ranking of 500 four-year public institutions across the U.S. UMBC is one of the top two public universities in Maryland, and ranked #53 in the nation, improving by six places from last year.

Banner image: UMBC logo on campus. 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 psychology faculty closely collaborate with communities on research to prevent intimate partner and gender-based violence and to support survivors. Their work to transform systems is earning support from government agencies and colleagues in their field, with new awards that will enable them to have an even greater impact. 

Meeting the needs of the community

Chris Murphy, a professor of clinical psychology, has received a $420,000 grant from the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women. The three-year grant will fund a research collaboration with the Gateway Program at the House of Ruth Maryland in Baltimore City to assess their Batterer Intervention Program (BIP) supportive services model. 

The 26-week court-ordered rehabilitation program is designed to hold offenders of intimate partner violence (IPV) accountable and to maintain survivors’ safety. It focuses on changing participants’ violent behavior through lessons about power and control as well as nonviolent strategies for communication.

“We know that one abusive partner can create multiple victims and, if they have children, they begin a generational cycle that is difficult to interrupt,” says Lisa Nitsch ‘01, psychology, a social worker and director of training and education at the House of Ruth Maryland. “It is time for us to stop asking why victims choose to stay in abusive relationships and start asking why abusive partners feel entitled to terrorize their victims.”

To better meet the needs of the communities they serve, the Gateway Program developed a culturally sensitive approach to their BIPs over the last two years. Through that process, they found that BIPs don’t usually address several issues impacting clients, such as past trauma, mental health, employment, or parenting. 

In collaboration with a number of city agencies, the Gateway Program developed a supportive services model to complement the BIP. This includes optional on-site services related to mental health, parenting, and employment. By addressing these intersecting needs, the Gateway program aims to reduce IPV.

“We have to find more effective ways of addressing abusive partners and engaging them in a change process,” saysNitsch. “We are invested in this project because it is essential to our mission ‘to lead the fight to end intimate partner violence.’”

When Murphy heard about the Gateway Program’s new supportive services model, he offered to develop an assessment to evaluate its effectiveness. “A lot of the field has focused on holding offenders accountable for their behavior, but not necessarily what will make them less likely to engage in abuse or violence,” explains Murphy. 

A team approach to IPV research

Murphy brought together a team from across disciplines and institutions to help design a holistic assessment. The team includes Tara Richards, co-principal investigator, assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha; Charvonne Holliday, assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Nitsch,who is also aboard member of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence.

The program evaluation is a three-part process. Murphy and his team will first assess if there is a decrease in IPV incidents among offenders in the Gateway Program after they’ve participated solely in the Batterer Intervention Program. Second, they will examine if there is also a decrease among clients who choose to access additional support services. Third, they will assess the challenges and values that clients express, and if how they receive services fits their expectations and needs. 

“We have been working with the Gateway Program for over a year to collaboratively develop the assessments needed to determine who will benefit the most from certain services,” says Murphy. 

Richards explains that to identify clients’ needs the team assesses factors such as substance abuse, low educational attainment, and antisocial behavior, which are correlated with criminal behaviors among other types of offenders. She explains her role as evaluating how integrating knowledge of those factors and of abusive behaviors “with a culturally sensitive curriculum to help develop individualized services” can reduce recidivism. She explains, “We can’t separate these issues and expect to get the best outcomes.”

In addition to this research, Murphy also offers training on motivational communication strategies for service providers, to increase the likelihood that their clients will utilize the available services. 

The results will be used to improve the delivery of Gateway Program services. They will also inform other programs nationwide, and inform training materials for service providers in other agencies.

“Those of us who work in this field know intimate partner violence tends to carry on through generations,” says Murphy. “If we can stop someone now from being abusive who is in their twenties and has young children, it can benefit everyone else in their family and system.” 

Community-based participatory research with survivors of gender-based violence

Nkiru Nnawulezi, assistant professor of psychology, has received the Linda Saltzman New Investigator Award for her work with communities to support survivors of gender-based violence. The award is funded by the Center for Disease Control Foundation, Futures Without Violence, and RALIANCE. It honors her ongoing research and will be formally announced at the 2020 National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence in late April.

“The award is such an honor because it isn’t just my work, but also the communities I work with. It’s about the people who I have a privilege to know and be surrounded by,” says Nnawulezi. “It is a community honor.”

The accolade acknowledges her work using transformative Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) to evaluate the systems and institutions that serve survivors of gender-based violence. Her work in this field spans from her dissertation, through her time as a UMBC Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity, to her current scholarship as an assistant professor of community psychology. 

Nnawulezi explains that transformative CBPR focuses on shifting the status quo from institutionally-focused research to community-driven research where the community acts on its power and determines what knowledge is generated and how it is used.

She works with survivors to research structures and policies related to domestic violence housing programs. When it comes to her specific focus in that area, she explains, “As a community, the survivors and practitioners decide what they want to research. It may be understanding what it takes for survivors to experience power, whether the organizational policies and culture create a loss of power, or if they support survivors having and using power.”

A focus on intersectional identities

Nnawulezi specializes in working with survivors with intersectional identities and community-based practitioners, exploring how survivors navigate institutions intended to support them. This includes survivors who are people of color, living with HIV, queer and trans, low-income, homeless or housing insecure, experiencing addiction, or experiencing severe mental illnesses. 

She finds transformative CBPR to be particularly suited to working with survivors with histories of multiple marginalizations because it questions why and how researchers can support communities facing multiple forms of oppression. This approach dismantles the traditional views of psychologists as altruistic professionals saving people in need, she explains. Instead, it moves toward supporting the liberation of historically marginalized communities by challenging systems of oppression and creating social change with community members.

“The purpose of my work can be summed up by this quote from Lilla Watson, an aboriginal elder, activist and educator,” shares Nnawulezi. “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

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

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

“Historians know that the Confederacy ran out of food by the end of the Civil War, and it shouldn’t have because it was an agricultural society,” says Anne Rubin, professor of history at UMBC. “I want to understand the causes of this, and the lived experience of different social classes during this time.” 

Rubin has just received a 2020 – 2021 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship to write a book examining how food shortages in the South affected wealthy and poor people, both white and black, during and after the Civil War, ultimately shaping Southern foodways.

Rubin’s award follows an NEH grant received last year by her colleague Susan McDonough, assistant professor of history, whose award supported more inclusive research on medieval women. 

Everyday documents as research tools

A resurgence in the popularity of Southern foods inspired Rubin to take a closer look at Southerners’ experiences with food during the Civil War. “There is a real nostalgia when people talk about heritage pork and heritage grains,” she reflects. “I want to cut through that. This kind of reverence for the past does not include a conversation of who was preparing the food or any of the racialized aspects of Southern cooking.” 

Rubin will research the differences between rural and urban food scarcity, and how that scarcity was felt by people at different places in society. There were white elites that for the first time had to manage with ingredients they deemed subpar. There were also enslaved people who had to continue cooking for elite whites and for themselves with less and less food. 

Rubin will also explore the experiences of poor whites, who may have already had to adjust their diets drastically as resources waned, and the 500,000 African Americans who fled to the Union Army, where they were given inadequate rations and suffered from sickness and malnutrition. All of these changes influenced the strategies Southerners used to modify traditional recipes, replacing inaccessible ingredients with alternatives. 

“A lot of the scarcity has to do with questions of supply,” explains Rubin. “Research shows that wealthy people in the South who were used to cooking with white flour and white sugar began to make substitutions with ingredients usually reserved for the poor, like molasses and cornmeal.” Recipe adaptations were recorded in homemade recipe books, letters, diaries, relief receipts, and ration logs from army camps.

Her research thus far also shows that the adaptations made by elite white Southerners became a way to show allegiance with the Confederacy. Southerners accepted not being able to have coffee and were willing to make other sacrifices as long as it meant the Confederacy could keep fighting. 

“These responses create a narrative of patriotism and nationalism around food,” shares Rubin. “There is an intention of using food and the history of food as a way to express loyalty to the Confederacy. But the experience of African Americans, poor whites, and elites varied drastically.”

Surviving famine and starvation

Two key questions Rubin hopes to answer focus on the management of food: Why did an agricultural society struggle to feed its citizens? And how did people survive the compounding effects of the 1867 famine that followed the Civil War, caused by crop failure? 

“Part of my research is looking at the response of the Freedmen’s Bureau to feed African Americans. I also explore the work of elite Northerners providing relief,” explains Rubin. 

Next, she will travel to archives in North Carolina, Louisiana, and other states in the South to piece together a social network analysis. This will help her better understand those affected by food scarcity in the South, those who provided help, who was receiving help, and what kind of help they were receiving.

The historian’s toolbox

Rubin teaches a Civil War and Reconstruction class as well as two Southern history classes—one that goes through the Civil War and one that starts with emancipation. She wants to share with her students the research methods she is using to develop this book, to broaden their sense of how we can learn about the past by looking beyond military history. 

“I research people who don’t always leave letters or diaries, but can be found through a receipt for the food they were given,” says Rubin. “I want students to think of food history as another tool in the historian’s toolbox—that you can look at a recipe and you can piece together a whole social network from it.”

This approach to history is also reflected in Rubin’s work as associate director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center, known for providing visually immersive websites and exhibits that bring a greater understanding to historical events. 

Continuing excellence in historical research

Rubin’s award is one of several that faculty in the history department have received this year, honoring and advancing their scholarship in a broad range of subject areas. 

Constantine Vaporis will soon be a fellow in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Vaporis is both a professor of history and director of Asian studies. He will research portraits of Samurai in early modern Japan. 

Christy Chapin, associate professor of history, has won an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for her research on flexible finance. She previously received a Kluge Fellowship to study the banking and finance collections at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Banner image: Rubin at The Humanities Teaching Lab: Frederick Douglass Day. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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

At a time when information and misinformation are coming at us from all directions, and everyone is looking for answers, UMBC researchers are stepping up. They’re working hard to answer pressing questions about COVID-19 and sharing their expertise to help the public stay healthy and make informed decisions. By taking time to share their knowledge with local, national, and global communities, UMBC researchers are fulfilling our critical mission as a public university.

Lucy Wilson, professor of emergency health systems and an infectious disease expert, has been speaking regularly with leading national news outlets. She’s offered sobering analysis of what to expect in the days and weeks ahead, as well as practical advice to help people limit coronavirus exposure, like removing rings and switching to glasses from contacts.

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  Photo by Carl Mikoy. Used under CC BY 2.0

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  Photo by Kyler Kwock. Used under CC BY-ND 2.0

As the number of cases in Washington, D.C., began to surge in mid-March, Wilson offered a reminder about the impact of social distancing. “Whatever numbers [of COVID-19 cases] we are seeing today reflect the transmission that was occurring one to two weeks ago,” Wilson told The Washington Post.  “We shouldn’t be surprised by numbers continuing to increase, and we also shouldn’t discredit the effect of social distancing until we’ve given it time to take effect.” 

Wilson has also talked about the importance of protecting the nation’s healthcare workers in The New York Times and the need to ramp up testing, also in the Post.

Dispelling rumors, sharing truths

Other faculty members are writing their own articles to help the public better understand issues in the news. Jeffrey Gardner, associate professor of biological sciences, explained “Why vodka won’t protect you from coronavirus, and four other things to know about hand sanitizer” in The Conversation. The article has been viewed more than 275,000 times across 44 different publishers. Almost overnight it has become the third most popular UMBC-authored article of all time in The Conversation.

Katherine Seley-Radtke, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, addressed whether the drug chloroquine is safe to use against COVID-19 in “5 questions answered about a promising, problematic and unproven use for an antimalarial drug.” The article, which calls on her seven years of research on coronaviruses and her career as a medicinal chemist, has been viewed more than 233,000 times across 49 publishers. It is UMBC’s all-time fifth-most-read Conversation article. 

Both Radtke’s and Gardner’s articles give readers useful and accessible information they can apply today.

Other UMBC experts are helping the public understand COVID-19’s effects on our communities, and how people can better support each other. John Fritz, associate vice president for instructional technology, has contributed to the conversation around the rapid transition from in-person to online learning. In the Baltimore Sun, he called the shift “a big step for a university like ours,” requiring flexibility and creativity. He also noted the importance of focusing on the needs of students who might not yet have access to the tools they need for distance learning.

Charissa Cheah, professor of psychology, is leading a new NSF-funded research project addressing how Chinese-American communities are experiencing discrimination related to COVID-19, and how they are coping. “The negative impact of infectious diseases on psychological health is understudied but highly significant,” Cheah says. Shimei Pan, assistant professor of information systems, will lead the study’s analysis of outbreak-related social media.

Alumni focused on vaccine development, testing

UMBC alumni have taken lead roles in the record-paced development of a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. Kizzmekia Corbett, Ph.D. ’08, M16, biological sciences, has led a team working on the vaccine at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She and her teammates, including Olubukola Abiona ‘17, M25, biochemistry and molecular biology, received the genetic sequence of the virus early this year and developed a potential vaccine within two months. 

They’ve since passed their findings to Darian Cash ’02, M10, chemistry, at the biotech company Moderna. Moderna is already administering phase I clinical trials with volunteers in Washington state.  

On top of her research, Corbett has also been actively discussing her work with the media, including The New York Times, NPR, and Bloomberg News. 

Corbett, Abiona, and Cash thank the Meyerhoff Scholars program for helping them get to where they are as researchers, and to handle the intense pressures of the moment. “The Meyerhoff program not only showed me the Ph.D. pathway, but also provided mentorship and guidance to make it achievable,” Cash says. “Now, I use the skills the program taught me, such as public speaking and critical thinking, in my role as a scientist at Moderna.”

Corbett and Abiona draw on UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski’s consistent exhortation to “Focus, focus, focus,” Corbett says. “The UMBC connection and the training we received there, for both of us, has been instrumental in how we are operating right now,” she adds.

By bringing their expertise to bear in solving the COVID-19 crisis, these researchers are helping the United States and the world move through this uncharted territory.

Banner image: Chemical reactions sketched on a fume hood in Katherine Seley-Radtke’s laboratory. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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

UMBC’s Tagide deCarvalho has won the 2019 Olympus Image of the Year Global Life Science Light Microscopy Award, Americas division. The award recognizes the “very best in life science imaging worldwide,” according to Olympus.

deCarvalho’s winning image features a tardigrade, a microscopic animal that can withstand conditions that would kill almost any other living thing. Extreme pressures and temperatures, lack of air and water, exposure to radiation—none can destroy the resilient little tardigrade, also known as a “water bear.”

Bringing tiny creatures to life 

Tardigrades are mostly colorless, so deCarvalho, manager of UMBC’s Keith Porter Imaging Facility (KPIF), uses fluorescent stains to bring them to life. 

“I’m able to produce so much color in my images by using multiple fluorescent stains and capitalizing on the natural fluorescence of the samples,” she says. “I’m excited about this image because the fluorescent dyes I used allow you to see the tardigrade digestive tract, including the mouthparts and stomach filled with food.”

Tagide deCarvalho’s winning image of tardigrade.

The featured tardigrade came from a sample deCarvalho used in the Microscopy and Imaging Techniques class that she teaches in the KPIF. “Students remarked that observing these cute little guys was one of their favorite parts of the class,” she says. 

To create the winning image from this tardigrade, deCarvalho used the new super-resolution confocal microscope in the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building.

Sharing fascinating microorganisms

deCarvalho enjoys combining her interests in art and biology to make beautiful microscope images. One of her other projects involved making 13 images of microorganisms collected on campus by students. The collection has been made into a beautiful poster titled “Campus Microcosmos.”

As for the winning tardigrade, “I knew the moment I saw this colorful specimen that it was going to be a remarkable image,” deCarvalho says. “I love sharing the fascinating things I see in the microscope with other people.”

Banner image: Tagide deCarvalho works on Campus Microcosmos in the Keith Porter Imaging Facility. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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

“Historians know that the Confederacy ran out of food by the end of the Civil War, and it shouldn’t have because it was an agricultural society,” says Anne Rubin, professor of history at UMBC. “I want to understand the causes of this, and the lived experience of different social classes during this time.” 

Rubin has just received a 2020 – 2021 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship to write a book examining how food shortages in the South affected wealthy and poor people, both white and black, during and after the Civil War, ultimately shaping Southern foodways.

Anne Rubin. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Rubin’s award follows an NEH grant received last year by her colleague Susan McDonough, assistant professor of history, whose award supported more inclusive research on medieval women. 

Everyday documents as research tools

A resurgence in the popularity of Southern foods inspired Rubin to take a closer look at Southerners’ experiences with food during the Civil War. “There is a real nostalgia when people talk about heritage pork and heritage grains,” she reflects. “I want to cut through that. This kind of reverence for the past does not include a conversation of who was preparing the food or any of the racialized aspects of Southern cooking.” 

Rubin will research the differences between rural and urban food scarcity, and how that scarcity was felt by people at different places in society. There were white elites that for the first time had to manage with ingredients they deemed subpar. There were also enslaved people who had to continue cooking for elite whites and for themselves with less and less food. 

Rubin will also explore the experiences of poor whites, who may have already had to adjust their diets drastically as resources waned, and the 500,000 African Americans who fled to the Union Army, where they were given inadequate rations and suffered from sickness and malnutrition. All of these changes influenced the strategies Southerners used to modify traditional recipes, replacing inaccessible ingredients with alternatives. 

“A lot of the scarcity has to do with questions of supply,” explains Rubin. “Research shows that wealthy people in the South who were used to cooking with white flour and white sugar began to make substitutions with ingredients usually reserved for the poor, like molasses and cornmeal.” Recipe adaptations were recorded in homemade recipe books, letters, diaries, relief receipts, and ration logs from army camps.

Her research thus far also shows that the adaptations made by elite white Southerners became a way to show allegiance with the Confederacy. Southerners accepted not being able to have coffee and were willing to make other sacrifices as long as it meant the Confederacy could keep fighting. 

“These responses create a narrative of patriotism and nationalism around food,” shares Rubin. “There is an intention of using food and the history of food as a way to express loyalty to the Confederacy. But the experience of African Americans, poor whites, and elites varied drastically.”

Surviving famine and starvation

Two key questions Rubin hopes to answer focus on the management of food: Why did an agricultural society struggle to feed its citizens? And how did people survive the compounding effects of the 1867 famine that followed the Civil War, caused by crop failure? 

“Part of my research is looking at the response of the Freedmen’s Bureau to feed African Americans. I also explore the work of elite Northerners providing relief,” explains Rubin. 

Next, she will travel to archives in North Carolina, Louisiana, and other states in the South to piece together a social network analysis. This will help her better understand those affected by food scarcity in the South, those who provided help, who was receiving help, and what kind of help they were receiving.

The historian’s toolbox

Rubin teaches a Civil War and Reconstruction class as well as two Southern history classes—one that goes through the Civil War and one that starts with emancipation. She wants to share with her students the research methods she is using to develop this book, to broaden their sense of how we can learn about the past by looking beyond military history. 

“I research people who don’t always leave letters or diaries, but can be found through a receipt for the food they were given,” says Rubin. “I want students to think of food history as another tool in the historian’s toolbox—that you can look at a recipe and you can piece together a whole social network from it.”

This approach to history is also reflected in Rubin’s work as associate director of UMBC’s Imaging Resource Center, known for providing visually immersive websites and exhibits that bring a greater understanding to historical events. 

Continuing excellence in historical research

Rubin’s award is one of several that faculty in the history department have received this year, honoring and advancing their scholarship in a broad range of subject areas. 

Constantine Vaporis will soon be a fellow in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Vaporis is both a professor of history and director of Asian studies. He will research portraits of Samurai in early modern Japan. 

Christy Chapin, associate professor of history, has won an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for her research on flexible finance. She previously received a Kluge Fellowship to study the banking and finance collections at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Banner image: Rubin at The Humanities Teaching Lab: Frederick Douglass Day. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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

In the 1930s, famed biologist Ernst Mayr became the first to study Pacific Robins. Based on his observations of the robins and other birds on Australia and its outlying islands, he developed foundational concepts that continue to inform the study of evolution. He took copious notes on the birds’ physical characteristics, behaviors, and habitats. Always, he described the robin populations as a single species, albeit with significant variation from island to island.

Ernst Mayr made lasting contributions to evolutionary biology—but like most scientists, he wasn’t right about everything.

Bold new claims

Anna Kearns is a former UMBC postdoctoral fellow now at the Smithsonian Institution’s Conservation Biology Institute. With her UMBC postdoc advisor Kevin Omland and other colleagues, she has conducted new investigations into the relationships among Pacific Robins on various islands using many of the same bird specimens Mayr himself used. The difference is, “He would have mainly been just using his eyes” to compare specimens, Kearns says. She and her colleagues have had the advantage of major advances in technology since Mayr’s time.

Anna Kearns in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These robin specimens were collected almost 100 years ago by Ernst Mayr and others, and have proven invaluable to the modern study of the birds’ evolution. Photo courtesy Anna Kearns.

Kearns has built on Mayr’s work by using techniques like DNA sequencing and spectrophotometry, which quantitatively compares the hue, brightness, and saturation of feathers. She has come to a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between, say, a robin on Fiji and one on the Solomon Islands.

As a result of this research, Kearns and colleagues from UMBC, the Australian National Wildlife Collection, Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History are making bold new claims about the relationships between these birds. In a 2015 paper in Conservation Genetics, Kearns demonstrated that robins living on Norfolk Island, directly east of mainland Australia, are a distinct species from the rest. A new paper in the Journal of Avian Biology published this month indicates two more unique species—one that inhabits the Solomon and Bougainville Islands, and another that lives on Fiji, Vanuatu, and Samoa.

Preserving biodiversity

The new work demonstrates just how much is still unknown about avian biodiversity. “Even in this well-studied group of birds, that’s been a textbook example since 1942, we did not really know what the units of biodiversity were,” says Omland, professor of biological sciences at UMBC, and senior author on the new paper.

Kevin Omland, second from right, discusses research with a few of his students. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Understanding those “units of biodiversity” is critical for conservation. When all the Pacific Robins and mainland Australia’s Scarlet Robin were considered a single species (a single unit of biodiversity), the loss of the birds on one or two islands would be unfortunate, but not necessarily very impactful. If those birds were actually the only remaining members of a unique species, however, the same loss becomes catastrophic.

“What Anna’s work is showing is that the bird populations on these islands have very distinctive traits,” Omland adds, “so just knowing what the biodiversity is that we want to conserve is super important.”

Unpredictable patterns

The team’s work indicates that all the Pacific Robins are descended from an ancestral Australian population where males were brightly-colored and females were dull-colored. But as small groups of robins colonized the outlying islands, the population on each island took its own evolutionary path. Today, some island groups still maintain the bright male and dull female pattern, but on other islands both sexes have evolved bright coloration. On other islands, both sexes have evolved dull coloration.   

This figure from the new paper visually explains the location and coloration patterns of the different robins that Kearns, Omland, and their colleagues studied.

“When you look at the genetics, you find two distinct lineages” leading from the common ancestor to all the island populations that exist today, Kearns says. “So that means these patterns have evolved independently multiple times.”

Kearns and Omland think the changes have more to do with random forces than evolutionary adaptation. “If we flipped two coins, this is about what we’d expect,” Omland says. 

For example, the pattern an island’s population ended up with could depend on the color of the individuals that happened to get blown onto that island initially. Also, in a very small population, the random way genes are redistributed from generation to generation can have a significant impact—as much of an effect or more than natural selection.

Detective work

Kearns and Omland are both excited to have the opportunity to suggest names for the new species they’ve identified. Kearns suggests “Mayr’s Robin” for the Fiji/Vanuatu/Samoa population, in honor of Ernst Mayr’s pioneering study of these birds.

These robins are in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where Kearns conducted much of her research. Some of the handwritten notes are from Ernst Mayr himself in the 1930s. Photo courtesy Anna Kearns.

But their contribution to ornithology is more than a name. “Because these birds are all on very small isolated islands, and Pacific birds are often on many, many, many isolated islands, collecting is very difficult. So there haven’t actually been that many comprehensive studies,” Kearns says. Revealing the complexity of the relationships among these robins adds much-needed information to the field. It also raises the prospect that other birds—especially those on islands—might have undergone similar, as-yet-unstudied, evolutionary processes.  

The work is a unique blend of past and present. “You really wouldn’t be able to do this study without using these old collections,” Kearns says. At the same time, discovering the new species also wouldn’t have been possible without modern techniques. 

“It’s kind of like detective work in a way,” Kearns says. “I feel like there’s just so much more we need to know about it. But we feel like we have made a big step forward.”

Banner image: Kevin Omland (rear) goes birdwatching at UMBC’s Library Pond with a group of his students. Photo by Marlaynd Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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

As the COVID-19 outbreak originating in China has spread to populations across all continents except Antarctica, racism and discrimination against Chinese-American people have also increased. A team of researchers from UMBC and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) just received a Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant from the National Science Foundation to examine this intensified discrimination. They are also researching Chinese-American families’ coping strategies.

This research is led by PI Charissa Cheah, professor of psychology at UMBC. Her co-investigators are Shimei Pan, assistant professor of information systems at UMBC, and Cixin Wang, assistant professor of school psychology at UMD. Their study, “RAPID: Influences of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak on Racial Discrimination, Identity Development and Socialization,” is the one of first NSF research awards granted to examine the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Cheah, Pan, and Wang will collect data on public opinion, the social climate, and the experiences of Chinese-American families. They seek to capture the current moment and make it possible for future researchers to study this phenomenon in the longer term.

“The negative impact of infectious diseases on psychological health is understudied but highly significant, especially for minority groups linked to the disease through social group categorization,” says Cheah. She explains, “The results from this study will significantly contribute to our understanding of risk and resilience processes among parents and children under conditions of an acute but prolonged health and social threat.”

Understanding the impact 

As social scientists, Cheah and Wang will conduct focus groups and surveys to understand how various forms of racial discrimination connected to the COVID-19 outbreak are impacting families, particularly the identity development and adjustment of Chinese-American children. After the initial research phase, they will complete follow-up research six to nine months later to learn how parents have helped socialize their children and offered coping strategies around issues of race, identity, and psychosocial adjustment, in response to discrimination.

Pan, a computer scientist, will lead the analysis of outbreak-related Twitter posts to understand how public opinion, including anxiety and discriminatory attitudes, change as the outbreak intensifies or slows. Pan will apply large-scale social media analytics to study Twitter data from late 2019 onward, to ensure she captures posts from the moment the COVID-19 outbreak began.

The research is significant to Pan on a personal level, as a Chinese American and a parent. “I am aware of the related events and sentiments expressed in the news. As a parent to a Chinese American teenage son, I wonder how this experience will influence his identity formation now and as an adult,” she shares.

This project will also provide graduate and undergraduate students with an opportunity to conduct culturally-sensitive research with racial and ethnic minority families using multi-method and interdisciplinary approaches. 

“As a researcher focusing on bullying and mental health, I have seen and heard about discrimination towards Chinese-American and other Asian-American students, and increased anxiety related to COVID-19,” says Wang. “We aim to study the unfolding outbreak and related discrimination against Chinese Americans and other Asian populations to identify specific ways to promote resilience and support children and families during this challenging time.”

Cheah values the opportunity to do research that will immediately impact an urgent real-world issue, and also have a lasting impact on communities. She notes, “Knowledge from this RAPID grant will help educators, health care providers, and policymakers to proactively  support targeted marginalized groups and the larger public during future emergency events.”

Banner image: The coronavirus. Image by Alachua County, used under Public Domain Mark 1.0.