Lisa K. Van Riper has been appointed as UMBC’s vice president for communications and marketing. She comes to UMBC from Goucher College in Baltimore, where she serves currently as vice president for marketing and communications. She will begin in the role at UMBC on July 21.

Van Riper has more than 25 years of experience in communications and marketing in higher education, consumer packaged goods and services corporations, and public service agencies. At Goucher, she leads a team of professionals who collaborate across campus to support the college’s goals for recruitment, fundraising, reputation-building, and more through an integrated, digital-first approach to storytelling and marketing. She successfully led a major branding initiative for the college and has overseen a broad effort to enhance and modernize the college’s digital marketing strategy and develop a cohesive, unifying brand identity.

As a member of the president’s cabinet at Goucher, Van Riper has also attended thoughtfully to internal communications for the college, serving as lead for crisis and issues management communications and for presidential and cabinet communications generally.

Prior to her role at Goucher, Van Riper served as vice president for marketing, communications, and information technology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and as vice president for communications and public relations at Common App. Her higher education leadership experience includes several years as assistant vice president for university communications at the University of Richmond, and her professional experience outside of higher education includes communications leadership roles with CarMax, Inc., and Alexandria Renew Enterprises, an independent, special-purpose government unit in Virginia that manages wastewater for the city of Alexandria and surrounding areas.

Van Riper earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and is currently enrolled in Goucher’s Master of Fine Arts program in nonfiction. She is an active member of Leadership Baltimore County.

“In addition to being an expert marketer and talented communications professional, Lisa is a strong manager and leader who has successfully built and developed teams and fostered effective collaborations with campus partners. I am particularly excited about her skills in these areas and her deep interest in supporting the leadership and staff in University Communications and Marketing (UCM),” UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby shared in a message to the campus community.

“Lisa’s expertise and experience will contribute enormously to our shared work to advance UMBC’s strategic priorities and our mission as a dynamic, inclusive public research university.”

Happy FY26, UMBC!

As we begin a new fiscal year, the Travel Services team would like to thank you for your continued partnership and share an important reminder:

Starting today, July 1, 2025, Globetrotter is no longer available as a travel agency option in the UMBC travel system.

• Any new pre-approvals submitted from this point forward should not include Globetrotter.

• If you have an existing pre-approval already submitted and approved with Globetrotter, your travel will continue to be supported by them through completion.

Going forward, Altour is the approved travel agency for all UMBC business travel. You can contact Altour directly at 1 (800) 333-2115 for assistance with booking or support.

This change supports our transition to SAP Concur, our new travel and expense platform launching later this year. We’re excited to bring you a more efficient and user-friendly travel experience.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Travel Services at TravelServicesAP@umbc.edu.

Here’s to a smooth and successful FY26!
— UMBC Travel Services

Written by Adi Foord, assistant professor of physics, UMBC
This article is part of The Conversation‘s “Curious Kids” series.

How does the camera on the James Webb Space Telescope work and see so far out?
– Kieran G., age 12, Minnesota

Imagine a camera so powerful it can see light from galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago. That’s exactly what NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is built to do.

Since it launched in December 2021, Webb has been orbiting more than a million miles from Earth, capturing breathtaking images of deep space. But how does it actually work? And how can it see so far? The secret lies in its powerful cameras – especially ones that don’t see light the way our eyes do.

I’m an astrophysicist who studies galaxies and supermassive black holes, and the Webb telescope is an incredible tool for observing some of the earliest galaxies and black holes in the universe.

When Webb takes a picture of a distant galaxy, astronomers like me are actually seeing what that galaxy looked like billions of years ago. The light from that galaxy has been traveling across space for the billions of years it takes to reach the telescope’s mirror. It’s like having a time machine that takes snapshots of the early universe.

By using a giant mirror to collect ancient light, Webb has been discovering new secrets about the universe.

A telescope that sees heat

Unlike regular cameras or even the Hubble Space Telescope, which take images of visible light, Webb is designed to see a kind of light that’s invisible to your eyes: infrared light. Infrared light has longer wavelengths than visible light, which is why our eyes can’t detect it. But with the right instruments, Webb can capture infrared light to study some of the earliest and most distant objects in the universe.

Although the human eye cannot see it, people can detect infrared light as a form of heat using specialized technology, such as infrared cameras or thermal sensors. For example, night-vision goggles use infrared light to detect warm objects in the dark. Webb uses the same idea to study stars, galaxies and planets.

Why infrared? When visible light from faraway galaxies travels across the universe, it stretches out. This is because the universe is expanding. That stretching turns visible light into infrared light. So, the most distant galaxies in space don’t shine in visible light anymore – they glow in faint infrared. That’s the light Webb is built to detect.

A golden mirror to gather the faintest glow

Before the light reaches the cameras, it first has to be collected by the Webb telescope’s enormous golden mirror. This mirror is over 21 feet (6.5 meters) wide and made of 18 smaller mirror pieces that fit together like a honeycomb. It’s coated in a thin layer of real gold – not just to look fancy, but because gold reflects infrared light extremely well.

The mirror gathers light from deep space and reflects it into the telescope’s instruments. The bigger the mirror, the more light it can collect – and the farther it can see. Webb’s mirror is the largest ever launched into space.

Inside the cameras: NIRCam and MIRI

The most important “eyes” of the telescope are two science instruments that act like cameras: NIRCam and MIRI.

NIRCam stands for near-infrared camera. It’s the primary camera on Webb and takes stunning images of galaxies and stars. It also has a coronagraph – a device that blocks out starlight so it can photograph very faint objects near bright sources, such as planets orbiting bright stars.

NIRCam works by imaging near-infrared light, the type closest to what human eyes can almost see, and splitting it into different wavelengths. This helps scientists learn not just what something looks like but what it’s made of. Different materials in space absorb and emit infrared light at specific wavelengths, creating a kind of unique chemical fingerprint. By studying these fingerprints, scientists can uncover the properties of distant stars and galaxies.

MIRI, or the mid-infrared instrument, detects longer infrared wavelengths, which are especially useful for spotting cooler and dustier objects, such as stars that are still forming inside clouds of gas. MIRI can even help find clues about the types of molecules in the atmospheres of planets that might support life.

Both cameras are far more sensitive than the standard cameras used on Earth. NIRCam and MIRI can detect the tiniest amounts of heat from billions of light-years away. If you had Webb’s NIRCam as your eyes, you could see the heat from a bumblebee on the Moon. That’s how sensitive it is.

Because Webb is trying to detect faint heat from faraway objects, it needs to keep itself as cold as possible. That’s why it carries a giant sun shield about the size of a tennis court. This five-layer sun shield blocks heat from the Sun, Earth and even the Moon, helping Webb stay incredibly cold: around -370 degrees F (-223 degrees C).

MIRI needs to be even colder. It has its own special refrigerator, called a cryocooler, to keep it chilled to nearly -447 degrees F (-266 degrees C). If Webb were even a little warm, its own heat would drown out the distant signals it’s trying to detect.

Turning space light into pictures

Once light reaches the Webb telescope’s cameras, it hits sensors called detectors. These detectors don’t capture regular photos like a phone camera. Instead, they convert the incoming infrared light into digital data. That data is then sent back to Earth, where scientists process it into full-color images.

The colors we see in Webb’s pictures aren’t what the camera “sees” directly. Because infrared light is invisible, scientists assign colors to different wavelengths to help us understand what’s in the image. These processed images help show the structure, age and composition of galaxies, stars and more.

By using a giant mirror to collect invisible infrared light and sending it to super-cold cameras, Webb lets us see galaxies that formed just after the universe began.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 300 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

MSRP/Nationwide webinars are open to all Faculty and Staff. 

Click here to Register. All webinars are approximately 45 minutes in length.