As many of you already know, today marks the last day of UMBC employment for CAHSS's longtime research development anchor and lifelong arts & humanities advocate, Associate Director of CARAT Rachel Brubaker.
Over the course of Rachel's nearly 30 years at UMBC, she has helped faculty (and the college) to shape, hone, and find funding for their research in ways that were both fundamental to their career and equally fundamental to the stature and standing of CAHSS as a whole.
Put simply, Rachel knows the funding landscape and how to navigate it better than anyone I've ever worked with.
Her work was often quiet: collating and curating targeted funding opportunities for faculty, consulting with PIs to strategize and nudge their project ideas along (or slow them down if they needed more thought!), helping projects to create programming, content, and educational goals, scaffolding funding across a research arc rather than just in a single project, and navigating the many internal processes and protocols so that faculty didn't need to do so themselves.
I honestly could spend another 1000 words recounting her work here, but I think that a much simpler summation captures her career far better than the specifics do:
Rachel believed that the work of CAHSS faculty was of R1 stature long before the university itself received that designation.
She believed that the depth and breadth of the work that is done by faculty here was essential not only to the university, but to the larger fields and communities they serve.
And, most vitally, she believed in the critical need to foster and elevate the arts and humanities in everything we do here at UMBC (and in this country), arguing throughout her career that we should proudy place the research and projects done in these fields on equal footing to anything else this university produces.
We will do everything we can to keep Rachel's work alive here in CARAT but, truthfully, she's one-of-one, and we can only hope to dutifully follow her the path she blazed during her tenure.
The good news is that these paths have now been paved by her many successes and are simply the ways things are done now in CAHSS. It is and will be impossible to conduct sponsored research here in the college without touching upon some approach or process or strategy that Rachel helped to pioneer.
On behalf of everyone here in CARAT, we congratulate Rachel on her incredible career and wish her all the best in every single moment of her well-earned retirement. She will be missed!
Thanks for everything, Rachel! Off you go!
Marc & The CARAT Team
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Rachel can still be reached at her current email address:
rbruba1@umbc.edu
If you've been working with Rachel on a project, or have a question you would normally send her way, please feel free to reach out to me directly at mruppel@umbc.edu.