UMBC Draws Top-Seeded Connecticut in NCAA Tournament

Indianapolis-The America East champion UMBC women’s basketball (16-16) team has garnered the No. 16 seed in the Fresno Regional and will take on top-seed Connecticut (29-3) in the first round of the NCAA Tournament Sunday at 9 p.m. at the Hartford Civic Center in Hartford, Conn. The game can be seen live on ESPN2.

After becoming the first team in conference history to defeat the one, two and three seeds en route to the title, the Retrievers are making their first-ever trip to the NCAA tournament. UMBC becomes the fourth America East team to play as the 16th seed, and these squads are 0-3 all-time, including Maine’s 1995 loss to Connecticut. Overall, America East teams are 0-2 in the NCAA tournament against the Huskies.

The Retrievers have never played Connecticut, ranked third in the final ESPN/USA Today Coaches poll. UMBC is one of nine teams making its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament, while the storied Huskies are 58-13 in 18 all-time appearances since 1989, with five national titles and eight Final Four appearances.

Harvard was the only No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1 seed, taking down Stanford in 1998. If the Retrievers defeat Connecticut on Sunday, they will face the winner of the first round game between No. 8 New Mexico and No. 9 Wisconsin-Green Bay on Tuesday, March 20.

(3/12/07) © 2006-07 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

‘Beauty Myth’ Author to Discuss “The Changemakers: Ethical Leadership & Real Power” at UMBC Humanities Forum on March 14

Best –selling author Naomi Wolf will give a lecture on ethics and leadership on Wednesday, March 14 at 7 p.m. at UMBC as part of the University’s annual Humanities Forum speaker series. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Wolf has written essays for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Glamour and The New York Times. She is the author of a number of best-selling books including "The Beauty Myth" (1991), which was named one of the most important books of the 20th century by The New York Times.

The lessons Wolf passionately shares raise awareness of society's pervasive inequities and encourage her audiences to voice their concerns, and enact change. In her lecture, Wolf will address ethics and leadership, drawing on models using courage, justice, compassion, and a respect for all to change the world for the better. Her talk will spell out how we can be ethical leaders and make a monumental difference.

Wolf is co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization that teaches young women how to become leaders and agents of change in the 21st century.

Wolf will speak Wednesday, March 14, at 7:00 p.m. in Lecture Hall VII, on the first floor of UMBC’s Information Technology and Engineering (ITE) Building. The event is sponsored by the UMBC Center for the Humanities.

UMBC Student and Faculty Entrepreneurs

Look for more information on entrepreneurship at UMBC, and faculty and student entrepreneurs, on the UMBC Web site and myUMBC portal throughout the semester.

Melissa Amor
Senior, Political Science
Amor came to UMBC with plans for a career in law, but in her freshman year she took a class in The Practice of Management and became inspired by the idea of entrepreneurship. Now, she is a finalist in the Most Promising Campus CEO contest, founded by Randal Pinkett and is also interviewing at such prestigious graduate schools as Harvard, Notre Dame and Georgetown.

Amor’s Most Promising Campus CEO contest entry grew out of a class project with students Natalie Collings, Jessica Most and Johnny Tseng ’05, economics, to start a mobile salon. Amor expanded on the group’s ideas by creating a franchising plan for the salon, and hopes the group will reunite to develop the business regardless of the contest’s outcome.

In the 2006 MoshPit Business Plan Competition sponsored by the Greater Baltimore Technology Committee, Amor was part of a team that finished in second place against approximately 174 other entrepreneur student-led teams/companies from the Baltimore area. She also helped UMBC alumni Wan His Yuan and Jason Servary, founders of Openposting.com, market the first online classified community for college students.

Sandor Dornbush,
Ph.D. Student, Computer Science
Dornbush has found entrepreneurial ideas in things that bug him – being stuck in traffic and his dislike for making playlists for his iPod.

Dornbush is part of a research group led by one of his mentors — computer science professor Zary Segall-which specializes in human aware computing-making computers wearable, ubiquitous and most importantly, able to sense and adjust to a user’s mood, surroundings and social situation.

Last year, with the help of visual arts professor David Yager and the encouragement of Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship Director Vivian Armor, Dornbush took his idea StreetSmart Traffic to the Greater Baltimore Technology Council’s “Mosh Pit” business plan competition and placed third overall. The idea uses peer-to-peer wireless communication to boost a standard GPS driving aid.

More recently, Dornbush expanded on an idea for a smart MP3 player developed by Segall. The “XPod” learns the type of music its owner likes best and automatically plays the perfect song for studying in the library, working out in the gym or chilling out at home. The project was the source of a widely cited research paper, which led to media coverage in Electronic Musician, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun and others.

“The Mosh Pit competition was very fun and I learned a lot about how to develop and pitch a business plan,” said Dornbush. “I was kind of amazed by the support and attention that I got from the University when I did as well as I did. I would strongly recommend anybody with novel ideas that have market potential to pitch their idea.”

Doug Hamby
Associate Professor, Dance
After participating in the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship’s Faculty Summer Institute, Hamby created a Dance and Entrepreneurship class, which he is teaching during the spring 2007 semester. Students in the class have formed a dance company, and will be creating new dances and promoting the new company’s concert (12 p.m., April 27, Fine Arts 317). They spend two hours per week developing the new work and two hours learning about marketing and promotion.

Hamby said the class evolved out of years of talking with students about how to use their degree in dance. “They have to find their niche, they have to learn how to brand themselves and they have to be professional in how they go about this. Artists have to be entrepreneurial, to think in a creative way, to look for opportunities in order to get work,” he explained.

“I’ve founded my own company and produced many concerts, so I want to share my experience in a more formal setting with students,” Hamby added. “I think learning how to be an artist-entrepreneur changes them. It helps them prepare more while they are in school for life after graduation. They concentrate more on what they need to do in order to have the kind of career they want.”

Kriste Lindenmeyer
Professor and Chair, History
“Humanities and social science scholars have always been entrepreneurs – they just don’t know it,” said Lindenmeyer. “They are creating new fields of research and finding new ways to look at old problems. Entrepreneurship is about finding innovative solutions from a variety of perspectives.”

Lindenmeyer’s exposure to entrepreneurship began when she became a volunteer email list editor for Humanities Net (H-Net), an international consortium of scholars and teachers pioneering new communication technology in order to advance teaching and research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. “H-Net took the latest technological opportunity that scientists and engineers were using and adapted it to our own fields of interest,” Lindenmeyer said.

At UMBC, Lindenmeyer says she sees many examples of entrepreneurship, including collaborative projects across disciplines. She serves as a consultant for a National Institutes of Health-funded project led by principal investigator Lee Boot, associate director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center, entitled The Fieldtrip Project. UMBC faculty from a wide range of disciplines are developing an online community designed to stimulate discourse among teens concerning issues affecting their orientation toward school and learning. The community will include an episodic reality show, online role-playing game and discussion forums, among other media. Co-investigators for The Fieldtrip Project are Susan Sonnenschein, psychology, Linda Baker, psychology and Dongsong Zhang, mechanical engineering. In addition to Lindenmeyer, the consultants are Wayne Lutters, information systems and David Mitch, economics. Information systems Ph.D. student David Gurzick is the project’s graduate assistant.

Antonio “Tony” Moreira
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
Professor, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
With over 25 years of experience working with the biotechnology industry, Moreira has turned his expertise into a company with global reach. In 2000, he partnered with a European consulting firm to form SPI USA, Inc., which specializes in training and consulting services that help biotech clients comply with US Food and Drug Administration regulations and maintain best processes and practices for manufacturing.

What began as a corporate training CD-ROM has since expanded into a global business beyond biotech connecting UMBC and Maryland to the world. “We currently have projects in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Portugal, Albania and the U.S.,” said Moreira. Located in bwtech@UMBC research park, SPI USA has also hired many student interns from UMBC’s Shriver Center, some of whom have been assigned to positions in SPI’s European offices.

Moreira brings lessons learned from business back to classes he teaches at UMBC. “We often invite speakers from industry and the FDA to be guest lecturers to give current experience to the classroom,” he said. “And we use case studies on ongoing issues in industry in lectures and class discussions.”

The collaboration also benefits the research of faculty and graduate students. “We are very focused on the biotech industry’s real needs,” Moreira said. “We now have a major collaboration with the FDA which involves other chemical engineering faculty and has resulted in very significant scholarly publications and invitations for our faculty and students to present at major research conferences.”

(2/19/07)

© 2006-07 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

TV Grows Up Fast at UMBC

“Quiet on the set, please!” will soon be a familiar refrain at UMBC. Retirement Living Television (RLTV), America’s first network devoted exclusively to people age 55 and over, recently gave the University’s on-campus TV studio a $1.3 million dollar upgrade and has begun offering students hands-on experience behind the scenes of nationally broadcast programs.

RLTV began as a media offshoot of Erickson Retirement Communities and has since grown to reach over 26 million U.S. households through DirecTV and Comcast. RLTV produces two of its programs – “The Voice” and a yet-to-be-named advocacy show – at the revamped UMBC studio. The network will eventually broadcast from a new $20 million TV production and information technology facility at bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

The campus community is invited to celebrate UMBC’s partnership with RLTV on Friday Feb. 16 from noon to 2 p.m. at a studio open house featuring UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski, Erickson founder and CEO John Erickson and RLTV president Brad Knight. UMBC communication faculty and students will be on hand as RLTV production staff demonstrate the studio’s capabilities and discuss the programs produced there. The studios are located on the second and third floors of Academic IV, A Wing.

“The new studio and the new relationship with RLTV are already creating amazing opportunities for students studying media and communication to do hands-on creative and technical work in the field,” said Jason Loviglio, associate professor of American studies and coordinator of media and communication initiatives. “We’re lucky to have this exciting new resource right here on campus.”

The first crop of UMBC student interns is eager to get to work. For sophomore English/political science major and Humanities Scholar Adrienne Hawkins, the RLTV studio offers a chance to expand communication skills she developed through her high school’s TV program and as a writer for The Retriever Weekly student newspaper. “I would like to eventually run a successful television show, and this internship would be a step in the right direction,” she said.

“The RLTV staff always welcomes those eager to learn and help in the process,” said RLTV studio engineer Sophia Manos. “We hope it turns into a symbiotic relationship for RLTV, the Erickson communities and the UMBC media programs,” she said.

Cathryna Brown, a senior interdisciplinary studies major, is also looking forward to connecting with RLTV. Both Brown and Hawkins are working towards completion of the certificate in Communication and Media Studies.

Brown and other students recently worked with UMBC’s New Media Studio to create digital video illustrations of stories told by residents of Charlestown, an Erickson Retirement Community located near UMBC.

“The Digital Stories project allowed us to come together and communicate on a level that’s rare in today’s world,” said Bill Shewbridge, manager/producer of the New Media Studio. “Several students have described the relationships they have built with the residents as ‘timeless,’ which sums up the spirit of the project well.”

“I’m very excited to be a part of programming that will potentially bridge the gap between children, their parents and grandparents,” said Brown.

For more information on the RLTV Studio or the open house event, please contact Kathy Raab at 443-610-0028 or kraab@rl.tv.

(2/9/07)

© 2006-07 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University.   Learn more about our past award winners.

Outstanding Alumnus
Social & Behavioral Sciences
Eric A. Carlton ’91, Africana Studies

After becoming the youngest high school principal in the country at age 29, Eric A. Carlton ’91, Africana studies, later launched Banner Schools, a private company that partners with public school districts to provide a successful educational environment for at-risk youth. The company has three schools in Chicago, one in Miami, and will open another in Detroit. Together, the schools serve some 500 middle- and high-school students from the most troubled environments. A former UMBC SGA vice president and president, member of the men’s soccer team and tutor for the Shriver Center’s Choice Program, Carlton has received numerous accolades for his services as an educator.

Distinguished Service Award
Eli Eisenberg ’86, Interdisciplinary Studies

Eli Eisenberg ’86, interdisciplinary studies, is connected to UMBC through both service and philanthropy, as a member of the board of UMBC’s Alex. Brown Entrepreneurship Center, the “Exceptional by Example” Alumni Campaign Committee and the 2016 Alumni Strategic Planning Committee. In addition, he has endowed a scholarship in the name of his parents that supports two students per year.  Eisenberg is founder and principal of VPC, Inc., a company providing multimedia production services, event management and studio and technology systems design. Guests at UMBC’s Commencement ceremonies and the spectacular 40th Anniversary celebration have seen VPC’s technical expertise at work.

Outstanding Alumna
Visual & Performing Arts
Sheila López ’92, Visual and Performing Arts -Theatre

After earning her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama, Sheila M. López ’92, visual and performing arts/theatre, founded Antecesores, a non-profit organization in Buffalo, NY, that advances, nurtures and celebrates Latino cultures through theatre. Antecesores (translated as “ancestors”) focuses in particular on programs for children, to allow them to explore and discover their cultural heritage. She also works to bring different generations of Buffalo’s Latino community closer together and to provide a cultural bridge between Latinos and those of non-Latino descent.

Outstanding Alumnus
Engineering and Information Technology
Robert S. Marshall ’88, Mechanical Engineering

Robert S. Marshall ’88, mechanical engineering, is president and CEO of AWS Convergence Technologies, better known as “WeatherBug.” Marshall pioneered the networking of weather instrumentation and cameras using the Internet, and has built this capability into the single largest network of weather stations and Internet cameras in the world.  Since it was launched in 2000, WeatherBug has become one of the top 10 news and information sites on the Internet. It is the leading provider of real-time, local weather for broadcast television and, through a landmark agreement with the National Weather Service, now also provides critical weather data to federal, state, and local government agencies.

Outstanding Alumnus
Natural & Mathematical Sciences
Joseph P. McCloskey ’81 M.S., ’83 Ph.D., Applied Mathematics

Joseph McCloskey, M.S. ’81, Ph.D. ’83, applied mathematics, is a senior cryptologic mathematician for the National Security Agency, where he has worked since 1968. As technical director of the agency’s Mathematics Research Group for the past 11 years, he is responsible for coordinating and supervising the professional training of newly hired mathematicians and statisticians. Throughout his career, Dr. McCloskey has received numerous citations, including the prestigious Presidential Rank Award in 2006 and the President’s Award from the Crypto-Mathematics Institute, the agency’s oldest learned society, in 2001. He is the author of more than 80 professional papers, and he has taught one course each semester at UMBC for 20 years

Outstanding Alumna
Humanities
Patricia A. Smith ’74, Ancient Studies

A distinguished attorney, Patricia A. Smith ’74, ancient studies, has acted as People’s Counsel for the State of Maryland, a special solicitor and chief counsel to the Baltimore Police Department for the City of Baltimore, and has served as an administrative law judge in the Maryland Office of Administrative Hearings, as an assistant United States Attorney for the District of Maryland and an assistant attorney general in the Office of the Attorney General for the State of Maryland. She is also an instructor at the Johns Hopkins University.

Andrew Sears, chair and professor of UMBC's Information Systems department, was recently an in-studio guest for Maryland Public Television's "Business Connection."

Sears discussed how the information technology (IT) job market is doing much better than conventionally thought. According to Sears, trends like decreased outsourcing, increased hiring and even signing bonuses for talented IT grads all add up to a booming IT job market for the Class of 2007.

Sears was invited by the show's producers based on UMBC's growing reputation as a statewide and national leader. According to the January 2007 issue of Computing Research News, UMBC ranks # 2 in IT degrees awarded by major US research universities. UMBC also continues to be the largest producer of information technology graduates in Maryland.

To watch the video online, visit the UMBC Informations Systems department's website.

During the fall semester and winter break, students from the New Media Studio returned to the Charlestown Retirement Community for another round digital storytelling. Following the success of last summer's project, Retirement Living TV agreed to extend the workshop which they hope will form the basis of an ongoing program of viewer-submitted content for the network. This time cameras from RL-TV and the New Media Studio followed the students and residents as they collaborated in the creation of eleven new stories. The documentary footage and stories will be a part of an upcoming series on the project to be aired on RL-TV. You can view a short feature about the project here.