Photo caption: (back row, from left) Richard Blissett, Justin Donlan, professor Andrea Kalfoglou, Michael Young, (front row from left) Mary Rhee, Jacqui Wanjohi, and Melissa Chapman attend the National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference at Harvard University.

Three members of the UMBC Bioethics Student Association (BSA) presented research papers at the National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference at Harvard University March 13th and 14th.

Melissa Chapman, a junior biological sciences major and vice president of BSA, discussed the ethics of genetic testing of Ashkenazi young adults to determine if they are carriers of Gaucher’s Disease. Some organizations have advocated not informing carrier couples due to the availability of a new enzyme replacement therapy treatment. Chapman argued that not informing couples denies them the right to make informed reproductive decisions.

Richard Blissett, a junior bioinformatics and computational biology major and treasurer of the BSA, discussed the ethics of continuing to market preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) to patients seeking in vitro fertilization for infertility. The screening is controversial due to a lack of evidence that it increases pregnancy rates and consensus in the US and EU scientific community that it should be considered "experimental." Blissett argued that with the recent change in NIH funding for embryo research, PGS for infertile couples should only be offered in the context of well-designed clinical trials where patients are not expected to pay $5000 for the cost of the screening.

Finally, Mary Rhee, a sophomore double major in philosophy and biological sciences and public relations director for BSA, discussed the ethics of facial transplantation. Rhee argued that in most of the severe cases, the transplant is not simply cosmetic, but life altering, and that patients ought to have the freedom to consent to the surgery -- even if the immunosuppressant drugs required to prevent rejection will shorten their lives-- because it so dramatically improves their quality of life.

Andrea Kalfoglou, BSA faculty sponsor and assistant professor in the Health Administration and Policy Program said, “I was so proud of our UMBC students. Their presentations were thought provoking and professional. I think bioethics has really captured the imagination of UMBC students from many different disciplines.”

Calla Thompson, assistant professor of Visual Arts, received a 2009 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.

The video profile below was produced by the Visual Arts department and gives insights into Thompson's work and recent exhibitions.

Chris Corbett - a veteran journalist, novelist, humorist and professor of the practice of English at UMBC - discusses his recent book "Orphans Preferred: the Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express."

"UMBC in the Loop" is a production of UMBC's New Media Studio and the Research Channel.

Andrea Novicki from Duke University added a new post on the Center for Instructional Technology's (CIT) blog about a UMBC hybrid learning effective practice: using participation portfolios to manage and assess online discussions.

Can a Parking Lot be Good for the Chesapeake Bay?

To view scenes from UMBC CUERE’s pervious concrete installation, click the play button below.

9/3/2008

The answer could be yes, if it’s made of pervious concrete, a ‘green’ building material and the subject of a recent how-to workshop hosted by UMBC’s Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE).

Pervious concrete allows stormwater to slowly drain through it like a sponge. Traditional concrete causes runoff that erodes waterways and carries pollution into the Chesapeake Bay.

The August 27 event drew 90 public and private sector attendees from all of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed states (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Delaware) to UMBC. Attendees included state and local regulators and managers for planning, stormwater, environmental protection and highway/transportation departments as well as private sector engineers, architects, developers, builders and concrete suppliers and contractors. 

“We were delighted by the overwhelming turnout and interest,” said Stu Schwartz, organizer of the event and a senior research scientist at CUERE with more than 15 years experience in land use and water quality issues. “It was a great success in providing practitioners consistent information on how to use pervious concrete effectively.”

According to Schwartz and his colleague Norb Delatte of Cleveland State University, the workshop also taught attendees how to navigate Maryland’s recent changes in development laws, such as the Maryland Stormwater Act of 2007, which calls for “environmental site design” for new construction and development.

The highlight of the day was the arrival of a concrete mixing truck for a lesson in the proper pouring and installation of the material at two instrumented test plots outside the Technology Research Center building. The test beds are equipped with scientific instruments to give UMBC researchers long-term data on pervious concrete’s effectiveness as a building material and for environmental stewardship. Gwen Stanko, a doctoral student in CUERE’s prestigious IGERT program, and other UMBC students will help monitor the test beds.

The workshop and research effort was funded by the Chesapeake Bay Trust, part of the organization’s new Pioneer Grant Program, which focuses on larger, higher-impact grants to improve the health of the Bay. All labor, equipment and supplies to prepare the sites were donated by Increte of Maryland, and the test beds were installed by Z-Con Inc.

© 2007-08 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

A DVD-ROM co-authored by Helen Burgess, an assistant professor of English, has received a favorable review in the international science research journal Nature (March 5, 2009 edition).

The DVD-ROM, Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, examines the issue of owning human tissue and genetic material for research and potential profit. Biofutures uses video, text, interviews, film clips and Web links to explore ownership of human body parts. The discussion centers on themes of law, biology and culture.

The review applauded the approach of exploring the subject through multimedia information sources.

"The authors use their broad backgrounds in science policy, history and English literature to locate the questions of body ownership within the wider fields of social science and bioethics,” the review said.

Burgess worked with co-authors Robert Mitchell, a faculty member in the Duke University English department, and Phillip Thurtle, a faculty member in the University of Washington history department.

"Helen Burgess' recognition in Nature shows the wide-ranging scholarship that takes place in the UMBC Department of English today and our interest in new media," said Jessica Berman, associate professor and department chair.

"This recognition also shows the value of an interdisciplinary approach to such thorny issues as the ownership of body parts and the information derived from genetic material," Berman said.

Burgess is active in the new media research community as editor of the online journal Hyperrhiz: new Media Cultures.

Biofutures is a production of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Chris Swan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, was featured in a March 3 entry in the Baltimore Sun's "Bay & Environment" blog.

Swan is one of just a few researchers in the nation studying the environmental impact of salt used to clear roads after winter storms. Sun reporter Tim Wheeler quoted Swan and government officials on the balance between possible harm to Maryland waterways' frogs, zooplankton and insects versus safety for the state's drivers.

Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor of sociology, was quoted in a Feb. 24 Baltimore Sun story on recent controversies about the popular social networking site Facebook's privacy policies.

"It used to be that 'private' was intimate and invisible. But what we have here, on Facebook in particular, is intimate and visible," Tufekci says. "It's a public/private mixture that we've never had, and it's turned all sorts of things upside down."

Green Skies: A Better Environment for Air Travel

Hillol Kargupta logs thousands of frequent flier miles each year to do research, conduct business for a successful, global firm and to visit his family. But it was his quest to make those flights friendlier to the environment that recently won him a highly competitive IBM Innovation Award and a $20,000 grant.

Kargupta, an associate professor of computer science, is an expert on deep data mining in mobile environments. He is also the founder and president of Agnik, a company that pioneered the use of sensor technology to improve efficiency in ground transportation.

Now he’s looking to take his research and business skyward. And when the European Union includes aviation pollution in its ambitious cap-and-trade emissions market system next year, Kargupta hopes his sensors will analyze the data that makes skies greener in the EU and around the world.

“Every second of flight burns about a gallon of fuel.” says Kargupta. Airplanes already have sensors that monitor and adjust fuel/air ratios to yield the best fuel economy, he observes, but analyzing that data for emissions purposes “is a chance to meet a real market need.”

The available information is staggering. New York’s JFK Airport, says Kargupta, produces a continuous stream of about 100 megabytes of data per minute. “Multiply that times all the world’s airports,” he continues, “and it equals a huge amount of data changing rapidly over a large area.”

Kargupta is enthusiastic about the daunting task, however: “It’s just the type of challenge we like at UMBC.”

In addition to his research and business success, Kargupta is also a dedicated mentor. His former graduate students have gone on to careers at NASA, Columbia University, IBM, New Mexico State University and Haifa University, Israel.

(2/20/09)

© 2007-08 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �