Over the next few weeks we’ll be introducing you to this year’s Alumni Award winners. The UMBC Alumni Association proudly honors distinguished alumni and faculty for their accomplishments and dedication to UMBC. Today we’re talking with Dr. Anne Spence, Department of Mechanical Engineering, about her career working as a professor at UMBC.

Name: Dr. Anne Spence
Job Title: Professor of the Practice, Department of Mechanical Engineering
Award Category: Outstanding Faculty

Q: Why did you choose to teach at UMBC?

I chose to teach at UMBC because of its diverse student body, the strength of the undergraduate engineering programs, and the freedom to pursue my interests in engineering education.

Q: Please tell us a little about the trajectory of your career and what you are working on now.

I have had the privilege of engaging in many activities related to engineering education. Our current work to prepare teachers to teach engineering in elementary, middle, and high school will open the doors of engineering to a new generation of students. We are also developing new mentoring programs that will ensure that all students entering mechanical engineering will benefit from the types of activities formerly reserved for members of our scholar programs.

Q: What do you most enjoy about working with UMBC students?

I love the fact that UMBC students come from a variety of backgrounds. They bring a diversity of experiences that make the student body stronger. It is also great to see students who have participated in Project Lead the Way and FIRST LEGO League coming to UMBC to pursue their dreams.

Q: What is your favorite memory of your time at UMBC?

My favorite memories are of the freshman engineering design competitions. I love watching students flex their engineering muscles through the design of robots, submarines, catapults, solar rice cookers, and hot air balloons while competing and cooperating with their colleagues.

Q: What inspired you to pursue a career in engineering and education?

When I was an undergraduate, I was the only female student in my class and never had a female instructor except in the arts, humanities and social sciences. A few women started with me as freshmen but did not continue in the major. I thought that if they had seen someone at the front of the room that looked more like them, they might have persisted. I felt like maybe I could be that role model for both female and male students alike. I am so happy that I made that choice!

Check out the other Alumni Award winners.

Kamili Jackson ’97, M.S. ’99, mechanical engineering, has witnessed one NASA space launch in person during her nine years at the agency: the Hubble Servicing Mission 4 in 2009.

Jackson was a contracted materials engineer at NASA for that mission, helping the team make decisions on what metals, plastics and ceramics should be used for the craft. And as she watched her hard work blast off and enter orbit, she was filled with satisfaction.

That same year, Jackson co-founded a project that helps high school students take off into careers in engineering – the Future Innovative Rising Engineers (FIRE), National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), Junior Chapter in Greenbelt.

“We wanted to have a consistent impact on a set of kids,” says Jackson. The FIRE students come from all over Maryland and even Virginia, and they often stay on the team until they graduate from high school and find a college or university. (In 2013, the program began accepting middle school students as well.)

The competition and mentoring in the program is intense. Professional engineers and parents coach participating students through four national competitions in robotics, model rocketry and math. They also teach them coding, software and building techniques, and also facilitate discussions throughout the process. The goal is for the students to design and build their own robots and rockets.

“We get them to learn by doing,” says Jackson. “We want them to take ownership of what they’re learning.”

Her passion for community service blossomed during her undergraduate years at UMBC, where she was a member of the fourth class of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. (She has also served on that program’s alumni advisory board.) Among her long list of extracurricular activities at that time were day-long service projects in Baltimore City and mentoring elementary school kids. She also participated in campus governance in the Student Government Association.

“Vice president of student government was a big one as far as starting to figure out my leadership style,” recalls Jackson, who was elected to the position in her senior year. “Student leadership was one of the best things I did in college because you can be a leader, mess up, experiment, and at the same time make things happen.”

She completed a Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Cape Town. Jackson began working for NASA in 2005. After five years of consulting on space missions, she was hired as a civil servant to work in Safety and Mission Assurance.

Last year, Jackson was promoted to chief safety and mission assurance officer, and she leads a team that includes experts in reliability, safety, materials, electronic parts, radiation, and contamination. “This is the first time I have a team at work, which is cool because I am able to use all the skills I have been building up outside of work as a leader,” she says.

Leadership is one of the values she is imparting to her FIRE students. One former program participant who enrolled at UMBC, junior Markus-Allen Proctor, mechanical engineering, won third place in the NSBE Science Fair in 2012 as a senior in high school. Now he serves as the vice president of the UMBC NSBE chapter. As a sophomore, his Proctor’s team took third place in the 2014 Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition for creating EduPal – an online time management tool designed for student success.

Jackson wants her students to “catch the bug of winning” so they can push each other to soar even higher each year.

And winning is what they are doing. At the 2014 FIRST LEGO League Robotics competition, Jackson’s FIRE students built a robot designed to rescue people during a natural disaster. At the Awards Luncheon, her students were presented with the First Place Robot Design Award, and before they’d even finished taking photos for that, they heard their team’s name announced again for achieving the Overall Individual Highest Performance in the competition’s Try-Math-A-Lon “Points Race.”

As future engineers and competitors, they had achieved lift off.

— Salma Sparklin ’11

Read the full issue of the Summer 2014 UMBC Magazine.

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Erle Ellis: Nature
• Katie Cano ’16, Political Science, Selected as MHEC’s Student Commisioner
• UMBC Profiled in Princeton Review’s 2015 “Best Colleges” Book
• Anne Spence, Mech. Engineering, to Participate in Rep. Cummings’ Roundtable Discussion

View all the other great news on Insights Weekly.

Join us as we celebrate the amazing work our students do during the Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) on Wednesday, April 23, 2014. URCAD celebrates research, scholarship and creative work carried out by UMBC undergraduates across all majors and areas of study.

The event will also feature as its guest speaker alumnus Corey Fleischer ’05, ’08 MS Mechanical Engineering, who is Senior Mechanical Engineer at Lockheed Martin. In 2013 Corey was chosen to be part of Discovery Channel’s “The Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius.” He participated in several challenges that put his engineering skills to the test. In the final challenge, Corey’s team had to build a bridge to span a thirty-four-foot gorge. The bridge had to be mobile; all of the components had to fit in the back of a pick-up truck. The team had to build the bridge and prove that a truck could drive over it. After prevailing over nine other talented engineers, Corey won the competition.

Learn more and join us on April 23!

Mechanical engineering major Brian Wayman ’99 is using the skills he learned at UMBC and at Georgia Tech (MS, Ph.D.) to improve the lives of premature babies.

A mechanical engineer at GE Healthcare, Wayman was profiled recently on the College of Engineering and IT’s website. Prior to joining GE in July 2010, Wayman was the R&D Team Lead, New Product Development at Becton Dickinson.

Brian has several patents and patent applications for his work at Becton Dickinson on disposable syringes designed to prevent re-use of the syringe following injection.  In addition, he has several publications in peer-reviewed bioengineering journals.

Read the full story here.

From UMBC Magazine Food Issue, Winter 2010. How to Build a Ramen Bridge, featuring Tim Topoleski.

Video by Jenny O’Grady.