Ancient Studies Week Events
Join us for a week of lectures and performances!
Monday, Oct. 10, 12:00pm-12:50pm, 132 Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg. Lecture by Dr. James Romm, Bard College, “The Mythology of Ocean,” the river thought to encircle the earth in antiquity. Dr. Romm is an expert how Greeks and Romans imagined the ends of the earth.
Tuesday, Oct. 11, 10:00am-6:00pm, near the University Center and the Forum outside the Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg.—Marathon Reading of Vergil’s Aeneid.
Wednesday, Oct. 12, 4:00pm-5:00pm, Gallery of A. O. Kuhn Library: ANCS Week Keynote Lecture by Dr. Josiah Ober, who will lecture on “Democracy, Legitimacy, and Civic Engagement.” Dr. Ober holds the Mitsotakis Chair in Classics and Political Science at Stanford University. A reception will follow the lecture.
Thursday, Oct. 13, 7:00p-9:00p, 132 Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg.: concert reading of Aristophanes’ Knights. Contact Dr. Rosenbloom (dsrose@umbc.edu) if you are interested in reading.
Friday, Oct. 14, 12:00p-12:50p 234 Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg.: "Scribe School 2: Secrets of the Mycenae." Contact Riley (asarah1@umbc.edu) to register.
Saturday, Oct. 15, 2:00p-5:30p, 7th Floor A. O. Kuhn Library, ANCS Reunion Celebration of the UMBC’s 50th Anniversary. Come see emeriti Professors Sherwin, Freyman, and Koehler as well as the current faculty and generations of ANCS alumni. Featured speaker is Dr. Joe Howley, 2005 ANCS graduate and Assistant Professor at Columbia University. The cost is $30 per person. Currently enrolled ANCS majors and minors can attend free of charge. Contact Domonique Pitts to register (dpitts@umbc.edu). Because the event is being catered, registration is required for attendance.
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Monday, Oct. 10, 12:00pm-12:50pm, 132 Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg. Lecture by Dr. James Romm, Bard College, “The Mythology of Ocean,” the river thought to encircle the earth in antiquity....
Flyer
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Sat, 08 Oct 2016 17:18:52 -0400
Simple Plan Concert
Its Simple Plan Live in Baltimore this Monday 10th October
Event is at:
Baltimore Soundstage
124 Market Place
Baltimore, Maryland
Are you interested in seeing one of your fav band perform live. Details below :)
https://www.facebook.com/events/1557137751248663/
https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1224241
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Event is at: Baltimore Soundstage 124 Market Place Baltimore, Maryland Are you interested in seeing one of your fav band perform live. Details below :)...
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Sat, 08 Oct 2016 17:08:13 -0400
Robin Corbet discovers rare binary star system
Until recently, humans had only detected five binary star systems—pairs of stars orbiting each other—that emit extremely high-energy gamma rays. Robin Corbet, an astrophysicist at UMBC’s
Center for Space Sciences and Technology (CSST), just discovered the sixth, and most luminous, and this one is special. Instead of being in our Milky Way galaxy, it’s located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, our next-door neighbor galaxy, 163,000 light years away.
This marks Corbet’s second gamma ray binary discovery, following his initial detection of such a system through the
Fermi gamma-ray space telescope five years ago. After that initial find in 2011, he thought more would follow quickly, but the systems proved elusive. The fact that he found the sixth known gamma ray binary outside of the Milky Way came as quite a surprise. At first, he shares, “I didn’t believe it.”
In order to emit gamma rays, which contain one million times the energy of visible light waves, one of the “stars” in the binary system must be a black hole or neutron star, a star that has collapsed in on itself. “These are more massive than our own Sun but squeezed down to something about the size of Washington, DC,” explains Corbet. Hundreds of these binary systems have been found that emit X-rays, but only a handful emit even higher-energy gamma rays.
Corbet detected the system by analyzing variations in gamma rays coming from about 3,000 known gamma ray sources. In a gamma ray binary system, the intensity of the gamma rays as they strike the telescope varies depending on the relative position of the stars as they orbit each other. Because the gamma ray sources are so far away, only a small percentage of the rays ever reach the telescope. That means it can take a long time to collect enough data to detect a pattern.
Once the Fermi satellite collected enough data, Corbet ran analyses on a 12-core computer for a few months. Looking at gamma rays from all 3,000 sources, the analyses identified two stars orbiting each other every 10.3 days—a new binary system. Then Corbet requested data sets from colleagues around the world that included X-ray, radio wave, and visible light wave data. He hoped the additional information would corroborate the gamma ray signal and confirm the orbital period, which it did. The visible light data also supported the idea that the system contains a neutron star, but there’s still a small chance it could be a black hole.
Binary systems can only generate the energy required to emit gamma rays when the neutron star is rotating very fast. The fact that only six of these systems have ever been discovered suggests that very few neutron stars rotate that quickly, and there may be more slowly-rotating neutron stars than scientists thought.
Calculations suggest the neutron star in the system Corbet just discovered rotates around its axis in less than 39 milliseconds, compared to Earth’s 24-hour rotation. As a star rotates, it flings particles away from its surface, creating a “stellar wind.” With one star in a binary rotating so fast, interactions between particles in the stellar wind from each star can be intense, which is what creates the gamma rays. “It’s like having a particle accelerator in space,” says Corbet.
Next steps for the research include confirming that one star in the system is indeed a neutron star by making observations to directly detect its rotation period, although this is very difficult. Corbet is also interested in tracking the two stars’ orbits, to see if they are truly circular or more elliptical. Because there are so few of these systems, and this is the only one outside the Milky Way, anything learned will inform future research goals and theories about extreme binary star systems.
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This article was first published on news.umbc.edu and was written by Sarah Hansen. Until recently, humans had only detected five binary star systems—pairs of stars orbiting each other—that...
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Office of the Vice President for Research
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Sat, 08 Oct 2016 13:43:56 -0400
Brewster lab examine "pause button" on embryonic development
Work has an eye on improving organ transplant
Embryos of zebrafish, a workhorse model organism in biology labs, routinely survive without oxygen for up to 50 hours by hitting the pause button on their development. Rachel Brewster, professor of biological sciences, and her team are working hard to learn how they do it. She hopes mechanisms that enable survival without oxygen could eventually be intentionally triggered in tissues like donated organs, to increase the length of time that can pass before they are transplanted.
That brief window of time is a major limiting factor in the availability of organs for transplant. Today, donated organs are cooled to slow metabolism and reduce oxygen consumption. Using that technique, hearts and lungs last only four to six hours, and kidneys up to 48. After that, tissues break down due to lack of cellular energy. This sliver of time to identify a recipient and deliver an organ means recipients are limited to a small geographic area in which to find a donor. Each day in the U.S., 79 people receive organ transplants and 22 die waiting for an organ.
Brewster’s research is supported by an Idea Discovery Grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD is interested in ways to improve transplant technology to increase the chances that injured soldiers would have timely access to donor organs and other tissues. If successful, the benefits would extend beyond the military.
The zebrafish Brewster work with “can arrest everything they’re doing as a mechanism to conserve cellular energy,” she says, so the goal is to “find the signaling mechanisms that shut down cellular activity.” Tissues survive by reducing energy consumption when energy production plummets in the absence of oxygen.
One of Brewster’s goals with the new project is to understand the timing of arrest—when development is paused—in zebrafish embryos. The research group has already learned that younger embryos arrest faster and more efficiently than older embryos. Also, older embryos are less likely to survive when oxygen is reintroduced.
Brewster would like to understand the sequence of arrest, as well. For example, does cell division in muscles arrest before it does in the digestive tract? Does tissue in an extremity like the tail succumb to a lack of oxygen before brain tissue? Are there essential systems that never arrest? “We can’t identify signaling mechanisms that cause arrest until we define arrest,” she says.
The team also hopes to identify small molecules whose concentrations in the cell change quickly upon oxygen deprivation, allowing them to mediate the rates of cellular processes on a short time scale. Brewster believes these molecules’ rapid effect on the cell makes them more likely to be involved in arrest than slower processes, such as the rate at which proteins are built from genetic instructions and then modified by cellular machinery.
Brewster hypothesizes that the involved small molecules activate or deactivate larger effector molecules, such as a class of proteins known as
“kinases,” that carry out the arrest process. The team’s most ambitious goal is to identify those effector molecules. Rather than one “master regulator” molecule that controls the arrest process, Brewster explains, “It’s more likely every tissue fending for itself.” She adds, “My hunch is that the system is sloppier than we predicted.”
The experiments themselves are challenging and complex. The team will work with individual zebrafish embryos, and even using very young, fairly homogeneous embryos won’t make them all perfectly identical. Individual differences may show up as false positives in their results. “To figure out what is signal versus noise is not easy,” says Brewster.
One tack the team is taking to find molecules that trigger arrest is to knock out candidate molecules one by one. They’ll know they’ve got a winner if embryos without that molecule continue to develop in oxygen-deprived conditions.
“To actually identify a molecule that promotes arrest would be very exciting,” says Brewster. In addition to the organ transplant, another application of intentionally-triggered arrest might be during open heart surgery to prevent or slow tissue damage. Someday, NASA might use the technique to trigger a low-metabolic state in astronauts, similar to hibernation, to allow them to survive trips farther and farther from Earth.
Beyond practical applications, this project attracted Brewster on a more fundamental level. “Ninety-nine percent of developmental biologists study how development progresses,” she explains. “I was intrigued by the prospect of studying the exact opposite.”
Brewster is excited to share her passion for discovering how development can be paused with the many students who work in her lab, such as Ph.D. student Jong Park, who will focus on this project. Undergraduates have also contributed significantly to the research. “I’m very proud that most of the preliminary data was produced by undergrads,” she says. “It’s really kudos to them that we got this thing funded.”
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This story was first published on news.umbc.edu and was written by Sarah Hansen. Embryos of zebrafish, a workhorse model organism in biology labs, routinely survive without oxygen for up to...
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Office of the Vice President for Research
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Sat, 08 Oct 2016 13:39:22 -0400
NSF provides $5 million to UMBC-led LSAMP program
Supports students from underrepresented groups in STEM
UMBC is the lead institution on a $5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that provides additional funds for the
University System of Maryland Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (USM LSAMP). Universities will use the renewed funding to support students from underrepresented groups in STEM. The funding boost also allows for expanded support for transfer students and new programming focused on performance in mathematics.
“This funding for expanded programs indicates that we are able to continue the legacy of inclusive excellence that UMBC celebrates,” explains Renetta Tull, associate vice provost for graduate student development and postdoctoral affairs.
Through LSAMP, Tull says, “Programming that prepares students for graduate school in STEM fields will be available to any student at UMBC who wants to participate,” complementing gold-standard cohort-based models like the
Meyerhoff Scholars Program and
MARC U*STAR Program at UMBC. Some LSAMP funds will also support these well-established programs.
The USM LSAMP program has four key focus areas: participation (supporting students as they transition from high school or community college), performance (reinforcing mathematics knowledge and improving performance in math courses), preparation (getting students ready for research experiences by offering opportunities for training), and presentation (providing opportunities for students to present their work publicly).
Of the $5 million in funding, UMBC will disburse $1 million to University of Maryland, College Park and $750,000 to University of Maryland Eastern Shore, the other two member universities of the Louis Stokes Alliance. Towson University and Frostburg University are associate alliance members, and community college collaborators include Prince George’s Community College, Anne Arundel Community College, and Community College of Baltimore County. Tull explains, “The tiered structure allows current partners to mentor associate members and collaborating community colleges.”
UMBC has received NSF funding for LSAMP for 20 years. The new boost in funding will make more initiatives possible, including transition seminars for transfer students, a bridging conference for incoming first-year students, and a system-wide Winter Mathematics Institute. The institute, co-sponsored by the Diversity Committee of NSF’s Mathematical Sciences Institutes, is modeled on the successful Meyerhoff Summer Bridge program.
“The success of students at UMBC is underpinned by support initiatives like STEM BUILD and t-STEM,” shares Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. “Collaboration with the LSAMP program is a welcome addition, in that it broadens and deepens UMBC’s ability to attract and retain students from underrepresented group in STEM disciplines.”
UMBC is also home to a “Bridge to the Doctorate” program, funding for which is only available to institutions that have had LSAMP programs for at least 10 years. This program financially supports graduate students who participated in LSAMP programs as undergrads at any university in the U.S.
“We are delighted to build on our existing partnership with NSF,” said President Freeman Hrabowski. “UMBC strives to create an environment where students from all backgrounds can succeed in any field, and this funding enables us to expand that critical work.”
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UMBC is the lead institution on a $5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that provides additional funds for the University System of Maryland Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority...
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Office of the Vice President for Research
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Sat, 08 Oct 2016 13:33:56 -0400
UMBC faculty win major Maryland Innovation Initiative grants
Bringing in total MII awards to $2.4M
This story was first published on news.umbc.edu and was written by Sarah Hansen.
Tech transfer is growing rapidly at UMBC, fueled in part by the university’s notable success in securing Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII) grants designed to promote the commercialization of research.
“UMBC’s success in the MII program has been consistently growing over the course of the 3.5 years since the program started,” says Jennifer Hammaker, MII director at Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). In that time, UMBC researchers have received $2.38 million to develop their ideas into commercial applications, with an impressive success rate of 50 percent (50 applications yielding 25 awards).
The MII program is a powerful collaboration between the state of Maryland and five Maryland institutions: Johns Hopkins University; University of Maryland, Baltimore; University of Maryland, College Park; Morgan State University and UMBC. UMBC has one of the highest success rates for MII awards among these institutions. The most recent round of grants for UMBC includes projects in four distinct areas: interactive arts performances, biomedical technology, space weather forecasting, and biofuel production.
The Awards
Linda Dusman, professor of music, and Eric Smallwood, assistant professor of visual arts, will use their phase III award to scale up a prototype of their mobile app,
Octava, to make it available to a larger slice of the public. Octava provides real-time program notes during performances such as classical music, dance, and theatre, offering audiences details about the artists and other information that can enrich their experience of the performance and, as Dusman put it, “do real-time education.”
Previous MII grants helped Dusman and Smallwood generate the prototype and conduct a market research study. The phase III grant will enable the team to respond to feedback from phase II, including connecting the app to social media.
Chris Geddes, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and director of the
Institute of Fluorescence, won a phase III award in this round for
Lyse-it, a company that produces a low-cost portable device that breaks open cells and chops up their DNA to prescribed fragment sizes, a step required in many sample-preparation procedures in the biomedical research and health care industries. The phase III funding will facilitate production of a large inventory of the Lyse-it product and support development of a rapid marketing strategy.
Neel Savani, a researcher at UMBC’s
Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute (GPHI), is developing a system that can forecast solar storms up to 24 hours in advance, a huge improvement over the current ability to give a one-hour warning. His team’s phase I MII grant will allow them to “get a handle and statistical understanding of how good of an improvement this forecast will be,” Savani explains, “If I can validate how much the improvement will be, then I can convert that into a sales pitch.”
“It’s great to see the state of MD take the lead in supporting space technology,” Savani adds, “I’m seeing venture capitalists looking to invest in the space industry.”
Jeffrey Gardner, assistant professor of biological sciences, received a phase I award for a technology that will support the biofuels industry. His group “will develop a set of small porous filters that enables real-time measurement of microbial growth during biofuel production,” he explains. Bacterial cells used for biofuel production break down large molecules to obtain nutrients, and then use those nutrients to either grow more cells or produce biofuel. By measuring how many cells are growing in real time, researchers can tell if the bacterial cells are “spending more energy than they should making more cells instead of making biofuel.”
Learning Curve
The MII grant process can be a huge learning opportunity for research faculty, many of whom have never tackled a business venture. David Fink, a “site miner” at UMBC, seeks out faculty research that could lead to successful commercial products and supports faculty through the process from start to finish. Don Engel, assistant vice president for research, also encourages faculty to pursue commercialization when he thinks their work is a good fit.
Smallwood shares, “Dave [Fink] has been indispensable, helping us understand the program and shape our ideas.” As UMBC’s first MII team in the arts, and only the second team of artists to receive an MII grant, he says, “We were coming from a different field than most of the applicants, so we had to reorient our brains to how we navigate this new world.”
For Dusman, a business venture “is like an octopus.” She often finds herself asking, “What do you mean there’s one more leg?”
UMBC resources also aided Savani as he grew his business skills. “As somebody who comes from a very research-centric background, I don’t necessarily know the correct lingo for commercialization,” he admits, “That was a tricky component for me to learn, with a steep learning curve.” He thanks Fink and Engel, as well as Paola Buitron and Wendy Martin in UMBC’s Office of Technology Development and Margo Young at GPHI, for his success with the MII program. “They were an absolute tremendous help. They were very patient and supportive.”
“This program is asking questions of faculty that most of them have never been asked,” says Hammaker. “It’s forcing them to think differently.”
She credits UMBC’s success receiving a particularly large number of grants to a combination of support from high-level administrators as well as site miners like Fink. She cites Dusman and Smallwood as an example of what that kind of support makes possible. “They’re closing sales all over the country,” Hammaker says, “That doesn’t happen without a support system.”
Some companies formed by UMBC faculty, as well as alumni and university partners, choose to create a home base at bwtech@UMBC, adjacent to campus. Ellen Hemmerly, executive director of bwtech@UMBC, explains that the research and technology park “provides a range of incubator services to help the companies grow and be successful.”
Geddes, one of the phase III grant recipients, is a veteran entrepreneur attuned to the business landscape. “We are seeing an increased amount of funding available to faculty to explore their ideas and inventions with regard to commercialization,” he says, “With more funding and opportunities materializing, we should expect to see many more companies being spun out from UMBC in the coming years.”
That fits with the culture of UMBC, says Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research. “When we talk about research at UMBC, we frequently use the phrase ‘Innovation that Matters’ to reflect the fact that many of our faculty and students are working on our current, most pressing issues,” he shares. “Our success with the TEDCO MII program is rooted deeply in this research culture of making a difference.”
Hammaker sees UMBC as an exemplar in this regard: “Exactly what’s happening at UMBC is what we’re looking for. UMBC is doing a great job of working with the faculty and getting them prepared to come through the program.” She says, “UMBC has a lot to be excited about.”
UMBC and Tel Aviv University signed a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday, September 21, 2016, to formalize an academic collaboration between the two institutions. The agreement establishes a framework for joint research as well as academic exchange opportunities for students, faculty, and staff.
Antonio Moreira, vice provost for academic affairs, signed the agreement during a trip to Israel, as did Raanan Rein, vice president at Tel Aviv University. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan attended the signing of the document.
“The signing of this memorandum of understanding with Tel Aviv University opens up exciting opportunities for important academic collaborations involving faculty, students and staff from UMBC and TAU,” says Moreira. “Visiting TAU was very informative and allowed existing ties between the two institutions to be strengthened. We are delighted to have TAU as one of our partners.”
UMBC is the leader of the collaborative Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR), which has historically included five other U.S. universities working to address computational challenges. Recently, the National Science Foundation approved Tel Aviv University as the first international research partner site for the Center, setting the stage for additional collaborative activities.
Stu Schwartz, senior research scientist for the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE) at UMBC, has long looked with concern at the issue of soil compaction and its effect on stormwater runoff and infiltration. Impervious surfaces, such as roofs, roads, and parking lots, increase stormwater runoff and pollutants in streams and rivers. Schwartz and his students found that standard construction practices can routinely result in green permeable landscapes with compacted soil profiles that produce almost as much runoff as an impervious road or parking lot.
Looking for a better way to create sustainable, attractive landscaping, he dug into the problem of compacted soil and began collaborating with various government agencies to address these issues.
Schwartz and his students worked with the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration’s Office of Environmental Design to demonstrate and refine an alternative to standard topsoiling practices that are commonly used by contractors. The technique—suburban subsoiling—makes the soil less compact and incorporates rich, organic compost into the soil to restore infiltration and water-holding capacity.
This practice needs little to no ongoing irrigation and fertilizer input, functions well technically, and has the markers of commercial success. It can be implemented with relatively minor changes to standard land development practices, and holds great promise as a win-win technology to reduce stormwater runoff while delivering superior sustainable landscaping.
The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) recently identified this innovation as one of 2016’s
“Sweet 16” projects. AASHTO’s “Sweet 16” distinction annually recognizes four high value projects from each geographic region of the United States.
In applying the suburban subsoiling technique, Schwartz and his students have worked with the City of Baltimore and Yorkwood Elementary School. The collaboration aims to reduce the amount of asphalt covering the ground and create construction that can allow the ground to absorb more water. Schwartz’s team developed an alternative way to restore the sustainability profile of the soil after the asphalt was removed and replaced with grass.
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The story was first published on news.umbc.edu. It was written by Megan Hanks. Stu Schwartz, senior research scientist for the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE) at...
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Archived RCA News
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Office of the Vice President for Research
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Sat, 08 Oct 2016 13:08:14 -0400
UMBC researchers explore virtual and augmented reality
This story was first published on news.umbc.edu. It was written by Megan Hanks.
ABC News in Baltimore took an in-depth look at virtual and augmented reality this week, ahead of Sony’s planned launch of a Playstation virtual reality system. The segment,
“Virtual reality opening entertainment, research possibilities,” featured interviews with UMBC faculty on new technologies, the opportunities those technologies create, and issues for users and developers to consider as the field expands.
For viewers unfamiliar with virtual reality, Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research, explained how these technologies allow people to experience the world in a different way. “You put your headset on, you’re in the forest. You could be on a foreign planet or you could be in a battlefield,” he said.
In UMBC’s new
PI2 Immersive Hybrid Reality Lab, Jian Chen, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, demonstrated how ultra-high-resolution screens can help researchers visualize complicated data. To experience this technology, users wear 3D glasses with small sensors to enter a world that they can manipulate using handheld controls.
“In this type of environment, your brain thinks your body is moving but your body is not actually moving,” she explained.
The new lab will enable faculty and students in various departments to simulate data in uniquely immersive ways, whether a researcher is exploring wind farms, how blood flows through the human body, or highway traffic, said Steiner.
Ryan Robucci ‘02, computer engineering, and Nilanjan Banerjee, both associate professors of computer science and electrical engineering, are already using HTC Vive headsets in their labs to understand how people make decisions and react when when they are on a battlefield.
Banerjee says that augmented reality technology may be more useful and user friendly than virtual reality systems. Augmented reality allows people to see their surroundings, but alters the world through a device or glasses. Smartphone users are already playing Pokémon GO in huge numbers. In the near future, it could be common to have a technology that, for example, overlays directions and controls onto home appliances.
UMBC SWE,
The Naval Surface Warfare Center
is hiring for the following positions:
Environmental Systems Engineer
Machinery Systems Engineer
Materials Engineer/Scientist
Electrical Power Systems Engineer
Students can apply directly for these
positions on UMBCWorks!
Information Session
Date: Tuesday, Oct 18, 2016
Location: Commons 331
Time: 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Interview Day
Date: Wednesday, Oct 19,2016
Location: Career Center - Math/Psych Bldg.
Room(s) : Career Center - MP 201 (A), Career
Center - MP 201 (B)
Time: 9:00am to 4:30pm
Session: Fall 2016 On Campus Interviews
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UMBC SWE, The Naval Surface Warfare Center is hiring for the following positions: Environmental Systems Engineer Machinery Systems Engineer Materials Engineer/Scientist Electrical Power...
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Society of Women Engineers
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UMBC Society of Women Engineers (SWE)
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Sat, 08 Oct 2016 11:34:05 -0400
