A recent TIME article highlights UMBC as a university that should be on the radar for top companies and start-ups seeking diverse technology talent.

Tristan Walker, co-founder and chair of CODE2040 board, and founder and CEO of Walker & Company Brands, says that it is important to assist start-up companies in the Silicon Valley in connecting with talented students pursuing tech-related degrees. Walker notes that these companies might not have the resources to fly around the country seeking out upcoming leaders in tech at universities like UMBC, but that CODE2040 can help them make those connections.

CODE2040 is an organization that creates pathways for black and Latino/a computer science students to connect with small tech startups as well as leading Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Apple. In addition to providing highly competitive summer internships, speaker series, entrepreneurship workshops and mentorship for students, CODE2040 also works with companies that are committed to creating corporate cultures that support the success of people from all backgrounds. Walker says that CODE2040 helps “partner companies scale their recruiting efforts” to reach a broader range of talented computer scientists.

Several UMBC students have participated in the prestigious CODE2040 fellows program. Randi Williams ‘16, computer engineering, completed a CODE2040 fellowship in 2013, interning at the wearable tech company Jawbone and accessing CEO meetings and tours with companies including Google, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. After her return to UMBC, she was inspired to co-organize the first hackUMBC. In summer 2014, she conducted research in the robotics department of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena before joining UMBC’s ECLIPSE research cluster, focusing on wearable technologies to support people with limited mobility.   

Read the full article, “Meet the Silicon Valley CEO Opening Doors for People of Color” in TIME.

Image: UMBC’s Information Technology and Engineering building. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

“UMBC is excited about the impactful scholarship which our Summer Faculty Fellowship recipients will be pursuing this summer,” says Vice President for Research Karl Steiner. “I am confident that many of these projects will lead to externally funded, long-term endeavors which will contribute significantly to the recipients’ respective disciplines.”

A brief description of each 2016 SFF project is found below:

Jasmine Abrams, assistant professor of psychology, will research how stress influences cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk among black women, a group that is disproportionately affected by the disease, to inform future research and prevention strategies.

Ian Anson, assistant professor of political science, was awarded SFF funding to investigate how media narratives shape citizens’ attributions of responsibility for national economic conditions.

William Blake, assistant professor of political science, will examine voting behavior on ballot measures and state constitutions to broaden theories of economic voting behavior.

Colleen Burge, assistant professor of marine biotechnology, was awarded funding through the SFF program to measure oyster immune responses to an emerging disease to be used a biomarkers for oyster health.

Eric Campbell, assistant professor of philosophy, received support to publish a journal article that explains subjectivism, the idea that a person’s reasons for action are justified by their desires and attitudes, is ultimately a question about how to conduct ethical discourse and explores why the quasi-realist strategy to save moral discourse is self-undermining.

Chris Curran, assistant professor of public policy, received SFF funding to study the influence of states, school boards, principals, teachers, and other stakeholders on school discipline policies while assessing variations across school populations. The results will inform policymakers as they work to improve equality in disciplinary outcomes for students.

Thania Muñoz Díaz, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, was awarded funding to support research on the representation of Mexican migration from the perspective of women, translation, and cultural memory.

Matthew Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, received SFF funding to use aerial and satellite imagery from NASA’s G-LiHT imager to improve the ability to predict how forest structure and composition will respond to landscape fragmentation.

Bronwyn Hunter, assistant professor of psychology, received support to examine discrimination and rejection experiences among formerly incarcerated adults.    

Renée Lambert-Brétière, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, was awarded funding through the SFF program to write a book that aims to empower indigenous people of Quebec to develop, manage, and maintain their own language documentation projects.

Jiyoon Lee, assistant professor of education, received SFF funding to investigate U.S. public school teachers’ knowledge, understanding, and competencies related to assessment in K-12 classrooms.

Tania Lizarazo, assistant professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, was awarded funding to reimagine and develop a digital storytelling project she collaborated on with activist women to capture visual narratives about survival in Columbia.

Daniel Lobo, assistant professor of biological sciences, will use SFF funding to address the problem of discovering bacterial integrated regulatory-metabolic networks involved in the degradation of carbon sources.

Susan McCully, assistant professor of theatre, received support to write a companion piece to her critically acclaimed production of Kerrmoor to be performed as a stand-alone tragedy, or as the second act of the longer play.

Elizabeth Patton, assistant professor of media and communication studies, was awarded SFF funding to research the politics of media representations of family, privacy, race, gender and class, the politics of media practices in relation to work and play, and the politics of space.

Bryce Peake, assistant professor of media and communication studies, received funding to complete a book project that examines the ways that media sciences and listening practices are historically implicated in British colonial forms of masculinity in Gibraltar.

Hamed Pirsiavash, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, received an SFF to build a machine learning tool that can map sensory data from modalities such as natural images, clip art,  and spatial text into a common semantic representation.

Sarah Sharp, assistant professor of visual arts, was awarded SFF funding to develop the “Whole Earth Codex,”  a multi-component interactive sculptural artwork that complicates understanding of utopian communities.

Nathaniel Sinnot, assistant professor of theatre, received support to research methods to enhance the theatrical design process through computer programming and innovation.

Michelle Stites, assistant professor of education, was awarded funding through the SFF program to study mathematical interventions for students with learning disabilities.

Christine Yee, assistant professor of economics, received SFF funding to assess the impact of school accountability on the mental health of youth.

Meilin Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, received support to understand the impact of turbulent flow physics on mechanisms of drag reduction in efficient fish locomotion.

For more information about the Summer Faculty Fellowship program, visit the SFF website.

Image: Bryce Peake presents his research at a Dresher Center Faculty Micro Talks event. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

Rachel Brewster, associate professor of biological sciences, was awarded funding to study how zebrafish are able to survive extreme environmental conditions by entering hypometabolism.

Felipe A. Filomeno, assistant professor of political science, will receive START funding to study inclusionary policies on immigration settlement in Baltimore City. His case study will assess the outcomes of local immigration policies, examine how effective the policies have been in Baltimore, and advance understanding of local immigration policies.

Erin Green, assistant professor of biological sciences, will use the START funding to study the role of yeast genes in cellular stress response pathways. By understanding how yeast genes affect a cell’s response to stress, her work will expand the understanding of how environmental stimuli change the structure and function of DNA and proteins in chromosomes.

Marcella Mellinger, assistant professor of social work, was awarded START funding to study the evolution of anti-domestic violence advocacy efforts. She will gather qualitative data through focus groups and interviews, and identify themes that illuminate how advocacy work has shifted over time.

George Derek Musgrove, associate professor of history, will use START funding to conduct research and writing for the study “The Black Nationalist Resurgence and the Changing Nature of Black Protest in the Post-Civil Rights Period.” The study will focus on black political activism between 1980 and 1995, and will reframe this time period by displacing the popular teleological narratives in today’s discussions of race.

Hamed Pirsiavash, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering (CSEE), was awarded START funding to develop computer algorithms that can make computers “see” the world and “interact” with the world in ways similar to humans, accounting for a level of uncertainty. Utilizing these algorithms, computers watching large-scale unlabeled videos should be able to predict what will happen next.

Meilin Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, was awarded START funding to develop a 3D computational fluid dynamics simulation tool that will be used to study the fin-body-flow interaction in fish locomotion. The findings of this research will help improve the design of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).

Image: Associate professor Rachel Brewster. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

Three faculty in UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) have received distinguished awards from leading professional organizations for their commitment to mentoring students and advancing engineering education.

Amy Hurst, assistant professor of information systems, has been named a recipient of the National Center for Women and Information Technology’s Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award 2016, which she will receive at the group’s Summit on Women and IT in May.

Hurst studies accessibility issues and develops assistive technologies and tools to empower others to build their own assistive technologies. During her five years at UMBC, Hurst has mentored more than 40 undergraduate students and nearly 25 graduate students. She engages students in her lab in various ways, and says that mentoring students is a huge part of why she is a professor.

“Students are embedded in my research lab by conducting independent research, supporting my PhD students’ research, and maintaining our lab equipment,” says Hurst. “Through working in my lab, undergraduate students have gained valuable experiences and been very successful.”

Over the past five summers, she has also hosted 11 undergraduates from other institutions in her lab through the Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program. The program allows students to work alongside UMBC students and complete meaningful research, while having access to a faculty mentor.

Hurst prioritizes meeting with all of her students at least once each week to discuss ongoing projects. “I have found that this topic [DIY assistive technology] is engaging for undergraduate researchers interested in having real-world impact and working with special populations,” she says.

Hurst’s award follows state and national recognition of Anne Spence, professor of practice in mechanical engineering, and Marie desJardins, associate dean of COEIT and professor of computer science, as mentors and advocates for engineering education.

Spence received the Engineering and Technology Education Advocacy Award from the Technology and Engineering Educators Association of Maryland (TEEAM) in February. The award recognized her substantial contributions to Project Lead the Way, a national organization focused on increasing the number, quality and diversity of engineers in the U.S. by effectively engaging more K-12 students in engineering through energetic, hands-on learning experiences.

In July, desJardins will be presented with the Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award from the Computing Research Association-Education (CRA-E). The award recognizes her work advancing computer science education in K-12 schools and preparing young women to pursue majors and careers in computer-related fields.

Since 2005, desJardins has mentored more than 70 undergraduate students, many of whom have gone on to pursue graduate programs in computing. She connects with undergraduate students during their first two years, and guides more senior students—particular those with research experience—in serving as peer mentors.

Hurst shares desJardins’s focus on engaging undergraduates in research through the support mentoring provides. “Mentoring has always been a priority to me, particularly helping students who are interested in research but have had little experience or exposure to it,” Hurst explains. “I feel that mentorship is one of the best ways to support students as they grow intellectually and make their career choices.”

Image: Amy Hurst talks with a student in her lab. Photo by Tim Ford, coordinator of illustrative services in the biological sciences department at UMBC.

Reverse Engineering of Dynamic Regulatory Networks
from Morphological Experimental Data

Prof. Daniel Lobo, Biological Sciences, UMBC
3:00pm 11:00am April 7 6th,  ITE Building, Room 325b

Many crucial experiments in developmental, regenerative, and cancer biology are based on manipulations and perturbations resulting in morphological outcomes. For example, planarian worms can regenerate a complete organism from almost any amputated piece, but knocking down certain genes can result in the regeneration of double-head phenotypes. However, the inherent complexity and non-linearity of biological regulatory networks prevent us from manually discerning testable comprehensive models from patterning and morphological results, and existent bioinformatics tools are generally limited to genomic or time-series concentration data. As a consequence, despite a huge experimental dataset in the literature, we still lack mechanistic explanations that can account for more than one or two morphological results in many model organisms. To bridge this gulf separating morphological data from an understanding of pattern and form regulation, we developed a computational methodology to automate the discovery of dynamic genetic networks directly from formalized phenotypic experimental data. In this seminar, I will present novel formal ontologies and databases of surgical, genetic, and pharmacological experiments with their resultant morphological phenotypes, together with artificial intelligence tools based on evolutionary computation and in silico simulators that can directly mine these data to reverse-engineer mechanistic dynamic genetic models. We demonstrated this approach by automatically discovering the first comprehensive model of planarian regeneration, which not only explains at once all the key experiments available in the literature (including surgical amputations, knock-down of specific genes, and pharmacological treatments), but also predicts testable novel pathways and genes. This approach is readily paving the way for understanding the regulation (and dis-regulation) of complex patterns and shapes in developmental, regenerative, and cancer biology.

Daniel Lobo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research aims to understand, control, and design the dynamic regulatory mechanisms governing complex biological processes. To this end, his group develops new computational methods, ontologies, and high-performance in silico experiments to automate the reverse-engineering of quantitative models from biological data and the design of regulatory networks for specific functions. They seek to discover the mechanisms of development and regeneration, find therapies for cancer and other diseases, and streamline the application of synthetic biology. His work has received widespread media coverage including Wired, TechRadar, and Popular Mechanics.