Francisco Cartagena describes his academic journey as unorthodox. Now an employee for the City of Gaithersburg, Cartagena started his educational path as an undocumented student. While charting numerous challenges, Cartagena ’19, political science, M.P.S. ’22, cybersecurity, also found ample opportunities for growth along the way, becoming an effective leader of social change at UMBC at The Universities at Shady Grove.

Cartagena arrived with his family from El Salvador as a preteen. In 2009, he graduated from high school and set out to Montgomery College to pursue his associate’s degree in general studies—a goal that would take him a decade to accomplish because of his legal status. There, Cartagena joined the college’s Latino Student Union and together they advocated for the Maryland Dream Act—a statute that would allow undocumented high school students to pay for in-state college tuition.

“That experience really exposed me to the political science environment and how policy, with momentum, people, and activism, can actually be changed,” says Cartagena, who hopes eventually to leverage his role in local government to share the message that there are many attainable pathways to and through higher education.

Finding his momentum

Prior to the Maryland Dream Act’s passing in 2012, Cartagena was paying the international student rate for community college classes. To him, pursuing a bachelor’s degree seemed like a faraway dream.

“There were some instances when I couldn’t attend school or when I could only attend one class,” reflects Cartagena. “But it gave me that momentum to say, ‘I’m just going to keep at it.’”

Francisco Cartagena

At Montgomery College, Cartagena learned about the UMBC-Shady Grove campus and its political science program. As a full-time working adult, he believed that UMBC-Shady Grove would be a good fit. With an extra push from his wife Cora Trelles Cartagena ’12, social work, Cartagena reached out to Sunil Dasgupta, political science program director and professor at UMBC-Shady Grove, to find out more.

To Cartagena’s surprise, Dasgupta asked a question that would sell him on applying: “Why do you think you can complete this program?” Motivated by the challenge, Cartagena pushed forward and eventually proved that he would do more than succeed—he would lead.

“Francisco is somebody that intuitively knew the importance of politics in transforming and changing our lives,” says Dasgupta. “I think part of the reason that happens is because he comes from an immigrant family. When you’re in that position, you quickly realize you have to master this if you want to help yourself, your family, and your community.”

An uplifting environment

Cartagena saw The Universities at Shady Grove (USG) as a place to practice his role in politics. As one of two students representing UMBC on the Student Government Association’s executive board, he learned more about the funding process at USG, the development of programs on campus, and the ins-and-outs of university partnerships.

“When you have an environment with multiple people from different schools, you can truly see the different backgrounds, their intent, and how people process things,” Cartagena says.

When Cartagena attended USG’s job fair and spotted a table for Congressman Jamie Raskin’s office staffed by a fellow Latina, he saw a vision for his future. “At the time, a career in government or interning for a government official was so far-fetched, whether because of my status or my prior experiences. It was something I would just dream of,” explains Cartagena, who wound up spending the summer splitting his internship between Raskin’s Rockville office and his congressional office on the Hill—two experiences that propelled his career in government.

“I still pinch myself because I’m a first-generation immigrant who came here from El Salvador with my parents…To be able to represent the county I grew up in—it was a bunch of mixed feelings that were finally culminating into something very positive,” says Cartagena.

In 2018, Cartagena started with a role in the City of Gaithersburg’s human resources department and in 2021, transitioned to his current role as an I.T. project manager. Now, he oversees applications, business needs from different departments, and processes in the technology sector.

Continuing to lead

In 2019, as a master’s student studying cybersecurity at UMBC-Shady Grove, Cartagena continued his ongoing involvement on campus, joining the Graduate School Council and USG’s Advisory Board.

During his final year in the program, Cartagena received a phone call from Dasgupta, who was creating an interactive bot to help Maryland voters identify political candidates most aligned with their values. He hoped that the bot, along with his podcast, I Hate Politics, would serve as informative tools. But realizing that a significant portion of the county was Spanish speaking, he enlisted Cartagena’s help.

“The first person I called was Francisco. And it wasn’t a small job; it was pages and pages of translation,” Dasgupta says, adding that they only had about a couple of weeks to complete the project before elections began. Still, Cartagena took on the translation task without hesitation.

“That kind of collaboration uplifts UMBC and the community,” notes Dasgupta. “We continue to work with our students and alumni, and those interactions are very revitalizing. We find meaning through those relationships.”

Cartagena notes he wouldn’t have made it this far without the resources and opportunities he found at UMBC-Shady Grove. “If there was a change I could recommend, it would be showing students and adult learners that there are other pathways for you to get that Ph.D., get that bachelor’s, or get that associate degree,” says Cartagena. “I think oftentimes students are afraid; it’s an investment of money and time, and you don’t know if you’re going to make it through…but you will find your niche if you stick it out.”

Meet Evangeline Kirigua ’21, political science, who transferred from Montgomery College and is now working as an intake officer with the Maryland Department of Transportation. Evangeline, who returned to school in her 50s, recently created a scholarship in honor of her parents to give assistance to students studying political science at UMBC at The Universities at Shady Grove. Thanks for sharing your story, Evangeline!

Q: What’s one essential thing you’d want another Retriever to know about you?

A: Procrastination is a dream killer. Don’t do tomorrow what you can do today. As long as there is a minute in your day, use it. Tomorrow is not promised.

Q: What brought you to UMBC at The Universities at Shady Grove and what you love about the political science department, in particular?

A: I came to UMBC because when I was taking a class in International Studies at Montgomery College, the professor spoke highly about UMBC’s Political Science program. Political Science just speaks my language. I am passionate about civic engagement. I do not get it when people tell me that they do not vote: at the same time complaining about things in their community that are going wrong or not done. This led me to start a forum called Diaspora Initiative for Civic Engagement, to encourage voter registration.

Q: Tell us about someone in the community who has inspired you or supported you, and how they did it.

A: My forever guardian angel is Dr. Brigid Starkey, Head of Global Studies. I thoroughly enjoyed her class, American Foreign Policy. Dr. Starkey believed in me and encouraged me to do an independent study. Her support unleashed in me a tenacity that I never knew I had.

Q: We understand you’re a donor. What do you support and why?

A: I have founded a scholarship in honor of my parents: the Ernest & Adelina Kirigua Scholarship. It is to benefit minority students pursuing Political Science at UMBC/USG.

Q: What’s the one thing you’d want someone who hasn’t joined the UMBC community to know about the support you find here?

A: The Retriever spirit is real. I chose UMBC over other schools that had promised me almost 100 percent free tuition. I have never doubted my decision. Bring your dream: UMBC will help you build it, or help you dream.

A new study published in Planetary Science Journalhas determined how the Moon’s poles have shifted over more than 4 billion years, a phenomenon known as “true polar wander.” To trace the poles over time, the research team examined the combined effects of more than 5,000 craters on the Moon’s surface.

Each impact, and the subsequent crater, changed the distribution of mass on the Moon slightly. To rebalance, the Moon would have rotated just a little, without its axis moving in space. As a result, the axis would pass through the Moon at slightly different locations—the new poles.

“All this cratering is like a record” of the Moon’s history, says Vishnu Viswanathan, assistant research scientist with UMBC’s Center for Space Sciences and Technology (CSST), a university partnership with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Viswanathan co-led the study with David Smith, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Water on the Moon?

The study found that over approximately 4.25 billion years, the Moon’s poles wandered 10 degrees in latitude, or 186 miles, from the influence of cratering. Over the past 3.8 billion years, the poles have not wandered more than 2 degrees, or 37 miles. Such a moderate amount of polar wander would have created relatively stable conditions in the Moon’s polar regions over an extended period. That stability likely contributed to favorable conditions for resources such as frozen water.

Scientists have detected ice in colder, shadowed regions near the Moon’s poles. However, its amount and age is unknown. If the poles had moved substantially and frequently over time, any ice would repeatedly be exposed to sunlight and likely lost to sublimation—the process of a solid converting directly to a gas, like dry ice on Earth. With greater stability of the poles over billions of years, there would be more time for water to accumulate near the Moon’s present-day poles.

Stepping back in time

To calculate each crater’s effect on the location of the Moon’s poles, the research team relied heavily on a map of the Moon’s gravitational field, which defines the force of gravity at each point on the Moon’s surface. Sander Goossens, a former UMBC CSST scientist and a co-author on the new paper, developed the map previously using data from NASA’s GRAIL mission, which flew over the surface of the Moon in 2012.

The two GRAIL satellites measured anomalies in the distribution of mass on the Moon (such as craters), to a resolution of a few kilometers. The satellites’ detection is comparable to the way that a driver can feel the rise and fall as they pass over speed humps or potholes, Viswanathan explains.

Using Goossens’s map, Viswanathan and his team figured out a way to mathematically remove each crater’s individual effect, or signature, on the Moon’s gravitational field. The team started by sequentially removing 185 large craters whose ages are known, partly based on samples collected from NASA’s Apollo Moon missions. At each step going backward in time, they recalculated the presumed location of the Moon’s poles, creating a history of the poles’ location as they moved through time—the polar wander.  

For the rest of the craters, most of them small, the research team removed their signatures from the gravity field and randomly distributed them through time. The team’s model is designed so more impacts occur in the early history of the Moon, because it’s understood that impacts were more frequent during that period. By running this simulation again and again, they were able to estimate the path of the Moon’s poles based on its cratering history.

The Moon’s origin story

Moving forward, the new research may increase understanding of the formation of the Moon and the solar system in general. Information from the study about the shape of the Moon at different time points could help refine understanding of the Moon’s orbital path at those times. Also, shortly after the Moon formed, it was much closer to Earth and spinning faster. The contribution of small craters to the Moon’s shape could help add more detail to our understanding of how it reached its current location.    

Viswanathan is excited about NASA’s Artemis mission, which will likely collect more samples from previously unvisited craters near the Moon’s south pole. “More samples from more craters would tell us quite a lot about the Moon’s cratering history,” he says. Knowing accurate ages of the large craters, including the largest, the South Pole-Aitken basin, would help refine the polar wander model. Information about the craters’ composition could increase understanding of resources—such as water—present on the Moon.

The project has also been an opportunity for Viswanathan and his team to grow and gain new expertise. An astronomer and a planetary geodesist who has researched other aspects of the Moon, Viswanathan came to the project with the beginnings of the math needed to track the poles based on the gravitational field. “But I had very little idea of these craters’ names before,” he says. “So it was a nice way to familiarize with them.” 

The project, and especially the close collaboration with colleagues, has also served as an anchor for him throughout the pandemic. He shares, “I was so invested in the project for the last nearly three years. This kept me sane.”

American cities face environmental challenges that are exacerbated by climate change, from air and water quality issues to flooding and heat. Low-income neighborhoods and areas that were previously subject to racial redlining often experience these effects more intensely. 

A new program supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has funded Urban Integrated Field Laboratories in three American cities (including Baltimore) to generate resilience-enhancing solutions to urban climate challenges in collaboration with community organizations. The Baltimore-centered consortium, named the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC), will receive $24.5 million through the program. UMBC will receive $2.3 million of this larger grant. 

Leading UMBC’s work on the project is Claire Welty, professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering and director of the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education (CUERE). Johns Hopkins University leads the overall project, which also includes collaborators at the Pennsylvania State University, Morgan State University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Drexel University, and the University of Virginia.

“This Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative is an important program during a critical time for our region, for our state, and for our planet,” says Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC. “I am pleased that Baltimore was selected to serve as a representative metropolitan area for the climate challenges faced by many mid-sized industrial cities across the U.S.”

Listening to the community

Welty and UMBC colleagues such as Andrew Miller, professor of geography and environmental systems, bring decades of expertise in environmental monitoring to the project through their individual research and the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES). Originally funded as one of only two urban Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in the U.S., the BES has compiled massive datasets on the Baltimore region’s watershed, ecology, and sociological issues related to the environment for more than 20 years. The new BSEC will bring opportunities to expand this work in fresh directions.

“The exciting thing is leading from the needs of the community. To me, that’s what’s different about this,” Welty says. “What we want to try to do is partner with the communities to come up with solutions to these climate impact problems, and then what we’re bringing to the table are our tools to implement that.”

Welty and Miller bring expertise in understanding patterns of water quality, flood and groundwater modeling, and rainfall patterns and how they are changing. UMBC also brings experience interacting with local agencies, such as the Baltimore City Department of Public Works and Maryland Department of the Environment. Other institutions in the consortium bring complementary expertise, such as overall climate forecasting, an understanding of how climate impacts intersect with issues of public health, and experience building trust with community groups.

“Among us, we think we have tools that can be applied to solve these problems,” Welty says. “We’re not imposing our tools on community groups, though, or telling them what their problems are. They’re telling us, and we’re responding with support and resources.”

Adding nuance

Welty, Miller, and others have spent decades generating models and collecting on-the-ground (and sometimes underground) observations of water quality, flow, and more in the Baltimore region. They will continue that work with the BSEC, and with input from communities, prioritize certain issues or geographic areas.

The BSEC will also fund deployment of new sensors at existing Baltimore Ecosystem Study stream sampling stations in the Gwynns Falls watershed . These stations have a 22-year record of weekly water quality sampling, and the new sensors will add data on other parameters  at 15-minute intervals, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The data will be accessible in near- real time, on only about a one-hour delay.

The BES data is “the best urban water quality data set in the world. This is not meant to replace that, but to add nuance,” Welty says. For example, Baltimore streams have struggled with inundation from road salt in the winter. “You might miss the peak of a salt event with weekly sampling,” Welty says, but finer scale sampling would easily identify it in the data.

A giant puzzle to put together

The BSEC is a unique project that brings together wide-ranging expertise to address pressing urban needs. “The guiding objective of the BSEC process is to produce the urban climate science needed to inform community-guided, equitable pathways for climate action,” says Ben Zaitchik, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins and the overall project lead. “In doing so, we address a number of fundamental urban science questions from across natural science and social science disciplines.” 

UMBC’s Steiner adds, “This partnership with John Hopkins University and other research institutions is building upon our strong and long-term record of environmental research and educational initiatives here at UMBC. It will both challenge and enable us to explore equitable climate solutions.”

While the exact priorities and concerns that local communities will bring to the forefront are unknown, the BSEC group plans to bring their tools to bear in a way that best serves the people of Baltimore. Building coalitions with researchers and community members, learning the communities’ needs, and then finding the best ways to address them “is like a giant puzzle to put together,” Welty says. “It’s going to be exciting to see how it all unfolds.”

Artist retrospectives have been a significant part of the history of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. Since opening on the UMBC campus more than 30 years ago, the CADVC has delivered retrospectives of visionary artists like Fred Wilson, Adrian Piper, Kate Millett, and more. 

This fall, multidisciplinary artist Oletha DeVane joins these esteemed ranks with a new retrospective of her work, Oletha DeVane: Spectrum of Light and Spirit, now on view at the CADVC through December 17. It’s an exciting show for DeVane, a prolific artist and educator who has been a staple of Maryland’s cultural landscape for more than 50 years.  

“I’m honored, and I don’t think it was expected,” says DeVane. “There was a real sense of commitment [by the CADVC] to do the work, and, that’s what I felt was important — the commitment to to take on a project like this. It’s not simple when you have so many variables and mediums happening in a space.” 

The myriad artworks in Spectrum of Light and Spirit span DeVane’s prolific career, including paintings, works on paper, video artworks, and interactive sculpture. Curator Lowery Stokes Sims worked closely with the CADVC to bring all the pieces together into a cohesive whole, and to develop the interactive elements allow visitors to participate directly in the development of some of the artworks – and occasionally with DeVane herself.    

“Lowery is a curator who’s worked extensively with African American subjects and artists, and she’s a good friend as well,” says DeVane. “I’m so glad I asked her to curate, because she was able to carry the through line of what the work itself has been about over the last 50 years, and that was good for me.”

Sims’ curatorial perspective makes powerful connections between DeVane’s works in the gallery space. 

“Oletha DeVane is a way finder and a storyteller,” Sims says. “Over the last five decades as she has traveled in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, she has been inspired by the stories and characters she encounters, bringing the unexpected to light, while finding new nuances in the old and familiar, and unexpected correlations among those varied cultures.”

Art and outreach

Spectrum of Light and Spirit marks the first exhibition at the CADVC under the guidance of newly-appointed director Rebecca Uchill, who took over after the retirement of long-time director Symmes Gardner. 

“It is a true honor for me to have joined CADVC as this important exhibition came into being,” Uchill says. “Oletha DeVane is an artist of incredible vision and artistic range, and a key figure in art and education in our region. We have much to look forward to in the robust exhibition programming, which will include a series of activations of Nkisi Woman-Universal Nkisi, a community-engaged sculptural project by DeVane on view in the CADVC amphitheater.”

A nkisi is a power figure rooted in Congolese culture, imbued with sacred energy by the community where it is created. Over the course of the exhibition, visitors to DeVane’s large-scale nkisi sculpture will be invited to add beads to its surface. DeVane herself will periodically participate in these activations, including hour-long sessions slated for October 6, 8, and 29.

“The concept of nkisi to me is about power figures, and a female power figure is sometimes unusual,” says DeVane. “The idea is that they are oriented towards community, you know, in terms of how one begins this whole process of healing. How do you achieve justice in a community? How do you approach nature? What is it that we value? All those questions to me were a part of the nkisi spirit.”

In addition to the sculptural and painting works in the exhibit, DeVane’s video works, Beyond Bars: Prison Women Speak, created in collaboration with writer and media personality Tadia Rice, have been updated for this exhibition. The videos make for a profound dialogue with Prison Nation, the photography show on view across campus at the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery through October 14. 

“[Prison Nation] is pretty phenomenal. I was really impressed because the black and white photos are just beautiful,” says DeVane. “Ours is a little different. I chose to set up the photographs and the videos with the idea that the women would be interviewed from the past, the present and the future. It’s really about setting up an opportunity for people to understand that these women are in situations where they’re incarcerated, and happen to have had lives prior, and would like to go back to those lives. Just as our society begins to grapple with the issues around how our prison system works, we have to continue this work.”

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Spectrum of Light and Spirit is on view at the CADVC through December 17.  For more information about the exhibit and associated events, visit the CADVC website at  https://cadvc.umbc.edu/oletha-devane/

Devin Walker ’89, political science, is a man with a plan. And a cause and a vision and a passion.

Oh, and a Grammy nomination.

“Uncle Devin, the Children’s Drumcussionist,” as he’s known professionally, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Children’s Music Album in 2022 as a member of the 1 Tribe Collective, one of his many top-level endeavors that center around education, music, and young people.

He’s the musical muscle and co-owner of The Uncle Devin Show, an interactive musical experience for children that uses percussion instruments to inspire both fun and critical thinking.

Walker also runs a training course, “Racism in Children’s Music: Liberating Music for the Black Child,” and he has created an online music radio program for children called WEE Nation Radio, streaming R&B, funk, hip-hop, jazz, go-go, reggae, calypso, and world music, all created for children and families.

But the roots of many such accomplishments, says Walker, can be traced back to his years at UMBC.

Behind the Music 

Although music has always been a passion, Walker saw majoring in political science as an opportunity to probe systemic inequities and effect meaningful change.

“I was very active in the student movement back in the 80s,” he said. “Understanding the politics of everything really gave me the keen awareness to start to look for those things inside of whatever I was involved in.”

Those sharpened critical-thinking skills came in handy when he found himself researching a film called Ethnic Notions through UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library.

The Emmy-winning 1987 documentary peels back the anodyne veneer of familiar songs, books, cartoons, and movies meant for children to reveal their poisonously racist stereotypes, themes, and origins.

Even the sing-song silliness “Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe,” the film notes, originally alludes to the capture of African Americans fleeing enslavement.

“I was blown away,” Walker said. “I had no idea that there was a dark history” to so many songs, along with all the many stereotype-perpetuating movies and other media. 

Taking a New Tack

“So the seed was planted,” he said. “But even then, I didn’t think about coming in and really making a contribution to changing [the direction of children’s music] until around 2007.”

It was at this point, Walker said, that he truly began to understand firsthand the unique influence that music can have—for good or ill—on children. He and his wife Lolita Johnson Walker, whom he met at UMBC, don’t have children, but his sister had four, and he spent time with them every week. 

“Every Wednesday, it was Uncle Devin’s time,” Walker said, and that time included lots of music. But he remembered all too well the veiled racism of traditional songs he had researched as a UMBC student. 

Neither did he want his nieces and nephews to soak up too much of the wrong adult pop music.   

“I couldn’t let them listen to all that music, because it just wasn’t appropriate,” Walker said. “And so I said, I’ll create my own music for them. And as they got older, I said, let me record it so they can have a memory of it.”

Things snowballed from there, according to Walker. His nieces and nephews started playing the music for their friends, and the friends started asking Walker to record more songs, and people started asking him to perform for children and families.

Music with New Meaning

During Walker’s college days, he said, “I used to always participate in all of the [UMBC] talent shows. But it was all just us having fun. I never thought of it as a profession or anything like that.”

In fact, Cynthia M. Hill, a retired UMBC associate provost, remembers Walker primarily as a driven student.

“I met Devin when he participated in the Learning Resources Center’s academic support program for incoming UMBC freshmen,” Hill said. “He was impressive because he was anxious to learn and worked hard.”

But because they were both members of the UMBC gospel choir, she also knew firsthand that he had a professional-level musical talent. He even got to play with Dizzy Gillespie: The jazz giant visited UMBC in 1985, when Walker was a first-year student. 

And although he worked full-time after graduation, helping to investigate and resolve workplace issues covered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of both public- and private-sector employers, he continued to play with local bands.

And as Walker’s deep love of music—with the training and talent to match—continued to grow, he focused more and more of his prodigious energy into the journey that became The Uncle Devin Show, creating positive songs set to infectious beats such as “No Such Thing as Good or Bad Hair.” 

“I try to find a way to help—not to tell children what to think, but to teach them how to think,” Walker said; he sees music as the key. 

“We have a perfect tool here to help our children navigate these very difficult waters of life right now, and in a fun, entertaining, and engaging way,” he said “That’s really what my goal is.”

Meet Emily Faber, M.S. ’21, atmospheric physics, who is currently pursuing her doctorate in the same at UMBC. Emily is a first-generation college student who is also very involved as a student leader in the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. Take it away, Emily!

Q: What brought you to UMBC in the first place?

A: I came to UMBC for the department I am in. I knew I wanted to study Earth Science and I had a physics background so Atmospheric Physics is where I thought I could do the most good in the world. UMBC is also really well connected with the NASA and NOAA centers in the DMV area and I knew that is where I want to work, so it was a perfect match!

Q: What’s the one thing you’d want someone who hasn’t joined the UMBC community to know about the support you find here?

A: It’s here! sometimes it seems hidden but there are people here that I’ve found that would do whatever they could to help me if I needed it. And I’ve seen them pull off some pretty amazing things for other students too! PROMISE, GSA (Graduate Student Association), individual faculty, and the deans are all great and supportive people!

Q: Tell us about someone in the community who has inspired you or supported you, and how they did it.

A: I know, cheesy, but my advisor, Dr. Adriana Rocha Lima is a really great supporter of mine. They say you should find a mentor, a sponsor, and a coach, and Dr. Rocha Lima is really great at being all three for me! She explains things when I don’t understand without judgment, connects me with people and conferences in our field, and gives me advice when I need it. Find a great advisor; they are out there!

Q: Tell us about what you love about the atmospheric physics program or an organization you’re involved in.

A: I love how my program works with outside researchers and is really committed to Earth science as a whole. We routinely work with people from national lab offices that will hire our students one day and it really makes an impact in the skill sets we as students learn!

Q: What clubs and orgs are you a part of and why?

A: I’m a Graduate Student Association senator and Graduate Student Success Committee (GSSC) co-chair. I also help run the Graduate Gender-minorities in Physics group. In both of these I get to help people through their graduate school experience and help lift the graduate community up! I love seeing students succeed and hate seeing them struggle because they don’t find a resource that they need. These roles help me plug people in when they need help and that is incredibly rewarding for me!

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UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

Every year, Retrievers of all ages (including some actual Retriever pups) and community members gather together for UMBC’s Homecoming—and as always, this year has something for everyone. Designed to span two weeks (October 7 through 16) to accommodate all the festivities, “it’s an opportunity to think differently about what the concept of Homecoming actually is,” says Jess Wyatt, associate director of Alumni Engagement and one of the event organizers. 

“For a lot of folks at UMBC, it’s coming back to a department, coming back to a social group, coming back to a physical space, coming back to an experience.” 

Here’s how we make Homecoming our own at UMBC.

Revisiting student favorites

Homecoming is a special time for current students to celebrate their return for another year of classes and welcome first-year students into the fold. Keeping with tradition, the annual bonfire will kick off Homecoming on October 7, when students gather on Erickson Field for food, giveaways, and great company. After the bonfire, students can roll out their blankets on the lawn and cap the night with an outdoor movie screening.

The following week, Erickson Field will be transformed into a carnival ground—students get to preview the fun first, and on Saturday, October 15, the whole Retriever community is invited to play and ride, enjoy the petting zoo, food trucks, and more. Check out the full calendar of events for a packed day of activities, including an ice cream social hour and the hit Puppy Parade. All good dogs are welcome to join, with especially well-dressed pups participating in a special costume contest.

Welcoming back alumni

Alumni are always welcome back on UMBC’s campus, and Homecoming is a great opportunity to revisit your Retriever roots. If you ask Ron Pettie ’82, English, and his wife Christine, it’s all about reconnecting. “It’s a chance to come back and see what the school is doing now,” they’ll tell you. Through the years, the Petties have made a point to return to UMBC each October and are enthusiastic to talk about the close soccer wins, sharing a corndog, and trying to keep up on the rides with their two little nieces.

This year, Retrievers of all backgrounds will find a variety of events geared specifically toward them. Alumni will enjoy reunions, socials after sports games, compelling talks at GRIT-X, relaxation at the beer garden, and so much more. A recent addition for alumni is a Homecoming get-together at UMBC at the Universities at Shady Grove (October 8). And returning after a hiatus, is the Retriever 5k Dawg Chase and Fun Run (October 15), welcoming all runners and walkers.

Spending time with family

Homecoming at UMBC is an event for Retrievers to enjoy with their families, and the Family Breakfast (October 15) is our time to celebrate where we come from, the people we love, and how UMBC nurtures those connections. 

“We have a lot of non-traditional age students, students who are parents, [and] students who live in a multi-generational household,” says Wyatt. As such, Homecoming has been planned with students, alumni, and families of all types in mind. Pettie and family see Homecoming as a way to encourage their nieces to make connections for their future college careers while having a lot of fun at the same time. No two Retrievers are the same, and Homecoming is an opportunity to celebrate that.

“Homecoming isn’t just a work project for a lot of us, it’s the thing that we bring our families to every year,” says Wyatt. “It’s really just seeing the best of everything that UMBC has to offer.” 

Catch a game

If you’re looking to show some school spirit, week one of Homecoming is stocked full of sporting events, beginning with the Athletics Hall of Fame induction ceremony (October 7). Dress up in your favorite Retriever swag and come cheer for our basketball, lacrosse, soccer, volleyball, and softball teams across both weekends. Alumni will also step out onto the field to go head to head in a women’s lacrosse game, as well as a double header softball game–and don’t forget to stay afterwards for a BBQ! Whether you want to cheer or work up a sweat yourself, there’s always an opportunity to get moving at Homecoming.

With all this in mind, anticipation is in the air. “All the Homecoming events continue to evolve and are top notch,” says Pettie. “We always look forward to it.”

Homecoming events are spread across two weeks, October 7 through 16. Make sure to check out the full schedule of activitiesin advance, including any events that require registration, like Athletic events, Family Breakfast, and the 5k.

New UMBC-led research in Frontiers in Microbiology suggests that viruses are using information from their environment to “decide” when to sit tight inside their hosts and when to multiply and burst out, killing the host cell. The work has implications for antiviral drug development.

A virus’s ability to sense its environment, including elements produced by its host, adds “another layer of complexity to the viral-host interaction,” says Ivan Erill, professor of biological sciences and senior author on the new paper. Right now, viruses are exploiting that ability to their benefit. But in the future, he says, “we could exploit it to their detriment.”

Not a coincidence

The new study focused on bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria, often referred to simply as “phages.” The phages in the study can only infect their hosts when the bacterial cells have special appendages, called pili and flagella, that help the bacteria move and mate. The bacteria produce a protein called CtrA that controls when they generate these appendages. The new paper shows that many appendage-dependent phages have patterns in their DNA where the CtrA protein can attach, called binding sites. A phage having a binding site for a protein produced by its host is unusual, Erill says.

Even more surprising, Erill and the paper’s first author Elia Mascolo, a Ph.D. student in Erill’s lab, found through detailed genomic analysis that these binding sites were not unique to a single phage, or even a single group of phages. Many different types of phages had CtrA binding sites—but they all required their hosts to have pili and/or flagella to infect them. It couldn’t be a coincidence, they decided.

The ability to monitor CtrA levels “has been invented multiple times throughout evolution by different phages that infect different bacteria,” Erill says. When distantly related species demonstrate a similar trait, it’s called convergent evolution—and it indicates that the trait is definitely useful.

Timing is everything

Another wrinkle in the story: The first phage in which the research team identified CtrA binding sites infects a particular group of bacteria called Caulobacterales. Caulobacterales are an especially well-studied group of bacteria, because they exist in two forms: a “swarmer” form that swims around freely, and a “stalked” form that attaches to a surface. The swarmers have pili/flagella, and the stalks do not. In these bacteria, CtrA also regulates the cell cycle, determining whether a cell will divide evenly into two more of the same cell type, or divide asymmetrically to produce one swarmer and one stalk cell.

Because the phages can only infect swarmer cells, it’s in their best interest only to burst out of their host when there are many swarmer cells available to infect. Generally, Caulobacterales live in nutrient-poor environments, and they are very spread out. “But when they find a good pocket of microhabitat, they become stalked cells and proliferate,” Erill says, eventually producing large quantities of swarmer cells.

So, “We hypothesize the phages are monitoring CtrA levels, which go up and down during the life cycle of the cells, to figure out when the swarmer cell is becoming a stalk cell and becoming a factory of swarmers,” Erill says, “and at that point, they burst the cell, because there are going to be many swarmers nearby to infect.”

Listening in

Unfortunately, the method to prove this hypothesis is labor-intensive and extremely difficult, so that wasn’t part of this latest paper—although Erill and colleagues hope to tackle that question in the future. However, the research team sees no other plausible explanation for the proliferation of CtrA binding sites on so many different phages, all of which require pili/flagella to infect their hosts. Even more interesting, they note, are the implications for viruses that infect other organisms—even humans.

“Everything that we know about phages, every single evolutionary strategy they have developed, has been shown to translate to viruses that infect plants and animals,” he says. “It’s almost a given. So if phages are listening in on their hosts, the viruses that affect humans are bound to be doing the same.”

There are a few other documented examples of phages monitoring their environment in interesting ways, but none include so many different phages employing the same strategy against so many bacterial hosts.

This new research is the “first broad scope demonstration that phages are listening in on what’s going on in the cell, in this case, in terms of cell development,” Erill says. But more examples are on the way, he predicts. Already, members of his lab have started looking for receptors for other bacterial regulatory molecules in phages, he says—and they’re finding them.

New therapeutic avenues

The key takeaway from this research is that “the virus is using cellular intel to make decisions,” Erill says, “and if it’s happening in bacteria, it’s almost certainly happening in plants and animals, because if it’s an evolutionary strategy that makes sense, evolution will discover it and exploit it.”

For example, to optimize its strategy for survival and replication, an animal virus might want to know what kind of tissue it is in, or how robust the host’s immune response is to its infection. While it might be unsettling to think about all the information viruses could gather and possibly use to make us sicker, these discoveries also open up avenues for new therapies.

“If you are developing an antiviral drug, and you know the virus is listening in on a particular signal, then maybe you can fool the virus,” Erill says. That’s several steps away, however. For now, “We are just starting to realize how actively viruses have eyes on us—how they are monitoring what’s going on around them and making decisions based on that,” Erill says. “It’s fascinating.”

UMBC and the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have received a five-year, $13.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enhance recruitment and training of junior faculty from groups underrepresented in biomedical science. Funding is through the NIH Common Fund Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, which was founded last year to support efforts to hire groups of diverse, early-career research faculty. 

The grant will enable the universities to hire a group of four faculty members at UMBC and six at UMSOM, each of whom will have cross-campus appointments at both institutions. 

“Faculty hired under UM-FIRST will advance our teaching and research missions and serve as leaders for institutional change as we pursue our vision of a diverse professoriate,” says William LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC. “These faculty and those who follow will also serve as role models for future generations of underrepresented students.”

Fostering culture change

The grant aims to build self-reinforcing communities of scientists committed to diversity and inclusive excellence through the recruitment of early-career faculty who are competitive for assistant professor positions and have demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion. UMSOM and UMBC will measure their progress against clearly defined metrics of institutional culture change, diversity, and inclusion to determine if hiring efforts and other evidence-based strategies are achieving the program’s goals. 

The grant “is designed to foster sustainable culture change and promote inclusive excellence by enabling us to hire a diverse cohort of new faculty and to support faculty development, mentoring, and promotion opportunities,” says James Kaper, the lead on the grant and the James and Carolyn Frenkil Distinguished Dean’s Professor, vice dean for Academic Affairs, and chair of microbiology and immunology at UMSOM.

Building on a legacy of inclusion

The NIH FIRST grant builds on UMBC’s highly esteemed Meyerhoff Scholars Program, launched more than 30 years ago, which has led UMBC to become a leading university for developing underrepresented STEM undergraduates. UMBC is now the nation’s number #1 producer of Black undergraduates who go on to complete a PhD in the natural sciences or engineering and #1 for Black undergraduates who complete an M.D./Ph.D. 

At the same time that UMBC excels in educating undergraduates, the university is also classified as one of only 146 R1 (“very high research activity”) institutions in the nation.

UMBC’s efforts to promote faculty diversity in STEM include the PROMISE Academy and ADVANCE, which has increased women faculty in STEM by 70 percent at UMBC since 2003. 

The College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences’ Pre-professoriate Fellowship offers incoming faculty two-year appointments as research assistant professors, with structured mentoring and other scaffolds for success. Faculty who came to UMBC through this program in biological sciences, physics, and chemistry have already been converted to tenure-track assistant professors. 

Unwavering dedication

The recent $10M INCLUDES grant awarded to UMBC further builds a robust, diverse pipeline in STEM at UMBC by supporting postdocs from underrepresented groups, and the PROMISE Allegiance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program offers professional development and community to all graduate students and postdocs at UMBC and throughout the University System of Maryland. 

UMSOM’s efforts to promote a diverse STEM and health-science pipeline include the UMB CURES program for middle and high school students, several internship and summer research programs for college students, and multiple post-graduate training programs that give underrepresented minority scholars direct experience in a laboratory setting.

Like many of these other initiatives, “The true strength of UM-FIRST,” LaCourse says, “ is in the unwavering dedication of the leadership, faculty, and staff of these two institutions to inclusive excellence and social justice.”