In Recognition of Relationship Violence Awareness Month, the Women's Center is hosting Clothesline Project t-shirt making throughout the month of October.

All survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, and sexual violence are invited to make a shirt that shares their experience, story, or healing journey to add to the UMBC Clothesline Project. All materials are provided in the Women's Center. 

For more information on the Clothesline Project click on the link below.

The next Clothesline Project will be on display in April. 

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.”

Image: Colleagues gather to sign UMBC technology patents into the new Lyse-it company. From left to right: Paola Buitron, Mildred Homa, Wendy Martin, Chris Geddes, Russell Hill, Dean Drake, Rosemary Jagus, David Fink. Photo by Mary Larkin.

We have an immediate opening in our Security Department for a full time gallery officer on the dayshift; core work schedule is 9:15am to 5:15pm, Wednesday through Sunday. The individual will have responsibility for preparing the galleries for daily operation, monitoring activities in the Museum and implementing museum procedures as needed.

Duties

After conducting in-depth interviews and observations of students in a teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) graduate program, Sarah Shin, professor of education and special assistant to the provost for academic initiatives, has published a new book that examines TESOL as a second career.

The book, titled English Language Teaching as a Second Career (Multilingual Matters 2016), explores the challenges and successes that professionals ages 45-73 go through as they develop as teachers and launch their second careers.

In the book, Shin explains that many adults are transitioning into new professions and working later into what has traditionally been retirement age. She explains how the students she interviewed think of TESOL as it relates to their overall life goals and achievements and how they want to improve the quality of life in their communities through education.

“A welcome addition to the growing literature on teacher development, this book will be an important resource for teacher trainers and anyone working in TESOL,” the publisher states on the book’s back cover.

The text has received many favorable reviews for its ethnographic approach to reflecting on teacher experiences as they begin second careers in the context of growing demand for K-12 English language teachers in the United States.

“Sarah Shin makes a compelling case for the demographic changes in education and the accompanying challenges and opportunities for training a new breed of ESL teachers who bring profound real world experiences to their classrooms. A ‘must read’ for teacher trainers and for baby boomers contemplating how the next chapter in their life story will be written,” shared G. Richard Tucker, Carnegie Mellon University, in a review.

Shin is an expert in bilingualism, heritage language education, and TESOL teacher training. She is the author of two previous books Bilingualism in Schools and Society (Routledge) and Developing in Two Languages (Multilingual Matters). Earlier this year, Shin was selected for inaugural class of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) emerging leaders program. Read more about her work and research on the education department website.

Image: Sarah Shin. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.  

In the past year, dozens of companies have faced cyber attacks and hacks, with the most recently announced attack affecting half a billion Yahoo accounts.

Rick Forno, assistant director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and director of the Cybersecurity Graduate Program at UMBC, joined Nicole Perlroth, technology reporter for The New York Times, on WHYY to discuss this recent breach with Mary Cummings-Jordan, host of Radio Talk.

Although the Yahoo cyber attack happened two years ago, users are just learning about this breach now. These hacks can expose important identifying information.. Despite the level of sensitive information personal accounts can include, they often do not have the same types of security that employers typically ensure for work email accounts.

“The email address disclosures is bad enough, but if you have little bits of information like zip codes and birthdates, you can use these little tidbits to try to reset an account password and try to get in that way,” Forno explains. He adds that once a hacker enters an account they can access substantially more personal details and potentially hack into the user’s accounts on other sites.

Hacks of this nature should encourage people to use good cybersecurity practices, Forno suggests. “This that we’ve been preaching…[that] basic practices are just as valuable today as they were 20 years ago,” he says.”

To protect their email accounts, people should be vigilant when it comes account activity, change passwords regularly, and not share passwords between websites. Both Forno and Perlroth agree that enabling dual authentication, if available, is another way to protect accounts from being hacked. Writing out passwords and keeping them somewhere at home is one way to have different passwords for each account and not have to store them electronically, reducing the risk that a hacker may obtain the login information, says Forno.

Even with these preventative actions in place, cyber hacks will continue to be issues, he says. “The minute you learn of a problem, you’re already behind the curve in responding to it.”

Listen to the full interview “Cybersecurity and consumer protection online” on WHYY, Philadelphia’s NPR station. Forno also spoke with WOSU, Columbus, Ohio’s NPR station. The full interview “Tech Tuesday: Election Cybersecurity and Futuristic Fiction” is available. 

Image: Rick Forno. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Following the first presidential debate on September 26, Kimberly Moffitt was a guest on WYPR’s Midday program and WEAA’s The Marc Steiner Show to provide analysis and outline what the candidates need to do going forward to sway voters.

On WYPR, Moffitt, an associate professor of American studies, joined Liz Copeland, founder of the Urban Conservative project, and talked about how the tone and content of the debate changed after the first thirty minutes and offered her perspective on the strategy behind Hillary Clinton’s approach.

“This was not hands down a clear win for Hillary Clinton, but I do believe that she performed better than Donald Trump when I look at the entire 90 minutes,” explained Moffitt. “What I do think was different and savvy for her to do this time versus what I’ve seen her do in other settings…is that she decided not to play Trump’s game.”

Moffitt also said she thinks at this stage in the campaign, the candidates didn’t do much to sway voters’ opinions during the first debate. “I think folks are exactly where they were when they started this debate,” she explained.

On The Marc Steiner Show, Moffitt joined Richard Vatz, professor of rhetoric and communication at Towson University, and Mark Green, host of the nationally syndicated radio show Both Sides Now, to cover a range of issues during the debate. Among them, Moffitt commented on the moderating style of Lester Holt and the strategies that both candidates used to attempt to appeal to undecided voters.

To listen to the complete segments, click below.

Big takeaways from the presidential debate (WYPR’s Midday) 
Election roundtable: First debate (The Marc Steiner Show) 

Image: Kimberly Moffitt in her office. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.