When Erin Lavik, professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, was pursuing her graduate degree, she was required to pursue a minor outside of her discipline, and she selected playwriting. Lavik found that teamwork was crucial to the success of theatre, and that it also translated well into the scientific field she was pursuing, she explained in her recent TEDx Broadway talk “Genius Is Created Through Collaboration.”

“Theatre is the greatest gift you can give an aspiring scientist because theatre is dreaming realized,” Lavik said. She shared that she watched people come together with big ideas about stories, lights, and sound, only to surpass their dreams and the dreams of others around them as they moved forward with the creative process.

Lavik discussed how collaboration is crucial in the scientific discovery process, just as it is essential to a successful production in theatre, and she described how teamwork has impacted her research. She also addressed common stereotypes about the personalities and tendencies of scientists, including that they are male, work in isolation late into the night, and are odd or strange, and said that these stereotypes need to be broken. 

She points out that as young children we are all scientists, and, as we grow into adulthood and pursue careers, there is great value in continuing to support the intense curiosity and willingness to experiment and learn that children often demonstrate.

As a student interested in pursuing engineering, Lavik said, “Knowing that I could work with other people”—that science didn’t need to be a solitary enterprise—“made it a little less scary. And I went to college of be an engineer so that I could learn about science and apply it to big problems.”

The big problem that Lavik and her team are working on now is determining how to protect and repair the brain and spinal cord after injury, with a focus on stopping internal bleeding.

“I don’t know if our material will ultimately work in humans,” she said. “But I am absolutely and utterly sure that we wouldn’t have gotten to this point if it wasn’t for the fact that we have a whole team.”

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work recently spoke about cyberwarfare and U.S. efforts to fight online security threats, leaving analysts wondering about the nature of today’s battles in cyberspace. UMBC’s Anupam Joshi and Rick Forno  shed light on this world in a new Scientific American article that explains how online tactics known as “cyberbombs” work to prevent potential attacks, or could potentially be directed at U.S. targets.

Joshi is director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity and professor and chair of the department of computer science and electrical engineering, and Forno serves as assistant director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and director of UMBC’s graduate program in cybersecurity.

Cyberattacks can disrupt essential components of infrastructure people use every day, from cell phone networks to electric network generators, Joshi and Forno explain. They point out that “a ‘cyberbomb’ is not a single weapon,” but rather a collection of computer hardware and software that can be used to protect against cyber threats. This work might involve a broad range of professionals, including technological experts, military strategists, researchers, policy analysts, and lawyers, and as technology changes so do cyber weapons and tactics.

“We can analyze the underlying technologies and look at the global strategic considerations of those of those seeking to wage cyber warfare,” Joshi and Forno write. “That work allows us to offer ideas about cyber weapons and how they might be used.”

Read the full article, “America is ‘dropping cyberbombs’—but how do they work?” originally published in The Conversation. 

Images: Anupam Joshi presenting during cybersecurity forum hosted by the School of Public Policy. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.