In the quantum kingdom, particles flirt with the impossible, defying the tidy laws of Newton’s world. Today’s booming quantum industry, built on understanding this realm, hums with the energy of vibrating atoms. UMBC alumni are riding the quantum wave as they harness the field’s mysteries to unlock a revolution too strange to imagine—and too big to ignore.

Cory Nunn, Ph.D. ’23, physics, conducted astronomy research as an undergraduate, studying enormous objects scattered across the galaxy. But in the end, he fell in love with the physics of a much tinier universe, where you can never quite be sure where the electrons are, and the simple act of observing a system can shift its properties.

That kingdom is quantum, a field that, as it matures, is likely to lead to a revolution in communications, cybersecurity, scientific observations, and more. In Maryland today, political and business leaders are committed to investing in these new technologies and building a hub for quantum research. 

Quantum theory emerged in the early 20th century when scientists like Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger cracked open a subatomic universe where particles could sometimes behave like waves—common knowledge today, but revolutionary at the time. Their research left Sir Isaac Newton’s straightforward rules behind, replacing them with probabilities and uncertainty.

Cory Nunn, Ph.D. ’23, adjusts an experimental setup at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He says his advisor, Todd Pittman, prepared him well. “There’ a lot of ambition in Todd’s group; I feel like we were encouraged organically to push ourselves, because we were convinced what we were doing was really cool and worth exploring,” Nunn says. (Photo courtesy of NIST)

By the 1950s, what we would now call “quantum 1.0” hit its stride, turning theory into world-changing tech. Transistors—tiny devices found in everything from PCs to cars to smartphones—are the most ubiquitous example; they power all computer chips. Driven by what are called “quantum effects,” or the perks of quantum over classical systems, transistors shrunk room-sized computers into pocket calculators and sparked the digital age. Then came lasers, which used the quantum effects of excited atoms to beam data across continents, and atomic clocks, which keep time with extreme accuracy based on the vibrations of single atoms. These breakthroughs rewired society, powering the gadgets and networks of today. 

Quantum research has come a long way since quantum 1.0, which lasted through the 1970s, says Tom Smith, Ph.D. ’21, physics. “Now we’re in quantum 2.0,” Smith says. “There’s another wave of interesting quantum effects that we can take advantage of, like quantum superposition,” when a particle can temporarily be in two states at the same time, until the particle’s state is measured.   
Huge improvements in laser technology and optical components have advanced the field and “opened the door for other quantum phenomena to be implemented experimentally. It’s been a gradual development—baby steps over the years,” Smith says.

While quantum 1.0 generated foundational technologies, quantum 2.0 is about harnessing quantum phenomena to build next-level systems. Multiple companies and researchers have made strides in building “qubits,” or “quantum bits,” that can be coaxed to exist long enough to perform useful computations. The first qubits only lasted a few microseconds, but today’s qubits can exist for milliseconds—1,000 times longer—making it possible to scale up quantum computers. 

A key quantum effect called “entanglement” has also shifted from being a quirky laboratory phenomenon in quantum 1.0 to a workhorse in newer quantum systems. Researchers who showed that entanglement is real and exploitable received the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics. Their work paved the way for huge advances in quantum communication across long distances and quantum-based encryption methods.  

“As our control of very small, isolated systems gets better and better over time, what we’re realizing is that there are new capabilities that come with working with single atom systems or single ions,” Nunn says. “And they have new properties—quantum properties—that let us leverage different kinds of processing power than what we had with classical computers.”

Today, Nunn is a postdoctoral fellow in the Quantum Optics Group within the Quantum Measurement Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His research on quantum networking seeks to harness the power of quantum entanglement at a distance.

“It’s really hard to send these fragile quantum bits of information over a long link. So the solution most of us are pursuing is a quantum repeater, which is basically just a node in the middle that breaks up this longer link into two smaller links that are easier to manage,” Nunn says—or, if the link is long enough, many smaller links. He refers to one end of the link as “Alice” and the other as “Bob,” to talk about how information travels from point A to B.

“So that repeater in the middle is going to have to take a signal from Alice and a signal from Bob, and if they don’t meet at exactly the same time, so the repeater can perform an operation and link the two together, then one or both of the signals is going to have to be stored in a quantum memory.”

That “operation” at the node (which Nunn calls “Charlie”) entangles the photons coming from Alice and Bob, which Nunn says is the “most interesting weird property that quantum particles can have.” In entanglement, the signals become “inherently linked, so that these quantum systems are correlated in a way that’s just stronger than classical physics could explain.” 

After the operation at Charlie, Nunn says, “Alice and Bob’s systems, which are at separate labs, that never directly interacted with each other, now share entanglement.”

Nunn’s team at NIST is working to develop a range of technologies to make this long-distance entanglement possible, including sources of entangled photons, quantum memories, and methods of stabilizing links. Nunn is focused on developing specialized sources of single photons that can send synchronized quantum signals across the network.

Quantum systems don’t have to use photons, but they are “the best carriers of quantum information,” according to Nunn. “They can travel at the speed of light, don’t have to be cooled to an extremely low temperature to work (like some other quantum systems), and they can make it out of your lab and travel over fiber, or from satellite to satellite through space and the atmosphere. So these are inherently mobile ‘flying qubits’ that can actually take quantum information and fly from one place to another.” 

Tom Smith, left, and Binod Joshi, Ph.D. ’25, physics, at work in Yauhua Shih’s lab at UMBC. Photo by Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17.

In the current wave of quantum 2.0, new materials and fabrication techniques have enhanced researchers’ ability to produce tiny, precise quantum systems, opening the doors for creating quantum networks. Finally, software is starting to catch up to mathematical theories proposed decades ago—but there’s still much work to do. 

Although fully capable quantum computers are still years away, researchers, businesses, and governments are already preparing for how they might disrupt current practices. For example, powerful new tools like Shor’s algorithm would leave most modern encryption methods vulnerable to attack. In addition to quantum measurement science, NIST is playing a leading role in standardizing new cryptography techniques, called post-quantum cryptography, that better prepare us for a world with advanced quantum computers.

Quantum 2.0 is about control—taking the weirdness of quantum mechanics and engineering it into tools that outperform classical limits. Unlike quantum 1.0, it’s less about discovering quantum rules and more about exploiting them for computing, secure communications, and ultra-precise sensing. The field is growing rapidly, and governments and tech giants alike are spending billions on developing the next big breakthroughs. 

Smith, who is a physicist at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), believes quantum sensing is one of the most exciting areas in quantum. It refers to the use of quantum systems, such as atoms or photons, to measure physical parameters with unprecedented precision and sensitivity. While quantum computing deservedly gets a lot of airtime, “I believe quantum sensing is equally far along in its R&D but doesn’t get as much attention, because it’s not the darling of private industry currently,” Smith says.

For example, he says, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is designed to detect gravitational waves, which Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts. The LIGO team updated the observatory’s systems to take advantage of quantum effects, specifically squeezed light. Squeezed light helps make the timing or detection rate of photons more predictable, like steadying the flow of raindrops into a cup to produce consistent readings from measurement to measurement, Smith says. After LIGO made the switch, it started detecting a lot more gravitational waves.

Other companies have built quantum sensors that detect exceedingly minute shifts in gravity or magnetic fields, which can be used for anything from detecting underground tunnels to measuring brain activity to improving GPS systems. These advances come from better control of quantum states and miniaturization, which has moved tech from lab benches to the field. 

“At the Navy, we’re going to keep an eye on, and in some cases have a hand in, making improvements to various types of sensing. We’re getting to the point now that maybe we can actually make a product out of this and utilize it in the field,” Smith says.

While systems like LIGO are already active, there are only a few instances of the technology around the world. For a technology to truly be “in the field” from Smith’s perspective, it must be produced at scale and put to work on, for example, a large number of aircraft carriers or military planes. 

“I would like to think that certain quantum sensors could be used in the field within the next decade,” Smith says.

Nunn was a junior at the University of Delaware when LIGO upgraded. During his astronomy research, he attended conferences for quantum optics, because the first quantum optics experiments were designed to observe starlight. “All the signals that LIGO uses rely on the same type of physics that I’m studying now,” he says.

Today at NIST, his work builds directly on his Ph.D. research with Todd Pittman, Ph.D. ’96, professor of physics and director of UMBC’s Quantum Science Institute. 
“There was a lot going on in Todd’s lab that I was able to directly transfer to my research at NIST,” Nunn says. “Now I am directly applying the same skills, the same systems, that I was used to working with as a member of the quantum information group at UMBC.” 

Some of Nunn’s current quantum networking projects involve work with the Washington Metropolitan Quantum Network, or DC-QNet. Quantum networking involves connecting quantum devices to increase their capabilities, just as classical devices are connected today to create systems like the world wide web. The DC-QNet “is a bonafide networking application,” that relies on the research he did with Pittman, Nunn says. 

The DC-QNet links four federal agencies plus the University of Maryland via fiber optic cables that travel belowground and high in the air. 

“As a photon travels along the link, it might get lost along the way, because it’s just one itty bitty photon against the whole world, traveling across kilometers of fiber,” Nunn says. The fiber “is basically a kilometer of glass that it has to see through.”

Today, researchers are still investigating what’s possible and building prototype quantum networks. Once full-fledged quantum computers exist, we’ll connect them and enhance their capabilities with networking, Nunn explains. Eventually, he hopes, “we’ll have the next, futuristic, Star-Trek-level internet that relies on quantum physics.”

One big goal of quantum 2.0 is to minimize the amount of light required to send a usable signal—even down to single photons, Smith says. In the context of quantum communication, “You send this train of individual photons with independent polarizations, and if you can control those polarizations—the direction the lightwaves are vibrating—you can transmit information that way,” he explains. 

Both Nunn and Smith emphasized that information sent via quantum versus classical communication signals is more secure. When information travels via a classical laser pulse from Alice to Bob, an eavesdropper, typically referred to as Eve, could take away or analyze some of the light, and the recipient would still receive a pulse, not realizing their signal had been tapped. 

“But at the single photon level, if an eavesdropper takes away one photon, or even obtains information about the photon, the intended receiver registers an error, so it’s easier to detect eavesdroppers,” Smith explains. That’s a huge advantage for sending confidential information—whether it’s an everyday banking transaction or a matter of global diplomacy.

Today, Smith still does work in the lab at the NAWCAD, but spends much of his time keeping tabs on what’s happening in quantum technology across academia, industry, and government, so he can recommend research NAWCAD ought to support elsewhere or pursue in-house. 

“We have a lot of support right now from our chain of command to do the research that we think is best, that we think will be the most impactful, which is always a great place to be in, to have that type of freedom,” Smith says.

Smith has also continued to collaborate with his Ph.D. advisor, UMBC physics professor Yanhua Shih. Shih is a first-generation quantum optics researcher, having done pioneering work in interferometry, one of the technologies LIGO relies on. His current work on quantum sensing is complementary to active NAWCAD research. 

“By collaborating directly with academia, it feels like we’re having a bit more of an impact,” Smith says. In fact, the UMBC physics department partnered with NAWCAD through a program that supports NAWCAD staff to complete their doctoral degrees. A new Ph.D. candidate is joining UMBC through the program in fall 2025. 

Nunn, too, is thriving. He loves what he does at NIST and would like to stay on after his fellowship concludes. 

“There’s just a lot of good research that goes on at NIST, and the people I’m working with are amazing sources of information. I’ve grown a lot as a postdoc here,” Nunn says. “It’s really inspiring to work with hard-working and clever people on new solutions for quantum networking.”
 
Pittman isn’t surprised by Nunn’s success.

“Cory had a knack for experimental work and really took advantage of every opportunity to become a top-notch independent researcher at UMBC,” Pittman says. “By the end of his time in my lab, working with Cory was more like collaborating with a senior colleague than mentoring a student. In his final year, our one-on-one meetings usually started with me asking, ‘OK, Cory—what are you going to teach me today?’” 

“Todd was supportive and eager to give guidance early on, and then also eager to step back when he felt I was able to tackle a problem on my own,” Nunn says. “Getting to a point where he could tell me, ‘Oh, I’m learning something from you,’ was really encouraging, and the fact that he was so open to that really helped me to grow.”

Smith connected with Shih via a research rotation, and “it was a perfect match,” he says. “I learned a lot from him, but he was also hands-off in a way that allowed me to learn on my own.” 

All new graduate students in the UMBC physics department share office space, an arrangement that Nunn and Smith praised for the way it organically built community among the students.

“We had a great camaraderie. That was a key aspect that allowed me to achieve as much as I did in grad school,” Smith says. But at bedrock, the thing that excites them both is the science itself and the autonomy to pursue it.

Nunn has always been intrigued by questions like, “How does light really work?”—even discussing them at high school sleepovers. It wasn’t until he arrived at UMBC that he learned that “this is an active field of research, where we’re trying to understand what quantum mechanics tells us about the way nature really works.” 

Part of the excitement, he says about working in Pittman’s lab, was research into quantum memories and quantum sources that have exciting, real-world applications. “But at the core, our excitement is really investigating the way the world works on different scales that we’re not used to thinking about in our day-to-day life.”

And even as Nunn learns more and more, the mysteries of how the quantum scale operates feel limitless. He takes the attitude of a true scientist, recognizing that while “I understand more, I also understand that there’s more than ever that I don’t understand.”

The original “UMBC” ghost image from 1995 is taped inside Pittman’s journal from the time. Photo courtesy of Pittman.

In 1995, a UMBC research team led by Yanhua Shih, professor of physics, pioneered a quantum technology called “ghost imaging,” which leverages quantum entanglement to reconstruct an image of an object without actually shining any light on it. The 30th anniversary of this quantum feat was marked in a Nature Communications Physics article this spring. The UMBC team originally demonstrated the technology by rendering the letters “UMBC” in a first-of-its-kind experiment. Since then, ghost imaging has enabled revolutionary applications in secure communication, medical imaging, and remote sensing.

Todd Pittman recalls the excitement of the original breakthrough, telling Nature: “Seeing the ‘UMBC’ image emerge from the data for the first time was super exciting and very rewarding; I remember it like it was yesterday!” 

Thirty years ago, UMBC was already making a name for itself in the quantum research space, including early work by Shih. His experiments showed that photons can instantly affect each other regardless of distance, laying the groundwork for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for proving quantum entanglement. That research and other early advances like ghost imaging have led to more recent contributions in quantum optics, computing, and thermodynamics that are shaping the quantum research landscape. 

By now, Shih has trained a second, and now a third, generation of quantum researchers, including people like Pittman, Cory Nunn, and Tom Smith, who will lead UMBC quantum research into its next era.

Before Joy Gabrielle Ware walked off the Commencement stage, she stopped mid-stage to face her peers and shouted, “UM!” prompting a booming “BC!” response from the undergraduates and their families who packed the arena last week at UMBC’s 84th Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony. Ware, an individualized study major, was awarded the historic 100,000th degree since UMBC’s first Commencement class in 1970, which had 241 students—a stark contrast to the 1,528 undergraduate and over 700 graduate degrees awarded to the Class of 2025.

To celebrate this historic moment, President Valerie Sheares Ashby paid tribute to the alumni known as the Founding Four, who represented graduates of the first four undergraduate classes from 1970 to 1973.

“What a profound impact UMBC has had on the state of Maryland and the world,” said Sheares Ashby. “Each one of our alumni has made a difference in some way, many of them as leaders and pathbreakers—in the public and private sectors, in the arts, in education, in research, in public service, and in their communities.”

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Gratitude

The Class of 2025 celebrated and cheered for each other. However, thunderous applause rippled across UMBC’s Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena every time a speaker asked the students to thank those who made their dreams come true. The stands were filled with roommates, classmates, mentors, and families who kept pointing the way when graduation seemed out of reach.

Celebrating graduation day! (Brad Ziegler/UMBC)

“You took risks when you chose to pursue this graduate degree. You stumbled and struggled and faced down your fears and insecurities,” said Graduate Student Association President Jessica Burstrem, Ph.D. ’25, language, literacy, and culture, in her address to her peers at the Graduate School Commencement ceremony.

“That bravery is why you celebrate today. Those are the kinds of people the world always needs—people who do the right thing even if they are afraid. People of integrity and bravery. People who stand together,” said Burstrem. 

The path of service

College wasn’t Tina Garcia’s first path, even after becoming the first in her family to graduate from high school. She served nearly a decade in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of staff sergeant, before continuing her service within the government. After serving her country, Garcia chose to honor her family once again—this time by becoming the first to earn a college degree. She drew on her experience as a veteran and her majors in social work and psychology to co-found and serve as vice president of UMBC’s Student Service Members, Veterans, and Families organization.

“UMBC is where I found my community, and with it, a renewed sense of purpose to continue serving Veterans. I’m so grateful to everyone who continues this work, who shows up for veterans every day, and who refuses to let that momentum fade,” said Garcia, as one of two undergraduate valedictorians. “When we find belonging, we thrive. When we thrive, we create space for others to do the same. May you always find places where you belong and never let anyone convince you that you don’t.”

UMBC welcomes all

For international students, the meaning of community transcended physical boundaries, cultures, and languages, with graduate students representing 27 nations across five continents and Central America, and undergraduates representing 35 countries across six continents and the Caribbean, including Jamaican native, Akellia Bernard, a music performance major with a concentration in voice. Bernard, a member of UMBC’s Choir and Camerata, performed the national anthem for the three commencement ceremonies. This summer, Bernard plans to join the Choir and Camerata in Paris and Prague, where they have been invited to perform with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra.

Praise Lasekan, a biological science major, whose family watched his valedictorian speech virtually back home in Ondo, Nigeria, was adamant about how the Retriever community became the vessel for his growth, acceptance, and joy.

“The person you see standing in front of you today was once called a failure. People made fun of me. There were times I almost quit. But mentors, community, and the grace of God reminded me: Dreams don’t die, they just need to be stirred again,” said Lasekan. This fall, he will begin his Ph.D. at Brown University in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry. “UMBC showed me that community isn’t just who you’re around, it’s who holds you up when life feels heavy.” His journey resonated with the celebratory crowd and earned a standing ovation from the full house. 

As Retrievers crossed their tassels from right to left, President Sheares Ashby reminded them that while the pursuit of their dreams might have had similar zig zags, they, “will be the ones who will listen to all the voices, fight for the needs of others, not just yourself, unite, not divide, bring calm to chaos, open doors, and see new ways forward.” 

Listen to Akellia Bernard sing the Star-Spangled Banner, Governor Wes Moore’s message to the Class of 2025, and watch all three ceremonies at commencement.umbc.edu.

On May 2 and 3, the campus celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Linehan Artist Scholars Program with two days of festivities attended by dozens of alumni, current scholars, and incoming students.

Exhibitions and performances featured works by scholars from across the years, including choreography by Ryan Bailey, LAS ’16, a theatrical performance by Grace Marsh, LAS ’28, music performances by Michelle Purdy, LAS ’10 and Christian Hartman, LAS ’20, artwork by Petra Janka, LAS ’25 and Riley Payne, LAS ’29, and creativity by many other alumni and students. Featured speakers included Cameron Slayden, LAS ’99, from the very first LAS cohort and now CEO of Microverse Studios, James Dorsey, LAS ’05, a music teacher in Prince George’s County Public Schools, and Courtney Culp, LAS ’20, a designer with Warner Brothers Discovery.

Left: Brechtel and Haynes are greeted by UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby following their performance, joined by Shaness Kemp, assistant professor of dance. Right: Christian Hartman plays the cello, while Ryan Bailey and Clarisse Lukban dance on stage in Linehan Concert Hall.

“The Linehan Program has strengthened my passions for new music and interdisciplinary collaboration, and I am so grateful to the program for supporting me as an artist and providing me with so many opportunities to create and collaborate,” says Hartman, who played the cello for the event. “I was so thrilled to get the opportunity to perform once again on the stage I called home for four years, and to work with Clarisse and Ryan. I didn’t see their choreography or the projections until the day of the performance, and to see it all come together was such a breathtaking experience.”

Left to right: Darielle and Earl Linehan at the post-celebration luncheon; Jillian Casey, LAS ’27 with her mom at the post-celebration luncheon; Ann Sofie Clemmensen, director of the Linehan Artist Scholars Program, poses with Petra Janka, LAS ’25.

“Earl and Darielle Linehan’s commitment to UMBC and the Linehan Artist Scholars Program has created transformative learning experiences for hundreds of talented undergraduates majoring in the visual and performing arts,” says Ann Sofie Clemmensen, director of the program. “Our focus for the celebration was to highlight the past and the future of the Linehan Artist Scholars program, and what makes our program and community unique and essential to the undergraduate rigor at UMBC.”

Juju Ayoub, LAS ’25, and Sarah McHale perform a dance duet, accompanied by music sung by Jacob Perry, LAS ’14, with visual projections by Jillian Casey, LAS ’28.

With a deeply held belief in the importance of the arts in society, Earl and Darielle Linehan launched the Linehan Artist Scholars Program with a generous gift in the 1990s. (To this day, Earl Linehan loves to recount that he and Darielle met UMBC President Emeritus Freeman Hrabowski on a bus in Israel, and that Hrabowski asked them right then for their support.) In 2015 the Linehans fully endowed the Linehan Artist Scholars Program, ensuring its future ability to continue and grow. Now, its graduates in dance, music, theatre, and the visual arts number almost 400.

Left to right: An audience cheers on dance and music performances in the Theatre atrium; a group of Linehan Artist Scholars pose for a group photo during the post-celebration luncheon; Marlayna Demond, LAS ’11, center, talks with her husband, Adam Rhoads, and Tom Moore, director of arts and culture.

“Artists are the leading edge of creativity in our society,” says Earl Linehan. “They inspire our thinking and enrich our lives. But how can we encourage more young people to turn their talents into a career? Young artists seem to thrive best in an atmosphere that blends critical study with creative expressions—the kind of interdisciplinary environment that UMBC has always fostered.”

See more photos from the two-day celebration. Learn more about the Linehan Artist Scholars Program.

All musicians start out as absolute beginners. Some might progress as self-taught, others might have private music lessons, and many will pick up their first instrument in school. But without a musical pathway—consistent access to physical instruments and dedicated music educators year after year—budding musicians will falter on their journey. 

For Nema Robinson, and the thousands of other Baltimore City student musicians who have benefited from extra-curricular, free, equitable music education through programs like the Baltimore Symphony’s OrchKids and Peabody Institute’s Tuned-In program, these communities have opened musical doors to a professional career in music and so much more. Now on track to graduate with a music education degree, Robinson has reached a full circle moment to teach at the programs that set the stage for her own success.

The first violinist plays a long, drawn out A. The other musicians settle their feet against the stage floor and their backs hover near, but don’t quite touch the backs of their chairs. Suddenly, the noise of the orchestra breaks across your ears—briefly discordant and separate—but as the players all search for the same A, the notes weave together into a pleasing buzz of anticipated energy. In tune together, they look expectantly at the conductor. 

Among the Uggs and Vans and Crocs and Nikes nestled under the music stands are Nema Robinson’s double-buckled black platform Mary Janes. Robinson, a fourth-year music education student and Linehan Artist Scholar, is at one of her teaching gigs that supplement and complement her degree. Today, she’s in Friedberg Hall at the Peabody Institute in Mt. Vernon, Baltimore, as part of Tuned-In, a free musical study and youth development program for Baltimore-area students. The elegant marble relief sculptures that flank either side of the stage and the gentle curve of the stairs leading to the second story seating section are just the background to the real art on the stage: Middle and high schoolers are making music.

In Baltimore City, only 60 percent of public schools have some type of musical component, says Nick Skinner, the vice president and founding team member of BSO OrchKids—which also offers free, community-based, high-quality music instruction and programming in the city. Of that, only 12 percent of city schools have instrument programs, compared to nearly 100 percent in nearby Baltimore, Howard, and Montgomery county schools. “There’s no musical pathway. So if you’re lucky enough to have music in your elementary school, you may not be able to continue that music study sequentially into middle or high school,” says Skinner. “It’s a really patchwork model of how students can progress musically through their education.” 

When former BSO conductor Marin Alsop began her tenure in the city, she saw a need to fill this gap, and in 2007 founded BSO OrchKids. As Skinner tells it, Alsop saw that “many of our students here in the city were locked out of these opportunities to have the power of music in their life—to benefit from the inherent value of playing an instrument and the benefits that come from the study and the artistic process of learning an instrument.”

Asked to lead

When Robinson was a kid, she was walking around Artscape with her mom waiting to see her cousin perform on stage. Artscape in Baltimore City is the nation’s largest free outdoor arts festival, famously held on whatever is the hottest weekend in the summer. Robinson recalls getting to the event early and waiting in the unbearable heat. They found a place to sit and wait for her cousin’s opera performance and during that period OrchKids took the stage. “And my mom was like, ‘Oh my God, all these Black musicians playing classical music.’ We immediately got applications, and all of this started from there.”

Young Nema Robinson playing the violin and with a group of BSO OrchKids. Robinson is crouching in purple, and fellow UMBC student Rickerra Bassett is standing in front with a teal shirt. Photos courtesy of Robinson.

In fourth grade, Robinson joined OrchKids and thought she wanted to play the tuba. Her mom shot that down for practical reasons, like 11-year-old Nema being able to even carry the instrument. “I’m still too small to play the tuba,” says Robinson. Her instrument of (second) choice was the violin, and through the daily after-school sessions at OrchKids and the all-day Saturdays at Tuned-In, along with numerous other musical opportunities she’s taken part in, Robinson has far surpassed the lauded 10,000 hours on her way to becoming an expert.

On stage in the Linehan Concert Hall rehearsing with UMBC’s Chamber Ensemble, Robinson stands in a semi-circle with a dozen other musicians. At this point, she’s been playing for 10 years. As the group launches into a slow baroque minor key waltz, Philip Mann, the conductor and assistant professor of music, stops them short. “Let’s move closer,” he says to the collection of string instrumentalists. With a shuffle of music stands, the ensemble tightens the circle. Black leather Doc Martens now firmly planted beneath her, Robinson leans into the music with her instrument familiarly tucked beneath her chin.

Before UMBC had a chamber orchestra—an intimate group of musicians—Robinson played in UMBC’s Symphony Orchestra, which is open to staff, students, and community members. She was a section leader her first year at UMBC. “I had to make sure I was locked in because this was a really big deal in a university just starting out. I think for me it was definitely nerve wracking, like, ‘Oh, I can’t mess up. But the conductor said, “You’re doing great. Just play.’” As time went on Robinson saw that as a music major and a Linehan Scholar, she was being asked to lead. 

“I slowly adapted,” says Robinson, “and then I started to realize that music majors—maybe that’s why we are the section leaders—because we are setting an example for the community members.”

Listen to different nuances

Ann Sofie Clemmensen, director of the Linehan Artist Scholars Program, knows this was intentional. “Across the arts, we do lean on scholars to lead some assignments because they are receiving resources that others are not. In the music department, in dance and theater, and visual arts, we’re identifying leaders and those who can become leaders. And I think that’s what UMBC is very good at.”

This May, the Linehan Artist Scholars Program is celebrating three decades of supporting an arts-focused community at UMBC. Founded with support from Earl and Darielle Linehan, the scholarship supports students with an exceptional interest in the arts. Specifically, the program “acknowledges the importance of artists as leaders. As artists, we understand that a production or an orchestra is a component of many things that have to have some sort of organizational aspect,” says Clemmensen. “You have to listen to the different nuances.”

Robinson has found the scholars community to be uplifting and collaborative. “Insanely great,” to use her exact words. “It’s really cool to see how everyone else is very invested in their art, and it made me realize how it’s all tied together,” Robinson says. When she heard fellow OrchKid and Tuned-In student, Rickerra Bassett, was thinking about UMBC, Robinson immediately connected the young violist to Linehan, where she is now a first-year double major music education and performance scholar. 

This is the dream

Bassett started at BSO OrchKids during kindergarten, practically still a baby, she says. She stayed through her senior year, and like Robinson, has continued to work for the program as a graduate. Despite the camaraderie and the support BSO OrchKids offers, Bassett said it is rare that a student stay in the program for their full K-12 experience. “The main reason why I stuck with it is, well, I enjoyed it. I also realized how high demand violas are—there’s not as much competition for me to participate in orchestras compared with violin, so I feel like I’ve gotten way more opportunities because I play viola.”

“Rickerra and Nema are in so many ways, shape, and form what we always hope OrchKids to be,” says Skinner. “We’re always striving to improve, but looking at their trajectory—that is the dream in a lot of ways.” OrchKids has paved and paid the way for Robinson, Bassett, and many other musicians to attend prestigious music camps in other states, perform on the BSO’s Meyerhoff stage with world-class professional musicians, participate in the YOLA National Festival in Los Angeles, and so many other opportunities in addition to their daily musicianship classes and other education supports. And now they’re at UMBC, learning to mentor the next generation of musicians. 

“In so many ways,” Skinner says, “they are the definition of what OrchKids is hoping to achieve.”

Watching other young people discover the joy of sticking with an instrument gave Bassett, who also played with Tuned-In, the idea to double major in music education. “Seeing the younger students get so excited about things that we would probably think of as small was just the sweetest thing,” says Bassett. “I was seeing myself in them since I started that young. And I’m just hoping that they keep going. I want to motivate them to keep going.”

Music as social transformation

It’s not just about the music. Or rather, the music is more than the music classes. “I can’t believe how much the musical development and the social development are connected,” says Daniel Trahey, who co-founded Tuned-In at Peabody in 2007, coincidentally the same year he was a founding team member at OrchKids. “When you see someone like Nema—when she saw what she was able to do—her confidence level just skyrocketed once she started practicing. And this is so key to all of our kids, we need our kids to be thinking about themselves and investing in themselves in order to be better for others. And the thing that’s the most amazing to me is to see someone like Nema start to invest in herself, start to map out time for only themselves to sit down and practice when their other friends are off doing other things.”

Skinner puts it similarly: “When learning an instrument, you’re developing skills that you don’t even really realize that you’re forming—creativity and collaboration, leadership, the responsibility of practicing your instrument or making sure you have your music for a rehearsal. These are skill sets that our students are forming from a very young age that become embedded in them and can then easily be reapplied. There’s a tremendous amount of research that’s been coming out over the past decade about the power of music and how it impacts the brain. There’s almost nothing like playing an instrument when it comes to really enhanced brain function and activity, cognitive development, and executive function capabilities.”

Rickerra Bassett has been playing the viola since kindergarten in programs like OrchKids and Tuned-In. Photos courtesy of Bassett.

For Robinson, the structure and consistency of the programs she played in was key. They gave shape to her education and the expectation of practice and performances, and ultimately shaped her talent and her work ethic that shines through her myriad teaching roles. 

Trahey stops mid-sentence to brag on this young professional. “Nema is what, 20 years old? She has the best attendance, the best timeliness. She is the most professional at sending emails. She takes her job so dang seriously, it is inspiring to me. And Nema plays a very important role at Tuned-In because for our high school kids, who are really sick of hearing from me, they’re listening to Nema because Nema’s got real world experience.”

Trahey’s hopes—and part of Tuned-In’s goals—is that the program would be fully staffed one day by graduates of the program. Commitment to continuum is how they put it: students become the teachers. “By valuing the community the student comes from, the student will want to come back and work toward creating an even healthier community,” says Trahey. 

In the big picture view, the musicianship classes and camps and performances—they’re all leading toward social transformation, but Trahey doesn’t want that to mean that the students leave their communities behind along the way. “I hope for most of the kids, to do what they want to do, and then find a way to also give back to their communities. We’re already seeing this where our students have gone on to get political science degrees or medical degrees, and then they become our largest advocates, and so for many of the communities that we’re working in.”

“We are really looking at how we can use music as a vehicle to open up the world to our students,” says Skinner.

Robinson saw music education in action by watching Brian Kaufman, associate professor of music education, teach at BSO OrchKids. He helped her discover music education as a major and the idea to pursue it at UMBC. “He was just very passionate about it. And you can just see it in the work and the community he created,” she says. “And when I visited, UMBC felt so welcoming.”

From his years of watching her as a student and then as an assistant, Trahey says, “Nema’s always had it, but I think UMBC and the music education program has really helped her get a more global perspective. Before she would concentrate on maybe one kid’s problem or two kids’ problems. And now I’m seeing her be able to really serve the needs and hear the voices of every single child in her ensemble or in the room that she’s working in, and that’s been a huge growth point for her since being at UMBC.”

Not an everyday type of thing

Back in the marbled hall at the Peabody Institute, Robinson is threading through the music stands on stage to offer encouragement and correction to the young people on stage. The lead instructor has stepped away to give the reins to Robinson. 

Mi’onte McGhee, a high school violinist who has been playing with Tuned-In for four years, says, “Nema is such a big help to us. She’s really good if you ask her a question about technique—you don’t even have to ask sometimes, she just comes up and says I can help you with that, but she’s really nice about it. She never makes you feel like you can’t play. She’s really kind and knowing that she’s gone through all this before helps me relate to her.”

For Robinson, there’s nothing like the feeling of creating music with people. “It’s like you’re in a different zone, if that makes sense. It’s not necessarily an everyday type of thing, she says. “You definitely have to have a good intention and really put your all toward it. It’s doing something you’re very passionate about and then putting it forward. It doesn’t always make sense, but when you do it, it feels right.”

Packed and energized sporting arenas. Clinching the closing medal ceremony of the Olympics for the first time. Primetime broadcasts with viewership in the many millions—women’s sports are starting to get the time and attention they’ve deserved all along. 

At UMBC, our women athletes have been gathering championship rings and lifting each other up along the way. You’re invited to join the stands and cheer on these world-class Retrievers.

By Kara Newhouse

The women of the UMBC volleyball team stood at the edge of their home court with eyes toward the rafters. To the right of the American and Maryland flags hung two banners with black cloths draped over them. The home opener match of the 2024 season would start soon, but first, a bit of pomp and circumstance for the Retrievers who won the past four America East Conference tournaments.

A game announcer directed attention to a massive video screen which showed senior Mila Ilieva, economics, blocking a hit and clinching a 3-0 sweep of the Binghamton Bearcats in the 2023 championship. On the floor, current players grinned, reliving their victory as triumphant music kicked on. All eyes returned to the rafters and up went the black cloths to reveal two black and gold banners listing the volleyball team’s three regular season titles and four tournament wins.

On its way up, one cloth got stuck, hanging at an angle as the players turned for a photo and a crew in the rafters fixed it. Not the smoothest of unveilings, but it was perhaps reflective of the trajectory of women’s sports in this country, a path punctuated by moments of great promise—the passage of Title IX, packed crowds at the 1999 Women’s World Cup, Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky’s medal dominance at the Rio Olympics—but often regressing to the status quo as a “niche interest” ignored by investors and corporate broadcasters.

This year, however, the veil keeping women’s sports from mainstream popularity has finally lifted. The final game of 2024 NCAA women’s March Madness netted over 18 million average viewers—4 million more than the men’s final. At the Paris Olympics, the women’s marathon medals were given during the closing ceremony instead of the men’s for the first time. Professional leagues are smashing attendance records and making expansion plans. 

As a recent viral T-shirt declares: Everyone watches women’s sports. And Retriever athletics is full of women worth watching. In addition to volleyball victories, UMBC boasts four consecutive America East championships in softball. Swimming alumna Emily Escobedo ’17, finished third in the 200-meter breaststroke at NCAA championships as a Retriever and later won a world championship in the same event. The lacrosse team is coached by a hall-of-famer. Shot putter Cleopatra Borel ’02, was the college’s first national champion and competed in four Olympics for Trinidad and Tobago. That’s just what’s in the record books. At UMBC, student-athletes are also supported as teammates, scholars, and aspiring leaders. Are you watching with us?

It’s electric

For Kennedy Lamb ’20, English, the recent popularity of women’s sports is overdue. “It’s about time these women’s sports teams, especially at UMBC, get that attention,” said Lamb, who won an America East championship with Retriever softball in 2019. 

During her time as a student-athlete, Lamb experienced a similar change in viewership to what’s happening nationally. She remembers looking out from the diamond as a first-year student to see just a few parents. “We love the parents, but you always wish that maybe another sports team or maybe a friend or someone from your math class would show up,” she said. Over the ensuing years, as the softball team turned into a winning one, her wish came true. “By the time I was a senior, the hill was filled.”

Lamb got a reminder of how that felt when she attended a Washington Mystics game against the Indiana Fever, the team on which mega-popular Caitlin Clark plays. Both times the Fever came to Washington, the arena sold out. Lamb said her friends and family who are longtime WNBA fans recalled how they used to get cheap tickets to games with middling attendance. “Now it was this sought after activity. Tickets were expensive. And seeing the electricity in the stadium reminded me of the electricity of being on the UMBC softball team,” Lamb said.

Clark’s celebrity drew large crowds across WNBA cities this year, but it wasn’t only the Clark effect bringing people in. The New York Liberty, for instance, averaged the second highest home attendance in the regular season with 12,700 fans. Five years ago, the Liberty’s home game average was 2,200 fans.

For Tiffany D. Tucker, UMBC’s new director of athletics, physical education, and recreation, the popularity of the WNBA and other women’s sports is payoff from decades of work by athletes, coaches, executives, fans, investors, and allies. It’s not that the product on the floor changed, but “sometimes people need an invitation,” Tucker said. “It’s as if they’ve been peeping in, and it’s like, ‘I want to be a part of it,’ and now everybody feels like they’ve been invited and that they’re a part of the team.”

As she dives into her new role, she plans to extend the same invitation for all to watch UMBC women’s athletics.

Top to bottom: LynaBeraich, Tiara Bellamy,Lexi Tepper.

A relational environment

After the volleyball banner ceremony, Tucker sat at center court with President Valerie Sheares Ashby to watch the contest against Lehigh University.

“Let’s go, Serin! You got it!” the athletics director called as setter Serin Maden, an economics junior, stepped up for a serve.

A former basketball coach who once aspired to be an author and international speaker, Tucker’s voice carried easily over the cacophony of the crowd and thwacks of palms smacking leather.

“Let’s go, Jada!” she called shortly after Maden’s serve. “Let’s go, Aysia!” a few minutes later.

Tucker was less than four weeks into the job. Asked how many names she’d learned in those weeks, she exhaled. “I try to get them all, I try,” she said. Counting both men and women student-athletes, that’s almost 400 names. “I’m going team by team,” Tucker added with a deep laugh.

At once the mark of a good leader, Tucker’s effort is also a benefit of UMBC’s size. “When you’re a student-athlete at a smaller, mid-major institution, you may know the name [of administrators], or you may know where the offices are to certain resources,” Tucker said.

“These are the same people who are here to support our women’s sporting events. These are people who are readily there to help you, not that they’re not there at a larger institution, but because of the size of the institution, I think it’s a little bit more intimate and relational.”

UMBC volleyball celebrated winning the last four America East Conference tournaments. Photo by Luna Siesko for UMBC.

In the grind together

In the stands behind Tucker, a row of preteen girls got into the Retriever spirit, barking loudly to support the home team. Sporting shiny red jerseys, these girls were volleyball players from Shepherdstown Middle School in West Virginia, attending their first college game. Though the Retrievers lost, the match was “really fun” and “cool,” the girls said with big smiles afterward. Their favorite part? “The rallies,” according to one. “Yeah, the rallies!” another girl echoed.

A third player had a different thought. “The way they supported each other,” she said. “They huddled after every point and high fived and cheered for each other.” At this, the rest of the tweens bobbed their heads in agreement and declared that they wanted to take that back to their own matches.

That kind of support cuts across sports at UMBC. “There’s this camaraderie when you’re all together, day in day out, waking up at 5:30 for practice,” said Lamb, who is the godmother to the child of one of her former softball teammates. “It’s one thing to have great friends who you see in your English class, but ultimately you don’t grind with them. Being a DI athlete is a grind. You have no choice but to lean on others. You can’t do it alone. And that’s a type of friendship that isn’t found everywhere.”

Left to right: Katana Nelson, Jada James, Mikayla Bryant.

Aysia Miller ’24, biological sciences, knows something about grinding with teammates. She won four America East championships in volleyball with four different pathways to the trophy. Her first year, the Retrievers were the underdogs facing the heavyweight University of Albany. Her sophomore year, the team blew out everyone in conference play but struggled in the tournament. Her junior year, they started the season strong but hit a losing stretch midway. Her senior year was the magic one.

“It was just like everything was clicking, and it was honestly pretty perfect,” said Miller, who is now a master’s student in applied molecular biology. With an extra year of athletic eligibility because of COVID-19, Miller has the unusual opportunity to achieve a five-peat. But the team struggled at the start of the season, losing nine in a row.

After the Lehigh match, Miller said she and her teammates knew they needed to improve. “Ultimately, I do believe that culturally our team is in a good spot. We have each other’s backs,” she said. “No one is turning on each other, and we’re not blaming one another about losing, about not things not going our way. And it kind of all comes down to what are our values as a team, what’s important, and how we’re able to treat each other.”

Open doors

Shared values can be the difference between a thriving locker room and a toxic one. During the women’s basketball preseason, the team spent an afternoon defining and performing skits about the core values posted in their locker room: service, toughness, family, loyalty, commitment, and consistency.

Team bonding activities like that one, as well as movie nights, a trip to the state fair, and the thrill of competition are what motivated Riley Donahue ’24, political science, to stay for another year as a master’s student in public policy. As a transfer student, Donahue has experienced multiple sets of coaches. From her perspective, positive culture starts at the top, and she loves the tone set by Coach Candice Hill and her staff. “They want to make sure everybody’s OK, and they have an open door policy if you need to come and talk to them,” Donahue said.

While coaches keep doors open for student-athletes to come inward, the rest of the college opens doors to go outward and excel beyond their sports. Players and staff are proud that academics get just as much emphasis as athletics at UMBC. That’s what drew Donahue here from Auburn University as a junior. Right away, Donahue jumped into an internship fair that led to working on Brooke Lierman’s successful campaign for Maryland Comptroller. The following spring, she interned in the Maryland legislature for Delegate Cheryl Pasteur.

“It was a haul to Annapolis,” Donahue said, but she paid for gas with money she earns from NIL (name, image, likeness) deals. “It was really fun to sit in on judicial hearings, to walk through the Senate building …and I enjoyed being around it and helping draft bills, helping make scholarships for students.”

Donahue is president of UMBC’s Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) and the America East chair for the NCAA Division 1 SAAC. Eventually, she wants to be president of the United States. “This place challenges you academically, and that’s what I want. Because the career that I want to go into is not going to be easy,” she said.

“Just come and play”

Women’s sports have a long history at UMBC, thanks in large part to Linda “Louie” Sowers ’70, American studies. Sowers, who played volleyball in high school, arrived at UMBC in its inaugural 1966 semester. Looking around campus, she found something missing: women’s sports. So in her second year, she approached athletic director Dick Watts with a request to change that. “I was a little sophomore, and he was an intimidating person…so it took a lot of courage for me just to go in there and ask,” she recalled.

Five years before Title IX mandated equality of athletic opportunities among other things, many male athletic directors might have brushed off Sowers’ request. But according to Sowers, Watts handed her a piece of paper and asked her to get signatures of female students who wanted to play sports. If she gathered enough names, he would hire a volleyball coach.

Sowers took that paper to the cafeteria, located in one of the only campus buildings at the time. “I basically just, in between classes, went up and down all the tables and got as many girls as I could,” Sowers recalled. “I had girls that said ‘I’ve never played before,’ and I would say, ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Just come and play.’”

She collected 66 signatures, and Watts hired a volleyball coach that spring. The next fall, Watts added a women’s athletic director, plus field hockey and basketball teams. “Because we were such a small school…it was like this little core group of us that wound up playing all three sports,” Sowers said. More than 50 years later, she still attends Ravens games with one of those friends and keeps in touch with others by text and email.

Fill the stands

In Sowers’ day, spectators included just a few parents and male athletes. Even today, crowds tend to follow a team’s success. Teams that have yet to lift trophies said they’re still hoping to see more fans.

One misty September night at Retriever Soccer Park as the women’s team mounted a comeback win over Mount St. Mary’s, parents in slickers and some fellow student-athletes—including Miller—cheered from wet bleachers. One dad rang a cowbell after every Retrievers play. Center fullback Lauren Reid, psychology and visual arts, said she’s grateful for family support but wished more peers would show up.

Reid knows how it feels to put on her cleats for a packed house. Last June she traveled to soccer-mad Brazil as a member of the Jamaican women’s national team. When Brazilian legend Marta took the field, the energy shift was incredible, Reid said. “I think it would give us the same feeling here if our whole student body was showing up,” she continued.

Tucker, too, said she wants to see growth in crowds to mirror what’s happening at a national level: “I want to fill the stands. I want women athletes to really feel their value and know that they are loved.”

Tucker plans to personally visit rotary clubs, local churches, schools, and others to extend the invitation. She wants to saturate the community with her message about Retriever women’s athletics.

“We have some of the best scholars. We have some of the best athletes in the country right here on our campus, and they’re passionate about what they do. They’re very disciplined. And it’s fun. It’s action-packed. It’s right here in your backyard,” Tucker said.

Consider yourself invited.

For almost 70 years, Milt Halem, now a research professor at UMBC after a career at NASA, has deployed the latest computing technology—from vacuum tubes in the ’50s to artificial intelligence today—to tackle some of science’s toughest problems.

Colorful screen prints cover the walls of Milt Halem’s Rockville, Maryland, apartment. One shows a high-altitude view of the Nile River, cutting through desert sands before emptying into a turquoise Mediterranean. In another, the fragile blue marble of the Earth rises above a desolate lunar surface.

One large picture, taking centerplace on the dining room wall, is more enigmatic—filled with alternating red, yellow, and blue patches. “This is what’s known as the quasi-biennial oscillation,” Halem explains.

Tens of thousands of feet up, in Earth’s stratosphere, the winds around the equator regularly shift direction, blowing east for many months, and then west, and then east again. A satellite measured the shifts, and Halem, a former NASA scientist and current UMBC professor, turned six years of that data into art.

Halem’s framed prints, many of which he created himself while taking evening and weekend classes at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., are a window into his nearly 70-year-long scientific career. For roughly 40 years of that time, he worked for NASA, the famed federal space agency. Halem harnessed NASA’s space-based instrument “eyes” and ever-evolving computer “brains” to advance humanity’s understanding of Earth and our place in the cosmos and, in 1996, was recognized with NASA’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal.

In 2003, after retiring from NASA, Halem joined UMBC as a research professor. In his more than two decades at the university, he has nurtured connections with government and industry, brought in research money and equipment, regularly taught a popular graduate course, and mentored more than a dozen Ph.D. students, helping them pursue their passions and propel their careers.

“I think of myself as a computational scientist: I use computers to both discover and explore new territory,” Halem says. “What I love is the computer’s ability to represent, and to explain, the world around us.”

Charting computers’ evolution

Halem began his working life at the dawn of the computing age, and his career trajectory mirrors the steady rise of those digital devices. After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1951, Halem was drafted into the Korean War effort and served on U.S. Army bases for two years, first in New Jersey and then in Arizona. After a stint clearing rocks off the golf course so that the officers could play, Halem’s skills were better put to use on some of the Army’s first attempts to use what at the time were relatively new-fangled devices called computers to improve surveillance of battlefields.

In 1955, Halem received a fellowship to work with an IBM 704 computer installed at New York University. The computer took up significant floor space with its multiple cabinet-sized components, filled with vacuum tubes for logic operations and magnetic tape for memory. It was state-of-the-art in its day, able to execute about 40,000 instructions per second.

“You could say 1955 was my start in high-performance computing,” Halem says. “I’ve been acquiring and managing and programming and doing research on computers ever since.”

In the late 1950s, NASA established the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and, shortly after, opened a New York campus—the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—focused on theoretical research.

Milt Halem delivers remarks during a conference at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 1986. Photo by NASA. 

Because of Halem’s experience with computers, he was hired as contract support. In the subsequent years, he worked with some of the most advanced computers of the time, using them to model the Earth’s atmosphere and predict the scientific value of launching new Earth-observing instruments. In 1968, he also earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU.

Halem at UMBC in 2024.

In the late ’70s, Halem moved to Goddard’s main facility, GSFC, in Maryland to continue his computing work. In 1983, he became chief of the Space Data and Computing Division and shifted from using supercomputers to being a force in their development. The division had recently developed the Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP), a trailblazing computer containing 16,384 processors working simultaneously. This degree of parallelism, which lies at the heart of today’s supercomputers, marked a radical departure from traditional computing.

“The MPP was a relatively simple concept, but it took us more than a decade to develop it,” says Jim Fischer, who managed the MPP’s fabrication contract and applications programs. “Milt found people to help and money to support the machine. And then he offered it to the U.S. science community to try it out, and they recognized its architecture as a solution. Milt pumped us to world class by force of will.”

In the ensuing years, Halem and Fischer pursued making the power of MPPs more accessible and less expensive. In 1994, their staff demonstrated the “Beowulf” computing cluster, composed entirely of mass market personal computers networked with Ethernet and running the Linux open source operating system.

Now 30 years later, the Beowulf approach sits at the core of most of the world’s supercomputers and much of the cloud infrastructure, putting vast amounts of affordable computing resources at the fingertips of scientists, engineers, and even social media users.

After Halem arrived at UMBC in his 70s, he continued to engage with the latest computing technology. He was instrumental in securing the donation of high-performance IBM computing equipment from NASA to the university, and he helped run a new computing research center. With his students, he has explored the frontiers of quantum computing and AI.

“I’ve followed the evolution of high-performance computing my entire career,” Halem says.

Computing for science

Computers can do many things—from recommending videos you might like to rendering life-like graphics—but Halem is most interested in what they can do for science.

“Science is based on the notion of observations and then explaining the observations by some theoretical process,” says Halem. “That was the way science evolved until the mid-20th century. Then computers came along and became the third pillar of science.”

Halem’s passion fit with NASA’s mission. Though the agency was born out of the Cold War and the space race with the Soviets, it has concentrated its efforts on the peaceful use of space to advance science.

NASA launches satellites that observe Earth from space with a suite of scientific instruments (including some designed at UMBC), and a large part of Halem’s research has been using computers to understand how that data can improve our understanding of the Earth’s air, water, and land and the physical processes that link them. Halem has also advanced weather forecasting through, among other techniques, finding new ways to incorporate observations into the weather models.

As an administrator at NASA, Halem always put the science first, according to his colleagues. “I believe that Milt left a legacy of making decisions that are in the best interest of science,” says Dan Duffy, the chief of the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at GSFC, who sits in Halem’s old NASA office and has continued to work with him on special projects since Halem joined UMBC.

“His motivation was always driven by the scientific community’s needs,” Fischer adds. “It was very high-minded.”

Shaping students’ lives

At UMBC, Halem has continued his devotion to computing for science’s sake. In doing so, he has supported the research community and shaped his students’ lives.

Jennifer Sleeman, Ph.D. ’17, computer science, was co-mentored by Halem on her Ph.D. thesis, which involved mapping topics from past climate reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and trying to predict the contents of future reports.

Jim Fischer, Milt Halem, and Sophia Hamer (left to right) in Halem’s UMBC office. One of Halem’s screen prints hangs in the upper right.

“Milt and I would have discussions about my thesis, and I always like to describe it as: Milt decided to adopt me. I was close to the end of my Ph.D., and I changed my focus based on working with him,” she said. “It really changed the trajectory of my career.” After graduating, she became a research assistant professor at UMBC. She currently studies weather and climate-related topics as a senior AI research scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory while she continues to work part-time with Halem and his students.

Sophia Hamer ’22, mathematics and computer science, who is currently working with Halem as a master’s student, also credits Halem with helping her find her career footing. She first met him to discuss a research project when she was an undergraduate and just emerging from a time when she struggled with her grades and with choosing a major.

“Dr. Halem took a chance on me,” she says. “I honestly think that was the turning point for me. Before I was thinking, ‘I’m just gonna squeak out of here with a degree and hopefully my GPA isn’t too bad to get a job.’ But now, my entire perspective has shifted: I’m about to graduate with a master’s, and I’m doing impactful research in a field I really like. I never thought that would be possible.”

“Milt is tough—he pushes you—but he also works closely with you,” Sleeman adds. “I really grew from that relationship.”

AI for weather and climate forecasting

Both Sleeman and Hamer are working with Halem on a project to be the first to use AI to make regional weather predictions, one of a couple AI projects Halem is currently pursuing.

In his embrace of AI, Halem is yet again advancing alongside the technology that has defined his career. Gone are the days of mere 40,000 instructions per second. Now advanced computer chips power computationally hungry “neural networks” originally inspired by the workings of the human brain. Neural networks are behind celebrity chatbots such as ChatGPT—and forecasters are increasingly turning to them to predict the weather too.

While traditional weather models simulate the physics of the Earth and its atmosphere to make predictions about the future, AI forecasting models simply examine vast datasets of past weather and learn how to spot patterns.

So far, the main advantage of AI forecasting is speed. What can take days for a physics-based model can be done in only minutes or seconds with AI. AI weather models offer great promise for distributed, real-time weather forecasting, for example as natural disasters unfold. Halem and his students are looking in particular to predict wildfires.

While much AI weather forecasting research is undertaken by leading tech companies such as Google and Microsoft, Halem thinks his students are more than holding their own.

“I’ve got a new generation of computer scientists making breakthroughs,” says Halem. “Two students who are writing up their master’s theses are doing leading AI computations to rival what some big tech companies are doing.”

The work of weather and climate modeling is growing in importance as global warming unfolds and the Earth’s natural patterns shift. “Applying what I know to a real-world problem has been an amazing experience,” Hamer says.

The projects are also yet one more demonstration of Halem’s constant intellectual evolution.

“Milt has an amazing ability to learn new things,” says Anupam Joshi, the acting dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. “He was trained as a mathematician who then specialized in high-performance computing and in the last few years has become an expert in using AI systems to model weather and climate phenomena. It speaks to his intellectual capabilities but also his perseverance and his grit.”

Halem (far right) poses with (from left to right) NASA’s Jim Fischer and John Dorband, and Microsoft Fellow Jim Gray next to the first Beowulf computing cluster. Photo by NASA.

Into the future

Now in his tenth decade of life, Halem shows few signs of slowing down. When not spending time with his large family, he’s still tackling some of science’s thorniest problems, such as how to predict weather patterns months to years in advance.

“He’s like the energizer bunny,” says Fischer, his former NASA colleague.

Duffy agrees. “He has an amazing amount of energy; he never seems to stop. He has a willingness to listen, learn, and ask questions and is an amazing role model for his students.”

Halem says it’s the computation challenges that drive him. “I have to keep moving because the computational instrument continues to evolve,” he says. He continues to be on the lookout for new ideas—the latest he’s come across being an AI research scientist. “The AI agent can use large language models to read the literature; it can write computer code and conduct experiments by itself. It can write the paper on what it discovered. So that’s probably the ultimate research goal that I would like to see if I can make an impact on,” Halem explains.

“Milt is probably one of the most dedicated people I know to the research,” Sleeman says. “He’s so tenacious, and it’s just so impressive. It’s a privilege to continue to work with him.”

“Milt is incredible,” adds Joshi. “If we could replicate him, we would.” And maybe, in some sense, Halem’s AI scientist would do just that.

UMBC at the Universities at Shady Grove finds itself uniquely situated—at home within the country’s third largest biotech hub where the demand for highly skilled workers is growing. These Retrievers are filling specialized roles after graduating with the training they need to succeed in this booming industry.

It’s an early Friday morning in the Biological Sciences and Engineering Building and nine students, working in small groups, are bustling back and forth between fume hoods and a large centrifuge. They carefully swish flasks containing cells and growth medium. The smell of sanitizing alcohol pervades the space. Neon orange test tube racks and turquoise tube caps stand out within the sterile white look of the work benches, hoods, and lab coats.

As the cells use oxygen to release energy, they produce carbon dioxide. The CO2 turns the solution yellow, indicating successful cell growth. After the experiment, students sterilize their solution with bleach for disposal; in response to the alkalinity, it blooms to a brilliant magenta. In another room, one student offers tips to her classmate on how to use a pipet more effectively, and the instructor flits between groups, answering questions as needed—but for the most part, the students operate confidently on their own.

This is a regular day in Biotechnology 303: Applied Cell Biology in UMBC’s Translational Life Science Technology (TLST) program. The program, offered by UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS) exclusively at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG), a multi-institution education facility in Rockville, Maryland, is designed to offer hands-on training to prepare students for careers in the booming biotech industry in USG’s backyard. 

Elizabeth Friar (left) and Samantha Petros ’23 have stayed in touch since Petros graduated. 

A clear direction

It was the promise of experiential work with real-world applications that drew Samantha Petros ’23 to the TLST program. “I really liked the convenience of the USG campus, and a lot of the courses were really focused on hands-on learning,” she says. Without really knowing what the work would look like before she started the program, “I was able to try out a lot of different things in a very low-stakes environment and get an idea as to what I found interesting.”

That turned out to be cell culture work. Applied Cell Biology with Elizabeth Friar, lecturer and undergraduate program director in TLST, “cemented that benchwork is what I enjoy doing,” Petros says. From then on, “There was a clearly defined arrowhead in the direction I wanted to go.”

That was a big shift from where she started, as a film major at Montgomery College (MC). A virology course to meet her science requirement turned her on to MC’s biotech associate degree, and then she transitioned to the TLST program at UMBC. After learning some basic lab techniques in TLST classes, she landed a part-time job, where she carried out entry-level manufacturing tasks for malaria vaccines. Today, Petros is thriving as a cell culture specialist studying malaria at Axle Informatics, a contractor for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The position she’s in now traditionally requires a master’s degree, which she doesn’t have—yet, anyway. “Knowing that I have valuable skill sets from TLST—working in manufacturing, getting good connections with my professors, and going to the networking events that TLST offers—all of that compounds and has got me to where I am now,” Petros says. “I genuinely believe that I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all of those factors, with TLST obviously being the biggest one.”

Location, location, location

TLST is a young program, but it is growing quickly. The first class—just two students—arrived in fall 2019. Friar joined in summer 2020 and began laying the groundwork for the program’s eventual growth. Today, “It’s humming along,” she says. There are currently 50 students who have declared TLST as their major. “Now we’re thinking about what we can do next. How can we expand?” 

TLST is unique as the only undergraduate STEM program at UMBC without a footprint on the main campus. The location choice at USG is intentional. The Capital Biohealth Region, encompassing the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland, is the third most competitive biotech hub in the country—and Montgomery County, Maryland, is the hub of the hub, boasting more than 350 life science companies and located a stone’s throw from the NIH, FDA, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For TLST alumni, the employment options are seemingly limitless: 80 percent of American pharmaceutical companies are within a two-hour drive, and they can expect a nearly 23 percent growth rate in the biotech industry over the next 10 years—well above the national average.

As Friar puts it, “Regenxbio is down the street. MacroGenics is down the street. MilliporeSigma is opening their new lab right next door, and they’ve now hired eight of our alumni. Soon we’ll have an NIH vaccine lab right down the street. ATCC is right down the street.” All these biotech companies need qualified workers—and TLST is providing them.

Steven Schaffer (right) and Princess Nyamali work under a biosafety cabinet in Elizabeth Friar’s Applied Cell Biology course. 

Training lifetime learners

Jeff Galvin, CEO of American Gene Technologies (AGT), has hired TLST alumni and would hire more. “The TLST program seems to provide a great overview of not just biotechnology techniques,” he says, but it gives students “an understanding of the business in general. I find that UMBC students lean toward being self-motivated problem-solvers. It seems that the administration from the top all the way down promotes that idea of creating value through creative, hard work.”

Titina Sirak ’20, TLST, had a major impact at AGT. She established a brand-new laboratory certified to handle human cells from scratch, Galvin says, “And that’s not easy—there’s a lot of regulations associated with that, even economics.” While she wasn’t an expert at first, “she was able to do enough things right that the project came to life.”

Galvin emphasizes the importance of “learning how to learn,” saying, “Things are changing so fast, that it’s the folks who can adapt and become lifetime learners who are going to be the most successful.And that’s something I saw from the students coming out of TLST.”

A vision fulfilled

So far, TLST has graduated 25 students, and 94 percent of them were employed in the biotech industry within three months of walking across the Commencement stage. “We’ve had a number of really standout students who have gone on to do really great things, so I’m very excited about how it’s going,” Friar says. 

Merryll Kallungal ’24 works under a biosafety cabinet at ATCC. Interns Jason Bose (left) and Tamilore Akinde (second from left) and an ATCC lead scientist observe.

So is William R. LaCourse, CNMS dean, which offers the TLST program. He envisioned the program years before the first two students walked onto the USG campus, and it came together with input from faculty at Montgomery College and five departments at UMBC.

“TLST is an innovative and practical education that combines ‘know-what’ and ‘know-how,’” says LaCourse. “It is a highly flexible program with various pathways to serve the ever-changing needs of a growing industry. TLST is where the silos of disciplines break down and cross-disciplinary knowledge is the goal—both in content and practice.”

The program is shaping up just as LaCourse and Annica Wayman ’99, mechanical engineering, and former associate dean for Shady Grove Affairs in CNMS who led TLST’s launch, had hoped. The state of Maryland is growing its biotech hub while UMBC students are gaining the skills they need to succeed in the workplace and getting well-paying jobs, and the student population is growing.

Connections that build confidence

Just as important as high-demand lab skills, students and alumni value the relationships they’ve formed with faculty. “Every teacher I had was very supportive, very understanding, very willing to work with me,” Petros says. “I think it’s important to get your money’s worth out of college, and I definitely feel like I got that and more in TLST because of the support network that I had there and my teachers.”

Petros is still in touch periodically with Wayman and Friar. “Dr. Wayman was a shining inspiration. She’s just a wonderful person. She’s so knowledgeable and always willing to help,” Petros says. The support she has and the success she’s found now have inspired Petros to look back and help those coming up behind her. In addition to USG resources, as a student Petros attended networking events offered by BioBuzz, a community resource for biotech industry professionals and job seekers in the Capital Biohealth Region. In fact, it’s how she found her current role. 

Today Petros is a BioBuzz Ambassador. “I wish I had known about BioBuzz when I first started in biotech,” she says. “Now I want to be that advocate for younger students or people who are just starting in science.”

A strong foundation

“Our students come to us because they want to make a difference in people’s lives, but they don’t necessarily want to go to medical school,” Friar says. It doesn’t hurt that “we have some really spectacular facilities that are a real draw for students,” she adds. 

The Biological Sciences and Engineering Building opened at USG in fall 2019 and boasts beautiful modern laboratories and classrooms plus plenty of comfy nooks for meeting with a study group or just relaxing. TLST has also received over $1 million dollars from the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals, some of which has supported further upgrades and additions to the teaching laboratories. 

A flow cytometer, a machine that can detect properties of interest in up to 10,000 cells per minute, will enable a new mixed undergraduate/graduate course in flow cytometry launching next spring, for example. And equipment to practice skills like protein purification, biomanufacturing processes, and cell culture create rare opportunities for undergraduates. A required TLST course covers the wide range of instrumentation you might find in a modern biotech laboratory.

It’s normal for students to start off nervous when they use complicated and expensive equipment or work with human cells for the first time. “But by the end, they are old hands, and I think they would feel comfortable tackling anything in that lab on their own,” Friar says. “And it’s because the curriculum is really well scaffolded. We add skills as they go along, and then we repeat the old skills. The program is set up to foster growth and independence.”

Princess Nyamali stepped away from the centrifuge for a moment during Biotechnology 303 to share that the TLST coursework “is a really good foundation.” She’s currently completing an internship at NIST, and “everything I’m learning in this cell culture class is stuff I’m doing at NIST.” While it might have been daunting at first, trying so many different things across the TLST curriculum “helps you know that you want to do it,” she says, in addition to showing potential employers that you can.

TLST student Fae Switzer works at the microscope with guidance from her mentor, Emma Todd, at ATCC.

Thinking ahead

Although the two-year program initially targeted transfers from regional community colleges, “we were getting so much interest from students on the Catonsville campus, we went ahead and put it on the list of majors for freshmen applying to UMBC,” Friar says. “That’s been the fastest growing cohort in our major.”

Steven Schaffer transferred to TLST after starting on the main campus in bioinformatics. Now he is in the bioinformatics track within TLST; the other option is a biomanufacturing track. Schaffer likes that there is a strong cohort connection because everyone takes mostly the same classes together. “I would recommend TLST. It’s a growing field and the skills you learn are very versatile,” Schaffer adds.

Schaffer hopes to eventually take on a role that leans into engineering at a place like Northrop Grumman. But before that, he’s eyeing UMBC’s Master of Professional Studies in biotechnology. The M.P.S. degree offers advanced instruction in the life sciences, plus coursework in regulatory affairs, leadership, management, and financial management. Friar describes it as “a cross between a science master’s and an M.B.A.”   

Academic decathletes

Soon, the confident students in Friar’s cell biology class will arrive in labs across Montgomery County, the capital region, and beyond. They will contribute to drug discovery and production, design manufacturing processes, and, eventually, lead teams and make strategic decisions for major biotech companies. 

Jeff Galvin, the ATG CEO, referred to TLST alumni as “academic decathletes.” Like decathletes, they have an array of skills and perform all of them admirably. But rather than medals, they’re seeking an opportunity to contribute to positive change through their work. They’ll translate basic science into diagnostic tests, treatments for disease, and more to improve the lives of their neighbors in Maryland and those in need around the world. 

ATCC’s SPARC internship program offers opportunities for TLST students to conduct meaningful work in the biotech industry. Merryll Kallungal (far left) transitioned from her internship to a full-time role at ATCC this summer. 

SPARC-ing Rewarding Careers 

Just 10 minutes from USG in Gaithersburg, Maryland, biotech company ATCC has capitalized on the TLST talent pipeline. Their Student Partnership and Research Collaboration (SPARC) Program requires USG enrollment and offers qualified students paid, part-time career opportunities throughout the academic year at ATCC’s research facility. As the leading developer and supplier of authenticated cell lines, microorganisms, and associated data for academia, industry, and government, a successful internship at ATCC is a feather in the cap for students pursuing a TLST degree.

Of the seven interns selected for the SPARC program this year, four are TLST students—and they are thriving. The interns praised their SPARC experience while donning lab coats, shoe booties, safety glasses, and gloves in one of ATCC’s labs—where keeping employees safe and protecting lab samples and products from contamination is mission critical. 

“I love the TLST program!” exclaimed Fae Switzer, who has wanted to pursue a career in biotech since she learned about CRISPR, the gene-editing platform, as a child. Switzer, a SPARC associate biologist in the microphysiological unit, notes that things she learned in her UMBC classes prepared her for the internship, and things she’s learning at ATCC now are helping her in her classes.

Jason Bose, a SPARC associate biologist on the microbiology team, knew he was interested in biologybut not medical school. When Bose learned about TLST, he thought, “Wow, this aligns with what I want to do,” he says. “It’s been really great so far.” He even uses the basic coding skills and tricks for Excel spreadsheets that he learned in class—which at the time he wasn’t so sure about. “Yep, I use them all the time at ATCC,” he says. 

Tamilore Akinde completed an internship last summer at ATCC’s headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, and now she is a SPARC intern. “I like that TLST teaches multidisciplinary skills,” she says. Being able to pivot toward different opportunities that come her way is valuable, she adds. 

“The hands-on lab training provided by the TLST program has prepared students for impactful careers at ATCC,” shares Ruth Cheng, general manager and senior vice president for research and industrial solutions at ATCC. “Witnessing students like Merryll Kallungal transition from the SPARC program to a full-time role in cryobiology R&D is a testament to the power of this collaboration.”

After interning at ATCC, Kallungal graduated from TLST in May and assumed a full-time associate biologist role in the cryobiology group in June. The lab techniques she learned in TLST came in handy at ATCC, and she has already learned a lot of new things, too. “I absolutely love what I do,” she says. 

Walking into the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, you always know you’re going to see some well-curated photos and works of art, but the trove of images currently on the walls for Revisions: Celebrating 50 Years of the UMBC Photography Collections (closes December 15) are assembled as an remarkable representational sample of the nearly 3 million images that make up the UMBC archive.

Known today as one of the country’s premiere university collections of photographs, the Photography Collections had a modest but auspicious beginning. In 1974, the Baltimore lithographer and photographer Edward Bafford donated to UMBC Special Collections a remarkable early image by Arthur Stieglitz (1864–1946), a photographer widely credited with helping transform photography into a serious art form. Bafford’s gift coincided with the foundational purchase of more than 5,400 photographs by labor activist Lewis Hine that documented horrific child labor practices.

Over time, the Photography Collections at UMBC have expanded through purchases and gifts. One special acquisition stands out for its regional importance: In 2014, the collection received the photo archives of the Baltimore Sun, including more than 750,000 prints, negatives, and transparencies from the 1930s through the 1980s.

Housed in the Special Collections department of the Library, the collections are open to the public, and are widely used by scholars and photographers. An increasing number of images have been digitized for online viewing, available through the Library’s website.

Looking back at a half-century of collecting, the exhibition offered thematic groupings and visual juxtapositions of photographs from the nineteenth century to the present. Co-curated by Beth Saunders, curator and head of Special Collections, and Emily Hauver ’06, curator of the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, Revisions asked viewers to approach the history of photography with fresh eyes. In this photo essay, Hauver offers her thoughts on a few stand-out images in the show.

Sun Rays—Paula, Berlin, 1889

Sun Rays-Paula, Berlin is a particularly apt founding image for a university collection; it was made when the great Steiglitz was himself a student, and could thus be viewed as a symbol of the endurance of formative educational experiences on the making of an individual’s personal and professional identity. UMBC’s Photography Collections were conceived of as a teaching tool through which budding photographers enrolled at the university can contemplate the elements of successful photographs through the close study of master prints.

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), Sun Rays—Paula, Berlin, 1889. Gelatin silver print, 1929. Gift of Edward Bafford, P74-07-001.

Ralph Gibson (American, born 1939), Elba, c.1983. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Carol A. Merritt, P93-14-004.

Ship Island, Miss. & 74th U.S. Colored Infantry, c. 1864

This composition comprises several photographs of Black Union soldiers and white officers and is embellished with hand-drawn elements. Posing for portraits during the Civil War— the first major conflict to be extensively documented through photography—allowed Black men to assert their newfound identity and freedom as soldiers. The person who made this composition sought to memorialize the patriotism of Black soldiers through the visual image, showcasing the commitment of these men to fight for their own liberation. The fact that the embellishments are incomplete draw a poignant, if unintentional, parallel to the unfinished business of achieving true racial equality in this country.

John Waters, 2013

What could be more “Baltimore” than John Waters? In this image, taken by Sam Holden, a Baltimore-based photographer who tragically passed away at the age of 44 in 2019, the filmmaker grins impishly at the camera while posing with a cherry pie.

Sam Holden (American, 1970–2014), John Waters, 2013. Cross processed chromogenic print. Sam Holden Collection, Coll255_IA-001.

Marble Steps, 1954

Row after row of white marble steps for which the city of Baltimore is famous are seen in this photograph by Aubrey Bodine, one of Maryland’s best-known photographers. The geometry and contrasting tones of the steps pair with Bodine’s meticulous composition to manipulate the viewer’s perception by drawing the eye down the block and giving the impression of depth that defies the flat surface of this photograph.

A. Aubrey Bodine (American, 1906–1970), Marble Steps, 1954. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Mrs. A. Aubrey Bodine, P86-19-032.

Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1976

This photograph by Mary Ellen Mark flips the typical script of looking at a photograph wherein the observer looks upon a passive subject. Here, the photograph appears to be looking back. Despite the visual distortion caused by the screen covering the door’s small window, the power of this woman’s gaze implores us to make a connection, challenging us to engage on a deeper level with her and, perhaps, with ourselves. It’s made all the more compelling knowing that it was taken on Ward 81, a women’s security ward of the Oregon State Mental Institution.

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940–2015), Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1976. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Andrew Cahan, P2013-32-001.

Boy and dog, c. 1870s

Our collections hold thousands of images of anonymous people. Here, a small tintype shows an unusual pairing—a Black boy with a dog—framed in a case. We don’t know his name or where the photo was taken, but we can date this image to the 1870s. As we gaze back into his eyes, we wonder: Who was he? What was his story?

Unidentified photographer, Boy and dog, c. 1870s. Tintype. Library purchase, P78-120-006.

Elba, c.1983

Mirrors, with which photographs have long been metaphorically compared, offer opportunities to extend the narrative possibilities of a photograph beyond what is in front of the camera to what is behind, beside and beyond. This photograph by Ralph Gibson is compelling because it elicits conflicting reactions at once: comfort with the familiarity of the subjects (a nose, mouth, hand, landscape) and unease with the disjointed way they have been assembled.  

Unidentified photographer, Boy and dog, c. 1870s. Tintype. Library purchase, P78-120-006

Emily Hauver ’06, curator of the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, and Beth Saunders, curator and head of Special Collections, worked together to comb through the university’s extensive collections to display a stunning representation of what is available in the archives.

By Emily Hauver ’06 and Thomas Moore

At the height of COVID-19, Nicole Attram developed severe lower back pain which impeded her mobility and flexibility. While physical therapy helped mitigate the symptoms, the cause is still unknown. That experience determined the course of her career. After graduating from UMBC in 2023, Attram, mechanical engineering, received a 2024 – 2025 Fulbright U.S. Student award to study in Milan, Italy, in a master’s program in international healthcare management, economics, and policy specializing in pharmaceuticals and medical technology at the SDA Bocconi School of Management.

“This experience has inspired my interest in orthopedic biomechanics, particularly prosthetics, and exoskeletons, to help restore autonomy to individuals with lifelong mobility challenges,” shares Attram on her website. “I aim to conduct research at the intersection of systemic racism, healthcare policy, and orthopedic biomechanics to offer holistic care and assistive technology to underserved communities.” 

Each year, more than 10,000 students apply to the Fulbright U.S. Student Program with just over 2,000 selected from hundreds of colleges and universities across the U.S. In the last decade, UMBC students and alumni have received more than 85 Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards for research and teaching placements in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, South America, and Europe. UMBC was named a Fulbright Top Producing Institution for the third time in five years for the 2023 – 2024 cycle.

Attram’s mentor Maria C. Sanchez, director of the Grand Challenge Scholars Program, professor of the practice, and director of the Engineering and Computing Education Program, says, “Nicole always displayed the motivation, perseverance, and inquisitiveness of a successful researcher. She also demonstrated a high level of global awareness that was refreshing to see in a non-international undergraduate student.”

Advancing global research

Attram is among eight recent graduates and alumni in UMBC’s 2024 – 2025 Fulbright U.S. Student Program class who are sharing their knowledge and building community around the world by earning a master’s degree, conducting research, or teaching English. This year is especially significant, as six of eight awards are research-focused, marking the highest number of research awards in UMBC’s Fulbright history. Students seeking research awards must develop a proposal in coordination with potential advisers in the universities and laboratories where they want to study as part of their application. Graduate degree awards require submitting both Fulbright and graduate school applications.

1. Arpita Tuladhar ’23 public health, Research Award to Germany
2. Jennifer Sorrells ’22, political science, Research Award to North Macedonia
3. Jolie Greer ’24, psychology, Research Award to Bulgaria 
4. Lauren Mister ’24, teaching English to speakers of other languages, English Teaching Award to Bahrain
5. Sarah-Fatime Yoda ’24, chemical engineering, Research Award to France
6. Stuart Holton ’24, political science, English Teaching Award to Slovakia
7. Timothy Mallard, M.A. ’21, teaching English to speakers of other languages, Research Award to Uganda

“This year’s cohort of Fulbright recipients and alternates shows the country and the globe what we at UMBC already know,” says Brian Souders, Ph.D. ’09, language, literacy, and culture, M.A.’19, TESOL, the associate director of global learning at UMBC’s Center for Global Engagement. In this role, Souders, who received a 2023 Fulbright International Education Administrator Award to Germany, has led hundreds of Retrievers through the Fulbright application process as UMBC’s Fulbright Program advisor. “We produce world-class graduates who will lead the future with their work in laboratories, in the field, and in the classrooms throughout the world.” (Image by Marlayna Demond ’11/UMBC)

Learn more about UMBC’s Fulbright Program.

UMBC’s 2024 fall semester is already poised to be one for the record books. With 2,250 new first-year undergraduate students, UMBC officially enrolled the university’s largest entering class in history. Campus also opened its arms and its doors to 800 transfer students and over 800 new graduate students this fall. 

“These students come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences from all over the world,” says Dale Bittinger, M.P.P. ’16, assistant vice provost for strategic undergraduate engagement, partnerships, and pathways. “They have impressive credentials—from valedictorians to community engagement to research and creative performance—and we look forward to them joining the UMBC community and all they have to offer.”

In an email to students marking the start of the semester, President Valerie Sheares Ashby wrote, “Anyone who knows me knows that the start of the academic year fills me with joy and inspiration. I am reminded of the meaning and importance of our mission and the remarkable human beings who constitute our beloved UMBC community.” 

In addition to sharing her excitement throughout events at Welcome Week, Sheares Ashby took time to note a few upcoming initiatives on campus, including announcing the new UMBC Institute of Politics (IoP)—an academic, political research, and public outreach center that will harness the university’s robust research capacity and civic-focused public mission to provide a regional base for local, state, and national political analysis. Led by Mileah Kromer, the IoP’s inaugural director, the institute’s most important purpose will be to provide UMBC students with unique opportunities for experiential learning and to build career-ready skills.

Embracing the UMBC spirit

Addressing this year’s new cohort of students at Convocation, Manfred van Dulmen said, “As provost, my commitment to you is that I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you have access to a great educational experience and that you have the support to excel, graduate with a degree, and be ready to make a difference in your community and in the world.”

With a plethora of Welcome Week events, UMBC’s newest Retrievers took advantage of the many ways they could connect with their peers. Student Government Association (SGA) president, Meghna Chandrasekaran, political science and biological sciences, spoke at Convocation, sharing the importance and impact of being engaged with the campus while recounting how it was during her first weeks on campus that she found her niche in the SGA. 

“UMBC is a special place because the minute you become a part of our community, you are now part of a longstanding culture that promotes agency,” said Chandrasekaran, now a senior. “Even the smallest of actions like going to an organization’s meeting or hosting a grand scale event is part of that agency. It is all because you decided to fully embrace the UMBC spirit.”